A case of grievance.

UNTIL the Falklands War, few people other than stamp collectors had ever heard of those barren, windswept islands in the South Atlantic; and until Thomas Watt Hamilton walked into Dunblane Primary School last Wednesday morning and shot 16 children and their teacher dead, then turning his gun upon himself, few people had ever heard of Dunblane. After the three-minute massacre of the innocents, however, the name of Dunblane, a typically dismal small Scottish town, was -- and remains -- upon everybody's lips.

As well it might: for Thomas Watt Hamilton's crime was the very acme of modern social pathology. It wasn't only that the crime was followed at once by scores of psychologists, counselors, and psychiatrists giving their opinions on television and in print as to how the full exploration of Hamilton's fantasy life might have prevented the tragedy; it was that the crime was itself a perverted form of psychotherapy, a cathartic release from the frustrations from which its perpetrator had long suffered.

Thomas Watt Hamilton was a strange man, but he was not by any means unique: on the contrary, I meet his like among my patients not infrequently. Those who dream of mass killing are a tiny minority of the total population, perhaps, but they are not therefore a negligible number. And since the last such mass killing in Britain occurred in 1987, when a young man in the small and equally obscure English town of Hungerford went on the rampage and killed 17 people, perhaps the question should not be why such events happen at all, but why so few of them happen.

Hamilton was a loner who had expressed a somewhat steamy interest in young boys since about the age of 20. In everyday life, he could be perfectly polite, but he was close to no one. At the age of 22 he was expelled from the Boy Scout Association, not for any sexual deviancy, but because he had failed to take proper care of the boys in his charge on an outing to the Highlands. Instead of staying in a hostel, he had made them sleep in his van in the freezing cold.

Apparently, he never forgot or forgave. He devoted himself to his twin interests, guns and boys' clubs. They were to be united in the most unhappy fashion.

He hired local halls and started his own clubs. On three occasions, permission to hire halls was refused him because of persistent rumors about him. On one occasion, he appealed successfully via the legal system, unproved allegations being no grounds to refuse anything to anyone, apparently.

Nevertheless, his reputation remained distinctly unsavory. It was known to some that the walls of his apartment were covered with pictures of small boys in various states of undress. He was known to be a fitness fanatic who exercised the children entrusted to him with sadistic ruthlessness. He took photographs of naked boys which the local shop refused to develop, so that he had to take them instead to Glasgow. One mother reported his activities to the police, but nothing was done. Nor was anything done when Hamilton later threatened her with a gun. The police merely said that he had a gun license, and that therefore everything was in order. Hamilton wrote a circular letter to the parents of Dunblane protesting his innocence of sexual perversion.

In 1992, however, the local council decided that enough was enough, and refused him further permission to run any boys' clubs at all. Thereafter, Hamilton gave himself over to the expression of bitterness at this terrible injustice, and he wrote uninterruptedly to the powerful and important to complain. Shortly before the denouement of this terrible story, he mailed a bundle of querulous letters to radio and television stations, and even one to the Queen.

The locus classicus of his prickly self-absorption is in a letter he wrote to the Scottish Secretary (the cabinet minister at the head of Scottish affairs) on March 24, 1993, a year after he had been prevented from running boys' clubs:

With the horrific murder of little James Bulger, possibly by two 10-year-old boys, the whole question of juvenile crime is in greater debate across the whole country.

The work of my group in providing sporting and leisure time activities for young boys has the effect of channeling young energies into creative and worthwhile pursuits . . .

It is ironic the decline of these clubs was caused by the irresponsible actions of overzealous police officers from Central Scotland police, obsessed with child abuse, in carrying out their failed pervert hunt using unfair tactics. . . .

The proper and legitimate purpose of the need to take such photographs had been fully explained previously to [police officers]. When senior officers had been shown these photographs in earlier years, their only comments had been "the colors were nice."

