“Knife crime” is apparently on the rise in the UK. Cherie Blair was quoted by the Independent as saying that she fears for her children in an environment where murders are apparently caused by the availability of bladed weapons.
Cherie Blair admitted yesterday that she fears for the safety of her children when they go out on the streets. She also claimed that government figures drastically underestimate the scale of knife crime among children in Britain. …
Mrs Blair attacked government statistics which, she said, “did not acknowledge what is happening to young people” and called for a new approach to tackle the “lethal fashion accessories”.
Mrs Blair, who has four children, told the Home Affairs Select Committee: “As a parent, I am concerned about what’s happening when my children are on the street and I know I am not unique in that by any means. If young people think they can carry knives and no one is ever going to pick them up carrying a knife, then they are more likely to take one out. Whereas, if they think when they carry a knife that’s going to be detected, that may well make a really big difference.”
The concern over knives was highlighted by several high-profile murders in the British capital, one of which involved the torture, stabbing and burning of two French biology students in their apartment. They were stabbed nearly 250 times. A Telegraph story conveys the atmospherics.
A teenage boy has died after being stabbed by a gang of youths in south London. The 16-year-old, named as Shakilus Townsend, was repeatedly stabbed by at least six hooded and masked youths yesterday afternoon. … Shakilus is the 18th victim this year of London’s knife crime crisis. The attack comes four days after 16-year-old Ben Kinsella was stabbed to death in Islington and two French students, Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, 23, were found stabbed and burned in New Cross.
The French press is calling London “the city of blades”. One journalist wrote with an unintended Gallic charm, “these things happen all the time in London, I lived there and ‘le stabbing‘ is the fashion.” The Brussels Journal wrote:
Violent crime has doubled since Labour came to power a decade ago. Stabbings and assault in Britain are now common, if not daily occurrences; at night city centers are generally regarded as no-go areas; “feral” youths and gangs loitering the streets – often drunk on cheap alcohol – make many people too afraid to go for a walk on a summer evening.
Every week yields up plenty of reasons why people have good reason to be scared in modern Britain. On Saturday evening 60-year old Stan Dixon, a former soldier, was attacked by youths, for asking them not to swear in front of a woman. He died yesterday in hospital. 17 teenagers have been murdered in London alone this year. The latest victim, 16 year-old Ben Kinsella, was killed on Sunday night. On Tuesday Dee Willis, a 28 year-old woman, was stabbed to death by a female attacker in south-east London. Today, the country woke up to reports of the extremely brutal and apparently motiveless murder of two French exchange students, Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez (both 23). The two men had been playing computer games at Mr. Bonomo’s apartment in New Cross, south-east London, on Sunday night, when they were attacked, gagged, tortured (suffering nearly 250 stab wounds between them), and their bodies set on fire.
Despite Cherie Blair’s belief that increasing the penalties for possessing a sharp object will help solve the problem, I am unpersuaded that “knife-free zones” are an effective solution. Knives, for most of recent history, were as common as shirts. Readers of 19th century British fiction know that the children of that era sharpened their pencils with pocket knives. Farmers carried bladed implements as a matter of course. And there were knives in kitchens, eateries and workplaces. Many tradesmen had not one, but several in their pockets. Even mild-mannered draftsmen wielded X-acto knives.
And as anyone who has mis-spent his youth can testify, what constitutes a bladed weapon is limited only by the imagination. A wine bottle rapped against a railing. An artfully folded aluminum can. Forks bent to fit around your hand. Ballpoint pens. Sticks cut at an angle. Flathead screwdrivers. Hard wire. Anyone who works in corrections knows that a determined man can make a weapon out of practically anything.
The implements of mayhem were always ready to hand. What was lacking once was the wolfpack social infrastructure to wield it at random. The hardware remained largely inert until the right software was downloaded to animate it into chopping, slashing and stabbing motions. Maybe what we need is a software patch, not downrated hardware.
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25 Comments
1. Nomenklatura:People like Cherie Blair imagine that London is a ‘progressive’ city, at the forefront of something or other. Their vanity demands it, and therefore it has to be so.
