In a development that has sent shockwaves through the chancelleries of Europe and the damp, gin-scented corners of my own bachelor flat, the parents of a Serbian teenage shooter have been clapped in irons. The boy, barely old enough to grow a proper moustache, took a rifle to school and did what rifles do in the hands of the young and the angry. Now his mother and father are to face the music, charged with failing to secure the weapon that turned their child into a headline. Meanwhile, the EU and UK have deepened their legal cooperation, signing some sort of parchment that promises to make extradition and mutual legal assistance as smooth as a politician’s promise. I can almost hear the champagne corks popping in Whitehall and Brussels, though the bubbles taste faintly of gunpowder.
Let us pause to consider the sheer, staggering absurdity of it all. Here we have a tragedy of the most intimate kind, a family shattered by a boy with a gun, and the response from our betters is to tighten the legal screws across borders. As if the problem were a matter of jurisdictional friction rather than the simple, horrible fact that a child got his hands on a killing tool. The parents, we are told, are to be jailed for their negligence. Negligence, the coward’s word for a cascade of failures that ends with bodies on a school floor. I do not weep for them, mark you. But I do wonder at the moral arithmetic that locks up a mother and father while the boy himself is whisked away to a psychiatric facility, there to be treated for the malady of being alive in a world that sells firearms like candy.
And what of this EU-UK legal cooperation, this deepening of ties that smells of desperation and cheap cologne? It is a fine thing, no doubt, for the barristers and the bureaucrats. They will have their conferences and their joint working groups, their memoranda of understanding and their shared databases. They will pat one another on the back and speak of the need for a unified response to crime in a post-Brexit world. But I ask you, dear reader, what use is a unified response when the crime itself is as old as Cain? The problem is not that the British and the Serbs cannot share evidence. The problem is that the evidence is always the same: a boy, a gun, a school, a grave.
I am reminded of a certain UK politician who once declared that the government would ‘do everything in its power’ to prevent school shootings. This, of course, meant that they would do nothing of the sort, but would instead make a series of solemn speeches and then go to lunch. The EU-UK cooperation is just more of the same, a solemn speech writ large across two landmasses. They will share information on gun trafficking and tighten borders, but they will not ask the obvious question: why does a teenage boy in Serbia need access to a rifle in the first place? The answer is that he doesn’t, but that would require a conversation about the culture of gun ownership, and that is a conversation no one in a suit wants to have.
So the parents go to jail, and the lawyers go to work, and the rest of us are left to wonder how many more such deals will be signed before the next tragedy. The EU and UK have deepened their cooperation, but they have not deepened their courage. And I, Barnaby ‘Biff’ Thistlethwaite, sit here with my gin and my righteous indignation, wondering if there is a single leader in Europe with the backbone to say: ‘No more guns, no more excuses, no more children dying for the sake of tradition.’ But I suspect if there is, he or she is too busy signing another agreement.
Let us raise a glass, then, to the parents in their cells and the children in their graves. Let us toast to the deepening of legal ties and the shallowing of moral ones. Let us hope that the next time a teenager lifts a rifle, the EU and UK are ready with a memorandum of understanding. It is, after all, the least they can do.
