In a move that has the commentariat drooling into their cornflakes, Serbian authorities have banged up the mum and dad of a 13-year-old school shooter. The poor sods are looking at hard time for what prosecutors call 'criminal negligence' after their little darling took daddy's gun to class and murdered nine children, plus a security guard. He even used his own father's weapon, which is like borrowing the family car for a joyride, except the collateral damage is a bit more final.
Now the British press, those paragons of nuance and restraint, are having a field day. 'Tough sentencing for negligence!' they roar, as if locking up grieving parents is the final frontier of justice. The Daily Mail has probably already typeset the headline: 'HANG THEM BY THEIR BALLS IN THE TOWN SQUARE'. Forget rehabilitation, forget examining the root causes of why a child would commit mass murder. No, no, let's find someone to burn at the stake. It's the British way.
But let's pause for a moment between the gin-soaked moral outrage. This is a family that, according to reports, had a gun safe but the kid knew the code. So is the father a monster or just a bloke who thought his son wasn't a budding psychopath? The mother, for her part, was allegedly not at home. Should she have been psychic? The whole affair stinks of a society desperate for simple answers, for a villain with a face you can put on a wanted poster. 'Bad parenting' is the new 'terrorism'. It's the catch-all explanation for every societal ill, from obesity to mass shootings.
And Britain, with its own grim history of gun violence and school shootings (Dunblane, anyone?), is suddenly the voice of moral clarity. Never mind that our own laws are a mess of contradictions. Never mind that we're currently exporting more arms than a Saudi prince on a shopping spree. No, let's pat Serbia on the back for making an example of two people whose lives are already a waking nightmare. Because nothing says 'justice' like piling on misery until the scales tip into absurdity.
The real scandal here is not the sentencing, though that is a farce. It's the media's gleeful embrace of punishment as spectacle. They want blood, and they don't care whose. The parents are convenient scapegoats for a system that failed entirely: the school that didn't spot the warning signs, the society that fetishises gun ownership, the culture that turns troubled boys into ticking time bombs. But those are messy, complex problems. Much easier to lock up mum and dad and call it a day.
Biff Thistlethwaite's verdict: This is the kind of justice that makes you want to drown yourself in a bottle of cheap Gordon's. It's theatre, pure and simple. The state puts on a show of toughness while the real problems fester. And the British press, ever the eager audience, applauds from the stalls. But mark my words: this won't stop the next school shooting. It'll just give the next set of grieving parents something to fear besides their own breaking hearts.
