It’s the defining mark of left-liberal crime policy: Deal mainly with the tools, not the people who use them. Hence American liberals’ obsession with gun control. Of course, there are more guns than people in the United States—upwards of 300 million, in fact—and so any attempt to regulate their possession is doomed to minuscule success or, far more likely, total failure.
We’ve often wondered why left-leaning policymakers don’t propose to regulate the ownership of knives. Lots of people are injured and killed by knives, after all. In 2016, in fact, 1,604 people died from knife wounds in the United States. So why not ban them? Or at least regulate them?
We’ve often asked this question in jest in a perhaps mischievous way of drawing attention to the absurdity of most gun control proposals. But we foresee a time when it won’t be a joke any longer. This week we received a press release from the mayor of London: “Mayor Sadiq Khan is taking action to tackle the scourge of violent crime in London, together with the Met Police. With the tragic rise in knife killings on our streets this year, he’s introduced tough, immediate measures to address the violence.”
Uh oh.
Mayor Khan’s office has allotted metal-detecting “knife wands” to every school in London, is helping London boroughs to develop their own “knife crime action plans,” and last year hosted an “Education Knife Crime Summit” in which stakeholders met “to work on anti-knife crime education in schools.” The mayor in fact has published a new Knife Crime Strategy, “a package of tough and comprehensive measures to tackle knife crime, taking in views from bereaved families and victims.”
We took a look at the strategy. It’s an 80-page document with lots of flattering photos of Mayor Khan and lots of nebulous language about safe communities and “stakeholders.” It informs readers that the mayor’s office is “working to ensure knife retailers and their couriers/delivery companies have access to training and guidance on the law on underage sales.”
We hope all those London toughs don’t move from knives to axes or nunchucks. The mayor will have to rewrite his entire strategy.
