Dunblane report released
Discussion
Or at least the majority of it!
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>> Edited by telecat on Monday 3rd October 06:53
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>> Edited by telecat on Monday 3rd October 06:53
Yeah, this does fall into the category of "wise after the event."
"He was in serious financial difficulties. His mood was low and he was deeply resentful of those who had claimed that he was a pervert and had discouraged boys from attending his clubs. After a gap of about 8 years his interest in firearms was resurgent. There is evidence which points to his making preparations for what he did, including the questions which he put to a boy about the layout and timing of events at the school and his questioning of a retired police officer about the time which the police would take to respond to an incident."
All of this may be true, but it's a huge leap therefore to assume from this that someone is going to go nuts with a gun and kill a lot of children.
Hell, there's discussion *here* about how long the Police take to respond to an incident. So are we all potential killers ?
Of course not.
What is happening is this. After the event, there is a big inquiry, and people look at it retrospectively and say "look at that .... look at that .... look at that" .... all those things together, it's obvious you could see it coming.
The problem is that it's a basic statistical error ; the complainants are saying all these things are soooo unlikely so you should have known, *but* this is a specification-after-the-event error.
(It's in the same area as dealing a bridge hand and then saying it's so incredibly unlikely that that particular hand would come out....)
The human brain is incredibly good at putting patterns together and concluding they are so improbable that an error has been made. But it only works retrospectively ; if events had been different you have a *different* pattern.
And, a further point, any witnesses to this inquiry are giving evidence in the knowledge that the bloke dunnit. So they are hardly likely to say "I quite liked the bloke" even if they did !
The problem with this kind of thing is that with almost anything and anyone if you start stringing together information afterwards you can construct all kinds of unlikely scenarios.
If you start allowing these kinds of things as grounds for prosecution, then anyone is vulnerable on the whim of just about anyone. Take any person, any of us, and start hunting for suggestions and evidence that they are bad, and you'll find it.
This is the core mistake behind a lot of innocent people being banged up ; the Police assume for some reason they are guilty and work backwards to find all kinds of vaguely circumstancial evidence that they are, then throw it at a jury (which is unlikely to understand the logic flaw) as if it had been worked forward.
There is a whale of difference between this and say Ian Huntley. Huntley appears to have been ignored by Social Services and to some extent the Police for reasons I cannot fathom. It is inaccurate however to blame the Police recording system for not 'catching' Huntley when he applied for a job (which was in a different school to the one the two girls went to anyway ; the link was through Maxine Carr, so he could have had a job in Tescos).
"He was in serious financial difficulties. His mood was low and he was deeply resentful of those who had claimed that he was a pervert and had discouraged boys from attending his clubs. After a gap of about 8 years his interest in firearms was resurgent. There is evidence which points to his making preparations for what he did, including the questions which he put to a boy about the layout and timing of events at the school and his questioning of a retired police officer about the time which the police would take to respond to an incident."
All of this may be true, but it's a huge leap therefore to assume from this that someone is going to go nuts with a gun and kill a lot of children.
Hell, there's discussion *here* about how long the Police take to respond to an incident. So are we all potential killers ?
Of course not.
What is happening is this. After the event, there is a big inquiry, and people look at it retrospectively and say "look at that .... look at that .... look at that" .... all those things together, it's obvious you could see it coming.
The problem is that it's a basic statistical error ; the complainants are saying all these things are soooo unlikely so you should have known, *but* this is a specification-after-the-event error.
(It's in the same area as dealing a bridge hand and then saying it's so incredibly unlikely that that particular hand would come out....)
The human brain is incredibly good at putting patterns together and concluding they are so improbable that an error has been made. But it only works retrospectively ; if events had been different you have a *different* pattern.
And, a further point, any witnesses to this inquiry are giving evidence in the knowledge that the bloke dunnit. So they are hardly likely to say "I quite liked the bloke" even if they did !
The problem with this kind of thing is that with almost anything and anyone if you start stringing together information afterwards you can construct all kinds of unlikely scenarios.
If you start allowing these kinds of things as grounds for prosecution, then anyone is vulnerable on the whim of just about anyone. Take any person, any of us, and start hunting for suggestions and evidence that they are bad, and you'll find it.
This is the core mistake behind a lot of innocent people being banged up ; the Police assume for some reason they are guilty and work backwards to find all kinds of vaguely circumstancial evidence that they are, then throw it at a jury (which is unlikely to understand the logic flaw) as if it had been worked forward.
There is a whale of difference between this and say Ian Huntley. Huntley appears to have been ignored by Social Services and to some extent the Police for reasons I cannot fathom. It is inaccurate however to blame the Police recording system for not 'catching' Huntley when he applied for a job (which was in a different school to the one the two girls went to anyway ; the link was through Maxine Carr, so he could have had a job in Tescos).
