Stumason
If I'm not mistaken, the UK has laws on the books for harassment, assault, armed robbery, attempted murder, and so on.
Why go after the knives and not the crimes?
I understand that going after the knives is just a way of going after the scumbag chavs, but why do you need an excuse? If someone is going around
fighting and assaulting people, committing robberies, and generally causing a disruption in the lives of law-abiding citizens - why do you need
another excuse, a mandatory term that hinges on the weapon? Why not just pick their asses up and lock them away for being a menace to civilized
society?
If you want these children off the streets, then impose 100-year penalties for all the crimes associated with them, and watch them grow old behind
bars. Better yet, send them to America, to some of the places I've lived that make London look dowright quaint.
Introduce these skinny, white, filet-knife wieldin' morons to the Mexi-Mafia and their machine guns, they're just across the street in the parking
structure adjacent to my old building in Chicago, or the west side Disciples who used my porch lights to sight in their pistols. Hell, take 'em up
to Brooklyn and introduce them to some machete-wielding Jamaicans, real scaries - "That's not a knife, this is a knife."
Really though, if you really want to stop the violence, attack the cause (uneducated, unemployed, disadvantaged young males), don't chase the
symptoms around in circles. Don't get me wrong, I understand that your country has a crime rate rising faster than anywhere else (except maybe South
Africa), and you feel you have to do something about it. I get that.
It's insane to make self-defense illegal, and that's what you do when you make carrying weapons illegal in and of itself. Without established intent
to commit a crime, there's no way you can justify disarming innocent people and leaving them at the mercy of these scumbags.
That's my opinion anyway...
The murder rate in my country is four times that of the UK and we don't feel it's necessary to criminalize cooking implements. Why is that?