General Chat

Just to point out, Derrick Bird's firearm was legal, and licensed.

Sorry, Uzzi, that's not correct. You may use whatever force is necessary under he circumstances, contrary to the popular view expounded in pubs and the press. It's exactly the same law that applies to the police when they are armed. A member of the public legally owning a firearm could have shot him and not suffered any consequences. A member of the public with an illegal firearm would rightly be pilloried and suffer the consequences. The end doesn't justify the means in this case or any other of a similar nature.

FLIR is no use in dense wooded areas. It is the same by day or by night as it works in the infra-red spectrum band.

TW, people will always look for answers when a tragedy occurs. How unfortunate that they don't look for information first, and then see what questions are actually raised and how they might be answered though, eh?

This happens every single time, in every imaginable situation.

When Marc Lépine went on his shooting rampage at the Montreal engineering school over 20 years ago, police and other emergency services did not enter the building until some time after they got there. Apparently this was the procedure at the time (like they'd ever had someone lining up women and killing them at a college or university before in Montreal). The coroner's broad investigation did fault the front-line responders for the delay -- and procedure has been changed. But the fact was that the deaths and injuries were all over by the time the police got to the scene anyway.

In the case of the horrific murder on an intercity bus a couple of years ago in western Canada, people all over the internet were blaming the other passengers and the driver for fleeing the bus instead of trying to stop the killer. He was in fact a completely insane large man, who decided to stab his sleeping seatmate to death in the middle of the night in the middle of the prairie. By the time anyone even had time to wake up and see what was happening, the victim was, if not dead, fatally injured and beyond assistance. Several passengers took risks to get the elderly and children out, and they stood guard to keep the man from leaving the bus until police arrived.

What do we expect of mortals? The people on that midnight bus were heroes, not cowards. The police are almost always doing their utmost and best in situations like Cumbria. They may make mistakes. Those mistakes are worth knowing about and trying to avoid in future. But badmouthing with no basis says a lot more about the people doing it than about anyone else.

I doubt whether Derrick Bird came to close to being on the police radar. He was a well like well respected local man.

sorry Eldrick what's not correct ?
the fact that I stated that an illegal firearm holder would have been hauled up infront of a judge or most legal holders couldn't shoot to seriously damage or kill a human person ?
I am aware of the statement may use whatever force is necessary under the circumstances, my knowledge of this may come from pubs but from the law side of running them not from drinking in them, I also have spent many years with the police force breathing down my neck due to my Uncle being one.
I don't have any real knowledge of FLIR
but I agree the end doesn't justify the means all I was doing was putting a scenario across that it wasn't easy to stop Mr Bird.

TW yes Derrick Bird was a legal holder of a firearm and no doubt when it was granted nobody ever thought he would use it as he did.

I doubt even he thought about it Uzzi. As was said at the time, you can't legislate against a switch in someone's head.

Hailey, the Thai prostitute angle is actually interesting in more than a peepshow way.

Men who use prostitutes, or go for mail-order brides, or have a preference for women from exotic places like Thailand or Russia, are really acting out a huge sense of entitlement. They are commonly men whom women who are their peers or "better" -- same age or younger, equally or more attractive, same cultural background -- find creepy and unpleasant. They seek out women who are at a disadvantage.

They are narcissists, at the least. They feel hugely entitled, and when they don't get what they feel entitled to, they feel hugely aggrieved. And they feel justified in doing whatever they feel like.

Just with a superficial knowledge of the facts of this case, the profile might fit well.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/7808240/
Derrick-Bird-was-dumped-by-Thai-prostitute-weeks-before-massacre.html


edit -- and these events really are not cases of people just "losing it". They are foreseeable in the case of someone with that personality profile. The thing is that there are an awful lot of people with that personality profile, and only a small fraction of them will ever actually do anything this exaggerated in response to their grievances. But they don't just "snap" in some irrational way that any of us might do some day. People who don't have this kind of personality don't "snap" and start killing people.

true TW I believe it was Eldrick who rightly said you can't legislate against insanity.
I doubt when he was given that licence he believed he would use it as he did.

I'm going to pick up a habit from you now Janey...

They are commonly men whom women who are their peers or "better" -- same age or younger, equally or more attractive, same cultural background -- find creepy and unpleasant.

Just with a superficial knowledge of the facts of this case, the profile might fit well.

It would except it was well known that Derrick Bird was a well known and respected member of the community, quiet yes, but I haven't heard the words 'creepy' or the like when referring to him.

I have seen quiet and loney or even loner, the night before it was reported he had gotton upset about beeing teased by fellow cabbies on the local rank, do you think the next move is to say he was being bullied by co workers?

Our ex accountant had a Thai bride (he was known locally as Mr. Pick 'n Mix).

It would never occur to me that he would be predisposed to any actions outside the accepted norm. Neither the rather insecure chap we know who holidays in Thailand three times a year!

Just another hype by the despicable media machine who are looking for any piece of (in their view) titillating news.

Sue

Teresa , the words have been mentioned yet but wait till the press have been waving their cheque books about it will...

TW ... men who hang out at strip bars featuring Thai women working there (and plainly don't give a toss whether they have been trafficked into the country, as many have) and court prostitutes ... poster children for creepy and unpleasant, I'd say. (And not paying his taxes for 14 years, I read? Fits, too.)

