SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop. Only 19 submissions in the queue.
SoylentNews
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?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Knives are too Sharp and Filing Down their Points is Solution to Soaring Violent Crime, Judge Says
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 251 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
It's not the inital skirt length, it's the upcreep.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday June 02 2018, @11:00PM (10 children)
Actually we would. Because any crime at all indicates that the level of deterrence wasn't at the hypothetical ideal.
And that would be right.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Sunday June 03 2018, @12:13AM (9 children)
You're so focused on the 'hypothetical' and 'perfect' that you're ignoring what the word 'deterrence' means. It doesn't mean Any and all crime-prevention systems. Its definition is narrower than that.
Like I said elsewhere in the thread: it's like saying Suppose my car has a perfect steering-wheel and then continuing and given that we're supposing my car is perfect...
No, it does not. You are wrongly assuming that there is no such thing as a crime which cannot be prevented by systems of deterrence. I have already explained at some length why this assumption makes no sense (indeed, we know it is false), but I'll give it another go.
An ideal system of deterrence is, rather trivially, a system that maximally deters crime by means of reliably imposing harsh negative consequences on guilty parties (and not on the innocent).
Certain categories of crime can be prevented by deterrence. Organised crime would be reduced to zero, for instance.
Crimes of passion, however, cannot be prevented by deterrence.
If we follow this line of thinking, we end up concluding that under a perfect system of deterrence, we would be protected from inconvenient weather, right? Otherwise the system couldn't truly be perfect, right?
This is nonsense, of course. Weather is unresponsive to the threat of punishment. Ants are similarly unresponsive. Enraged and psychotic human beings can be similarly unresponsive.
Consider the man who, on discovering his wife's infidelity, murders her in a blind rage and then commits suicide. Our perfect system of deterrence would not prevent this from happening.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 03 2018, @04:17AM (8 children)
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Sunday June 03 2018, @10:58AM (7 children)
Did you even bother to read my comment? Rather than responding to my points, you're unthinkingly parroting your old position again and again. Is that really the best you can do?
For what feels like the millionth time: a system which prevents emotions arising in the first place, cannot possibly meet the definition of 'deterrence'. Such a system couldn't possibly be based on imposing negative consequences for the commission of crime (which is the definition of deterrence).
It is simply not the case that as the effectiveness of a system of deterrence approaches its upper limit, the crime-rate approaches zero.
Do you disagree with my definition of 'deterrence'? If so, why don't you just say so? If not, you're not making any sense.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday June 04 2018, @02:48AM (6 children)
Again, we're not speaking of real world deterrence. I have no idea why you bothered to tilt at this imaginary windmill in the first place, but it is an utter waste of your time. By definition, perfect deterrence means no violations of the deterrence occur. The deterrence would not be perfect otherwise. Your arguments are meaningless in the face of semantics.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday June 05 2018, @10:23AM (5 children)
If it detects, it isn't deterrence.
For heaven's sake, look at the definition I just gave. Do you disagree with it, or not?
There's a reason I already asked you that question...
Ah, then we're speaking of different things. That's our whole disagreement, then. That took long enough.
Your definition is a contradiction - by definition, it cannot exist (due to the existence of crimes which cannot ever be prevented by deterrence). There's no point trying to build a thought-experiment around a contradiction. It's like trying to reason about the inverse of a non-square matrix.
I was going with a different meaning of 'perfect deterrence', where it instead means it cannot be made any more effective. Such a system would not reduce crime to zero, for the reason I've repeatedly stated.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:12PM
Deterrence is a complex process which does many things, including detection. You can't deter, if your deterrence process doesn't understand what crime is. You can't deter, if your deterrence process can't detect crime. This is silly to continue.
Once again, your argument is semantically invalid. You are claiming that perfect deterrence is imperfect and then giving a bunch of irrelevant reasons why. A perfect process is not a real world process, and thus doesn't follow those rules. It is not constrained by anything you can come up with - by definition. You're not even wrong here.
Keep in mind this whole thing started because someone started babbling about "perfect deterrence" in the first place.
Words have meaning.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 05 2018, @02:34PM (3 children)
More on this. When it became clear that nobody else was going with that meaning, why continue butting heads? It would have been simple to describe explicitly the definition you used ("What I mean here is"), instead of coyly dragging this out and speculating ad naseum on why you're the only smart person in the thread. You have ten posts on this so far, and you have yet to state what you mean by "perfect deterrence".
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday June 28 2018, @02:54PM (2 children)
Well, yes, I did. Repeatedly. I'll quote you the exact words and give you a link to the comment, but somehow I doubt you'll bother to take it on board.
Source. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 29 2018, @04:21AM (1 child)
And of course, if a system doesn't fully deter crime, then it is not maximal and hence, not ideal. You're begging the question by assuming that a perfect (or "ideal") system is not perfect and going from there. This has nothing to do with the futility of designing perfect systems. If you have a system and it allows for flaws that the system is intended to prevent, then it is not perfect. That's all there is to it.
Further, I don't agree with even your assertion that you defined a "perfect" system above. You already moved the goalposts by introducing constraints on the operation of the system. It's no longer perfect.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Saturday June 30 2018, @04:23PM
Wrong. As I have already explained to you, we are discussing an ideal system of deterrence, which is more constrained than merely a crime-prevention system.
The word 'deterrence' exists for a reason. It has a specific meaning.
Deterrence isn't the only means of reducing crime, and deterrence alone cannot reduce crime to zero. I have repeatedly explained this point: a crime of passion cannot be prevented by deterrence, as we aren't dealing with a rational actor. If your system simply jumps in and tasers our would-be-criminal, that isn't deterrence, that's force-based prevention.
Wrong. I am using 'ideal system of deterrence' in the sense of a system of deterrence that cannot be further improved, without making into something other than a system of deterrence. You are using it in an imprecise sense where it must by definition reduce crime to zero, whether or not it still actually qualifies as a system of deterrence (as opposed to some other kind of crime-prevention system).
Wrong.
Consider a museum with two ticket gates, each manned by an attendant. Suppose the first attendant is perfect, and never lets anyone through without buying a ticket. Suppose the second attendant is imperfect, and sometimes lets people through who haven't bought a ticket.
Your position is that Well the first attendant isn't really perfect, as people are still getting into the museum without buying a ticket. This reasoning is clearly unsound. Only the first attendant is perfect, not the system as a whole.
This mistake even has a name: the fallacy of composition. [logicallyfallacious.com]
It's not moving the goalposts, it's clear thinking. We were discussing systems of deterrence specifically.