Hey, Why Waste Two Tragic Deaths?

The two recent deaths of young children crushed in security gates is a salient reminder to ensure that if you have such gates, or plan to have them installed, best to ensure it’s from a reputable company and all the required safety systems are in working order.

Unless you are Jonathan Glancey, the Guardian's architecture and design correspondent, that is.
He simply sees an opportunity to advance his agenda:

Local people say both sets of gates – guarding new, yet far from "exclusive", estates – have existed solely to stop residents' cars from being stolen. Perhaps they have. And yet, surely, the safest form of street, and thus housing, is a permeable one, supervised – naturally and subtly – by people walking up and down it.

Clearly, the people who have these installed think otherwise.

Perhaps the fate of so many people who have faced car thieves only to end up under their own cars, and thrn on a mortuary slab, is foremost in their minds?

When did this new generation of gated estates emerge? I'm not too sure, although I remember them sprouting promiscuously in London's Docklands during the late 1980s, those yuppie years when Porsche-driving young City types brandishing mobile phones the size of bricks bore down on the newly shipless docks. They liked the idea of living by the Thames and close to the financial towers of Canary Wharf; they also feared the locals.

So, yuppie "apartment" blocks (a "flat" would never do) were tucked away behind gates, CCTV cameras and guard-posts.

Those ghastly, horrible yuppies! Who do they think they are, flaunting their wealth?
Just asking for it, aren’t they, Jonathan…

Today, there is barely a town worth the name in Britain – let alone elsewhere in the world – free from gated estates, gated car parks, gated malls, gated streets. It's as if we've all become scared, or simply suspicious, of one another and that the best thing we can do for our own good is to tell everyone else to stay well away.

Well, clearly there’s little point in expecting the police or justice system to do anything about it, is there..?

What has happened to us? How can such paranoia, and shortsighted urban planning and design, be worth the death of two little girls?

The two children died either because the safety mechanisms that should have been employed were missing or non-functional, or perhaps because there was a design fault. We don’t know. We won’t know, until the inquests.

We DO know that all across the country, thousands of children have NOT been crushed to death by gates that function as they are supposed to.

But let’s not let that stop us advancing our ‘rich people are just awful’ agenda, eh?

Still, at least you aren't shouting for a ban, like some people...