. . . If the Government is going to effectively condone the police undermining, smashing and destroying voluntary youth groups in modern day witch-hunts, it is perhaps hardly surprising that bored children with little or nothing to do turn their energies to crime from a young age.

His grievance fed his bitterness, and his bitterness his grievance, until finally he thought of a resolution of his situation: and in the days before he carried it out, he was a changed man, euphoric and talkative, where before he had been miserable and taciturn. By massacring the children, and then killing himself, he simultaneously brought retribution to a cruel world, righted a wrong, achieved immortality, and put a term to his own misery. No psychotherapist (or Hollywood scriptwriter) could have thought of a neater ending. And his argumentation in his letter to the Scottish Secretary was uncannily like that of the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, who wrote two letters to the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal a couple of years before the bombing to air his complaints about the cruelty of modern farming methods and the corruption of American politicians. "Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system? I hope it doesn't come to that. But it might."

But it is Thomas Watt Hamilton's profound sense of grievance that is the Leitmotiv of his thought; and in this he is truly a man of his time. He conceived of any obstruction to the fulfillment of his desires as an infringement of his inalienable rights: hence the aggrieved tone of his letter to the Scottish Secretary. He believed that his right to run a boys' club was of the same nature as his right to a fair trial or to freedom of speech. Even if he had been caught with a boy in flagrante delicto, as he was not, it is not difficult to imagine his defense, culled from thirty years of liberal argumentation:

"What harm have I done?" he would have written. "I am very fond of boys and would never have inflicted any injury upon them. The alleged harmfulness of pedophilia and pederasty do not come from the acts themselves, but from society's prejudiced reaction to them. The Ancient Greeks were pedophiles, and their society was the finest Mankind has ever known. It is surely time we rooted out this absurd, unthinking, and primitive prejudice."

His use of grievance to justify an atrocious act is again characteristic of our age. Not long ago I met a man who told me that he would like one day to go into a crowded supermarket and spray the shoppers with machine-gun bullets, because they were all meat-eaters. The conditions in which meat was produced were an abomination and a disgrace, he said. And in order to make his protest heard, he would have to decimate the suburbs: our furry friends deserved no less. Indeed, it would be immoral for him to stand back and do nothing.

Only yesterday, I met a young man who felt so strongly about the destruction of the rain forests of Brazil that he could no longer agree to participate in a society which permitted and profited from it. He had thus dropped out of higher education: the only honorable course of action in a world such as ours was to live in perpetuity upon social security, get drunk, and hit policemen, which he did regularly. That his own actions might be causing suffering had not occurred to him, and when it was pointed out, he said such suffering was trifling by comparison with the destruction of the rain forests.

I hear echoes of Thomas Watt Hamilton in the conversations I have with criminals in the prison where I work. They tell me that in a world in which property is so unevenly distributed, theft is not crime, but rather, redistribution or even a form of taxation. And thus the locus of moral responsibility and control is shifted from the individual to society, leaving the individual to act out as he pleases, free of unpleasant guilt or irritating restraint.

And, as we know, there is no higher good than self-expression. To hold anything in, to repress feelings, even murderous ones, is not only impossible in the long run, but a dereliction of duty to oneself. If Thomas Watt Hamilton had lived, he would have told us that his act was one of self-affirmation in a world which constantly and maliciously thwarted him. He would have had a hundred arguments at the ready to prove that, in singling him out as evil, we were demonizing him and blaming him for all society's ills. He would have told us that it was a sign of our complacency -- the worst moral defect known to liberal man -- that we held him accountable for his actions and not Dunblane council and Central Scotland police, who provoked them.

Curiously, it is true that Hamilton was not solely to blame for his actions, but not in a sense that will please liberals. All those who have assiduously taught us over the years that self-fulfillment is a right, regardless of its content; that the locus of our moral concern should not be our own actions, but the conditions of society as a whole; that all repression of desire is wrong -- they should look in the mirror and see a little of Thomas Watt Hamilton in themselves.