Don’t blame knives for knife crime

In his illuminating book Life at the Bottom, author Theodore Dalrymple recounts a common theme he observed amongst the inmates he worked with as a prison doctor. He noticed the tendency of prisoners to speak of their actions, for which they now found themselves incarcerated, in the passive tone, completely absolving themselves of any agency. This includes even those who had committed the most serious of crimes, such as one man with a long litany of convictions who was eventually sent down for murder. When pressed to explain the circumstances that led to his fatal deed, the murderer spoke as if he had no agency or control of his actions. “The knife went in,” he recounted, as if he were just a passive bystander to this conspiracy of the universe to use him as a vessel for this deadly act.

Dalrymple further explained that many prisoners conceived of their penchant for criminality as something completely out of their control, akin to an addiction. This conveniently shifted the moral burden of responsibility away from themselves, transforming the prisoner from a willing menace to an unlucky victim of an unwanted illness. In doing so, it also shifted the responsibility for stopping their crimes from the perpetrators to society at-large, for ultimately if they did commit any crimes, it was only because society had failed in its duty to alleviate them of the illness that drove their criminal compulsions.

This worldview, one in which wrongdoers claim to have no control over their actions and therefore bear no responsibility for their consequences, is referred to by Dalrymple as “the psychobabble of the slums”. It is one he valiantly tried to dissuade his prisoner patients from believing in, and worryingly it is a worldview that seems to have permeated out of the lower rungs of society and into its ruling echelons. For now, when some terrible act of violence occurs, the response is no longer to focus on the failings of the individual perpetrator and how they came about, but rather on how society collectively failed to eliminate the tools that the perpetrator used in their attack.

The inanimate object subject to recent scrutiny is the humble kitchen knife. Our state broadcaster recently enlisted the help of crime policy expert Idris Elba to create a documentary on the topic of knife crime, and from this experience he concluded that a crackdown on kitchen knives is needed, arguing that “not all kitchen knives need to have a point on them”. Whilst Elba’s intent is no doubt a noble one, his call reflects the passivity that is assumed of criminals identified by Dalrymple. It is assumed that certain people will inevitably find themselves with a knife on their person, and that this knife will inevitably find itself stabbing others, so best to blunt all knives in the hope that when the inevitable happens, the victim might stand a better chance of surviving.

The threat comes from the select few who would ever think it appropriate to use a knife … against another person

One quickly notices that the whole language around knife crime is cloaked in this passive tone. Campaigns call for “taking knives off the street”, as if knives were like tumbleweed, independently rolling along the streets of Britain, occasionally plunging themselves into unfortunate passersby. Of course, this is nonsense. If there happen to be knives “on our streets”, it is only because a small proportion of Britain’s population have chosen to carry them there. And even when knives do find themselves on the move, carried around Britain’s streets, they are not intrinsically dangerous to others — these knives will not start stabbing people of their own accord. The threat comes from the select few who would ever think it appropriate to use a knife — or any tool capable of such lethality — against another person. Therein lies the real danger. 

Elba’s campaign for blunting kitchen knives comes shortly after Axel Rudakubana’s murder spree was bizarrely twisted into an attack on the online retailer Amazon, from which he ordered the knife he would later use as his weapon, for supposedly not having enough safeguarding checks. New regulations are now to be brought into place to make online verification more thorough when ordering knives. The Prime Minister justified these new measures by highlighting the supposed online laxity that facilitated Rudakubana’s massacre: “Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them. And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer.”

Tragic indeed. Yet what seems most startling about this case is not that Rudakubana was able to order a common kitchen appliance online, but that an individual with such a concerning record of violence, who had repeatedly made threats and broken the law — someone who was a clear and present danger to society — was allowed to roam the streets unperturbed. If someone has time and again shown clear intent to use knives, then perhaps that constitutes a signal that this person needs quarantining from the rest of society, rather than the whole of society being at fault for failing to blunt all sharp objects and making the purchase of a useful kitchen appliance a task of herculean difficulty.

The unfortunate truth is that if someone is intent on causing lethal harm to others, they are spoilt for choice of tools to do the job. In fact, the most common murder weapon in Britain, beating out the kitchen knife, was no weapon at all. Further restrictions on the freedoms of the law-abiding majority, making shopping for cutlery more arduous and cutting open a watermelon impossible, only serve to make everybody’s life marginally worse and more difficult, whilst doing little to hinder those intent on doing harm to others. Attempting to rid society of kitchen knives is a misdirected exercise. Instead, we should focus on excluding from society those who carry knives or have a record of violence, incapacitating them through incarceration, thereby halting any potential escalating path of violence. It is they, those who seek and do violence, who are the real threat to peace and order, not the inanimate knife. After all, if a knife went in, it is only because someone willed it to be so.