Our outrage should give us hope

The more you read about the murder of Rhys Jones, the more shocking it becomes. The combination of a BMX—a symbol of childhood fun—and a brutal shooting brings home just how brutalised our society has become. Jon Swain’s piece in The Sunday Times comparing Liverpool to the war zones he has reported from painfully details this point. But the sheer level of outrage this pedal-by-shooting has generated should give us hope; especially if this outrage can be harnessed to effect a substantive change in our culture. Before moving back to London last year, I lived in Washington for four years where the kind of incident we saw in Croxteth Park on Wednesday night was tragically common but hardly dominated even one news-cycle. As a country, we thankfully seem to have grasped that we need to address these problems before they pass a point from which it becomes nigh-on impossible to return.