London has a problem. England’s capital and largest city has seen a 40 percent increase in homicides in the last three years. There have been 53 murders already in 2018, and it is only April.
Because it is near impossible to own a firearm legally in Britain, knives have been the go-to weapon in most of these murders. Authorities have noticed this, which is why the London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced this weekend that they would soon crackdown on anyone caught carrying a knife.
“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,” he tweeted.
Khan’s note included a link to an information page that explained additional steps the city would take to “tackle the scourge of violent crime in London,” including “boosting police power” with a new “violent crime task force of 120 officers” and “targeted patrols with extra stop and search powers” and establishing support groups to “steer young people away from violent crime.”
Good on them for taking steps to explore the root causes of the violence, but moving against knives is a particularly ill-conceived waste of time. It is not even particularly logical.
Go through the steps: They came for the firearms, so criminals moved on to other modes of violence, including knives. Authorities announced this weekend that they would treat knives as contraband. What do you suppose the criminal element will do now? They will move on to something equally fatal, and so on and so on until — what, exactly? Scrutinizing blunt objects? Been there, done that, as my Washington Examiner colleague Tom Rogan explained here, about how British gangs have already figured out workarounds to carrying baseball bats.
This is to say nothing of the impracticality of criminalizing household objects. Anything can be a weapon if you want it to be. If we take these confiscation policies to their logical conclusions, how far are we from Khan announcing the police will monitor residents’ fists?
None of this will matter so long as the authorities don’t solve the “why?” of the city’s building crime wave. The city would be better served if the mayor and his cohort focused all of their energy on the wielder and not the wielded.
In 2017, London suffered 130 homicides, 80 of which were stabbings. In fact, the problem has grown so serious that the city of eight million surpassed New York City in February and March in monthly homicides.
Fifteen people were murdered in London two months ago, whereas New York City, which is also home to approximately eight million people, recorded 14 homicides in that same time period. In March, an additional 22 people were killed in London. New York City recorded 21 homicides during that time. It’s the first time in modern history that London’s capital city has more murders in a single month than New York City.
The problem obviously isn’t the knife. The problem is that people are choosing to kill other people at an alarming rate. To distract from the real problem with a ridiculous confiscation policy that will surely harass the innocent is to waste of valuable time and resources.
Khan and his team have detected a pattern. Good for them. Now if only they could figure out where, exactly, to focus their efforts.
