It’s the clarion call that follows every tragic incident and leads to the eternal ratcheting up of state control.
Safety notices, health and safety laws, regulatory requirements on manufacturers and suppliers, monitoring QUANGOs, consultative bodies, risk management professionals, kneejerk bans and swivelling of exopthalmic eyes.
Take this fine and pertinent example:
Oh dear kiddies died. Oh noes! Poor ikkle angels :o(
SOMETHING MUST BE DONE!!!!1111!!!!
The family of a Bridgend girl who died after becoming trapped in a sliding electric gate are supporting a campaign to ban them in residential areas.
Karolina Golabek, five, died on Saturday, less than a week after another young girl was killed in similar circumstances in Manchester.
The relatives of Semelia Campbell have told BBC Wales that both deaths were “pointless”.
Tragic as it is, their deaths were indeed pointless. As are most deaths. It’s nature. Life. Deal with it. Preferably not by turning this tragic but hugely unlikely accident into a crusade to interfere with other people’s lives and choices.
I mean, really. Get over yourselves, grieve your loss in private and have some dignity for pity’s sake.
I despair.
AJ
Al Jahom's Final Word 
Since these things are supposed to have safety devices, why not simply engage a lawyer and sue the manufacturers?
Two people have been arrested in one of the cases. They are aledged to be the installers. Such gates do have safety devices such as clutches and sensors. So if the installers failed in their jobs they are liable.
Watch the cunts start a facebook campaign next. Ugh puke.
“Get the fuck over yourselves, grieve your loss in private and have some dignity for pity’s sake.”
Sorry Al Jahom, but I think that’s just downright nasty, to be honest. They’re grieving parents, for goodness sake. Yes, their support for this thing is very misguided, but telling them to get over themselves is simply cruel. Besides, I don’t seriously think that the principles of libertarianism will be the thing weighing on their minds right now.
If you take the quote in isolation then sure, but in context, I don’t think it’s nasty.
People are absolutely entitled to grieve, mourn their tragic, heartbreaking and senseless loss. But why do they feel entitled to project their grief outwards onto the world?
It’s a private matter, and yet they decide to exploit it, in order to give the tragic death some twisted sort of ‘purpose’.
What gives them the right to tell the rest of the world how it should be on the basis on a private tragedy?
Fair enough. Like yourself – correct me if I’m wrong – I’m one of these people who thinks grief should be handled in private, not shown on the public stage. Not least because you’ll inevitably see the media attempting to milk that grief for all the airtime/column space it’s worth. We have some utterly despicable cunts running our media these days.
I agree with what you’re saying here – creating new laws on the basis of private grief is certainly not something I want to see – I just thought you were putting it in a rather insensitive way. Still, they’re only words, I suppose.
They really shouldn’t have agreed to this, but the media are partly culpable for this state of affairs – where grief has to be played out in front of camera. Bastards.
I go with the harsh but true approach. If they kept their grief private and didn’t try to use it to impose their will on others, such comment wouldn’t be forthcoming.
We should not – absolutely not – be making law on the basis of what should be the private grief of the bereaved.
Harsh but fair IMO
Grieving parents are absolutely the very last people who should be consulted about legislation related to the risk that has caused them to grieve.
My blood still boils about that arsehole from Yorkshire TV who took his two young kids in a canoe on a river in flood and blamed the canoe hire people when one of them drowned. He did the full quivering-lipped speech on the courthouse steps etc.
Some comics did a sketch about this issue, with the newsman mawkishly trying to tease out a call for knee-jerk legislation – can’t remember who?
I have a feeling it was Mitchell and Webb on their radio programme, and the grieving parent kept saying to the insistant interviewer, “As a grieving parent I’m completely unsuited to passing comment on that.”
I think you’re right, it sounds like the clear logic of David Mitchell.
13 years of being fed NuLab bullshit about the caring state, which provides all your needs and is “there for you” when it matters, has produced an underclass of dependants. How can you imply parents should actually look after their own children? Surely when they play outside, out of sight, the state will be there to watch over them? If anything happens therefore, it’s the state that’s to blame.
I view this as Natural Selection in action: the stupid, dependant attitudes are a sign of the death of our “society”; once so vibrant and thriving, leading the world in innovation and expertise, now sadly diminished beyond hope. Fuck Bliar & Broon for the devastation they’ve caused.
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