Knives cause crime.... (And hate?)

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.

Notice that test of need for knives is measured by "practical value in the kitchen" and nowhere is self defense mentioned. In this country the expression "legitimate sporting need" is often kicked around.

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?

Suppose a white hunter with a history of hating Asians had shot Chai Vang? Should a history of having bad thoughts cloud the right to self defense?

posted by Eric on 05.27.05 at 09:17 AM





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Seems we've been down this path before ...

http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/001922.html

As I said then about 'knife culture',

No kitchen is off limits!

Dennis   ·  May 27, 2005 01:32 PM

"It would be easy to imagine an Arabian romance about a sultan whose grand vizier had his throat cut by his barber; and who immediately forbade razors throughout the length and breadth of his empire. But he would hardly be attacking the deepest causes of the discontent of that empire. Then when he has carefully excluded all razors, he will be very much surprised when the next grand vizier is killed with a red-hot [fireplace instrument]. He will be still more surprised to find that an increasing number of his critics have passed from razors to red-hot [fireplace instrument], as an increasing number of Americans are passing from drink to drugs. Thus slowly will that sultan begin to have a glimmering of of the first great principle of practical politics; that the sin is in a man's soul and not in his tools or his toys; and that insofar as his soul is affected by them, it is affected by all of them, and not by one in unique isolation."
-G. K. Chesterton, June 5, 1920

E. Merrill Root noted that, back in the days when England was still great, a man named William Shakespeare once wrote a play, Othello, in which the protagonist was tricked into smothering his wife with a pillow. Will "pillow control" be next? The "social blueprinters" never seem to learn that murder, and all other sins, are in man's heart and not in his guns or his pillows.

Well, with the advent of machine knitting, there is absolutely no practical need for knitting needles.

Take the needles out of granny's hands before she murders again!

Darleen   ·  May 27, 2005 02:58 PM

Nice post. And wow, great comment SMA! Everywhere liberals take control things go past parody. Wow.
cheers!

Harkonnendog   ·  May 27, 2005 05:10 PM

Dear Harkonnendog:

Thank you!

I haven't had time to do any more than write a few posts, and I'm way behind in my reading, but THANK YOU ALL!

Eric Scheie   ·  May 28, 2005 01:19 PM


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