I would like to remember Eric Inness and David Mackenzie.

What goes around comes around! arnold schwarzenegger also did steroids, glorified violence, and was voted a hero. Don't hear you criticizing that and the insanity statistics related to the millions dead in Afghanistan Mr Cameron. Maybe if Moat had worn a uniform and done the deed in another country you would feel differently.

Also can I congratulate NOT the police, NOT the armed forces but the PEOPLE of britain on the falling crime rate. Well done. Don't give them another excuse to spend your tax on millennium domes, bankers and war.

Like many of the people who have expressed their views in relation to this case (including those closely affected), I am able to have sympathy and sadness for both Mr Moat AND his victims. However, it seems that this kind of balanced outlook is to have no place is Cameron's Britain.

I think Mr Cameron has made a terrible error of judgement that will become more embarrassing as we learn about Mr Moat’s unstable psychological state. I am genuinely surprised that he feels that he has the right or expertise to judge this man, whom we all know relatively little about at this stage.

Yet, unbelievably, he has expressed an immature, unhelpful and inflammatory tabloid view of this case, which basically boils down to: Mr Moat was a baddy, and that is that. This is telling of Mr Cameron and is not what we need or expect from our prime-minister at times like this.

Apropos of the culpability of Mr Moat, as Mark Twain once said:“I have no special regard for Satan; but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue bibles against him, and say the most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side. We have none but the evidence for the prosecution, and yet we have rendered the verdict. To my mind this is irregular. It is un-English; it is un-American; it is French . . . Of course Satan has some kind of case, it goes without saying. It may be a poor one, but that is nothing; that could be said about any of us.”

What happened to the right to freedom of speech? we dont all have to think like a politician ( Im neutral with the whole moat thing)but if i wasnt id like the option to have my own view.

Surely it is possible to discriminate between sympathy and admiration in the case of Raoul Moat. A compassionate society is one that, at the same time as condeming him and showing sympathy for his victims, looks at the reasons why a man finds himself in the position where he is compelled to go on a shooting rampage .

Moat's victims are far more worthy recipients of sympathy, but Mr. Cameron should bear in mind that this is a man who felt he had no option but to shoot himself in the head. That a person can find themselves in such a position in which they see no alternative but to take a shotgun to their temple is, I would suggest, worthy of a measure of sympathy, and saying so does not make less of the contempt that is rightly felt for his actions.

Mr. Cameron has been too general in his dismissal of "any wave of sympathy" for Moat. If we examine the meaning of Mr. Camerons recommendation against sympathy with someone who felt the need to end their own life, are we saying that it was right that he is now dead?

As Prime Minister, perhaps Mr. Cameron should set a moral tone. He could well have condemned the reference to Moat as a 'legend' and any admiration of him. (Such admiration is nurtured in no small part by an increasingly irresponsible media. He could have mentioned that. But that's another issue entirely.)

Cameron ultimately chose however, to take an authoritarian position. It appears that the new government does not find it coherent to simultaneously show compassion and condemnation. If we follow this thought through to it's logical conclusion, at what point does a criminal act become so horrendous as to exempt the perpetrator from any right to sympathy from the public or perhaps even the judicial system?

If this authoritarian tone displayed today by the Prime Minister, leaks down and informs policy, will we see a more authoritarian shading to our system of justice? Is this what the majority want for our predominantly liberally populated country?

Might I suggest that perhaps Mr. Cameron's liberal Tory mask is beginning to ever so slighly slip away.