Bang bang bang, you're dead.

 The Dutch army is so short of bullets that soldiers in training have to point unloaded guns and go 'bang bang' bang'. They should come to Britain where we, too, seem to have a problem in understanding the reality of violence.

John 'Goldfinger' Palmer, a well known gangster, was shot in the chest six times and the police accepted the paramedics assurance he'd suffered a heart-attack. This may sound unlikely, even unbelievable, but then again society seems increasingly confused as to what constitutes violence. The police, too, so it seems.

A child brushed with a stinging nettle and a man hit by a biscuit have both been recorded by police as violent crimes, acting under new, stricter Home Office rules. Another incident in which a child was caught by a boxing glove being swung about by a younger brother was recorded by Norfolk police as an assault occasioning actual bodily harm.  

The biscuit incident involved a woman throwing said comestible at a man and causing a small red mark. In another case involving two children, police recorded an assault after one of them rode into his friend while they were doing 'wheelies' on their bikes. Similar lunacy involved a woman charged with assault for slapping her three year old son's hand after she caught him stealing a bar of chocolate from a shop.

 I don't know who was most stupid, the police or the member of the public who recorded it. In this context the delay in diagnosing what actually killed John Goldfinger Palmer becomes almost understandable.