The Patriot Post® · Dull the Knives to Blunt Crime?
To American gun-grabbers, our British cousins are admirable models. To those of us who love Liberty, however, the British haven’t changed much from when they tried to confiscate American weapons, sparking the Revolutionary War in 1775.
In 1997, the British banned most firearms in response to the Dunblane shooting a year earlier. In the ensuing years, gun crime went up until a long effort at very strict police enforcement, including raids and confiscation, finally started to bring the numbers of gun murders down. Now the United Kingdom has a “knife problem.” Which is to say, people will murder each other with whatever tools are available. It’s a sad fact of human nature that hasn’t changed since Cain murdered Abel.
Last month, we detailed how London’s murder rate surpassed New York City’s for the first time. London’s response has been a major crackdown on knives.
But a judge has upped the ante. Retiring Luton Crown Court Judge Nic Madge says there should be a UK-wide program to file down the points of kitchen knives and possibly to ban the further sale of pointed knives.
“Every kitchen contains lethal knives which are potential murder weapons,” he complained in his valedictory address. “But why we do need eight-inch or ten-inch kitchen knives with points? Butchers and fishmongers do, but how often, if at all, does a domestic chef use the point of an eight-inch or ten-inch knife? Rarely, if at all.” He urged knife makers to “consider preventing the sale of long pointed knives, except in rare, defined, circumstances, and replacing such knives with rounded ends,” as well as for police to offer modification services for knives that have been “properly and lawfully bought for culinary purposes.”
If that foolish argument sounds familiar, it’s because American gun-grabbers use the same “logic” to justify magazine capacity limits and gun buybacks. “Why would anyone need more than 10 rounds?” they ask. “We’re not confiscating; we’re buying back guns voluntarily,” they assure. Yet in all these examples, proponents are making faulty assumptions in order to violate natural rights.
In 2016 in the U.S., there were more than 15,000 murders. It’s true most were committed with firearms — though most of those were gang- and/or drug-related — but there were nearly 2,500 murders committed with blunt objects, poison, strangulation and hands and feet, among other methods. No one is ever going to solve the problem of violence and murder by dulling knives or limiting magazine capacity. And citizens can’t defend Liberty from tyrannical government when they’ve been disarmed.
Update: Two police were murdered in Belgium yesterday by a jihadi terrorist wielding a knife. He stabbed the two officers and then stole their guns to finish them off. Of course, to twist the story a bit, the UK Mirror calls the attacker a “gunman.” They are just two of the hundreds of victims during Ramadan. And the violence has everything to do with ideology, not the tools used.