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This 1 weird trick will solve your crime problem

Knives are too sharp and filing them down is solution to soaring violent crime, judge says.

56 comments to This 1 weird trick will solve your crime problem

  • CaptDMO

    Judge is too dull, beating him down would address a plethora of issues.

  • Y. Knott

    I have another solution to soaring knife crime – what was that old saying, you know, something about “bringing a knife to a gunfight”… ?

  • This is perhaps the most moronic remark by a judge I have I ever heard

  • Sam Duncan

    They won’t be happy until we’re only allowed wax crayons and blunt scissors.

    And people will still be shot, stabbed, and insulted.

  • JohnK

    It’s when you hear shit like this that you start to think a society is reaching its end.

  • That was my reaction too, JohnK. We may need nothing less than a revolution to sweep these insane people away & roll back the state to sane levels.

  • John B

    The clown… knives need not be sharp to inflict a fatal stab wound.

  • JadedLibertarian

    Ban tool use. The Paleolithic Era was a bad move.

    #PlioceneForPeace

  • Matthew Asnip

    How long until cricket bats are replaced by nerf and rocks with styrofoam?

  • If you see a criminal approaching you with a sharpened knife, don’t panic. Once the knife is embedded within your soft, yielding flesh, you should have enough time to file it down before you bleed out.

    In related news: Violent crime involving blunt instruments is on the rise.

  • bobby b

    If you legislate that all foodstuffs must be cut into bite-sized pieces at the wholesaler level before being sold, no one would ever need another deadly assault knife.

    As an added benefit, food waste would decrease. If you knew that you would be full on 18 bites of steak and 12 bites of asparagus, you could buy 18 bites of steak and 12 bites of asparagus.

    We need to do this for the children.

  • mezzrow

    Why do so many in Asia eat with two sticks? Why is any food that requires a knife and fork classed as “primitive” cooking in areas once under the rule of the old middle kingdom?

    The reach of the empire goes deep into the mind.

  • Mr Ecks

    It seems it was said by the legal fuckwit during his retirement speech so hopefully he can piss off to obscurity and find himself in Hell in due time.

  • Henry Cybulski

    That’s one way to increase membership in the knife-dullers guild. But what about the awl-blunters guild and the ice pick-benders guild?

  • Mr Ed

    bobby b has good intentions, but they simply don’t go far enough. People can choke on bite-sized chunks, you Americans need a Soup Amendment to permit, nay, require Federal oversight of food size, and liquidising all solid food at preparation point will reduce choking risks.

  • Is it not said, Oh, you are so sharp you will cut yourself? (From the Way of Mrs. Cosmopolite, as quoted by Lu-Tze to Lobsang Ludd in Terry Pratchett’s Thief of Time)

  • Runcie Balspune

    He’s probably not a fan of one of his peers.

  • Thailover

    The knives aren’t too sharp, the judge is too dull. The appropriate response to the ridiculous is ridicule.

    Judge Nic Madge blaming the knives. How is it possible for someone so stupid to become an actual judge?

  • Tedd

    How long until cricket bats are replaced by nerf and rocks with styrofoam?

    [Emphasis added]

    Those Star Trek episodes I watched as a kid are starting to seem prescient.

  • CaptDMO

    Mr. Ed
    “…you Americans need a Soup Amendment to permit, nay, require Federal oversight of food size, and liquidising all solid food at preparation point will reduce choking risks.”
    No actually. We’re the ones with good teeth to incise/chew with.

  • Phil B

    In a few years, in the UK you will be able to conduct a reign of terror with a balloon on a piece of (blunted) stick … I wonder what legislation will be introduced to counter that?

  • File the tips off kitchen knives? What idiocy. It’s not the tool, it’s the underlying culture that’s the issue.

  • Roué le Jour

    OK, come at me with that banana…

  • Regional

    How does one carve the Sunday Roast? and
    Didn’t Britain fight a war against Fascism?

  • Rxc

    Maybe all nails will also have to have their points removed. And no more ice picks or sewing needles. No more liquid containers that can be broken to form sharp edges. No more screwdrivers that can be sharpened to a point .

    This the

  • Eric Tavenner

    The stupidity is so overwhelming that it hurts from 4000 miles away.

  • AlexB

    Roué le Jour: It’s the basket of raspberries that worries me.

  • Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker) Gray

    If we had no crime statistics, there would be no (definition of) crime! So abolish all crime statistics! And bananas and raspberries!

  • Eric

    This is perhaps the most moronic remark by a judge I have I ever heard

    That says a lot given the fierce competition.

  • Bruce

    Thailover:

    “How is it possible for someone so stupid to become an actual judge?”

    It seems to be the key selection criterion of the job. It’s like some invisible, brain-sucking monster from a Dr. Who episode has been on the rampage for several decades.

