Covering for Their Own Failures, U.K. Officials Blame Violent Crime on Access to Knives
The United Kingdom is a case study in what a country looks like when instead of targeting criminals or addressing the incentives for crime, the powers that be obsessively focus on tools criminals might use and tighten the screws on an entire society, innocent people included. That’s how the country degenerated into a surveillance state that prevents its citizens from carrying the means of self-defense and punishes them for saying anything the authorities consider provocative. After a murderous attack by a violent, radicalized assailant, politicians have decided the problem is access to knives.
Ignore Our Failures, It’s About the Knives
“Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in a piece for The Sun about Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls and injuring others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year. “And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue. The technology is there to set up age-verification checks, even for kitchen knives ordered online.”
What Starmer mentioned but glossed over is that Rudakubana was three times referred to a program intended to divert people from radicalization and terrorism before authorities lost interest in him. At the time of his arrest, he had a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which led him to being charged and sentenced for terrorism. He also possessed the deadly poison ricin that he’d manufactured himself in sufficient quantity to conduct a mass attack.
Rudakubana was a human bomb waiting to go off. But Starmer focused not on officials’ failure to pay attention, but on knives—edged tools that are among humans’ earliest and most important creations.
“Online retailers will be required to ask for two types of ID from anyone seeking to buy a knife under plans being considered by ministers to combat under-age sales after the Southport murders,” reports Charles Hymas of The Telegraph. “Buyers would have to submit an ID document to an online retailer and then record a live video or selfie to prove their age.”
It’s difficult to see how an ID check is going to stand between those planning mayhem and tools first crafted 2.6 million years ago in their most primitive form and still used by people every day. My dentist forges knives in his backyard fo
Article from Reason.com
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