KEY POINTS:
I don't know whether it's because I'm getting older, or whether it's because I've been doing talkback for 10 years, or whether society really is going to hell in a handcart - as so many of my callers have been trying to tell me - but I'm morphing
into a redneck.
It's been a bad week. First, it was the shooting of the Christchurch man. When people tried to tell me it was a tragedy, I replied that child leukaemia was a tragedy. A man who makes wrong choices and dies in a street is sad but preventable. That prompted a few accusations of hardness and lack of empathy.
Then Francis phoned me to say that his 17 years of violent offending was the fault of the system because they (whoever they might be) hadn't tried hard enough to find the right medication for him and so he kept assaulting people. For 17 years.
I suggested, forcefully, that he had a certain amount of free will and perhaps if he'd devoted the same amount of initiative and energy into healing himself as he did into bopping people, he might not have spent so much time in prison.
As a result of our discussion, in which I expressed very little sympathy for Francis, I got told off by other callers for being unkind.
And then this story, from Christchurch, surfaced: A young chef has been given a two-year sentence for knifing a little oik who was giving him grief on a bus late one night.
Shyan Hill was taking the bus to work when six members of the Aranui Town Maori gang boarded the bus. They took exception to Shyan wearing a red sweatshirt because red is the colour of a rival gang. The drunken little thugs spat on him, threw a lighter at him and punched him around the head as they left the bus. Shyan was carrying his chef's knives with him and, as they swaggered off, he lunged at one of them who ended up with a knife in his side.
He lived, but Shyan pleaded guilty to intent to cause grievous bodily harm and was accordingly slammed with a two-year sentence, with leave to apply for home detention.
I don't know what happened to the oiks. They're probably too young to charge. And when I read that story, my only regret was that Shyan hadn't turned the whole bloody lot of them into a gobshite kebab.
The judge might think Shyan's reaction was over the top, but if someone spat on me, I'd bloody react too.
And then Jeff rang with his story. He'd been asked to work overtime but begged off because he was tired. He drove home just before midnight to find his wife and young son standing in the backyard, phoning the police and screaming for help because their home was being invaded.
Jeff stormed into the house and found three young guys ransacking the place. They took off, he chased them and managed to beat the living daylights out of the lot of them and hold them in place until the police arrived.
The police carted the three would-be robbers off to the police station but a couple of days later Jeff was served with a court summons, as the parents of the kids had forced charges to be laid against Jeff for assault. He was advised to plead guilty by his lawyer, and received a couple of hundred hours of community service.
He's had to sell his house because his wife's too scared to live there, and his boy still has nightmares.
And the three little shites? They were too young to charge despite being built like front row forwards, but Child, Youth & Family is now involved.
Who exactly is the victim here? The police were just last week bemoaning the fact that more than 8000 crimes were committed last year by kids too young to be dealt with by the courts and they were powerless to act. Shyan and Jeff weren't. They dealt to the little pricks who had crossed the line - only to find out that they were the ones to be punished.
It makes no sense. Until someone pulls up these feral teenagers and gives them the message in language they will understand, they will continue to believe they are the stars in a movie of their own making. They're living in a fantasy world and we're allowing them to do so.
Another week like this and I'll be calling for compulsory military training.
