When ‘you’ll be sorry’ boomerangs

It can feel good to vent. Necessary, even.

When the frustration builds to a point that you’re just about shaking with contained rage, it can seem that the only way to stop yourself imploding is to explode – erupting into a passionate storm of rebuke, reproach and recrimination.

But there comes a point where the desire to make your displeasure not just understood but consequential can be hurtfully indulged by a few choice words that turn a tantrum into something menacing.

A man who threatened to blow up a Work and Income New Zealand office in Gore was talking to the disembodied voice of a call centre worker. Hugely frustrated about his financial situation, he said he had sodium nitrate at home and that the quicker the offices got blown up the better.

For this deliberate evocation of the fatal shootings at the Ashburton Work and Income office, Alan John Leatham – who had even known one of the Ashburton victims as his case worker – was this week sentenced to four months’ community detention. A measured sentence. As was the one handed down last month to Picton man Hemi Smith, who threatened to kill a police officer’s wife and children and burn down his house. Giving utterance to that scenario cost him 150 hours’ community service and nine months’ supervision.

More startlingly, a Christchurch man was in March jailed for 11 months for emailed threats to kill members of Parliament, complete with lurid details about the visceral nature of the violence. The offender, Steven Shane Lawrence, was a lonely alcoholic on medication for bipolar, depression and anxiety disorders.

Which doesn’t excuse much. Sad cases are as capable of causing extravagant harm as anyone else.

Generally when people are called to account for such talk, they seek to minimise the harm by inviting everyone to accept that of course they didn’t mean it, or intend to carry it out. But even faint possibility of sincere intent is enough to cause real distress. And that’s what the threat-maker generally is so often exploiting in the first place.

All of which means that it’s entirely appropriate that the search continue for the blackmailer who threatened to contaminate baby infant formula with 1080.

The deadline may have passed but this clown still needs to face a pointy reckoning.