“Victims petrify politicians”, writes “Bagehot” in the Economist. (Alternative link here.) “They are apex stakeholders. Normal rules for decisions—risk, cost, proportionality—are thrown away when they are involved. What if a headline suggests ministers snubbed victims? Write the cheque. Civil servants, always cautious, become cowards. Campaigners know this. The unedifying spectacle of a grieving parent wheeled in front of cameras to push a particular policy, whether limits on smartphones or ninja swords, has become a political trump card.”
“Has become”? One of my few criticisms of this admirably unaccommodating article is that it talks as if this development were new. That voters and hence governments cannot bear to disagree with a victim was already an established pattern in the days when the cheques being written really were cheques. It was old news in 2001 when I wrote a piece for the Libertarian Alliance in about the reaction to the gun massacre at Dunblane.
. . . nowadays we give the bereaved parents at Dunblane, the survivors of rail crashes, and similar groups both the license to say anything due to the distraught and the intellectual consideration due to experts. They can’t have both. Not because I’m too mean to give it to them, but because the two are logically incompatible. The press and public have handed power to those least able to exercise it well.
(Alternative link here.)
Bagehot continues:
Trade-offs are ignored when victims campaign. Martyn’s law, named after a victim of a suicide-bombing at a concert in Manchester in 2017, requires any venue that can hold more than 200 people to have an anti-terror plan, even if it is a village hall. It is likely to cost businesses about £170m ($225m) a year to comply and bring about £2m of benefits, mainly from lower crime. A careful balancing of interests is close to impossible if a victim’s mother is involved. “This would not have happened without your campaigning,” said Sir Keir at a meeting with Martyn’s mother, rightly.
The word “rightly” is not here a term of praise. “Martyn’s Law”, like nearly every law named after a victim, is a bad law that should never have been passed. But the blame for it should not fall on Martyn’s mother. God knows she never wanted to be labelled “Victim’s Mother” on the chyron. She never wanted to be in a position such that her opinions on measures to take against terrorism were of interest to anyone. She never sought to be a lawmaker; never claimed she would be any good at it. The man who should be blamed did.
The thing about these laws is that they are monuments to people’s grief rather than being useful. No doubt their heard words from the grief of this mother, and whose heart does not go out to her after than outrageous tragedy, and we decide let’s have “Martyn’s Law”. The purpose is to have a law, a memorial, and what gets poured into it is almost irrelevant. And of course that means the civil servants pour whatever is their priority into the law, so in many ways this is the worst, the government exploiting the victims to advance their own causes.
Every so often one of the parents from the Sandy Hook school massacre is on an advert advocating for some entirely useless gun control law. I have such mixed feelings about it since I feel so much compassion for the pain of the person, but I almost feel they are exploiting their children’s suffering to make a political point, so I am simultaneously mad at them.
Something I have noticed over the years having known a fair number of people who have lost loved ones. The initial pain is overwhelming, but then they redirect their energy into the funeral arrangements, contacting family and engaging with all the “our deepest sympathies” and all the “I made you this casserole” that engulf them. And then the funeral is over, and it is only at that point, all alone in their grief, that the fullness of it hits them. I have always made it a policy with people in my life who have lost loved ones to rather focus my support on them after the funeral rather than all the brouhaha before.
But this is a similar thing — it is trying to take something so utterly senseless as the murder of children, and imbue it with some sort of meaning. In part to try to deal with facing the gaping maw of the utter capriciousness of life, but also, I fear, in part as a distraction to avoid the overwhelm of the grief they must face after the distractions are put away.
And it just seems to me so vile, so horrible, that politicians would take advantage of people at their lowest to advance themselves. And then have the audacity to call this “compassion”.
But I’m sure I don’t need to tell anybody here that politicians are, generally speaking, scum.
Long ago, I was low-level staff for a MN guy. He was pushing a new law that was triggered by something bad that had happened to someone.
His staff chief said, let’s call it Sammi’s Law! Great heartstring tug!
Boss said no, it’ll pass or fail on its merits.
There are SOME pols who are more than decent. Two that I worked for, I’d rank amongst the best of humans. So, just sayin’.