I'm not making this up.
First your guns (didn't reduce crime), now your kitchen knives, pretty soon you guys on that side of the pond will have to cut your steak with a spoon (until meat is outlawed as "bad for you")
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www.eurekalert.org/pub_re...052505.php
A&E doctors call for ban on pointed kitchen knives
Reducing knife crime: we need to ban the sale of long pointed kitchen knives, BMJ Volume 330 pp 1221-2
Long pointed kitchen knives should be banned to reduce violent crime and deaths from stabbing, say accident and emergency doctors in this week's BMJ.
Violent crime is on the increase in the UK, say the authors, whose experience of working in emergency departments suggests that kitchen knives are used in as many as half of all stabbings.
Many assaults are committed impulsively and prompted by alcohol and other drugs, and a kitchen knife makes an all too available weapon in such circumstances.
Yet there is no reason for long pointed knives to be publicly available at all, having little practical value in the kitchen, argue the authors - who consulted ten top chefs from around the UK. 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.
A short pointed knife may cause a substantial superficial wound if used in an assault, but is unlikely to penetrate to inner organs. Whereas a pointed long blade pierces the body like "cutting into a ripe melon", say the authors.
The use of knives is particularly worrying amongst adolescents, say the authors, reporting that 24% of 16 year olds have been shown to carry weapons, primarily knives.
Links between easy access to domestic knives and violent assault are long established, say the authors, highlighting 17th century French laws which decreed that the tips of table and street knives be ground smooth. A century later in this country forks and blunt-ended table knives were introduced in an effort to reduce injuries during arguments in public eating houses.
The present-day UK Government should also legislate to combat injuries from knives, argue the authors. Banning the sale of long pointed knives would be a key step in the fight against violent crime.
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When will people learn that banning objects does nothing for crime? The very definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results....
Jimro
As ridiculous as this case is, comparing it to the banning of guns is ridiculous...
Apart from for target shooting (which we have CLUBS which you can join, and I o enjoy target shooting with rifles and handguns) there's no POINT having Guns...
You say we'll have to cut steak with spoons, well, we couldnt cut it with guns eiter.
Guns were banned in an attempt to reduce crime, and now someone is calling for kitchen knives to be banned to reduce crime.
Heck, might as well ban screwdrivers while you are at it.
Before you ask I am familiar with UK firearms laws, which allow the private ownership of shotguns and rifles that are manually operated, with registration and showing a "need or purpose" to have and use.
Jimro
It's not just the reducing crime element, it's the feel good factor as well...
I went to America last year and i was overtaken with paranoia that everyone I talked to was hiding a gun in their pocket, it was scary...
Dont tell me that I was being stupid, I know I was, but it still happened all the same, and I've spoken to others and I'm not the only one who feels uncomfortable travelling to countries with fewer gun laws.
In the pub culture that the UK is gripped in, and has been for years, guns just wouldn't be used appropriately. The people who need them for a reason can get hold of them, most other people just feel better not thinking about guns all the time, or preferably at all.
The only downside is, when a gun crime DOES happen it comes as eve more of a shock, but I can only list 2 or so cases last year, both times reacted in public outcry because "these hooligans are actually using GUNS."
When someone gets stabbed no-one cares, well they do, they all feel sorr for the victim and angry about the stabber, but it's nothing unusual.
When someone gets shot, that is just taking it a step to far.
There IS a fundamental difference between being scared of beign assaulted in the street, and being scared of being shot by someone half way down the road.
And why were you afraid someone might be armed? This is a serious question simply because it is the fundamental basis for those who want to ban guns, fear.
Most high publicity shootings in the US occur where people are specifically banned from carrying weapons, Luby's cafeteria shooting in Killeen TX, Columbine CO, etc. So being surrounded by unarmed people isn't necessarily safer than being surrounded by armed people.
Jimro
Take away the guns and they'll stab each other, take away the knives and they'll throw drano on each other, take away the drano and they'll sit around trying to figure out the right way to bounce a stale cheesy poof of someone's skull so it cracks it. You could cut everyones limbs off at birth and they'd just roll around trying to nibble each other to death.
I said it before and I'll say it again. Some people are bent and taking the lives of others and short of killing them there is no way of stopping them. 
~Rico
