Because it doesn’t stop there …
British Knife Control Protest: “Stop knives, save lives”
Is that real?
Yes.
Yep,
The UK has been on a full assault against knifes for a while. They even arrest kids for posing with knives on social media. Here is more on the law and the villainizing of knifes around the UK.
The new powers to arrest and jail for up to 2 year, children ages 12 and older for being known to often carry a knife, like a pocket knife. Posing with knives on social media. Being involved in anything that could be considered a knife crime, like possession without actually doing anything wrong. ECT.
It is terrible and just further shows how these kinds of weapon control measures do not actually solve crime. Instead, they just broaden the net making more and more law abiding citizens in criminals with the stroke of a pen. They even have their own version of an Assault Weapons Ban for knives, it is called the “Long, Pointy Knife Control”.
I traveled there last August. They are very anti-gun and anti-knife and yet their crime continues to skyrocket. There are parts of London nobody will go into after dark.
I couldn’t take a small knife just for use as a tool to cut bandages or tape because of their stupid ban. The ruckus is fun to watch from here though. Wait until all of the knife manufacturers move out of England and stop selling their products there.
Besides, there are a lot of pointy objects which can be substituted for a knife such as a screwdriver, ice pick, chisel etc. Furthermore, one could sharpen almost anything to use as a weapon. Where does the ban stop?
Banning the weapon has had very little effect on the problem. Besides you can always use battery acid. Oh wait, that is already being done in England. http://time.com/4858177/rise-in-acid-attacks-britain/
It will be most amusing when they start carrying baseball bats around with them for protection. Yep, it is being done and you can get arrested for it. https://www.quora.com/Can-a-person-arrested-in-the-UK-for-possessing-a-baseball-bat-for-self-defence-be-fingerprinted-and-recorded-onto-the-PNC
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Because it’s not about being effective or stopping crime/violence; if that were the case there would be significantly different solutions being implemented… It’s about exerting control over peoples lives, ensuring they can’t take care of themselves, and making them thank you for it. (as I am sure you understand…just stating the facts)
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The creative anarchist will always find a way, but yeah I get it. Government control is the objective.
https://uniteyouthdublin.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/anarchist-cookbook-william-powell.pdf
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I hear this all eh time, often with allusions to Rules For Radicals. Maybe there’s truth to it, but I feel that explanation is a little too simplistic.
Look at conditions a century ago. Residents of the early 20th century industrial societies were coming off the tail end of the Gilded Age when the average person was far more concerned about subsistence than we are today. Many of the revolutionary scientific - and social - advancements we take for granted were just beginning to be realized. Life was rougher back then with childhood dread diseases, harsher living conditions, and markedly higher crime.
Contrast with today - we’re all generally far healthier, wealthier, and on average live longer, far more ordered lives. Normal for most of us is far higher up the Hierarchy of Needs than our grandparents and great-grandparents:
Anyone remember Clear and Present Danger? It’s almost quaint that in 1989 one could plausibly argue that drug trafficking was America’s number 1 foreign policy concern a mere 12 years before the events of September 11 2001 - but that was the lens America was looking through at the time.
So extend this analogy to person-on-person violence. For generations the violence rate in society has trended down and our lives have been largely more successful. With lower-hanging fruit picked, other problems seem to loom larger. What was once an acceptable level of violence …
In December 1971 Reginald Maudling, then British Home Secretary, declared that the situation in Northern Ireland at that time amounted to "an acceptable level of violence". Later Unionist politicians in particular claimed that this term effectively became the security policy of successive British governments who were prepared to countenance paramilitary activity so long as it remained within what it judged to be manageable proportions.... is no more as society moves on to the next seemingly-looming problem.
Also, without leaning too heavily on uphill both ways barefoot in the snow with my little bother on my back everything-used-to-be-harder nostalgia, there seems to be a growing aversion to handling unexpected contingencies in life:
- Got a flat tire? Don’t swap out the spare - call AAA.
- Feeling under the weather? Rush to the urgent care rather than getting plenty of rest and hydration.
