Dunblame

A decade on from the Dunblane school massacre channel five revisited it.How could any programme do justice to such a tragedy?It was however handled fittingly enough.Until that is, the gun control issue was broached.Then the programme temporarily changed and moved into agenda gear.

It is understandable for the parents of those slaughtered children to seek causes for the tragedy and to want to make sense of such a senseless act of gratuitous barbarism but it is interesting to see how in the process human beings so often latch on to the entirely wrong causal explanation and seek out an object upon which to vent their anger and grief.In this case of course it was the handgun - (plural of in the killer's case) and the need to ban it,which they effectively achieved in the UK,giving it the most stringent gun control laws in the world.Since when of course the incidence of gun related deaths has quadrupled....

This sort of displacement or projection psychology has been little discussed,certainly not in the mainstream media especially as in many instances the MSM instigates or engenders such phenomena, albeit sometimes unwittingly.

Unable to confront the sheer enormity of such human evil the victims family primarily, in unconscious self defence mechanism will shift their animus away from the source of their grief and project it onto soemthing they find easier to confront, usually an inaminmate object,in this case the gun.In a few leaps of pretzellogic the gun is now seen as the cause of the crime and must be proscribed by law.The perpetrator,the man who pulled the trigger and went on a five minute act of random carnage is relegated to a side issue,beyond all analysis and thus tidly substitued by the handgun.

On a wider scale,macrocosmically we see a variant of this phenomena at work - same displacement projection psychology - in the dynamics of the anti war peace groups.Bush becomes Hitler -'the greatest terrorist in the world' acording to the SWP, and Saddom is airbrushed out.

There are probably legion other examples of this at work in interpersonal relations.Couples who fight over domestic arrangements like leaving the lid off the toothpaste.Or policemen who go after a man who displayed golliwogs in his front window,but seem to develop myopia when criminal acts of vandalism are taking place under their noses.

How much easier it is to project onto carefully selected and constructed scapegoats than to deal with the real issues we are confronted with!