An SAS hero, who served his country with distinction for 22 years, has been properly thanked – with a 15-month prison sentence.
Since most burglars get off scot-free, or perhaps with a deferred slap on the wrist, one has to assume that Albert Patterson committed a worse crime than breaking into somebody’s house and stealing everything of any resale value.
He did. All these years, he has kept in his heart the memory of his 22 comrades who died next to him in the Falklands. And, in remembrance of them, he has kept in his house a trophy pistol he took off a captured Argentine officer.
The pistol was discovered by the police investigating a burglary in the 65-year-old’s house. Had the investigation resulted in the arrest of the burglar, and the arrest in a trial (both huge statistical improbabilities), the criminal would have received a suspended sentence. But he wasn’t caught. Instead the police arrested Mr Patterson.
The gun was neither loaded nor prominently displayed. It was hidden and locked away, but that didn’t matter. Back in 1998 the government introduced a handgun amnesty, which was a fancy word for confiscation. People were supposed to turn in their guns in exchange for a fraction of their value and a promise not to prosecute.
Once the amnesty expired, possessing a handgun became illegal. Serving his country abroad, as he did at the time, and then working for various NGOs in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mr Patterson might not even have known about this ridiculous legislation or, if he had, it might have slipped his mind.
Yes, fine, the law is the law, and ignorance is no excuse. But there’s one aspect of jurisprudence common to all Western countries and certainly in England: our legality can be traced back to the Bible.
It originates from the laws laid down in the Old Testament and then refined in the Gospels, where severity was leavened with mercy. For example, the letter of the law said that the woman taken in adultery should be stoned to death. Yet, having invited those who were without sin to cast the first stone, Jesus simply told the woman to sin no more and sent her on her way.
That’s not to deny that some seminal Western laws have pagan Roman antecedents, or that some marginal ones aren’t Biblical in nature. But, in the West, the principle of justice leavened with mercy is the foundation of them all.
The ill-advised ban on handguns surely was designed to guarantee that weapons wouldn’t fall into wrong hands. In fact, it guaranteed that wrong hands were the only kind into which guns can now possibly fall, and wrong hands can still get a weapon with embarrassing ease. Law-abiding subjects of Her Majesty, on the other hand, have to remain unarmed in the face of a sky-rocketing crime rate.
But leaving this asinine law aside, surely this was one case in which mercy was called for, nay demanded? Presiding Judge Plunkett felt so.
He also knew, or claimed, that his feelings didn’t matter one jot. He was privileged, the Judge said, to have examined Mr Patterson’s service record, highlighting the numerous times he risked his life protecting his country.
But the law, said His Honour, left him no choice in sentencing. And, come to think of it, “In the wrong hands these weapons could lead to the death of police officers or cause all sorts of mayhem. It’s the risk that Parliament is concerned about.”
In the wrong hands, rat poison, available at any DIY store, could poison the water supply of a large city. In the wrong hands, kitchen knives one can buy at any supermarket could slash dozens of bystanders before the police could bat an eyelid. In the wrong hands, electric drills and axes, sold by any hardware shop, could become weapons of torture and murder.
Is Parliament concerned about those? Not one bit. It’s guns that stick in its craw because, in the right hands, they may act as a natural restriction on arbitrary power, which is exceedingly becoming exactly the kind of power our government exercises.
People despise laws they regard as unjust, and they break laws they regard as ludicrous. And what can be more ludicrous than pronouncing that Mr Patterson’s hands, which for 22 years fired weapons in defence of his country, are now so wrong that they can’t be trusted with antiquated trophy pistols locked away in his cabinet?
Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of our forces in Afghanistan, put it in a nutshell, calling for the veteran’s ‘immediate’ release.
“This is another example,” he said, “of our troops being persecuted by a government and courts obsessed with political correctness.
“An SAS hero who risked his life to defend his country shouldn’t be treated like a South London drug dealer… The country should be grateful for what he did.”
It is. This is how today’s Britain shows its gratitude.