Tackle those sexists after the shooters are in prison
POLICE say the gunning down of a man in Glasgow – the latest paroxysm of violence in an ongoing gangland feud – was ‘a targeted attack’. But if officers think ‘targeted’ is reassuring, that at least it wasn’t a volley pumped into a stranger or a case of mistaken identity, it’s time they thought again.
In 2006, I was in Dublin as a gang turf war raged. Close to Christmas, 19 people – including a young mother – had been killed.
That’s when a ‘targeted attack’ was launched on ‘Marlo’ Hyland, a drug dealer hiding at his niece’s home. Also there was Anthony Campbell, a plumber fixing a leaky radiator.
Hyland’s killers shot innocent 20-year-old Anthony. Ballistics showed he had his arms above his head in abject surrender when his life was ended by a pistol round.
The latest Scottish targeted attack saw two masked men burst into a flat and unleash a fusillade that left their victim fighting for life. It’s more south-central Los Angeles than Shettleston.
It happened close to where another man was blasted in the head last month and came weeks after a man was fatally shot after being lured outside his Airdrie home.
Gangland killings are not ‘executions’ carried out by ‘assassins’. That gives them a veneer of – not respectability, certainly – but faux glamour as though they don Bond-style black tie before precision ‘hits’.
The only true hitman I’ve seen was Vinko Sindicic who, in a Fife street in 1988, put four bullets into a Croatian dissident at the behest of his Yugoslavian government masters.
Sindicic was a trained murderer. To look into his eyes was to witness the merciless, shark-like gaze of a true predator.
The gunmen rampaging in Glasgow are in the pay of drugs gangs. Weapons are often smuggled in with drug hauls as part of the grubby deal.
When they pull the trigger, these thugs are themselves often on drugs such as amphetamine. Professionals? They are irrational, unreliable and a danger to us all.
Their gang bosses will sometimes load their weapons in such a way the first trigger-pull does not fire a round – that’s to stop them accidentally shooting their own getaway driver on the way to their sickening business.
Remarkable, too, is how much tabloid crime reporters know about the key players and the fault lines between gangs. Something is far wrong if detectives either don’t know the same or are powerless to act on the information.
In 2006 Dublin, the then justice minister was to the fore with increased surveillance and extra armed officers.
His soundbite that the killings were ‘the last sting of a dying wasp’ proved a hostage to fortune, but at least he was visible.
Whither callow Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf, while in the backroom of some Scottish howf plans are probably even now being laid for the next ‘targeted attack’?
Buck up your ideas, Mr Yousaf. This is no time to be tinkering with daft plans to outlaw sexist wolf-whistling.
Have Police Scotland got everything they need to smash the gangs and put the men of violence behind bars?
If not, it’s on you.