Instead, London today is quite simply New York in the 1970’s. The ’software patches’ it needs were been applied in the US more than twenty years ago. The main one required recognizing that certain people, if you can’t implement a better solution, have to be locked up for most of their lives, to deter others and to protect the public.
In order to further postpone recognition of this, elite liberals have to resort to ever greater absurdities. Emergency room doctors in the UK got together recently for example and announced that the problem is that the kitchen knives over there are “too sharp”.
Jul 4, 2008 - 4:41 am 2. Panday:Wretchard,
I noticed you had a picture of a balisong there, which is illegal in many states in the US. That always struck me as ridiculous- as if a knife was somehow, per se, “evil”. This knife is an eeeevil knife, but this knife is okay.
As for “knife free zones”, here is a video on how “gun free zones” work. Maybe the idea has merit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0vyxgJLJVA
Jul 4, 2008 - 5:29 am 3. Paul:As it says in the Talmud: it’s not the knife, it’s the fool who holds the handle.
Jul 4, 2008 - 5:43 am 4. 3Case:Lost a witness once because, in the words of the police Lt. who advised me of the death, “he took a knife to a gun fight, literally.” They should relax their gun laws in order to reduce their knife crime.
Jul 4, 2008 - 7:38 am 5. Vinny Vidivici:At the risk of sounding like a cranky old fool, I would argue that responsibility lay with ‘progressive’ excuse-making for criminal, anti-social and deviant behavior — masquerading as open-mindedness and compassion — coupled with a deliberate assault on the standards and institutions of civilized society.
Fact is, like knives, guns were routine fixtures in the lives of my parents and grandparents, but none thought to show up at school to massacre schoolmates or co-workers.
Wretchard is right. It’s a software problem. A virus let loose.
Jul 4, 2008 - 8:13 am 6. Steve Skubinna:The Brits are about two ticks away from banning knives, regardless of their utility (me, I always carry one on me, and I use it daily - but have never stabbed a person with it). Such a step will have a dramatic effect on reducing nothing at all.
Once people begin bludgeoning each other with cricket bats, I expect the British to be in an impossible quandary.
Jul 4, 2008 - 9:08 am 7. Gordon:In my youth some 50 years ago many boys carried some kind of knife, often maid on their fathers’ grindstone. I never heard of anyone being stabbed!
Jul 4, 2008 - 9:32 am 8. Peterike:What we need in England is to imprison anyone who kills on the street, whether with a knife or a gun, for the rest of their life.
We also need to destroy the gangs.
Theodore Dalrymple over at “City Journal” has, for years now, been documenting the decline of Britian into Liberal insanity. He’s always worth reading. Here’s a recent column on a murder in Britain and the punishment — or lack thereof — that followed.
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/eon0408td.html
Jul 4, 2008 - 9:51 am 9. NahnCee:What I keep looking for, and so far have not seen, is evidence that native-born Brits are fighting back against their Pakistani and Muslim tormenter-invaders. Perhaps it’s the way the stories are written, but it appears to me that the knifers are white-on-white British killings. Which just simply makes no sense, unless the stabbers are too drunk and too unevolved to have any sense to make.
Is there any possibility that there is cross-racial targeting going on in London like there is here in Los Angeles with the browns targeting the blacks?
Like the two French dudes … the thought crossed my mind to wonder if they were gay and it wasn’t a robbery gone bad as much as a jihad against homosexuals.
Jul 4, 2008 - 10:29 am 10. Nomenklatura:“appears to me that the knifers are white-on-white British killings”
In fact it’s primarily black youths, wounding and killing blacks, whites and others in the UK. Tony Blair, speaking at the end of his period as Prime Minister:
“Tony Blair yesterday claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture… He said people had to drop their political correctness and recognise that the violence would not be stopped “by pretending it is not young black kids doing it”.
Giving the Callaghan lecture in Cardiff, the prime minister admitted he had been “lurching into total frankness” in the final weeks of his premiership.
- The Guardian, Thursday April 12, 2007
Of course British liberals are not ready to see what is in front of their eyes. From the same article:
“Mr Blair’s remarks are at odds with those of the Home Office minister Lady Scotland, who told the home affairs select committee last month that the disproportionate number of black youths in the criminal justice system was a function of their disproportionate poverty, and not to do with a distinctive black culture.”
