Knife Control in the UK

With Knife Crimes on Rise, British Judge Recommends Duller Kitchen Knives

Katherine Rohloff / June 14, 2018
A veteran British judge says Britons should round off the tips of their large kitchen knives as a way to cut down on the rising number of knife attacks in England, which has strict gun controls.
Judge Nicholas Madge made his proposal at his recent retirement ceremony after 77 knife-related incidents, including three deaths, occurred in Bedfordshire, England, over the prior two months, The Telegraph newspaper reported.
“Why do we need 8-inch or 10-inch kitchen knives with points?” Madge said at the May 25 event. “Butchers and fishmongers do, but how often, if at all, does a domestic chef use the point of an 8-inch or 10-inch knife? Rarely, if at all.”
Amy Swearer, legal policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation’s Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, ridiculed the idea as knife control.
Rounding off the tips of kitchen knives, Swearer told The Daily Signal, is “the liberals’ version of gun control in England, 40 years ahead of the United States.”
“Blunt tips for knives seems practically absurd. You can make a shank out of plastic in prison,” Swearer said. “Will they regulate plastic next? Where will the line be drawn?”
The Heritage policy analyst attributes Madge’s “extreme” proposal to England’s gun control policy, in place since the mid-to-late 1990s.
England slowly achieved the dream of American gun control advocates, but it didn’t help curb crime, Swearer said.
“To keep people safe, allow law-abiding citizens to defend themselves,” she said.
Today, England suffers from an epidemic of so-called “hot burglaries.” Hot burglaries occur when an individual enters a house despite knowing that the resident is home.
Swearer said that in the U.S., 14 percent of all burglaries are “hot,” while England’s “hot” rate is 60 percent.
“There was a study that asked burglars why they did or did not commit hot burglaries,” she said. “American burglars said residents were more likely to have a gun, while English burglars knew that the resident didn’t have a gun, and that they could get [the victim] to open [his or her] safe.”
Swearer attributed that to the Second Amendment right to bear arms, a right Britons don’t enjoy:

England didn’t have a gun problem, and did everything [American pro-gun control advocates] wanted. Now, they are in a worse, violent situation than they were already in, even compared to the U.S. By cracking down on the most basic things, liberals are laughing. … Basically, Britain has become a police-protectionism state, so now [the British] have the right to hope that the police arrive in time before they are killed.

Madge’s call for blunting knives stems from the fact that deadly mass attacks may be committed using anything that can serve as a weapon.
England has seen a 21 percent spike in knife and other non-gun related incidents from 2011 to 2017, with an incident occurring every 14 minutes with a sharp object, the Independent reported.
Swearer said that’s because knives in England have become the “new guns.” If British citizens were given their guns back, she said, England would be better off:

We have the Second Amendment, literally, for things like this, and we shouldn’t listen to people who try to diminish it. The Second Amendment protects firearms used by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes. When we ignore these provisions, that basically removes a very serious protection that prevents us from going down the path that the Founding Fathers did not want, and become just like England.