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A judge has proposed a nationwide programme to file down the points of kitchen knives as a solution to the country’s soaring knife crime epidemic.
Last week in his valedictory address, retiring Luton Crown Court Judge Nic Madge spoke of his concern that carrying a knife had become routine in some circles and called on the Government to ban the sale of large pointed kitchen knives.
[...] He said laws designed to reduce the availability of weapons to young would-be offenders had had “almost no effect”, since the vast majority had merely taken knives from a cutlery drawer.
[...] He asked: “But why we do need eight-inch or ten-inch kitchen knives with points?
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Knives are too Sharp and Filing Down their Points is Solution to Soaring Violent Crime, Judge Says
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There's no such thing as an original sin.
-- Elvis Costello
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday June 01 2018, @07:20AM
There's a long tradition in the UK of judges losing contact with reality*, both magistrates [wikipedia.org] and judges [wikipedia.org], and apart from making headlines in newspapers on slow news days, their kookiest opinions are either ignored or laughed at, as they have little to no actual influence on legislation.
If, however, the same sentiment is expressed by a politician in one of the mainstream parties, that is the time to start worrying, as they have the potential of getting their evidence-free opinions made into law.
A judge or magistrate’s opinion only really matters in a court, and then only in matters of interpretation of the law, where there is a working (if under strain) process to remedy mistakes (the appeal process). Politicians can make new laws, and as many politicians have found - for example, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or Vladimir Putin - even constitutions need not be a great hindrance to modifying the law to reflect the politician's will.
*E.g. Michael Shrimpton [wikipedia.org], who beleived there was a German plot to attack the UK Olympics with a Russian atom bomb; Sir Jeremiah Harman [wikipedia.org] who, on hearing the nickname of a popular footballer, enquired if the word used was the name of an opera; and Sir Oliver Popplewell" [wikipedia.org], who did not know the (then) popular slang term for a particular portion of well-known UK Olympic athlete's anatomy.