This will all of course be very familiar to an American audience.
Jul 4, 2008 - 11:25 am 11. NahnCee:Good. Now define “black culture”. Here in America that would be gangsta’s and hip-hop, but they would be native-born. What and who is “black culture” in England?
Jul 4, 2008 - 11:48 am 12. NahnCee:Be interesting to see what would happen to the knife-wielders if native-born Brits who could trace their family tree back to grandparents also born in Great Britain were allowed to purchase and use guns in self-defense.
“An armed society is a polite society.” I don’t think the problem is knives, per se, as much as it is lack of a cogent platform of self-defense.
Jul 4, 2008 - 11:54 am 13. Peterike:“I don’t think the problem is knives, per se, as much as it is lack of a cogent platform of self-defense.”
Clearly. And don’t forget, in Britain if you defend yourself from a crime and — heaven forbid — hurt your assailant, you are generally in far more legal trouble than they are. It is massively sick, the death-wish of the Left writ large, and embellished every day by the slicing of knives.
Jul 4, 2008 - 12:39 pm 14. Coisty:What and who is “black culture” in England?
Mostly Jamaicans and Nigerians, though South Africans have “enriched” England with something known as “jack-rolling”. Google it.
This culture of violence has been common in England since at least the 1970s. Lately it has got worse due to immigration, laws against self-defence, and, I would say, the Americanisation of Britain. By Americanisation I mean the America of MTV, and the glorification of “blackness”, and rootlessness, as well as consumerism as an end in itself.
When I was last in Britain some of these thugs were interviewed on TV about why they’re into violence. They were all dressed in colourful clothing like rappers with American sports logos, moving their hands the way rappers do and talking about “respect”.
Jul 4, 2008 - 12:53 pm 15. whiskey:Boris Johnson the new mayor of London advised everyone to look the other way and don’t interfere in crime or any other going-on.
What the problem is, really, is single motherhood and the attitude of women (and the men who pander to the female voting bloc). This is a problem all across the West, in every modern country, even Japan is facing it now.
It is caused by two factors:
1. Single mothers cannot for the most part (there are some exceptions) raise young men who do not become feral wolf-packs. Lacking any male authority figure who gives a damn about them, and teaches them self-control, discipline, pride, accomplishment, and other things important to young men, they devolve into a Lord of the Flies society (as seen in West Africa, and many other places). Competing to see who can be the most brutal thug since that is what is rewarded by their peers (fear, respect) and women (who sleep with the biggest thug). A society can go from say, 24% illegitimacy in 1964 (Black rate then) to 90% today (in the urban core) and as Barack Obama noted, have the elderly reminiscing fondly about segregation’s times, because then children could play in the street without fear, even given the truth of the NAACP’s “A Black Man Was Lynched Today” banner.
2. Cherie Blair’s solution, which is typical of female-oriented vote pandering. Ban knives. Everyone knows it won’t work (you can make a knife out of anything) and it won’t be enforced either. It’s the extension of the single mother “forbidding” her sons to hang out with gangs. But it panders to the female demographic majority by not threatening the celebration of single motherhood, and not doing anything that would actually solve the problem: imprison for a long time a lot of violent young men.
Women generally fail when confronted with violence. As a demographic group they have no real understanding of it, even though they are often it’s primary victims. They often in the West cling to social attitudes and mores that have been built up over 100 years or so that speak to their power as a bloc voting group: “niceness,” social ostracism, the importance of being seen as not “mean” and a rejection of physical violence to solve physically violent problems.
In the short term, only locking up a great amount of violent young men, most/many of them Black, Muslim, etc. for a very long time, and directing the police to bust heads without any worrying about any repercussions, i.e. if a young Jamaican or Pakistani man is beaten severely, simply ignoring it and saying he “had it coming” will do any good at all. Otherwise any place young people gather will be a gang-ridden Lord of the Flies society.
In the long term, single motherhood MUST BE DISCOURAGED.
