Knife Control is a Scapegoat for London's Real problems
London is coming for knives, kitchen knives, because they shouldn't have points! Or maybe there is a practical reason they should.I can't believe I actually have to explain to a judge why knives in the kitchen have points... its called cutting food. But all this talk of sharp knives seems to just be a scapegoat for the real cultural problems facing London.SUPPORT JOURNALISM. Become a patron athttp://www.patreon.com/TimcastSupport the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
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If I were to tell you that a teen in the UK was critically injured in a stabbing, would you be surprised?
The answer is probably no, because people get stabbed all the time all over the world.
However, if you've been paying attention to the news, you've probably heard a ton of stories about escalating knife crime.
In fact, we've heard that London now surpasses New York in terms of homicide.
So there's been a lot of discussion about knives and murder.
There's been proposals to dull knives or even ban knives.
But is that actually a solution?
What's actually causing the violence?
And is it possible that these proposals will simply backfire?
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Our first story from the BBC.
Teen critically injured after three London stabbings.
A teenage boy has been critically wounded and two others injured in three unrelated stabbings across London.
The 17-year-old was found stabbed in Cole's Crescent Harrow after police were alerted at 2011 BST.
Two other men, both aged in their 20s, were injured in separate stabbings
in Northolt, West London, and Brixton, South London.
The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said he was due to meet Home Secretary Sajid Javid
on Monday to discuss how we address the scourge of serious violence across Britain
following a fatal stabbing in North London on Saturday.
The killing near Turnpike Lane tube station in Haringey is the Met's 74th murder investigation this year.
I think most of you are probably not surprised that there are so many murder investigations and stabbings in London because we keep hearing about these stories.
From USA Today, London's murder rate now tops New York City's.
When British police launched a murder investigation Tuesday into the shooting death of a 17-year-old girl, it pushed the homicide rate in Britain's capital to a new troubling milestone.
London's murder rate surpassed New York City's for the first time.
In 2017, there were twice as many murders in New York City than London.
This year, the monthly murder rates are nearly equal.
There's a lot of speculation as to why knife crime and murder is escalating in London, but I want to focus specifically on the knife debate because I know a lot of people have been joking about it and talking about how silly it is that there have been discussions about dulling knife blades and a judge actually questioned why knives are pointed in the first place.
From the Telegraph, knives are too sharp and filing them down is a solution to soaring violent crime, Judge says.
A judge has proposed a nationwide program to file down the points of kitchen knives as a solution to the country's soaring knife crime epidemic.
Latest figures show stabbing deaths among teenagers and young adults have reached the highest level for eight years, and knife crime overall rose 22% in 2017.
In the past two months, he said there have been 77 knife-related incidents in Bedforshire,
including three killings.
Accordingly, it is very easy for any youth who wants to obtain a knife to take it from
the kitchen drawer in his home or in the home of one of his friends.
As a result, said the judge, the most common knife a youth will take out is 8 to 10 inches
long and pointed from his mother's cutlery tray.
He asked, but why do we need 8-inch or 10-inch knives with points?
Butchers and fishmongers do, but how often, if at all, does a domestic chef use the point of an 8-inch or 10-inch knife?
Rarely, if at all.
This story seems so damn silly, and there are a bunch of memes about butter knives and banning butter knives, and how no matter what happens, there's going to be crime, people are going to get injured, and the UK is going to ban whatever the implement of injury is.
So the judge asked a question, and I decided to look up the answer.
Why are household knives pointed?
And there's a very simple answer.
Kitchen knives are made pointed because they are generally used by piercing it into the vegetables, and then slicing, dicing, or chopping.
It is commonly observed that in kitchen, the chef first used the tip of the knife to initiate the cut, and then slide the blade to complete the cut.
Yes, we've actually come to a point where Instead of trying to figure out what's causing the crime, we just say, well, maybe if we get rid of knives, this will stop the crime.
But in actuality, it won't, because people will use screwdrivers.
People will, I don't know, tie a shoelace to a padlock and swing it around.
You could beat someone to death with a block of ice, or a fish.
You just have to apply blunt force.
And not only that, if they actually do file down the points of knives, Then someone could just spend some time filing the knife back up to commit crimes.
It would seem like they're not actually addressing the crime.
They're not actually dealing with the problems in their society that is resulting in knife crime.
They're just trying to take knives away.
