BBC article discussing whether knives could be changed to reduce stabbings.
Most of those commenters seems to be unaware that the number of people stabbed on impulse by their partner is in fact enormous. Every murder counts, you can't just say "well it might make a small difference in the murder rate, but the speed at which I can prepare dinner is much more important than a dozen or so families torn apart by murder." Homicide rates are far higher in countries where guns are legal (something I truly cannot understand) compared to where they are not, and suicide rates drop when the means to commit suicide are harder to come by. From this I assume that a trend towards making kitchen knives safer would probably help the murder rate as well. (I could research this, but right now it's unholy o'clock in the morning and I've been surfing the internet to wind down after three days of setting up my new laptop, culminating in a lovely struggle with a virus called Smitfraud C. I still can't get Thunderbird to behave.)
Anyway, who needs a stabbing weapon for cooking? I used to have a lovely 8" Sabatier chef's knife which was my main knife, but a reckless home help blunted it beyond the point where domestic sharpening could restore any sort of edge, and it's been sitting wrapped in paper in my kitchen drawer for years without my feeling a strong urge to hunt down somewhere that does professional knife sharpening. My cooking knives are a bread knife which would be equally usable without its point, not to mention that it's not strong enough for stabbing; a 3" paring knife which is rather blunt; a thin 4" serrated knife which would just bend if I tried to stab someone with it; and for my main knife, a 5" rectangular cleaver-type, kept sharpened but with no point at all, although as pointed out in one of the BBC comments it could be used for other types of injury. I rarely need a point to a knife, and when I do I'm using it for fine work and don't want it to be a big, heavy knife. In other words, I am a keen cook who does fine without a single knife that would make a good stabbing weapon. Now an outright ban probably wouldn't work, but changing the general style of kitchen knives on sale might make a fair bit of difference.
The thing that strikes me most about those comments is that no one wants to admit that stabbings often happen in the home, on impulse, between people who are supposedly bound together by love. It's like rape and child abuse: people are far more likely to be raped by someone they know, and children abused by family members, but the press is such that the public fear is of strangers leaping out from behind a bush and priests. No one wants to think of these situations happening in "normal" society, just as no one wants to admit that yes, a stabbing could occur in any house in the street, and it's far more likely to be someone who had a bloody awful day at work, or a woman with severe PMS (while more violent crimes are committed by men than by women, a highly disproportionate number of crimes by women, as well as suicides, occur during the premenstruum) who just snapped, picked up a knife from the counter, and shoved it at their nearest and dearest.
Please note that all this discussion is happening in the UK, where guns are illegal, so we don't have that mindset of "I need an incredibly dangerous weapon in the house in case I get BURGLARS OMG, whom it is my constitutional right to murder" being used to justify a weapon which is more likely to end up killing the wife.
Most of those commenters seems to be unaware that the number of people stabbed on impulse by their partner is in fact enormous. Every murder counts, you can't just say "well it might make a small difference in the murder rate, but the speed at which I can prepare dinner is much more important than a dozen or so families torn apart by murder." Homicide rates are far higher in countries where guns are legal (something I truly cannot understand) compared to where they are not, and suicide rates drop when the means to commit suicide are harder to come by. From this I assume that a trend towards making kitchen knives safer would probably help the murder rate as well. (I could research this, but right now it's unholy o'clock in the morning and I've been surfing the internet to wind down after three days of setting up my new laptop, culminating in a lovely struggle with a virus called Smitfraud C. I still can't get Thunderbird to behave.)
Anyway, who needs a stabbing weapon for cooking? I used to have a lovely 8" Sabatier chef's knife which was my main knife, but a reckless home help blunted it beyond the point where domestic sharpening could restore any sort of edge, and it's been sitting wrapped in paper in my kitchen drawer for years without my feeling a strong urge to hunt down somewhere that does professional knife sharpening. My cooking knives are a bread knife which would be equally usable without its point, not to mention that it's not strong enough for stabbing; a 3" paring knife which is rather blunt; a thin 4" serrated knife which would just bend if I tried to stab someone with it; and for my main knife, a 5" rectangular cleaver-type, kept sharpened but with no point at all, although as pointed out in one of the BBC comments it could be used for other types of injury. I rarely need a point to a knife, and when I do I'm using it for fine work and don't want it to be a big, heavy knife. In other words, I am a keen cook who does fine without a single knife that would make a good stabbing weapon. Now an outright ban probably wouldn't work, but changing the general style of kitchen knives on sale might make a fair bit of difference.
The thing that strikes me most about those comments is that no one wants to admit that stabbings often happen in the home, on impulse, between people who are supposedly bound together by love. It's like rape and child abuse: people are far more likely to be raped by someone they know, and children abused by family members, but the press is such that the public fear is of strangers leaping out from behind a bush and priests. No one wants to think of these situations happening in "normal" society, just as no one wants to admit that yes, a stabbing could occur in any house in the street, and it's far more likely to be someone who had a bloody awful day at work, or a woman with severe PMS (while more violent crimes are committed by men than by women, a highly disproportionate number of crimes by women, as well as suicides, occur during the premenstruum) who just snapped, picked up a knife from the counter, and shoved it at their nearest and dearest.
Please note that all this discussion is happening in the UK, where guns are illegal, so we don't have that mindset of "I need an incredibly dangerous weapon in the house in case I get BURGLARS OMG, whom it is my constitutional right to murder" being used to justify a weapon which is more likely to end up killing the wife.