Jul 4, 2008 - 1:05 pm 16. sirius_sir:Fact is, like knives, guns were routine fixtures in the lives of my parents and grandparents, but none thought to show up at school to massacre schoolmates or co-workers.
I remember when the idea of a school massacre first came to my attention. This predated Munich by roughly a decade and, as then, the perpetrators were followers of Arafat and the slaughtered were Jews.
To my mind the first incident remains the more shocking, mainly because these were adults who had gone out purposely to kill children. Can there be a more fundamental breakdown in the constraints that define civilization?
As I say, at the time I was shocked, possibly because I was no older than those slaughtered. It seemed a new kind of evil, but it had all been done before, albeit done with some pains taken to hide the deed from the world.
So the idea was even then out there, only applied in a new way. I am no longer so easily shocked because I know the idea will always be applied again, if possibly in a new way.
There is only one way to combat those who would take the idea and implement it and that is to take action against them. The enemy is not the idea, nor the idea of using something as a weapon that can be used for either a dastardly or noble intent. The enemy is the person who would use anything to kill us and our children, when all we want to do is go happily about our lives.
Jul 4, 2008 - 1:09 pm 17. NahnCee:In the short term, only locking up a great amount of violent young men…
This has been AMerica’s solution. Now we’re branching out into deporting the violent young men (and women), too.
Jul 4, 2008 - 1:45 pm 18. CPT. Charles:Question: at what point did the term ‘responsible human agency’ get deleted from British law? When did it get erased from legal theory?
The selective denial of a key aspect of civil [and tort] law cannot be sustained indefinitely. The system will collapse.
But then again, I suspect that’s unspoken goal.
Jul 4, 2008 - 9:15 pm 19. Ernie G:I was deeply shocked when I read of the deaths of the two French students. Then I noticed that the term “burglary” was used. In the United States, the term “home invasion” is used to describe this type of crime, and to distinguish it from what we call burglary: the illegal entry of an unoccupied building for the purpose of theft or mischief. Home invasions are less common in the United States because an invader can be met with deadly force. As another commenter (Peterike) said, “And don’t forget, in Britain if you defend yourself from a crime and — heaven forbid — hurt your assailant, you are generally in far more legal trouble than they are.”
So we have the spectacle of a citizen of a once-proud Empire, afraid to go out on the street, locked in his flat behind double-bolted doors, buttering his toast with his finger.
Jul 5, 2008 - 5:17 am 20. james wilson:The first generation raised by liberal culture produced both predators not to be trusted with guns and prey too cowardly to defend themselves with them. Since now they are reduced to the same theatre but with knives, their world must necessarily be reduced to spoons. That is the object both sides in this play are most familiar with, having been born with this object of the liberal imagination in their mouths.
Jul 5, 2008 - 7:59 am 21. Snowflakes in Hell » Quote of the Day:[...] From Richard Fernandez of The Belmont Club: And as anyone who has mis-spent his youth can testify, what constitutes a bladed weapon is limited only by the imagination. A wine bottle rapped against a railing. An artfully folded aluminum can. Forks bent to fit around your hand. Ballpoint pens. Sticks cut at an angle. Flathead screwdrivers. Hard wire. Anyone who works in corrections knows that a determined man can make a weapon out of practically anything. [...]
Jul 5, 2008 - 1:07 pm 22. Roderick Reilly:Cause and Effect. Ordinary Brits are told by law to be cringing cowards, so the punks are emboldened. Time for British Bronsons and “Death Wish III.”
Jul 7, 2008 - 12:17 pm 23. Frank:I remember a headline about 10 years ago about city violence. Seems the area around London in the 1340’s had a murder rate per 100,000 that was 3 to 4 times that of Detroit in the 1990’s. Since that could not have been cause by a surfeit of Saturday Night Specials and assault rifles, I guess you could say that England is now boldly leading us back to the past.
Jul 8, 2008 - 2:56 pm 24. Now Surrender:[...] mesures annoncées ne vont rien changer, puisque la solution est ailleurs. Il faut tout de même noter l’extraordinaire performance du ministère de l’Intérieur [...]
Jul 14, 2008 - 3:01 pm 25. Edgy | Baltimore Meetup:[...] Read more: Edgy [...]
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