U.K. Police Stop Showing Photos of Seized Knives Because They Could 'Scare' People

P. Gardner Goldsmith | September 23, 2019
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The Brits in government keep doing it.

They keep denying reality, as if living in a fantasy world constructed by Tolkien or C.S. Lewis.

For years, they’ve denied the fact that their “gun control laws” have backfired – denied the truth that their anti-rights statutes have not only not stopped violent crime, but have preceded increases in violent crime. And as murders and violent knife crime have spiraled upward nationwide, the politicians have acted even more childish, to the point where, in 2018, London Mayor Sadiq Kahn issued a useless “knife ban” (seeing even more subsequent knife violence – the highest ever recorded), politicians have used tax cash to pay for “#Knife-Free stories” to be printed on the inner lids of take-out chicken boxes, one MP suggested mandating GPS tracking devices on all knives, and parents have resorted to buying blade-proof vests for their kids attending government schools.

Keen observers of the situation might note the evident correlation between disarming peacefully-minded civilians, the fact that prohibition doesn’t stop criminals, and these disastrous problems in the U.K.

Others might keep pretending. And that’s just what the Thames Valley Police appear to be doing. As Patrick Gysin reports for The Sun:

A spokesman for Thames Valley Police said: "We have made the decision to stop publicising images of seized knives to help reduce the fear of knives and knife carrying in our local communities."

Yeah. A pause.

Knife violence is at an all-time recorded high in England and Wales.

Murders are the highest they’ve been in ten years.

By any objective standard, the UK police are not capable of stopping the spread of “illegal” knives, the fancy of the “knife ban” stopping violence is just that – fanciful – and the streets aren’t as safe as they once were. These are facts, undeniable facts.

Yet, the Thames Valley Police wouldn’t want people to be fearful of knives or knife-carrying in their local communities?

Perhaps it’s time for the spirit of Roy Scheider, aka “Brody” from “Jaws,” to ride up and down the Thames the way the Sex Pistols did in 1976 during Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee, blasting reality at the Mayor and the MPs that their capital city and nation-state are meccas for murder, that the reality out there is such that people should be fearful.

Many of the politicians in England have become so divorced from crime-reality that certain citizens have noted how fantastic their actions really are. One level-headed Brit noted on the Sun website:

The next logical step would be to stop calling them knives, I guess… That would be the ultimate measure in stopping the knife crime.

Which perfectly fits the modus operandi of the government.

This is now the state of the once proud nation-state of Great Britain: It’s a land where authorities not only pursue people like Count Dankula for making a spoof video of a dog doing a Hitlerian salute, where record shops ban Morrissey records because he speaks out in favor of Brexit, where Tommy Robinson is given what appears to be a railroad of a prosecution merely for reporting the sentencing of sexual offenders, it’s a Bizarro world where the very agents of the state who get tax cash forcibly taken from the citizens they’re supposed to “protect” will not only not admit how much their policies are failing, they won’t show people images of knives in case people become “unreasonably afraid” of what is actually happening in their land.

Some keen observers of politics note that the belief in the “legitimacy” of government authority over anyone is a form cultish religion. That’s valid. Since government (i.e. the state) is imposed on people and never engaged through voluntary contract – if it were through contract, it would be a private business – the state can never be said to be “good” or legit, and the idea that politicians have “authority” over people is a fantasy. So perhaps this new “deny reality” wrinkle in the ugly face of British politics fits right in.

Perhaps it makes sense that the agents of the state in the Thames Valley Police want people to pretend everything is a-okay.

Meanwhile, as Nick Kangadis and others have noted, in the U.S., where guns are sort-of-still-kinda-legal, knife-wielding criminals have been stopped by peacefully-minded people carrying guns.

American citizens and residents might want to hope that they retain their rights to self-defense, that politicians are not successful in imposing their fantasy world here.

Because, as Britain shows, that fantasy world is increasingly deadly.

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