London is a pretty insane place to live. I mean actually insane.
I did two years there once.
I can add that I'm 66, a pillar (not exactly a pillar, but still respectable 😀 ) of the community, and a professional person. I live in a very rural area where it is not unusual to have to, say, cut a sheep free from thorns - I had to do that last week.
My kayak knife does not have a point to it - it's made like that. It would be easier to stab someone with a banana. The Opinel is a utility knife - a tool.
Knives are not all stabbing implements. Not all knife-carriers are young men. Not all young men get stabbed.
One final point - if a kid wants to harm or hurt another kid he/she will find a way to do it, whether they carry a knife or not.
A lot of people put knife crime down to being 'a London thing', 'a gang thing' or an 'inner city thing', but it's not true. It's concentrated in urban areas probably because of the concentration of people and the added issue of their being more areas of conflict when people are jammed together. But there is a problem with knife crime all over the UK from Aberdeen to Cardiff to London, and rural areas are not immune. In fact, rural areas here have their own added problem of firearms offences, obviously because a lot more people legally carry them in rural and surrounding areas.
The 'gang' thing is also no longer true (if it ever was). The vast majority of children carrying knives are not member of gangs. They either carry them because it's what other people do, as a status symbol or increasingly, for protection.
Another thing to bear in mind with knife crime is that the people who are murdered are only the tip of the iceberg. In the last three years around 12,000 children in the UK were the victims of knife crime (it could be as high as 18,000 as some forces don't report the figures). The vast majority of these crimes were committed by children on other children and included robberies, rapes, kidnappings and serious but non-lethal wounding. Few of these ever make the headlines, but they are obviously devastating for the people involved.
Quote: "One final point - if a kid wants to harm or hurt another kid he/she will find a way to do it, whether they carry a knife or not."
That's absolutely true, but the use of knives magnifies the harm caused. What would have been a broken nose and some nasty but superficial cuts, turn into a fatal wound with knives in the mix. Listen to what the users of knives say about what they did. A common theme is that they had no real idea of the damage they were causing. Most of them had no intention of killing, they just wanted to lash out and inflict pain on their rival, opponent or whatever. Many of them are left stunned by the idea that they have killed someone and destroyed both their lives.
I'm convinced that many of the crimes would never have happened in the first place if these kids were not carrying a knife. The knife emboldens the owner and makes it much more likely that they will use violence to sort out whatever problem they're faced with. And it's simply not true to say that flashing a knife warns an aggressor off and therefore everything is fine. What happens in the real world is that the aggressor is humiliated by their lack of power and resolves to up their game by packing their own weapon, a bigger weapon next time. The original knife carrier may never come across his aggressor again, but someone else will, and they will suffer the consequences.
