Criminal law, International, Politics

London Mayor: “No Excuses: There Is Never A Reason To Carry A Knife.”

Gillray_-_Napoleon_ragingYou have heard of the NRA but how about KRI or KRO?  Knife rights organizations could well replace the National Rifle Association on the front of weapon control legislation after London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan moved to impose severe limits on knife possession.  It has long been a mantra among NRA supporters that “knives will be next” and Khan has fulfilled that narrative after knife attacks in London pushed the city’s murder rate on par with that of New York City.  Now Khan has declared “No excuses: there is never a reason to carry a knife. Anyone who does will be caught, and they will feel the full force of the law.”

Khan is pushing for a crackdown on knives as well as acid sales.  Acid attacks have been popular in Muslim countries and have begun to rise in Europe.

The current law bans knives longer than three inches and limits possession to folding knives. Here are the guidelines from the Metropolitan Police website:

Knives

It is illegal to:

  • sell a knife of any kind to anyone under 18 years old (16 to 18 year olds in Scotland can buy cutlery and kitchen knives)
  • carry a knife in public without good reason – unless it’s a knife with a folding blade 3 inches long (7.62 cm) or less, e.g. a Swiss Army knife (a “lock knife” does not come into the category of “folding pocket knife” because it is not immediately foldable at all times)
  • carry, buy or sell any type of banned knife
  • use any knife in a threatening way (including a legal knife, such as a Swiss Army knife)
In fairness to Khan, we also have knife regulations on size as well as prohibitions on things like switchblade knives.  However, Khan is moving to limit deliveries of knives and acids. Moreover the limits on acid sales to people over 18 is hardly draconian. However, it is hard to see how such limits will meaningfully reduce the criminal use of acid.
The knife limits will be interesting to watch. Obviously, this appears to be moving toward a ban on knife possession outside of the home.  Combined with the enhanced stop and search policy, it could represent a significant turn for Great Britain.

 

78 thoughts on “London Mayor: “No Excuses: There Is Never A Reason To Carry A Knife.””

  3. If the Brits don’t have the moxie to kick Khan out of office, shame on them. Here’s a novel idea..why not severely punish offenders? If sexual grooming and prolific rape only carries a slap on the wrist in the UK..I’m sure the punishment for stabbing is not much worse. The pathetic death of England..can hardly stand to watch it.

    1. See Theodore Dalrymple on the interaction between the judiciary and the Crown prosecutors. The British courts are like the California penal system ca. 1975. There is an institutional culture of laxity borne of the social attitudes of gatekeepers. Parliament could repair this, but they do nothing.

    2. Why should they kick him out ? On the contrary – the US would be lucky to have the likes of him, not least of all in the WH.

  4. When I helped out at the stables I had plenty of reasons to carry a small folding pocket knife.

  5. @JT”

    “It has long been a mantra among NRA supporters that ‘knives will be next’ and Khan has fulfilled that narrative after knife attacks in London pushed the city’s murder rate on par with that of New York City. Now Khan has declared ‘No excuses: there is never a reason to carry a knife.’ ”

    I don’t understand how London’s murder rate can be on par with that of New York City when the citizens of London are subject to very strict gun control laws.

    This is a deep mystery. 🙂

    http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/jlpp/Vol30_No2_KatesMauseronline.pdf

    1. What a fascinating masterpiece of academic logical fallacies they have conjured up !!

  7. What happened to the Brit’s. From Bayonets to spoons in just a few centuries.

  8. The crazy left won’t stop until we’re all in straight-jackets and rubber rooms just to keep us safe.

    1. “The crazy left won’t stop until we’re all in straight-jackets and rubber rooms just to keep us safe.”

      I think you are on to something, I really do. How can anyone take them seriously any more?

  9. Is a 10-inch screwdriver legal? How about a 6-inch metal nail file, a knitting needle or, shucks, a ten-penny nail? They aren’t knives. You can’t cut anything with them but they sure as heck can be used to stab people to death. (See jail and prison shanks). There’s a TV ad for the “Bavarian Edge” that shows it can sharpen a credit card to a razor’s edge. Banning knives won’t stop stabbings. All it takes is a pointed or sharpened object. If people are inclined to harm someone else, they don’t even need that, Any blunt object will do. It’s the behavior, stupid.

    1. Cricket Bats. Those things are murderous and can be used from many angles and have edges sharper than sides imagine the damage…..

      Croquet Mallets! same comment….

