Opting to bite the bullet
PEOPLE who believe in the right to bear arms have a point. They say that guns, themselves, don’t kill people. It’s people who kill people. In that, absolutely, they are spot on. Except that, also, it’s the availability of guns that kills people. “Don’t take your guns to town,” sings the mother in the famous Johnny Cash song, summing up something mothers have understood ever since guns, or towns, existed.
Despite the soul-searching and the expert opinion, I wondered if I SHOT MY PARENTS (BBC1) was a lengthy way of making the same point. In 2013, in the small town of Moses Lake, Washington State, a 14-year-old teenager named Nathon Brooks took a gun from his parents’ safe and emptied it into his sleeping parents. A popular student, with no history of criminal behaviour, drug use or difficulties understanding reality, Nathon seemed baffled himself by the crime.
Both parents survived and through an act of will or love or loyalty that some might say borders on the miraculous, have stood by him throughout. He is now serving a long sentence and won’t be released before he’s 29. Well-told and compassionately handled, this was one of those stories that came to a distinct fork in the road and let us choose where to go next.
It was hard to overlook the fact that even the prosecutor, pushing for the strongest charges and sentence against this young man, thought there was something strange about the household.
He had never, he said, come across a house where all the CCTV cameras filmed inside. He let that hang, and hang it did, alongside what to many a parent seemed like some harsh ways of dealing with teenage mischief at school.
At the same time, alongside all the diagnoses of ADHD and major depression and bipolar disorder, the basic reasonableness of both Nathon and his family couldn’t stop peeking through. It was the same state of mind that meant his parents, despite life-changing injuries, were able to stay being his parents and love him and kid themselves that he was just away, for a very long time, at a very secure type of university.
It also perhaps gave us some clue to working out what had really gone wrong. One night, this boy was angry with his parents. In some places where briefly angry teenagers live, like the UK, there are no guns. In others, there are.
I’m not sure it’s any more complicated than Johnny Cash put it.
Often, it’s a single, simple thing that puts people on the right path. Usually viewed as the hotspot of freewheeling, pleasure-seeking waywardness, the Big Top seems to have turned more than one life around. The final instalment of the brilliant CIRCUS KIDS (Channel 5) introduced us to Brandon, who couldn’t wait to tell us how horrid he’d been when he was 14.
Instead of running away to the circus, he’d been sent there to learn a craft among family members and never looked back. The work was exhausting, the now-17-year-old Brandon said, but he’d learnt that efforts (knife-throwing, whiplashdisplaying, tent-dissembling, the lot) paid off.
With some younger people he shared the basic, but powerful experience of responsibility. Lewis, who performed a clown act alongside his Dad, said performing with him and earning money with him made him feel like him.
What child doesn’t grow inches inside, given that chance?