In a development that has sent shockwaves through the chattering classes and caused at least three child safety experts to spill their Earl Grey in unison, a Serbian court has handed down jail terms to the parents of a teenage school shooter. The retrial, a grim rerun of a tragedy nobody wanted to see again, has prompted a flurry of British expertise on what went wrong and, more importantly, what this says about parenting in the modern age.
The parents, whose names shall be spared from my inkwell of scorn, were found guilty of negligence in a case that has left the Balkans reeling and UK columnists salivating. The boy, a mere stripling of 14, used his father's legally owned firearms to perpetrate a massacre that claimed ten lives and left the nation questioning its soul. Now, the trial's sequel has concluded with the parents facing five years each, a sentence that feels both just and utterly inadequate, like serving a thimble of water to a man dying of thirst.
Enter the UK child safety experts, a breed of professional who can be relied upon to issue pronouncements with the certainty of a drunk man navigating a roundabout. They have weighed in, not with solutions, but with the sort of weighty platitudes that make you long for the simple honesty of a punch in the face. 'This tragedy underscores the need for stricter gun control and better mental health support,' they chorused, as if this were a revelation and not the boilerplate response to every school shooting since time immemorial.
One expert, a woman whose LinkedIn profile probably lists 'empathy' as a skill, opined that 'parents must be held accountable for their children's actions.' A bold stance, indeed, worthy of a knighthood in the Order of the Bleeding Obvious. Another suggested that 'the root cause lies in societal alienation and the breakdown of community bonds.' A diagnosis so broad it could also explain the popularity of reality television or the inexplicable success of the mince pie.
Let us pause to consider the absurdity of this spectacle. Serbian justice, with all its continental gravitas, has spoken. Yet the British commentariat cannot resist the urge to offer its own verdict, a sort of ideological punditry delivered via Zoom from a suburban kitchen. They speak of 'lessons to be learned' as if tragedy is a school syllabus and not a visceral horror that defies tidy conclusions.
But what of the gun, that sainted piece of metal that the father kept in a manner befitting a medieval king protecting his treasure? Serbia, a land where firearms are as common as accusations of war crimes, has a love affair with weaponry that would make a Texan blush. The boy had access, opportunity, and a darkness that no parenting course could have dispelled. To blame the parents entirely is to ignore the toxic cocktail of culture, access, and adolescent despair that brews such monstrosities.
Yet blame we must, for blame is the opiate of the pundit class. It allows us to pretend that the world is orderly, that cause and effect follow a neat trajectory, and that a few years in prison will somehow calibrate the moral scales. The parents are villains, yes, but they are also avatars of a system that fetishises individual responsibility while ignoring collective rot.
So let the experts cluck and the court pronounce. The parents will serve their time, and the boy will perhaps one day explain the unfathomable. But as the coffee grows cold and the news cycle lurches onward, one question lingers: in a world of such casual cruelty, what hope is there for the next generation of shooters, parents, and the experts who will inevitably dissect their failures?
In the meantime, I shall pour myself a stiff gin and toast the grim industry of tragedy chic. Cheers, you bastards.
