One week in and Malta continues to be captivated, though not in a good way, by the seemingly endless saga of the Police Minister and his Glock-carrying drivers, one of whom released at least two, and possibly three, rounds into a private citizen's car. It doesn't seem as though anybody can talk about anything else in terms of current affairs. Even the announcement of a Chinese bridge project being studied as a link between Malta and Gozo failed to distract us despite its prominent positioning on a newspaper's front page last Sunday. Usually, something like that would have us fighting each other from dusk to dawn - for the bridge or against the bridge, with the battles and debates taking over dinner parties, coffee-houses, television current affairs shows and newspapers. But we're not bothered about the bridge because we have found something that unites us in a common purpose and which is not a charity fundraiser, and we are savouring the novelty of that. We all think, or most of us do at least, that the Police Minister should step down and wobble off into the sunset.
The interesting thing is that the belief is not partisan. Yes, of course there are those who can't see beyond the major issues at play here and can only dive in to take pleasure at giving Mallia a good whipping because he is a government minister for a party they don't fancy. But the reality is that people of all sorts are shocked because...what happened is shocking. Despite our quite prevalent gun culture and the quasi-lunatic obsession with shooting at birds, last Friday's near-fatal incident brought us up short. While there have been umpteen incidents of people shooting at others with their hunting-guns, and we are in way inured to all that, somebody bringing out a Glock in a fit of road rage and shooting at another person who is trying to escape - escape the gun and not responsibility for the accident - causes us to freeze with shock and anxiety. The eyewitness who spoke to the press (and thank heavens she did because that's where we immediately began to understand that the authorities were lying) synthesised the source of this shock when she said: "I have never seen anything like that except in films, and I never thought I would see any such thing."
Because here's the thing - while we are all well aware that the island is teeming with hunting-guns, and we see them whenever we are out in the fields because they are carried over the shoulder quite openly, we had no idea there are all these individuals running around with Glocks in concealed holsters. We begin to think that if they're carrying them they might be tempted to use them, just as Paul Sheehan did.
The fact that Sheehan is both a policeman and a minister of state's driver and protection officer has only served to make the story more compelling, as well it might. The greater part of the 'shock' factor comes from this. It shocks us not because it is an aberration, but precisely because it seems to us not to any aberration at all, but the natural reflection of a government and authority at all levels that is going completely haywire. We are well aware that people who don't know better are picking up on this, and that many who do know better are adopting the attitude that if you can't beat them you may as well join them. The deterioration has been rapid, and the fact that incompetent people of questionable integrity have been placed in key positions merely because they are loyal to those in power has only served - deliberately, perhaps - to hasten the erosion of trust in institutions.
From here on in, it can only get worse. The people who have been appointed are there to stay. Examples are not made of cabinet ministers and MPs who let us down, but only of those who are inconvenient to the prime minister at a personal level. The situation does not look good at all.