- Lawn needs mowing? Hire it done rather than doing it yourself.
- Cell phone running low? Beg someone for a charger and cable rather than having those things with you regularly.
- Power went out at night? Call the power company angrily and hope you have enough cellphone charge left to keep on Instagram-ing in the dark rather than break out the flashlights or go talk to your seldom-seen neighbors who will surely wander outside in confusion as well.
- Someone kicking in your door? Call 9-1-1 and hope the gendarmes show up before the door gives rather than calling 9-1-1 then seeing if Mister 870 pointed at them dissuades once the door gives.
I also see some weird morality projection going on. Yes, it is rather broadly not desirable to kill another human being or injure them by depositing a chunk of lead into their person at typically-supersonic velocities. But with the concept of your rights end when mine begin the laws around lethal self-defense are broadly contingent upon the aggressor violating the social contract in a way that presents a plausible threat of immediate harm. Avoiding lethal - or potentially lethal - acts of self-defense is preferred by all but the most loudmouth of armchair quarterbacks. But yet there seems to be a great distortion of this in some quarters who would insist that every such loss of life - or use of potentially lethal force - was avoidable and that surely every such situation could have been avoided or negotiated out of. This argument seems to loop back to the … softer … lives we’re generally living relative to previous generations.
Edited to add since I’d like to begin to address…
Eh I agree with the idea, but guns are a longstanding culture war set piece that will be argued over for the foreseeable future as proxy for addressing the more vexing roots of violence. Tackling this problem will mean lining up the ideological sacred cows for the slaughter and the goring of many a privileged ox - something we’re not prepared to do as a society, possibly not prepared to do as human beings.
In my view, in no particular order we’d need to tackle race relations, our dismal public educational system, the prison-industrial complex, tough on crime policies, income inequality, prohibition, some dearly-held notions of masculinity, mental health care in specific and health care in general, the toxic 24/7 news cycle badly distorting public perception, and begin to appreciate some of the limits of our ever-fragmenting senses of identity. For starters.
But instead we have our tic-tac-toe bumper sticker arguments that harden the existing divisions, convince almost no one, and fail to move the issue beyond any one faction gaining enough influence to dictate policy / legislative change.
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Could you summarize all of this in a sentence or two, please.
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There’s no TL;DR version forthcoming, sorry.
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Just make a chain mail undershirt before you go. We have a maker here who would be happy to teach you how.
Their Twitter feed is an interesting scroll…
Hm. I’m not sure that knife is worth the mention, but OK. Stolen moped. Well, I guess I’d be pissed if that meant I had to take a bus instead of getting to sit on my own vehicle in London traffic… What is “class A drugs”? Ah. Looks like about 7 years for having such fun-time items as “Crack cocaine, cocaine, ecstasy (MDMA), heroin, LSD, magic mushrooms, methadone, methamphetamine (crystal meth)”… Source Hm. Oh yea. That sticker’s the big problem here…
Damn carpenters! So offensive!
OK. That one at least LOOKS scary!
(that’s less than 10cm blade! “Hidden in a hedge”? Might have been lost there…)
Might have just been on their way to a pickup game at the park…
I (sometimes) carry a longer (locking) knife than that to open boxes at work…
At least this one appears to be…well…“a real knife” as our friend Paul Hogan would say…
Sometimes a might hypocritical…
But I was unable to find that image (except on meme sites, leading me to believe it’s intended to be a joke)…
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Oh, and today I learned…
what “DNA Tagging Spray” is…
https://www.selectadna.co.uk/dna-tagging-spray
Now I am scared I am going to be arrested in UK for my razor sharp wit!
Speaking of wit, they appear to be missing about…half.
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Please tell me you were not actually trying to prove a negative via “I couldn’t find it.”
Since thats a RT of a now-deleted tweet, there’s no image to verify whether “3 knives found” were indeed table/butter knives.
Must be one of those dreaded AKs (Assault Knives.)
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I’m waiting for news that they arrested a chef for carrying their knives to work.
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The image I posted was apparently from a 2008 march.