http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4581871.stm
I give europe 60 years before everyone is locked in a room with rubber walls for their own safety. Unfortunately, that means I give the US about 75 years for the same.
Think of the children. No one needs these assault kitchen knives…
What the everloving *?!!! Ten top chefs found no use for long knives? I suppose they don’t have to carve up much meat, they have assistants do that, so didn’t consider that use, eh? RAWR, the stupid, it burns!
For crying out loud, read the whole cite! :rolleyes:
Long pointed knives. My carving knife has a rounded end and is no less effective on the fourth Thursday in November.
OTOH, wasn’t the virtual elimination of privately-owned firearms supposed to eliminate violent crime in the UK? Now it’s long pointy knives. Next year, trees will be felled and burned if they produce long pointy sticks.
After that pointed comments will be banned. :rolleyes:
I don’t know…on the one hand, they’re curtailing our civil liberties, dude! But on the other hand, you can find enormous, wicked-looking knives at the dollar store, and I’m sure that’s only an encouragement to those with nefarious motives. Maybe if there was a semi-heavy tax on knives to discourage people from buying them?
I accidentally cut my leg with my razor yesterday. I think we should ban them too. 
No fair blaming British nuttiness on the rest of us 
(Scandinavians, for instance, have a relationship with knives that sometimes still freaks out my American cultural baggage. Like, say, teaching preschoolers to whittle… with their own belt knives…)
Call me crazy but it sounds like a pretty good idea to me, if something is being made that has features whose sole practical use seems to be injuring other people, perhaps selling it isn’t such a hot idea. I hate the whole nanny state thing as much as the next guy but this does make sense.
Pointy or dull, the edge will still slit throats nicely, and can cause very ugly superficial wounds on places like the face. The image of the wound they showed was from slashing, not stabbing. They are going after a symptom, not the cause. They’ll have to ban cricket bats, and golf clubs etc. next. They’ll have to have special licensing for things like hammers and saws too.
…is it only me, or does stuff like this ever give anyone else the feeling that the civilized world is going to end up getting torn apart by the machinations of insane, overzealous liberals on one side, and insane, overzealous conservatives on the other?
Zabali’s right, the pictured knife wound was a slashing wound, which I dare say you could manage with a sharp jackknife, much less a kitchen knife.
Their “top chefs” are on crack - those long slim knives are used when carving large cuts of meat or deboning fish, and it’s hard to manage with any other kind of knife. Well, OK, maybe they - or more likely, their assistants - have sufficient skills to manage without one, but that’s like giving someone a handsaw and telling them they don’t need a chainsaw for that huge tree. They might do the job, but it’ll take a long time and be very ugly.
Well, let’s not get carried away, folks. This isn’t proposed policy - it’s a suggestion by one team of A&E (ER in US-speak) doctors from one hospital. It doesn’t name the “top chefs” but considering that the UK is awash with egotistical celeb chefs who’d be happy to get their name in the paper in any connection, I suspect that the doctor’s definition of “top” is slightly different from most people’s. Plus, when you look at what the chef’s apparently agreed to, it’s difficult not to suspect the survey was along the lines of:“But, if you had to, you could do without, couldn’t you? Please say yes.”
But the important information here is the response from government and police.
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And then listed them at some length. This is a polite way of saying “No sale.”
My bolding. The cops can’t publicly tell A&E doctors to stop whining on, but that’s a pretty clear hint that they’re not in favour. This is a non-story on a slow news day.
Oh, and just to clarify:
No, it wasn’t. It was supposed to reduce gun crime - specifically, gun-crimes commited by previously law abiding legal firearms owners.
I agree completely with amrussell.
If you’re going to start threads making sweeping overblown statements about a possible UK policy which is not likely to happen, could you tell me:
The difference here is that in a heated argument how many people are going to find a cricket bat or golf club close to hand? The same for hammers and saws, they aren’t just left around the home but kitchen knives are frequently on racks in plain view and can easily be picked up in the heat of the moment and turned into a lethal weapon, far more lethal than bats or clubs. The comparison really doesn’t hold up.