But then that's all in the eye of the woman beholding him. I gather he was physically unattractive, by the usual standards ("fat and balding"), and single in middle age. Not a blazing success with the ladies, it seems.


Re being bullied: interestingly, this is the popular wisdom about the boys who committed the shootings at Columbine, in the US.

In fact, expert opinion is that one at least was a narcissist, subcategory "malevolent antisocial". There are varying degrees.

http://www1.csbsju.edu/uspp/criminal-profiling/Columbine_Eric-Harris-profile.html



http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/relationships/article2439812.ece

The monster in the mirror
If you like what you see, you could be dangerous. Yvonne Roberts investigates ‘clinical narcissism’

... In the UK, there has been an ambivalent response to the apparent problem. Partly because, for a number of years, some psychiatrists questioned whether NPD [narcissistic personality disorder] and other personality disorders existed at all, while others believed they were simply untreatable. The change came in the 1990s, spurred by the government’s growing concern for the safety of the public after several attacks by people suffering from “severe and dangerous” personality disorders, and demands that they should be treated.

... Successful narcissists have something extra that means people tolerate their bad behaviour. The most dangerous is the unsuccessful narcissist. He doesn’t have money or power or charm, so he’s fired a lot of the time. He drives more and more people away, until he ends up alone and a very bleak person.”

In treatment, people diagnosed with NPD are divided into two groups. In one are “pure” or thick-skinned narcissists. They have often been extremely spoilt and indulged and given no boundaries as children. >>> In the second group are thin-skinned narcissists, such as Vaknin, who have grown up feeling unloved and unlovable. Young says the former are almost impossible to help; the latter may respond to therapy.

"Derrick Bird was a well known and respected member of the community" not actually heard that....

but I would say that being a well known and respected member of a community is no guarantee of anything, I know plenty of those who I wouldn't trust as far as I could throw them, who show one face to the world and have quite another... trouble is so few 'odd' people DO seem creepy..how many times have serial killers/ paedophiles and the like been described as 'well known and respected' and their neighbours and friends been shocked ?

Nobody will ever really know what was going on in his mind, or why he did it.

Was it because he was in debt, was it because he got dumped by a Thai prostitute. was it a row he had, had. Who knows, many people reach the stress level that he must have done and do not go on the rampage. Who even knows if he hadn't planned in in his mind the day before.
Sadly the man is dead taking with him many innocents but no profile reader will ever understand exactly why he did what he did.

Putting the blame, unfairly, on the police response is not going to ease the pain of the families left behind. There was only one person to blame and he is dead.

Others better-informed than I, I see ...


http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/harrymount/100042383
/derrick-bird-was-sad-bitter-and-nasty-but-he-wasnt-a-loner/

It’s now become part of the official description of the Cumbria mass-killer; that he was that familiar murderous figure – the loner.

The word acts as an easy shortcut to all sorts of further implications: friendless, childless, jobless, detached from society. Except that Bird was none of those things. Before he turned on his cab-driving colleagues, he regularly went on holiday with them to Thailand. He was a regular at his local pub, where he dropped in not long before the killings; and, on the night before the killings, he spent several hours chatting to an old pal. He had children and a grandchild; and he had always worked. Yes, he’d split up from the mother of his children and seems to have engaged in some pretty sordid activities in Thailand. But, then again, lots of men lead these broken domestic lives and they’re not suddenly cast as loners.

I’m not for a moment defending Bird, who **as well as being sad and bitter was nasty and narcissistic**; other suicidal people don’t feel the wicked, selfish need to take others with them when they end their lives. I’m just saying that the loner tag is a lazy one.

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In a discussion I had on line about another narcissistic killer, someone else raised the "loner" tag being applied to that one, and suggested people like him are really "failed joiners" rather than loners. I suggested that some people are "loners" because basically, nobody likes them, and for good reason. ;)

But isnt' that simply deflecting from the reality that this was done by a known and liked member of the community. NOBODY saw it coming, not one person.

By placing a ''profile' and speculating about what 'type' of person DB really was is doing no good to anyone. People knew him, they trusted him, or they wouldn't have got in his taxi, they smiled and waved and said good morning to him.

The kind of people you talk of are usually the ones that are avoided in the street, people are suspicious by nature and anyone with a slightly unusual disposition like that is given a wide berth and whispered about in corners.

This doesn't appear to be the case with Bird.

¯`*•.¸ (¯`*•.¸Hayley Empress of Drama ¸.•*´¯)¸.•* Today at 18:34 Request review
I am very interested to know anyones views and how exectly they could of stopped him.

hi hayley 29.i dont think that would have been poss.we dont know what triggered him or if he planned this for a while ,or if something tipped him over the edge that day.we probably wont ever know the full truth.his workers have spoke about tax money etc .but its all that persons bits if you get my drift.sad so many suffered from his actions.

mmm Sorry Janey I have to defend the loner tag to some degree

My OH is a loner he cried more for over the death of a friends dog than he did over a friend. He isn't a failed joiner, in fact many who know him love him, he just is happy in his own world. He works behind a bar so interacts with people all the time, just doesn't socialise with them. Funnily enough he used to be a cabbie also .......:-)


edit to say I have empty his BB gun of pellets ! :-))))