Monday, July 17, 2006
Much safer now after knife amnesty.
There has been much written, both nationally and locally about the recent knife amnesty, which ended on the 30th of June 2006.
Most of it was in the form of self-congratulatory articles telling us the number of knives that had been handed in, and how wonderful it was that these knives were no longer on the streets. One such “story” from our local “news”paper is here.
A criticism of this kind of “story” can be found (some strong language) here. The main point to note is that there is no correlation between a knife amnesty and criminals disarming themselves, just because knives are being handed in, it doesn’t mean they were in the hands of criminals to start with. Similarly it doesn’t mean that all criminals have handed their knives in. In reality a knife amnesty is a non-story, as of course “Mrs Biggings takes old kitchen knife into police for safe disposal” would hardly be worth writing about, but that is all the knife amnesty amounts to.
So here we are, not even a month after the knives amnesty the local “news”paper is reporting this story: Boy 12 in knife robbery attempt. Note we have to read the article to discover we really don’t know the age of the knife wielder.
Surely the true story here must be the failure of the national knife amnesty? Did this “boy” perhaps not know of it? Which might explain his failure to turn the knife in. Or perhaps he’d decided not to turn his knife in because he still had a use for it? Maybe (shock horror) he purchased the knife during the amnesty itself?
People expect and in a free society have a right to objective reporting, but you’ll never see a report ever criticising anything like a knife amnesty, no matter how inane it is; the most it amounts to is a load of hot air. Even here where the evidence is right under the “reporter’s” nose and the knife amnesty a top story scarcely three weeks ago, the failure doesn’t even get a mention, but presumably the whole point of the amnesty was to prevent knives being used for criminal activity?
Rather than looking at realities, the intellectuals in the media must have a set of “commandments” to follow (I’m sure these must be instilled in their sub-conscious before they’re allowed out of journalist school) one of them must be:
“Weapons (or anything which could perhaps be a weapon) in the hands of the citizen, under any circumstances: BAD”
with a corollary:
“Anything removing weapons (or anything which could perhaps be a weapon) from the citizen: GOOD”.
So the knife amnesty must have been good, if it didn’t work it’s because there wasn’t enough of it (just like socialism); although this journalist clearly graduated from the school it wasn’t an advanced pass otherwise they’d have taken the opportunity to call for more stringent laws, perhaps banning all knives.
The criminal doesn’t care, the citizen stays disarmed, and the journalist gets their pay cheque.
What a load of nonsense.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
Most of it was in the form of self-congratulatory articles telling us the number of knives that had been handed in, and how wonderful it was that these knives were no longer on the streets. One such “story” from our local “news”paper is here.
A criticism of this kind of “story” can be found (some strong language) here. The main point to note is that there is no correlation between a knife amnesty and criminals disarming themselves, just because knives are being handed in, it doesn’t mean they were in the hands of criminals to start with. Similarly it doesn’t mean that all criminals have handed their knives in. In reality a knife amnesty is a non-story, as of course “Mrs Biggings takes old kitchen knife into police for safe disposal” would hardly be worth writing about, but that is all the knife amnesty amounts to.
So here we are, not even a month after the knives amnesty the local “news”paper is reporting this story: Boy 12 in knife robbery attempt. Note we have to read the article to discover we really don’t know the age of the knife wielder.
Surely the true story here must be the failure of the national knife amnesty? Did this “boy” perhaps not know of it? Which might explain his failure to turn the knife in. Or perhaps he’d decided not to turn his knife in because he still had a use for it? Maybe (shock horror) he purchased the knife during the amnesty itself?
People expect and in a free society have a right to objective reporting, but you’ll never see a report ever criticising anything like a knife amnesty, no matter how inane it is; the most it amounts to is a load of hot air. Even here where the evidence is right under the “reporter’s” nose and the knife amnesty a top story scarcely three weeks ago, the failure doesn’t even get a mention, but presumably the whole point of the amnesty was to prevent knives being used for criminal activity?
Rather than looking at realities, the intellectuals in the media must have a set of “commandments” to follow (I’m sure these must be instilled in their sub-conscious before they’re allowed out of journalist school) one of them must be:
“Weapons (or anything which could perhaps be a weapon) in the hands of the citizen, under any circumstances: BAD”
with a corollary:
“Anything removing weapons (or anything which could perhaps be a weapon) from the citizen: GOOD”.
So the knife amnesty must have been good, if it didn’t work it’s because there wasn’t enough of it (just like socialism); although this journalist clearly graduated from the school it wasn’t an advanced pass otherwise they’d have taken the opportunity to call for more stringent laws, perhaps banning all knives.
The criminal doesn’t care, the citizen stays disarmed, and the journalist gets their pay cheque.
What a load of nonsense.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
