11 year old shot in Liverpool

[caravel]

How many dear, precious children die each day? A few thousand? Probably more. And what do we do about it? Sod all. So if it makes you feel good that you are oh so caring at writing a few lines about a dead child then bully for you

He died. It's unfortunate. Life goes on. Today at work my boss told a mother that the surgeons wouldn't operate on her child - although that's the only chance he's got. A fairly usual day, then. Yes, I see and have seen a lot more death than most, as that's my job.

I care deeply about my family and my friends. But that's it. It's called professional detachment, and yes one does look at the world differently. Pretend to care about the occasional sob stories that reach the news, but basically neither of us does anything to stem death in this world, and I for one don't want to be a hypocrite.

The issue is not who dies or who doesn't die, and whether we care or not. This is about the increase in violent crime, stabbing, gun crime, anti social behaviour and street crime in general. If you can't see that this is happening, and getting worse, then I can only assume that you live in a nice part of London travel everywhere in a car and thus don't have to worry about it. In which case you're quite lucky.

[Bijo]

As for the issue regarding... "caring "(or whatever it is to be called contextually) Rory seems spot on in the reasoning he communicates.

Where are peoples' bleeding hearts for the continued injustice that has been occurring everyday in many parts of the globe and even on large scales?

[rory_20_uk]

The number of deaths due to guns per year isn't rising. I stated that in my first post. Stabbing, now that might be getting slightly worse, I've not looked up the figures.

What is soaring is people's perception of crime. Often this bares no connection with reality.

Oh, I don't have a car. I either get a bus or ride a bike. I live in a seemingly reasonable part of london, but yes I do hope when I'm older to be able to live in a nice ghetto until such time that politicians manage to sort things out.

[Husar]

I actually thought something similar than Rory. Hundreds of children starve every day and noone cares, then some day we get a single kid killed somewhat closer to ourselves and that's a big tragedy all of a sudden.

It most likely is for the family of the kid, the friends and maybe the whole village, but if I cried for every dead person in the world, I could never ever stop. The sad thing is that today we have the media which wants us to know such things and wants us to care, 200 years ago I wouldn't even know that this child had died and would likely never get to know about it either.

I know that sounds hard to some, it even sounds hard to myself, but it's reality and humans aren't made to care about everything. Remember the monkeysphere...

[Proletariat]

I don't really agree. When I see a headline like this, it's more personalized. '11 year old shot...' automatically conjures up images of children I know personally being shot, like my eight year old niece or something. When I hear '200,000 children in the Congo killed slaughtered' I'd usually think, 'God, can't believe some bastards out there could do that.'

I won't be sending flowers or money to the family or anything, I'm not saying I have a bleeding heart or am particularly compassionate, but when all you know is that it was one particular child age 11, you can relate to that easily if you've ever met an 11 year old. Maybe Husar and Rory are just much more logical than me (pretty certain that's true), but the individual circumstances are what makes these things stand out a little bit over massive, anonymous amounts of death.

[Crazed Rabbit]

You know, considering you're on a island, the whole gun banning thing may not be working out if a punk teenager can get a gun to do a ride by on some 11 year old kid.

CR

[Don Corleone]

You know, considering you're on a island, the whole gun banning thing may not be working out if a punk teenager can get a gun to do a ride by on some 11 year old kid.

CR

It's working exactly as planned. The teenager is alive and well. A year in the pokey, and he's back out hunting for another kid. But nobody is daring to defend themselves or their families over there.