Not happy with simply banning guns, doctors in the UK are now trying to ban kitchen knives because they’re often used in violent crimes.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news… but violent crimes don’t happen because weapons are available. They happen because people can’t control themselves. These things will happen regardless of the access to guns, kitchen knives, tire irons, or anything else like that. Knives kill about as many people as guns do every year: zero. The day when a knife gets up of it’s own volition and hurtles across the room and into someone’s chest, well, that’s the day I’ll support a gun or knife ban.
Luckily sentient, self-propelled knifes do not look to be in our near future.
I found this amusing, though:
The use of knives is particularly worrying amongst adolescents, say the researchers, reporting that 24% of 16-year-olds have been shown to carry weapons, primarily knives.
I bet most of them are 8″, pointed kitchen knifes, too, right? I’d guess that that 24% probably covered everyone that had so much as a swiss army knife on their key chain. These sorts of things are always suspect. Did these doctors sit around a room thinking “Hmm… I wonder if knives are common and dangerous… we should find out!” or “How can we make knives look as menacing and dangerous as possible?” I bet they’d made up their minds long before the studies were done.
The most unfortunate thing about this, though, is that you know somewhere there’s some damn liberal reading this article and thinking “Hey… that’s a great idea!!”
You can have my ginsu knives when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
May 28th, 2005 at 7:56 pm
Hmmmph. Now as much as I like to personify objects out of the amusing nature of that… knifes simply don’t commit crimes on their own.
Socks on the otherhand do in fact morph into coat hangers out of their own violition (j/k).
May 31st, 2005 at 8:59 am
haha, that reminds me of one of my students…(I am a special ed teacher, all my students are 8 yrs old)
…One of my students likes to pop plastic bags, or gloves, whatever she can find. I talked to her father about it, and found out that when she wants to play at home, they GIVE her plastic bags to PLAY with! I told them that was unacceptable, and he could get into trouble by letting her do that. He told me that it was okay, and he was so happy that she was playing with that instead of what she used to play with. So I asked what she used to “play” with, and he told me kitchen knives! But that was a step up from her previous “toy” of choice…glass. She would climb on the counter and take glasses out and shatter them on the floor. Her dad says they have one glass left.
Anyway, I agree that crimes do not happen because the weapons are available! And also I want to add that my students often have disabilites because their parents are so freaking stupid!!!!
Oh, one final comment…I just saw on the news here in NYC last night…a 9 year old girl stabbed an 11 year old girl to death because she would not share her doll. Looks like the knives are at fault again!