Looking at the report and his activities up to that point they do seem less than Huntley's. What is evident is that the authorities were aware of those actitvies over a longer period to the extent that he had been banned from carrying them out in certain areas. These and the fact he was "known" to the Police should have made the Police review the Firearms licence He held. Like Hungerford the signs were there but missed by the investigating Officers superiors. The "missing" sections of the report are supposedly those to do with personal and Physical inforamtion on the victims.
well apparantly Thomas hamilton was the head of a local paedophile ring, he twice applied for a gun licence, twice to be refused it, until his friend (forget his name now but a high up MP) approved it over the chief constables heads!!, friend is now high up in NATO incidentally for his misguided judjement, Masons?, or just favours for a fellow Paedo then?, we will never know as the Gov is so corrupt in matters like this
matchless
>> Edited by matchless on Wednesday 5th October 22:42
matchless
>> Edited by matchless on Wednesday 5th October 22:42
matchless said:
well apparantly micheal hamilton was the head of a local paedophile ring, he twice applied for a gun licence, twice to be refused it, until his friend (forget his name now but a high up MP) approved it over the chief constables heads!!, friend is now high up in NATO incidentally for his misguided judjement, Masons?, or just favours for a fellow Paedo then?, we will never know as the Gov is so corrupt in matters like this
matchless
Unlikely, as "paedophile rings" largely do not exist except in the minds of idiots like the NSPCC.
Apart from that, none of your 'evidence' means anything.
Also, what precisely are the Police supposed to do.
Unless Hamilton has done anything, they can't actually arrest him (quite rightly IMO).
The REALITY of these things is very simple, and is summed up in the phrase "s**t happens".
It is extremely dangerous to make laws and policy based on very extreme events.
Paedophile rings are dragged out every twenty seconds or so, on any grounds (e.g. Bryn Estyn).
They don't exist in 99% of cases. What you get is individuals or small groups covering up for each other.
The tales of massive organised rings for paedophiles are codswallop.
The NSPCC is an organisation which creates scare campaigns to get more money to feed its scare campaigns, the stories about "38% of children are abused" are achieved by classifying almost anything as abuse. It's rubbish, and it harms the cases of those who are genuinely abused. If you actually try to access its provision it's non-existent outside very prescribed areas.
They don't exist in 99% of cases. What you get is individuals or small groups covering up for each other.
The tales of massive organised rings for paedophiles are codswallop.
The NSPCC is an organisation which creates scare campaigns to get more money to feed its scare campaigns, the stories about "38% of children are abused" are achieved by classifying almost anything as abuse. It's rubbish, and it harms the cases of those who are genuinely abused. If you actually try to access its provision it's non-existent outside very prescribed areas.
autismuk said:
It is extremely dangerous to make laws and policy based on very extreme events.
What?? You mean like the bullshit Firearms amendments rushed in after the Dunblane incident?????
The one banning handguns, so now handguns are the most commonly used illegal firearm??
That sort of extremely dangerous law and policy based an A(n) extreme event ??
Someone I shoot with and have known for a long time was an officer of a shooting club of which Hamilton was a mamber and suggested to the police that he was not a suitable person to hold a Firearm Certificate. That is a VERY unusual thing to happen and ought to have been a powerful statement.
ratpit said:
It is extremely dangerous to make laws and policy based on very extreme events.
What?? You mean like the bullshit Firearms amendments rushed in after the Dunblane incident?????
The one banning handguns, so now handguns are the most commonly used illegal firearm??
That sort of extremely dangerous law and policy based an A(n) extreme event ??
And Automatic Firearms are banned but how many Uzi's and Ingram's are out there??
charltm said:
Someone I shoot with and have known for a long time was an officer of a shooting club of which Hamilton was a mamber and suggested to the police that he was not a suitable person to hold a Firearm Certificate. That is a VERY unusual thing to happen and ought to have been a powerful statement.
But : that fellow may well have been right, and Hamilton might have been a right dodgy wierdo, but to put all that together and say "they should have known" is just absolutely unreasonable.
For almost *anyone* (especially a known child murderer !) if you go and backtrack you will find umpteen people who think he was a bit dodgy etc etc etc.
But it will work with *anyone*.
ratpit said:
It is extremely dangerous to make laws and policy based on very extreme events.
What?? You mean like the bullshit Firearms amendments rushed in after the Dunblane incident?????
The one banning handguns, so now handguns are the most commonly used illegal firearm??
That sort of extremely dangerous law and policy based an A(n) extreme event ??
Yes, exactly that. Anything done in a panic. I can tell you from personal experience that the wonderful new checks brought in after Huntley are absolute sh*t.
The reason is simple.
The cops used to do it, but would only do it for people with substantial access to children (e.g. not cricket umpires).
So they did it properly. Faced with John Smith, they looked for J Smith, Jon Smith and similar people in similar areas. You got a grotty bit of paper back, but we actually had confidence that the cops got it right, based on them never failing to pick up anyone with a criminal record (usually years and years ago or unimportant).
Now they don't.
It is just fed in as is, and there you can get clear CRB checks for people who actually don't exist.
The data entry is so incredibly bad (we have sent back forms back because they entered it wrong, on two occasions FOUR times) and is done on the cheap.
One chap in his late twenties we *knew* had a criminal record (knocking a coppers hat off stuff), he'd admitted it at application. It didn't matter.
But his CRB check came back clean.
The reason was his middle name was "Leslie" and the prats had entered it as the female version "Lesley". So he came back with a clean CRB despite the person on that form not actually existing.
Now, we only picked this up because we knew of the discrepancy....... and this has happened more than once.
One wonders if there was something that should have been picked up whether one would notice that tiny change on the form, because it took us ages to spot what the error was.
One wonders how many of these errors there are (notwithstanding the regular refusal of LEAs to do it if they can avoid it).
autismuk said:FWIW, "Leslie" is the female version in the USA. The author of The Saint used to get letters from admiring males in the States ... disconcerted him no end until he found out they thought he was a she! - Streaky
... The reason was his middle name was "Leslie" and the prats had entered it as the female version "Lesley". So he came back with a clean CRB despite the person on that form not actually existing.
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