Gun Control, Knife Control, and Glass Control
Gun Control, Knife Control, and Glass Control
Only when guns, knives and glass bottles are banned, we’ll be safe.
By Daniel Greenfield
Nobody needs an AR-15. Or a handgun. Or a kitchen knife.
“Historically, we needed a point on the end of our knife to pick up food because forks weren’t invented,” a letter from the Church of England in the Diocese of Rochester reads.
Knives with points on them it explains are no longer needed in this modern fork-filled era.
“Research demonstrates kitchen knives are used in a large percentage of homicides due to their availability and lethal nature,” it warns.
A University of London researcher explained that pointed knives are obsolete and we don’t need them. Like straws, plastic bags and cars. Not to mention single family homes, trains, cows and freedom.
Once knives with points on them are banned, then the United Kingdom will finally be safe. Unless someone figures out how to somehow put a point on the new round-ended stab-proof knives.
Kitchen knives with rounded edges are being described as “stab-proof”. Rayware, the manufacturer, has touted its kitchen knives as being so impotent and useless that they won’t even puncture a balloon.
But give your average convict 5 minutes with them and they’ll soon be nice and stabby.
Kitchen knives are being banned in the UK under the Offensive Weapons Act 2019. The OWA reads like an NRA parody. It authorizes stop and frisk for corrosive substances in a futile bid to prevent acid attacks. Knife crime prevention orders will force teens to stop using social media or face jail time.
It bans the sale of kitchen knives, bread knives, garden shears, carpenter’s adzes and, scissors to anyone under 18. You can no longer order kitchen knives delivered to your home and many major UK retailers, like Tesco, no longer carry knives. A shopper went into a store, browsed the kitchen aisle, asked for knives and was told that they no longer sell any knives, including fork, spoon and knife cutlery sets.
Assuming that the UK does manage to eliminate all knives and convince the populace to eat all their food with sporks, there are rising numbers of murders being committed with broken bottles.
Or, as a UK government report describes them, “glass offenses”.
Knife control is working so well that UK thugs are turning to “glassing” which is exactly what it sounds like. Jabbing a broken bottle or glass into someone’s face or body. According to The Independent, “glassing”, which it describes as “an act of sickening violence”, was up 10% a few years ago.
“Some researchers estimate up to 80,000 glassings a year – but this includes threats to glass a victim, or last-minute confiscation of the criminogenic implement,” the paper claims.
“Hospital episode statistics point to assaults using sharp instrument – usually glass – causing 5,000 serious, life-changing, injuries each and every year. That means every single week: one hundred young adults totally unable to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives because a glass container, first reliably created in the 4th century AD, has shattered or been shattered.”
The solution is banning glass.
“Once glass has been accepted as a ‘criminogenic material’, alternatives to fragile glass need promotion. Such a vexed question: toughened glass? tempered glass? shatterproof glass? plastic glass,” it ponders.
4th century glass is outdated anyway. It’s time to embrace plastic cups. Except those destroy the planet. Reusable paper cups then. You can’t stab anyone with one of those. Meanwhile the UK’s Home Office is funding research into “glass innovation” because clearly the problem here is the glass, not the thugs.
The future British kitchen won’t have knives or glassware. Or forks, another historical relic. And probably not chopsticks either. In the progressive future, everyone will eat their food with their hands.
Enjoy your curry.
Speaking of the fourth century though, while good glassware took a while to produce, we’ve had reliable stabbing weapons for far longer than that. It takes skill to make a good knife. But little skill to make something with a sharp end.
Sarah Hainsworth, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Aston University explained that kitchen knives are dangerous because of their “length and point”.
This is exactly the sort of breathtaking insight that requires the services of the “first female Executive Dean of School of Engineering and Applied Sciences”. I’m not a pro or amateur chancellor at an engineering school, but I wager that I could turn out something both long and pointy with some common household tools. (Those will have to be banned too.)
Uncontacted tribes in the Amazon have figured out how to make spears that work better than the Tesco kitchenware junk imported from China. That’s because humanity has a passionate interest in weapons. It will go on making them and using them even if you ban kitchen knives and glass bottles.
Every human civilization, even the uncontacted Amazon tribes, understand that you don’t ban weapons.
You ban murder.
The Ten Commandments said, “Thou Shalt Not Murder.” Not, “Thou Shalt Not Possess Weapons.”
That’s not the first commandment. Instead it follows a series of commandments that lay out a moral system of values based on Divine authority. The Church of England could do worse than go back to the original material which focuses not on regulating our physical capabilities, but our moral senses.
The UK’s war on knives and glassware isn’t an intentional parody. It’s what happens when a society completely misses the point. You miss the point by starting with gun control and then trying to ban every single possible object which one person can use to harm another. And that’s every object.
Guns don’t kill people. Knives don’t jump out of the kitchen drawer and stab people. Glasses don’t zoom off into someone’s face of their own accord. The inanimate objects were never the problem.
Gun control embraces an animistic view of the world in which guns, knives and glass bottles are imbued with malicious spirits. If we purge ourselves of the objects, we’ll drive away the evil homicidal spirits.
American gun control activists say that we should be more like Europe. We are more like Europe.
Someone walks into a school or a store and shoots a dozen people and we wonder what we can do to ban the weapon he did it with, instead of trying to understand what’s wrong with our society.
In our past, murder was seen as a moral disease, not a regulatory loophole.
There is something wrong with a society in which mass shootings happen. There’s also something wrong with a society in which acid attacks and glassings happen. The bans don’t address the problem.
Mass murderers aren’t possessed by the animistic spirits of guns, kitchen knives or glass bottles.
They’re evil.
But we don’t believe in evil anymore. And so we summon the shamans of applied sciences to tell us how we can make our knives pointed so that the evil spirits of knife crime will no longer trouble London.
And then someone throws acid in someone else’s face and sticks a broken bottle in their eye.
Maybe we should stop the animistic war on inanimate objects and start fighting evil instead.