On the evening of September 23rd 1999, Harry Stanley, a 46 year old Grandfather, was returning to his home in Hackney, East London. He had spent the afternoon at his brother’s house helping him to repair a coffee table
Harry took one of the table legs home with him to work on. He wrapped it up in a plastic bag
On the way home, he stopped off at a pub for a drink. As he left one of the other patrons rang the police and reported ‘an Irishman carrying a shotgun’. (Harry was actually Scottish). The oblivious Harry continued on his journey home until he was some 50 yards from his front door when two policeman from the SO19 Armed Response Unit opened fire on him. One bullet hit Harry in the temple and he died instantly
Today, after a 12 month long enquiry, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that the police officers who carried out the shooting acted in ‘reasonable self-defence’ and would not face any charges
In the absence of a private prosecution by the Stanley family, we will never know quite what occured on that evening and why Harry is dead as police and witness statements and reports will remain filed away in the CPS cabinets. However, one doesn’t need to be privvy to these documents to ask some pertinent questions about why Harry Stanley was so ruthlessly gunned down outside his home
Harry was neither a terrorist nor a criminal and it seems highly unlikely that he would not have responded to some shouted warning. It seems even less likely that, confronted with the police, he would have tried to run or fight it out given that he was recovering from surgery for cancer. Is it all plausible that, acting on an unsubstantiated allegation, armed officers made a decision not to take any chances and simply executed him?
We shall never know for the officers in question will not stand trial. What should stand trial though is the policy of victim disarmerment which has left Britain with a duopoly of fire-power between state agents and criminals. If you’re not one you must be the other and holding something that could possibly be interpreted as a weapon gives said state agents a carte blanche to rub you out and call it ‘self-defence’. After all, as far as they are concerned you must be a dangerous criminal, right
The British police have advertised the fact that anyone found in a public place with a gun or something that looks like a gun will be met with lethal force. But such is the depth of anti-gun hysteria that this policy of extra-judicial execution is not only tolerated but demanded and will clearly be acted upon in the event of rumour/allegation/sniff/hint/outright lie. No chances are to be taken and no questions are to be asked
For us in Britain it is now too late to change this state of affairs but for those Americans reading this please remember Harry Stanley when the victim-disarmers tell you that guns are dangerous. Tell them that over here in London, table-legs can get us killed by the very people we pay to protect us
