Certainly sounds like he may have some sort of disrupted mental state. God, what a nightmare. That poor family.

Ban knives.

The kid was asking for it, :rolleyes:

If I wasn't drunk, I'd take issue with that...

...but, seeing as I am drunk...

Hah!:D

We kind of did over here:p


Not that the ban on some kinds of knife and mandatory prison sentences for carrying a bladed weapon would have stopped this appalling crime.

It's kind of like guns - as your post suggests. The thing with banning guns, is that it won't stop all gun crimes, and it won't stop all murders - but it will stop some.

Keeping everyone in cages would stop them all, but is that worth it?

Well for a few years it worked really well and knife crime fell - we've just had the first increase in knife crime for several years.

We currently have a growing problem with young people and knives which may be what is driving up knife crime. Of course - it's a good deal more difficult to control knives, which are used every day in every kitchen in every house everywhere, and a lot of the knives used in violent crime are domestic knives.

We didn't 'ban knives' really. But we banned the sale of certain kinds of knives and criminalised the carrying of a knife.

There were spikes, but in general the trend has been downwards I think since the laws were tightened up in the 90s and then again a few years ago.

There has also been a bunch of stupid... ASBOs, is it? Hefty fines like the woman who was cutting flowers in her yard when the school bus arrives so she walks out to meet her kids and the driver reports her. I see a lot of those on Arbroath. It works like our zero tolerance school policy. :rolleyes:

There have been odd bits of nonsense aye.

What's more troubling, to me, are the mandatory prison sentences for anybody caught carrying a knife, regardless of whether there was any intention to commit a crime with it. It results in unnecessary criminalisation, particularly of young people.

I agree with ban on carrying them - but sentencing should be down to the judge in individual cases - not all of which warrant prison.

Right, we have a huge problem of spending a fortune to incarcerate people, mostly teens, for small quantities of pot. This not only is a waste of resources, it tags them with a criminal record that will fuck up employment opportunities for the rest of their life. Do you think they could be a mite bitter, a mite antisocial? Maybe enough for them to become criminal or terroristic. http://cellar.org/2015/shades.gif

There should be an exchange program by which Brits convicted of carrying a knife are sent to us and Yanks convicted of possession of pot are sent to them.

Every prison in the UK wuold probably riot if we tried that. We've all seen American prisons on tv and they look like something out of some future dystopian nightmare.

We wouldn't put them in prison.