‘Kill motorcycle thieves’ says James May

JAMES May – you know, the one from Top Gear who doesn’t say outrageous things just to provoke – has written a 400-word article arguing motorcycle thieves should be killed.

In his ‘Carbolics’ column for the website Drivetribe, the former Top Gear presenter says they should be dealt with more severely than other thieves because they’re motivation is not need but greed.

Under the headline ‘Bike theft – solved’, he says: ‘We could attempt to absolve society of its responsibilities and blame the bike makers, for not providing adequate built-in security. These are platitudes. We must deal with the problem of bike thieves at its source, by killing them.’

The column is a response to another post arguing there is a UK motorcycle theft ‘epidemic’ and goes on to say the measure would not be ‘pure revenge’ but preventative.

May writes: ‘I have arrived at this conclusion not through knee-jerk reaction or impotent fury, but by a pure and unadulterated process of logic. They have to be killed.

'...The police seem unwilling or in some way unempowered to deal with it, the aggrieved people are unable to convene courts to try the perpetrators even if they could be caught, so they’ll just have to be killed. That way, they won’t nick any more bikes.’

He says that in some circumstances theft could be ‘reasonable’ because of need or ‘disparity of wealth and personal circumstance’, adding: ‘But the people we’re talking about here are just wankers nicking bikes for profit, so we should kill them.’

May concludes: ‘It has, like The Archers, gone on long enough. What many assume is a spate of petty theft is in fact a threat to societal stability. These thieves are not merely taking other people’s property, they are threatening anyone who opposes them with power tools, machetes and mediaeval debonkers. As several people have already pointed out, someone is going to be killed.’

Thoughts?

Here are ours: don't steal his bike.

Read the column here.