But that's just going to negatively impact Regular people, and not really stop those who are trying to hurt others.
What I find particularly funny, is that only a couple weeks before that Telegraph article, we saw this from The Independent.
Take good care of your kitchen knives, and they will take good care of you.
I'm not gonna read through this, but basically, the article talks about how a dull knife is dangerous, because people will apply too much pressure, they'll slip, they'll cut themselves, and sharp knives are actually safer for home use.
They flat out say, know how to recognize when your knife needs to be sharpened.
Dull knives can also cause accidents when they slip over rather than cutting through food.
Or how about this story from December?
Why dull knives are more dangerous in the kitchen.
This is not a solution to your crime problems, London.
This is just a band-aid over a band-aid over a band-aid because you've got cultural issues that are resulting in crime escalating.
And if you're going to punish a homeowner for having a sharp knife, you're just going to cause more accidental injuries.
You want to dull the tips of pointed blades?
Well then people are going to have to cut through fruits and vegetables by applying pressure.
And if those blades are dulled, then they're going to slip and hurt themselves.
Because most people who own knives aren't walking around and stabbing other people with them.
It's actually a ridiculously small minority of people who are stabbing others.
Going back to the first story, I just want to point out how this is their 74th murder investigation this year.
And yeah, 74 murders is really bad, but think about how many people live in London or the UK as a whole and aren't using their kitchen knives to stab or murder other people.
And according to The Sun, at least 46 of those people were fatally stabbed in London since the beginning of the year.
So just more than half were actually caused by knives.
46 people murdered by knives, and there's actually talk about the government dulling blades because people have used knives to murder other people.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan has sent 300 more police on the streets this month and threatened all knife wielders.
Whether they've assaulted anyone or not with the full force of the law.
For all the good it has done them, London has banned carrying a knife in public without good reason for years already.
But you know what?
This isn't the first time we have seen this.
In 2005, in The Guardian, doctors ban dagger-type kitchen knives.
A group of doctors today called on the government to ban long-pointed kitchen knives in an effort to reduce the number and severity of stabbings.
Knives are the most common murder weapon in Britain, and three doctors from West Middlesex University Hospital in London said their experience indicated that at least half of stabbing cases involved a kitchen knife.
London's metropolitan area has 14 million people.
And of that, we have seen 46 fatal stabbings.
If you were to ask me, that's actually a really good proportion.
I mean, murder is terrible.
It sucks that these people are being killed.
But sometimes we have to accept that murder and crime is going to happen.
Out of 14 million people, it's actually pretty good that only 46 people have been stabbed.
Let's not settle for that, though.
You know, let's actively try to reduce the amount of murder to zero.
But at the same time, we shouldn't overhype the escalation.
When looking at the London homicide rate from 1990 until 2017, we can see there was a peak in 2003 of 204 murders.
And that's fallen pretty dramatically.
From 2014 to 2015, however, we saw that rise from 83 to 118, and it's been slowly rising since then.
But there's only been a few years in which we have seen crime escalate.
So here's the actual issue at hand.
Knives aren't the problem.
They aren't.
People are going to figure out how to murder somebody.
They're going to figure out how to cause bodily harm.
It's just going to happen.
We shouldn't settle for an escalation in crime, and we shouldn't look to the past and say, well, it was worse before, so it's okay now.
We shouldn't overhype what's happening, because then what happens is you get judges saying we should dull knives or ban knives, and that's just ridiculous.
But we should say that there is something wrong with the culture in London that is leading to these murders.
And it's likely drug wars and gang-related, as it is in most major cities.
Where does this end?
They want to ban certain weapons because people commit crimes with these weapons.
Then people are going to use something else.
Does it end with everyone wearing a grey jumpsuit with no pockets, not allowed to carry anything in public?
Because think about it.
You could actually just take a rock off the ground and beat someone to death with it.
Are we then going to clear all streets of rocks because rock crime will escalate?
It's just not a real solution.
But you know what?
I think London is going to keep on Londoning because Sadiq Khan wants to have his rounding up of knives and it's not going to end there.
They're going to have to ban screwdrivers and probably butter knives.
Dulling the blades won't be enough.
And in my opinion, based on how things have gone over there in the UK, I imagine that they're going to start, they're going to keep banning things.
But let me know what you think in the comments below.
How do you feel about dulling blades Banning certain knives and stopping people from carrying actual knife tools.