Yes the wound pictured is a slashing wound but it is also non-lethal, you could argue that picture supports the case for banning pointed knives rather than supporting the case to keep them. The thing is slashings wounds aren’t the biggest problem, they would rarely be lethal unless well directed whereas stabbing wounds can be lethal with little or no “aiming”. I wouldn’t agree with banning them entirely either, i’m no chef but i’m sure there are uses for pointed knives. There is no reason you couldn’t sell specialist knives to deal with fish and meat but there is no need for every knife in the rack to have a sharp point.
I think we should take away the Doctor’s scapels and see how they like it
This is just a way of suppressing women, men get to keep their golf clubs for killing people, but women lose their cooking knives… (yes I’m not serious)
On NPR last night, they interviewed one of the doctors who authored the paper. Her justifications came off as being extraordinarily weak. She says that people in domestic kitchens do not need pointy knives that are longer than five centimeters long. That’s a very short knife–even shorter than most paring knives.
When asked how a person is supposed to carve a turkey or a leg of lamb with a knife that is only 3 inches long, or alternatively with a non-pointed knife, she had a hard time coming up with an answer. Then the interviewer pointed out that NPR had talked to ten chefs who said a pointed knife was necessary for carving and cutting through joints. She had no solution–she just admitted that yes, that’s a problem, and offered no solution.
The interviewer next pointed out that the home is full of lethal objects, like hammers and baseball bats and so forth, that could be used in crimes of passion. Again, the doctor had no real answer to that.
Pretty unconvincing.
Sure it does. My mom has a wicked, heavy metal hammer in the kitchen for tenderizing meat. She keeps it in a crock right next to the knives. She also has a pair of kitchen shears, used for snipping stuff like grapes. Those are right there in the crock next to the hammer. A rack full of heavy cooking pans and pots hangs right over the stove–some just the right size for bludgeoning. She’s got a big fork on that rack, used in carving, with sharp tines longer than five centimeters.
I have a hammer and two screwdrivers lying on the counter in my kitchen right now. I was hanging pictures last night. My parents keep theirs in a drawer in the kitchen.
My best friend’s husband keeps his softball bat in an umbrella stand in the kitchen. His golf clubs are in a bag in the garage, just outside the door to the kitchen.
Normal kitchens are full of lethal objects. Maybe what we ought to be doing is educating people about domestic abuse, and helping people get out of abusing situatiosn? A person who murders a family member in the heat of passion with a kitchen knife probably wasn’t a nice, gentle person up until that moment. (The doctor did indicate that the most prevalent type of stabbing situation was two family members who happen to be arguing in a kitchen.)
Banning every object that a few miscreants will use as a murder weapon is no solution. It’s fighting the symptom, instead of the underlying problem.
I’ll agree that letting preschoolers walk around with knives in their belts might be slightly on the unsafe side. My children got whittling knives when they were five (good quality sharp knives, of course – blunt knives are dangerous), but they were only allowed to use the knives when there were grown ups nearby.
I was pleasantly surprised when the day care started teaching the children whittling at age five. Predictably, there were a few minor wounds (the worst one resulted in a few stiches), and equally predictably, there were no serious wounds. I remember idly wondering if those few stiches would have resulted in a lawsuit in the US.
I don’t see rubber walls looming in this corner of Europe, anyway 
Maybe I can blame my Swedish ancestry for the hog sticker I like to carry when I can’t have my gun… 
That’s because Scandanavians are generally sane. Unlike others…
If they are worried about weapons “at hand,” then surely the solution is to remove everybody’s hands! :eek:
My paternal grandfather started teaching me how to whittle when I was five. Unfortunately he passed away not long after, but he did teach me about how to safely deal with blades when I was very young. Served me well in life.
(other than one unfortunate incident whilst camping when I was 15. That was mostly due to the fact that, at the age of 15, I was amazingly idiotic and refused to listen to any sort of authority. Also, it doesn’t count because you can barely see the scar today.)