Tuesday, 3 June 2008

I've got this stabbing pain...

A year or so ago I wrote a blog decrying the sudden upturn in gun-related deaths, especially amongst teenagers. Little Rhys Jones had recently been shot in the street and I wondered what kind of people could carry out such an act.

These days we hardly hear a thing about gun crime. Had you nipped down from a parallel universe you'd think we'd cracked it. Except of course, we haven't.

Earlier this week the 16th teenager this year was stabbed to death in London.

It simply beggars belief. Literally every week we're hearing stories of stabbings, often gang-related, but always tragic. It's nearly always youngsters, and it appears that the attacks are becoming more and more indiscriminate. When I was at school, only one stabbing took place (one too many, granted, but you get my point). That was in a fight between two long-standing rivals where one had tooled himself up with stuff from CDT just before it went off. The victim took several wounds to the legs with scissors but survived. His assailant ended up in Juvie.

These days though it seems every kid is tooled up, just in case. It's quite obvious that if they all stopped carrying them, they'd feel (and be) safer and the killings would all but stop, but that's never going to happen is it? As usual the Government are clueless, imploring parents to ask their kids if they're carrying a knife before they go out. Brilliant. That'll unearth them without fail, brainiacs.

I've given up trying to work out why it happens now. The oft-bleated reason is broken homes, but as I've said before, that's doing a massive disservice to those people from single-parent families who study, work hard and make a life for themselves without feeling the urge to cut someone up on the way. The simple fact is that no amount of breaking a home makes a person think that stabbing someone (often to death) is a suitable riposte to anything they suffered in return.

Apologies for the use of the word 'person' there, cos they clearly aren't people. They're scum.

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