London's Child Soldiers

The cleaner's son got shot last week. It's a sign of how far we've come that that may not shock you. What should I expect? This is London after all, the great world city where everything that can happen does happen. Certainly if it involves guns and knives. But I was shocked by this one. He was shot by a machine gun. Now that should be unbelievable: we like to laugh about the Americans and the crazy guns they can buy legally, Alito refusing to accept there was a constitutional ground for him to turn down a law on private citizens buying machine guns in the US. (Never mind that that wasn't the basis of his judgement; that's never stopped a good sneer before.) Oh yes, we're much more advanced in London. Here only the criminals have automatic weapons. Of course, that's nothing new either -- those sisters outside the nightclub, the Shakespeare girls, were shot to ribbons by machine guns. No, what got me about this story of London life was why this mother's son survived. 'He only got shot in the leg,' she explained, 'as they drove by in the car, because the machine gun was so heavy and the boy firing it was too young to hold the muzzle up properly'. Doesn't that break your heart? Shouldn't it? All those pictures of child soldiers in Africa we like to cry over could be taken right here on a South London estate. Oh yes, everything that happens in the world happens in London. More's the pity.