    As the Roman poet Juvenal asked: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

  • Regional

    Bruce,
    It’s a phase lock loop.

  • Pat

    Only those who want to stab people will bother to sharpen their knives on the handy kerbstones provided by the government.

  • TomJ

    AlexB: What about the pointéd stick?

  • NickM

    In 1991, a 63-year-old man from West Miltion, Ohio bludgeoned his wife to death with “a pair of banjos” according to The Baltimore Sun. Miami County Chief Deputy Charles said, “I’ve been an officer for 30 years, and that’s the first banjo killing I’ve seen.”

    From here.

    The point is the capacity for human ingenuity when it comes to killing is unbounded. This springs to mind.

  • How is it possible for someone so stupid to become an actual judge?

    I offer the following quote from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (from memory).

    Once in power, totalitarianism always replaces its intelligent supporters, however loyal, with crackpots whose idiocy is the best guarantee of their ideological conformity.

    I also offer the following that was said to me long ago by a Labour party member and magistrate.

    Being a member of a political party is one good way to become a magistrate.

    (In the above, ‘good’ should be understood to mean ‘efficient’ or ‘easy’, not ‘good’ in the moral sense. 🙂 )

    Under Theresa May’s government, dare we even assume which party it was? 🙁

  • Rob Fisher

    “That board with a nail in it may have defeated us, but the humans won’t stop there. They’ll make bigger boards and bigger nails. Soon they’ll make a board with a nail so big it will destroy them all!” — Kang

  • llamas

    @ NickM – I’m just returning to the banjo, 10 years after a hand injury that made me put it down. I’d forgotten that (re)learning to play makes me want to kill myself. Neat story, tho’ 🙂

    To the larger point (see what I did there?) – what everyone else said. You are forbidden to discuss a person who has been jailed for repeatedly discussing actual crimes of hideous violence and depravity, while also being forbidden to discuss the trials of those accused of those crimes – but you should file the sharp points off your kitchen knives. Truly, this is what the death of a formerly-great civilization looks like. I have to be in the UK in October for work – I used to look forward to such visits, but not anymore. You poor people.

    llater,

    llamas

  • NickM

    llamas,
    It might not be the death of civilization as we know it. But it would make de-seeding a chilli very difficult and for me that is more than enough.

    But really… Have these fools (plural because the BMA were muntering about this a bit back) ever been to an archeological museum. They are full of sharp pointy things going back to the dawn of humanity. I have a piratical array of sharp and pointy things. I need them for things like… Do I need to explain. Key point (as mentioned earlier) is intent. I, for example, have a box-cutter which frequently use for cutting boxes but never flight attendant’s throats.

  • I suggest we try to see the upside of this. 🙂

    Defenders of the second amendment now have quotable evidence to back the argument that if all guns were banned, demands to ban all knives would follow.

    Likewise, has this diminished the difficulty of explaining to #reluctanttrumpers that it’s unwise to allow the appointment of PC judges, however annoyed they are by the only candidate who won’t do that?

    As for me, living in the UK, there are fewer upsides. One can hope that talk of a knife ban may strike some otherwise apolitical people as stupid.

    For myself, I am an optimist. There does not seem much point in being anything else. (Sir Winston Churchill)

  • Patrick

    I fear and suspect we still have a way to go before we reach peak fuckwittery.

  • Ljh

    My parents gave me(girl) my first Swiss Army knife when I was ten when they judged I was sensible and dexterous enough. I always carried it with me and found it very useful. When I left home for a while it was my only toolbox. I have never stabbed anyone. I’m a relic from a previous age.

  • JadedLibertarian

    My kids all have, and carry, Swiss Army Knives. It’s one of the many upsides of homeschooling: there’s no law against them doing so, merely school policies.

    The knives I bought them are the round tip blade types, but to be fair I bought them when they were 7. By the time they’re grownups I expect them to be able to handle a point.

    My EDC is a Gadsden Flag Victorinox Tinker. I’ve been toying with moving up to a Fieldmaster because I’d like the scissors and the saw, but I’d miss the yellow scales.

    I’ve carried a pocket knife every day since I was a boy. When I go abroad I feel naked without it. The only person I’ve ever stabbed was myself, and that was an accident. I learned my lesson.

    A SAK would make a singularly poor weapon. If for some reason I needed it to be a weapon, I’d use the Phillips head screwdriver knuckleduster style in preference to the blade. But even a set of car keys would be better.

    Hostility to human tool use is about as misanthropic as you can get.

  • Phil B

    @Roué le Jour, @AlexB

    Fear not. There is a solution to hand …

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piWCBOsJr-w

    (When life starts to imitate Monty Python – or should that be, when Monty Python imitates life – then you know the country’s rulers have comprehensively list the plot, big time).

