For many years I have heard Second Amendment supporters ridicule gun control opponents by calling for kitchen knife control -- a concept so absurd on its face that the analogy should send liberal gun grabbers scurrying back to the drawing board.

I now see that in England (which has had total gun control for years), they did scurry back to the drawing board, and are now demanding knife control:

A&E doctors are calling for a ban on long pointed kitchen knives to reduce deaths from stabbing.

A team from West Middlesex University Hospital said violent crime is on the increase - and kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.

They argued many assaults are committed impulsively, prompted by alcohol and drugs, and a kitchen knife often makes an all too available weapon.

The research is published in the British Medical Journal.

The researchers said there was no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all.

They consulted 10 top chefs from around the UK, and found such knives have little practical value in the kitchen.

None of the chefs felt such knives were essential, since the point of a short blade was just as useful when a sharp end was needed.

The researchers said a short pointed knife may cause a substantial superficial wound if used in an assault - but is unlikely to penetrate to inner organs.

In contrast, a pointed long blade pierces the body like "cutting into a ripe melon".

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.

The study found links between easy access to domestic knives and violent assault are long established.

Well, just as I don't hunt with my guns (or hunt at all, for that matter), I don't need my so-called "sporting" or "hunting" knives to cut up meat or skin carcasses. These are all legitimate tools for self defense, and the call for knife control highlights that the real agenda is an anti-self defense one.

Self defense is all but illegal in Britain, and many people want it to be illegal here.

Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me if the knife control advocates in Britain called self defense a form of hate crime.

MORE: Actually, self defense might easily be construed as a hate crime were prosecutors able to show that the defender was racially prejudiced. La Shawn Barber analyzes the recent case of a Laotian who hated white hunters and killed several of them:

Chai Vang, a Hmong immigrant (who’s actually an American) is accused of shooting eight people and killing six of them. He claims he shot the white people because they called him bad names and fired a shot at him, but the two survivors of the slaughter said Vang shot first. And get this: four of the people he murdered were shot in the back. One was shot four times in the back. Vang was trespassing, hunting on someone else’s property, and he’d been warned before by these same hunters. Vang also has a history of trespassing on private property and getting into “confrontations” with other hunters.

Let’s see. A so-called hate crime is one motivated by someone’s race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, gender, age, blah, blah, blah. Based on all the stories I’ve read about this massacre, it looks and smells like a hate crime, given the fact that all the victims were white and Vang may have expressed hatred of whites. If so, will the prosecutor charge him with a hate crime?