By Tim Castle
LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Monday people carrying knives would be “caught, prosecuted and punished” as he defended the government’s handling of knife crime following a spate of stabbing deaths.
But his message was overshadowed over claims from opposition parties that the government had already backtracked from a “half-baked” policy to force those caught with knives to visit hospitals to see stabbing victims for themselves.
“We need to make it absolutely clear to everyone, but especially young people, that in our country there are boundaries of acceptable behaviour, that it is completely unacceptable to carry a knife,” Brown told his monthly news conference.
Four fatal stabbings in one day in London last week, taking the total killed with knives in the capital this year above 50, has returned the issue of violent crime to the top of the political agenda.
The capital’s Metropolitan Police Service says tackling knife crime has now overtaken counter-terrorism as its main priority.
Senior Scotland Yard officer Alf Hitchcock, the government’s newly appointed “knife tsar”, said stab injuries had become more severe and were being committed by younger offenders.
Brown said the government was taking a range of measures to reduce the menace of knife attack, including more visible policing, greater stop-and-search powers, increasing use of metal detectors and tougher prison sentences or community punishments.
“It is a combination of prevention, enforcement and punishment,” he said. “I wouldn’t want people to think it is one measure alone.”
4 responses so far ↓
Bill Somerset Pennsylvania // July 15, 2008 at 11:35 am
Several years ago I noticed something about our perception of knives. While waiting at a video rental store I began studying the artwork on the boxes. The ‘Action’ videos often had guns on the cover, but the ‘Horror’ movies showed many more knives, axes, and other sharp-edged tools. We accept guns in the hands of hero figures, but knives are only clutched by terrifying monsters.
pjwalker911 // July 15, 2008 at 7:04 pm
Well, there is something a little more terrifying about a big blade coming at you, but the fact is that guns are more deadly than knives (depending on who is using them). A person can usually take several stab and cut wounds (even to the skull) and live while several bullet wounds (especially to the head) will generally kill. It has to do with the fact that the bullet does more tearing, shock and destruction as it passes through whereas the blade is cleaner and does not usually penetrate all the way through the body. A cleanly cut blood vessel tends to constrict its own blood flow too, while one that is jaggedly torn apart by a bullet will leak more blood leading to faster bleeding out and death.
And before guns had been invented, only a few hundred years ago, the weapons of choice were swords and daggers. Both the “good guys” and the “bad guys” had them. But there have always been moves to remove blades from the general public both in the West and in the Orient, such as in Roman times and in Japan. Interestingly, the Okinawans simply adapted and created their own system of “unarmed” fighting using the body and various farming implements.
The point I want people to see is that only tyrants (and Brown IS another petty tyrant) attempt to disarm the general public. It happened in Roman times, it happened in Stalin’s Russia, it is happening in America, and it is already almost total in Britain where, I understand, you are not allowed to defend yourself by any means and if you do, you will face jail time for it. You are supposed to instead, allow criminals and police officers to harass and attack you at will. You are to be tracked by talking face-scanning cameras everywhere you go and submit to stop-and-search and also “stop-and-account” at the whim of any secret agent or machine-gun toting police officer. You are even to submit to being detained, tortured or killed by them for your own safety if need be because they thought you needed it. But that is just a smattering of the absolute tyranny that Britain has fallen under.
Remember the words of Solzhenitsyn
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
wil // July 16, 2008 at 3:25 am
Will Brown be punished for his silver dinner knives at the fancy banquets he likes?
pjwalker911 // July 16, 2008 at 4:49 am
You see the elite and their body guards are allowed to be armed with everything from butter knives to machine guns, but the general public are not because you can’t trust those commoners with sharp objects including nail-clippers and plastic spoons. Well it’s the same in the State prison system so why not on the streets of the “Free World”?? See, makes sense doesn’t it? hmmm?
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