  • Jon

    CaptDMO – whatever teeth you had (no doubt excellent) have surely been lost to your crack and meth addiction by now? Or lost in your hopeless addiction to the sugar water that passes for a national drink in your country. Or punched out in a fight with your cousin over a close female relative… Stereotypes, dear boy.

    My gnashers largely work fine. And I was told by a Californian girl once they were perfect. So get your gummy chops around that. :mrgreen:

  • Sonny Wayze

    ” If for some reason I needed it to be a weapon, I’d use the Phillips head screwdriver knuckleduster style…”

    At last! A good use for Phillips screwdrivers. Seriously, they’re passable at puncturing oil cans, but what else?

    Also, you leave home without a corkscrew???

  • Paul Marks

    Perry and others – I have heard people in authority (in many different fields) say far more moronic things than this.

    It is irritating to be ruled by cretins – but there we are.

  • JadedLibertarian

    Also, you leave home without a corkscrew???

    For years I carried a Swiss Champ which has basically all the tools, including the corkscrew. Given that I don’t drink, I never needed one the whole time I carried it. This (and the fact that the Champ is too heavy for daily carry) is why I replaced it with the Tinker. For me a Phillips head screwdriver is much more useful than a corkscrew.

    If I replace it, I would go over to a Fieldmaster which also has no corkscrew. Even if I drank, it would only be useful to me if I had a lot of French-style picnics. I suppose sitting in a field with a hamper full of good cheese, good wine and good baguettes isn’t without its appeal, but it’s not for me.

  • bobby b

    God, I really feel like a barbarian now. Everyone else carries civilized tools, with screwdrivers and probably the little plastic Swiss Army toothpick, and scissors that might cut dry leaves. When you occasionally work around cows, you need more. I carry an old custom one-handed spring-loaded Spyderco hawkbill so I can cut ropes and cowhide quickly. If I had it on me a few months ago, I wouldn’t have broken ribs between cows. But i left in in my car because the game warden was around. Game wardens cause more deaths than cows.

  • JadedLibertarian

    Partly that’s the law in this country, Bobby. Stupid laws passed by the same kinds of people as Mr Blunty-Knife.

    If it were legal I’d carry a lock knife, probably something like a Boker Plus Griploc, but lock knives are dangerous-therefore-illegal in the UK.

    Which is stupid, because as anyone who has ever shut a non-locking folder on their fingers will tell you, locks make knives safer.

  • NickM

    I have a Victoronix and a Leatherman. Both prezzies (brother and wife repectively) so those that know me trust me with sharp objects, scalpels (model making) a folding saw, several hammers (probably the most lethal items) and quit the collection of screwdrivers. The latter includes Phillips ones which I use a lot.

  • Sonny Wayze

    JL,

    “…Swiss Champ which has basically all the tools, including the corkscrew. Given that I don’t drink, I never needed one the whole time I carried it.”

    Thanks for taking the teasing in stride. I usually refer to mine as the Swiss Army Corkscrew, partly to relax the terminally nervous. I did once use the corkscrew to pull a thermocouple mount out of a cylinder head, but I suppose that’s a bit specialised.

  • Bruce

    Mister Estwing makes a nice range of useful items.

    His Shingler’s hammer and 22 Oz Framing Hammers are beautifully functional works of art.

    In slightly sharper news, see the EKA Swingblade G3; a simple, practical, “non-locking” field tool, also useful in the kitchen, especially for larger poultry like ducks and turkeys.

    Then there are nifty gadgets like the little Finnish hunter’s hatchet I found, that is so good you can use it to cleanly skin large animals and butcher the carcass, with the edge only needing a quick touch-up to be sharp enough for a shave before the roast-game dinner.

    And then there are the amazing Japanese ceramic kitchen knives. Sharp? Keeping bits of your fingers out of dinner is a challenge for the novice user.

  • jsallison

    Sam Duncan @1:54…

    I (or pretty much anyone) can kill with a wax crayon. Prefer new, it’s full length. The Joker in one of the Batman movies did it with a pencil. Nope, crayon will serve.

  • jsallison

    Ted @10:29

    Would that cricket bats were nerfed. My Windies might actually win something, no thanks to WICB or whatever the hell they’re calling themselves these days.

  • Bruce

    Erratum: The EKA Swingblade DOES lock, but, out of its sheath, ALWAYS has one sharp blade or other exposed; NOT the sort of thing one would recommend for “pocket carry”.

  • Nicholas (Unlicensed Joker) Gray

    This is leading up to the time when you won’t be able to use your kitchen without a current licence! I wonder if the judges have a deal going with the local fast-food and takeaway shops?