Then I’m not sure what your point is. You have a lower murder rate than all other countries that you are not comparable to, and much higher than the one country you are directly comparable to. A liberal, stable western democracy of precisely the type that makes up the Western Europe that you seem to be suggesting you shouldn’t be compared to either.
Don’t you think Canada is a better yardstick than Venezuela or Equador? You do realise that south and central American countries regularly occupy most of the top ten spots for world murder rates? Is that how low you want to set the bar?
One alternate possibility might be that they’re not cardboard caricatures filled with and motivated by irrational hatred for inanimate objects ; but instead consider that the availability of guns is a major driving force/enabler of violence in America, as well as the occasional high body count rampage.
I mean it *is * remotely possible. You never know.
I was comparing ALL of the Americas, and of all FIFTY some odd the nations on those two continents, Canada has the lowest murder rate and the USA has the 2nd lowest. So yeah, Canada has done really well, and the USA pretty well.
Yes, indeed they do.
Or if you like we can compare all the worlds nations, no cherrypicking in which case the USA is right in the middle.
You would be able to do most cooking tasks with these. I have seen other proposals to limit the total length of the knife if it has a sharp tip. (so you’d need 2 kitchen knives to cover most tasks - a short one with a sharp tip and a normal length one)
Here’s an articlewhere a physician explains the justification. Dr Crichton’s research showed that **45 **per cent of the homicides he looked at involved a **knife **and of those that could be identified, 85 per cent were kitchen knives.
Homicides, like most crimes, are not usually extensively planned or deliberated. In fact, many criminals are less capable of extensive planning than non-criminals.
So if you make it less accessible the *means *to commit the crimes, you would have a society with less intentional and crime of passion homicides.
Sure, they will still happen, but numbers matter. Either this proposed policy has an expected value in excess of the costs or it does not.
The chatter in here sorta reminds me of the talk people had when they first started trying to make cars safer with seatbelts.
Knives are easily lethal when used to cut. Stabbing people ia tough; even the Zodiac had trouble with plain stabbing. I doubt banning pointy knives will have much of an effect.
Self defense is harder with knives available but no firearms. If everyone could carry and/ or usea quarterstaff, sure.
But the only way his arguments stand up is if he builds a strawman to compare them, ascribing the most extremist position to everyone who disagrees with him. Otherwise, they’re fairly weak.
I mean, taking the same approach (and as I said to another poster previously), we could say that it’s been made abundantly clear, here and elsewhere, that what “gun rights advocates” want to go armed everywhere and to have the right to shoot anyone that they can, after the fact, claim they felt posed a threat to them (and as long as the other party is too dead to dispute the shooter’s version of events). Oh, the gun crowd claim they’re all “responsible and law-abiding” but - and again, as has been made clear here and elsewhere - that only applies as long as the law allows them to do whatever they want. The minute anything that might spoil their fun is proposed, suddenly there’s talk of guns “going missing in boating accidents” or even threats of violence against law enforcement. And nobody on that side “pushes back” against those claims, so we can extrapolate those views to everyone who is pro-gun. So much for being “law-abiding” and “responsible”.
But I don’t believe that’s remotely true of all or even most gun rights advocates, nor is it a constructive approach to take in these discussions, and I wish those relying on hyperbolic misrepresentation on the other side would similarly refrain from such nonsense.
As for knives in the UK, I have my doubts about the proposed non-pointy policy but I also doubt it will get very far, for the reasons already cited above. And as for cigarettes in the UK, I’ll point out that there have indeed been a series of increasing restrictions on them, to the point where they are literally now kept in an opaque cabinet behind the counter and have to be requested. They tried the warning labels, they tried the gross pictures on the labels, and now they’re trying this. Because there’s always a balance to be found between freedom and public health and safety, and it doesn’t lie at the end of “Let us do and have anything we want just because we want it”.
Note, knives and staves are already illegal to carry around in public for the purposes of self-defence. You can pick one up to defend yourself from an imminent threat, but you are not permitted to just walk around with one as a general precaution. Same with a firearm, except you need a special certificate to get one in the first place, unlike a knife.
No, Canada has done just “OK”. Western Europe is much better and the USA is dreadful. Your murder rate is three times that of Canada which in itself is higher than 39 european nations.
Out of 230 countries Cannada is 79th, USA is 143rd. There’s no official rating for these things but “OK” for Canada seems right with “appalling” for the USA.
It is obviously less lethal. The big round overhang will block the point to some degree and the shape below it is like a reverse barb, stopping the knife from penetrating as far.
And you’re glibly ignoring that most murders aren’t done preplanned by martial arts experts. If a guy flies into a rage and grabs the kitchen knife, he’s not necessarily going to remember that he has to “transition” from stab to slice.
Yes, anyone who wants a pointy object can make one. But banning the manufacture of pointed knives makes them less immediately available, so it will reduce the number of “crime of passion” stabbings at a stroke. It will also make it much more obvious when murders are premeditated, since the prosecution will be able to show that the defendant deliberately sharpened a knife or other object in order to stab the victim. If you put even five seconds of actual thought into it, the idea of banning pointed knives actually makes a lot of sense.
You are correct, but what about the legitimate uses of points on knives? I carry a knife everyday (part of my EDC kit) and the point is needed maybe once a week. In my kitchen, I use the point of a knife occasionally, for deboning, separating joints, skinning fish, etc. If I had to, I could work around being pointless, but I’d want to see a risk/benefit analysis that convinced me it was worthwhile.
They also look pretty goofy, which is probably not accidental.
The knife crime that’s getting the headlines is the gang related stuff, which can be pretty bad in some areas, and the death rate is only a small part of it. We’re not talking people who are going to spend the time re-grinding something, we’re mostly talking teens who grabbed a knife out of Mum’s kitchen because they think it’s cool and don’t want to be the only one on the street without one. A lot of the target market for these safety knifes will probably be parents concerned that their teenage son’s getting involved with more trouble than he can handle. Kids start carrying them to feel safer; it’s more of a ‘step one’ in a whole range of problems, hence what seems like a silly focus on that.
Though I will say, feel free to mock Scott Mann for suggesting GPS trackers in knife handles. The muppet’s the MP for my area (in which there is very little knife crime), and I’m hard pressed to come up with a single sensible thing he’s said since I moved here.
Absolutely. I mean, if you cut off supply (as opposed to stabbing it), then the few hundred knives currently in the UK will eventually go bad and then, Bob’s Your Uncle, no more issue! You starve the beast (stab it, so to speak with those steely knives but you just can’t kill that beast…or something), so to speak, and deny those bad guys access to new pointy knives, and cut down significantly on those crimes of passion stabbings in one, single, deadly downward stroke! It should certainly make it obvious that murders are premeditated, since there just won’t be new pointy knives, and the few remaining knives in the UK will be obviously going bad, having lived past their shelf life, so the only recourse will be for the evil folks to sharpen something else, giving us a true way to show they deliberately were out for blood.
I’m glad you put more than 5 seconds into this, as it really helps to see the issues and put this all in perspective. Seems a fool proof plan to me, and I wish my UK brethren and sistren all the luck getting this done and getting those evil knives off the streets, taking such a threat to public safety off the streets! Hell, with this one stroke, they will save hundreds of lives a year…lives that can then be productively spent dying by all the other stuff that is MUCH more likely to kill them, but that for some odd reason they aren’t really going after in the same way.