Stop this knife cult

Aug 28 2008 by Andrew Baldwin, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

PUBLICITY about young people carrying knives seems to have faded somewhat in the past few weeks.

But that doesn’t mean the problem has gone away.

The Examiner reports today on a crackdown which discovered that two shops had sold knives to a boy aged 15.

The full weight of the law must come down on the shopkeepers and staff who were prepared to do this.

Blades of all shapes and sizes are used to threaten, wound and kill and they cause far more deaths than guns.

It is an increasingly worrying trend.

Knife crime in our area may be small and we certainly do not have the menacing gang culture seen in urban centres like London and Birmingham, but we ignore it at our peril.

The issue is not going to go away overnight, but we need to deal in a tough manner with rogue shops if we are to make any inroad into the problem.

That someone can sell a knife to a lad who is 15 makes disturbing reading. Surely shopkeepers’ need to make money cannot be that bad?

On the wider scale of what to do about knife crime generally, the Government must to take urgent steps.

Poster campaigns, legislation, educating youngsters and further knife amnesties are all part of the package.