      Golf Clubs…. OMG it’s a conspiracy of the people with the champagne wishes and caviar dreams. ..

  10. “Kill The Redcoats!”
    That free speech phrase was widely said in the English Colony of America back in 1777 and thereabouts. We needed guns. We needed a militia. We needed a militia with guns which would compete with the Brit Redcoats arms. The right to bear arms is something we in America need to understand in the context of what was needed in 1776. We need knives and guns to defend a lot of things and it is not just the front porch when the rapist shows up.

    1. I use mine in any number of ways I suspect the Lord Mayor of Londontown did not heed Dick Whittington’s advice. Turn again, turn again Saw Deep Whittling ton You may be elected but here’s the rub you are far from being Dick Whittington.

  11. When this blog’s Leftists won’t bother to denounce Khan’s new policy, you know it has crossed the line. Going on the record to say so apparently is too much to ask. Reminds of Bonhoeffer’s quote:

    Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.

  12. “Car Control” is imperative.

    40,000 people are killed by cars each year.

  13. Is that a knife in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?

  14. Never a good reason to have a knife on you?

    1. To open 50 lb feed bags when the fiddly little string closure won’t unwind correctly.
    2. To cut through a lead rope
    3. To cut off the softened chestnuts off a horse’s legs instead of ripping them off, which can cause injury. Every horse gets a calloused area on the inside of his forelegs (and the back of their pasterns). That area will continue to add callous, and it can get quite thick. After you bathe your horse, it softens, and you cleanly slice it off. If you use a dull knife, you’ll be there hacking away at it, a sharp object by your precious horse’s legs, while he’s getting bored standing there…not a good situation. If you pull it off, you can accidentally pull some skin off.
    4. To cut through a seat belt in the event of an accident (the knife should be folding, of course, so you do not have an open blade tumbling through a crashing car)
    5. To open packages and birthday gifts. At every single birthday party and Christmas, at some point, my Dad will say, “Do you need my knife?”

    This are just the many uses I have for knives, and why I carry one. I suppose in a pinch, it would be better than nothing for self defense. Other people might have their own law abiding reasons for carrying one. If you were in some sort of emergency, like a flood or an earthquake, a knife could be a critical piece of equipment. Who am I to tell others that they could have no possible reason to carry a knife, or that their reasons aren’t good enough?

    What we are seeing is that banning firearms does not remove all crime. You have to focus on what is driving the crime instead of obsessing over the tools used. Personally, if I was a teenager, and a bunch of teenagers were getting stabbed to death in my town, I’d want to carry a knife, too. You don’t bring a knife to a gun fight, and you don’t walk into a knife fight empty handed. You have to have some means to at least attempt to protect yourself.

    I found this Guardian article interesting. Of course, it blamed cuts in government spending to knife crime. And yet, in the same article, the author wrote, “In his 2010 book Knife Crime: The Law of the Blade, the former Mirror associate editor John McShane compiles a sensationalist catalogue of the most high-profile knife murders in recent British history. Describing the 1995 murder of Philip Lawrence, a headmaster who was stabbed outside his school in west London, McShane declares that it marked “the dawn of an age when the response to a confrontation was no longer verbal or even rough physicality. Instead it was the quick, uncaring thrust of a blade from a feral youth lacking compassion or morality, thinking only of himself and nothing of the havoc caused to those in his way or their loved ones.”

    Cuts to spending does not turn compassionate youth into savages. It does not create the cultural shift from settling disputes with fistfights to coldly stabbing and killing someone. I remember years ago, my own father told me that when he was a boy, guys would fight it out with each other, and then the fight would be over. Sometimes the combatants would even become friends. Now, he said, kids shoot and stab each other. That was 20 years ago, and it’s only getting worse in the UK.

    There is something seriously wrong with this latest generation. They will forever be known to history as the School Shooters, Stabbers, entitled, collectors of grievances, self aggrandizement on social media, self obsessed, the world owes them, safe spaces, bubbles and teddy bears, shouting down professors, intolerance of the very existence of opposing ideas in close proximity or online, supporters of a sort of renaissance of Jim Crow dorm and study group segregation…It’s not good.

    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/28/beyond-the-blade-the-truth-about-knife-in-britain

    1. “It’s the situation that causes these crimes, not the weapon.”

      “Also, it’s all the fault of these young people. Clearly they’re just crazy, and nothing else.”

      …..This seems legit.

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