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POUNDLAND has banned the sale of kitchen knives across the UK in response to the crime wave hitting the country.
The retailer stopped selling the weapons in London last week and is set to extend the ban to all 850 of its UK and Ireland stores by the end of the year.
The move follows 35 people being fatally stabbed in London since the beginning of the year as violence in the capital spikes.
Austin Cook Poundland's retail director said: "We have committed to take knives out of all our stores, starting with London, which we have done with immediate effect a couple of weeks ago, and we will take them out of the rest of the country by October.
"Since I've come into my role we have had a lot of feedback from our store colleagues that we are retailing knives that can have the wrong ultimate purpose for them.
"We want to take them off our shelves and take them out of the hands of the wrong customers and, whilst there is a sales implication for us, it's much more important to us to protect both our colleagues and our customers from any risk.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6069878/poundland-stop-selling-knives-london-stabbings/
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Town-centre pound store prosecuted for knife sale
Management and training procedures at the town-centre branch of a national retail chain were questioned when the company was prosecuted for the sale of a knife to under-age customers.
Poundworld Retail Ltd appeared at Croydon Magistrates' Court on 16 May and was fined £4,000 and ordered to pay costs after being found guilty of selling a knife to a person under the age of 18. The total penalty, including victim surcharge, amounted to £8,520.
The court heard that, as part of a test-purchasing exercise conducted by the council's trading standards department, two 14-year-old volunteers went to the store's North End branch on 28 May 2015 and, after selecting a kitchen knife from a display, took it for payment to one of the tills.
The sales assistant, on only his second day at work in the store, failed to challenge the youngsters and the sale was completed.
http://news.croydon.gov.uk/town-centre-pound-store-prosecuted-for-knife-sale/
'You cannot be soft on this': Boris Johnson calls for stop and search increase to combat London knife crime surge
Boris Johnson has called for an increased use of stop and search powers to combat knife crime following a spate of fatal stabbings in London.
The Foreign Secretary warned against "going soft" as he insisted that Scotland Yard and Sadiq Khan "come down like a ton of bricks" on gang leaders.
His comments came after teenager Sami Sidhom, 18, was knifed to death on Monday night in the capital's third killing in two days.
Mr Johnson said when he was Mayor of London he adopted a dual approach that boosted stop and search incidents while mentoring young people to prevent them getting sucked into gang violence.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, he told current London mayor Sadiq Khan: "You cannot be soft on this."
London murder rate overtakes New York as knife crime rises
LONDON (Reuters) - London police investigated more murders than their New York counterparts did over the last two months, statistics show, as the British capital's mayor vowed to fight a "violent scourge" on the streets.
There were 15 murders in London in February against 14 in New York, according to London's Metropolitan Police Service and the New York Police Department. For March, 22 murders were investigated in London, with 21 reports in New York.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @03:22PM (6 children)
It is about more than violence -- it about the cost of violence to the perpetrator of violence. A dive deep into the murder rate in Britain shows that what brought relative peace was the gun, the introduction of the wheellock brought about a steep drop in the murder rate, and the even cheaper flintlock some time later, another steep drop. Suddenly the playing field was leveled between thug and victim and every thug had to take into account the real chance that the victim would no longer be a victim, but a defender. No longer would some 20yo meatball be able to act with certainty against an old man or woman.
What is interesting to me is that the gun made society peaceful enough for long enough, that people began to see the gun as the problem due to edge cases, rather than the instrument that made such violence "edge" cases rather than common occurrences in the first place.
From: http://billlawrenceonline.com/carlisle-moody-handguns-stop-murders/ [billlawrenceonline.com]
Murder rates
13th century: 22.68/100k
15th century: 40.79/100k
16th century: 20.28/100k (introduction of wheel lock)
17th century: 7.84/100k (introduction of flint lock)
1920: 0.84/100k (year the English right to bear arms terminated)
1999: 1.44/100k, but look at assaults: this went from 2.39/100k in 1920, to 419.29/100k in 1999. Clearly, thugs are bolder when there is no risk that their victims will fight back.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Wednesday May 01 2019, @03:56PM
Anti-psychotic medications have a similar problem. They work so well that after a while you feel like you don't need them anymore. Then you stop and bad things happen.
Something about forgetting history and doom..
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday May 01 2019, @04:46PM (1 child)
Umnh....I think you are ignoring all the other changes that happened during those time periods, such as the great London fires, the year of the plague, the invention of police, etc.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @05:25PM
Addressed in the original paper, link to which is in link above.
Another interesting point is how non-gunowners benefited from those who did carry weapons -- criminals couldn't tell who is and is not armed and the cost of guessing wrong could be very high (death). This has played out in assault figures that went from insignificant in 1920 when gun control was instituted, to 200x the level in current times. There's no cost to being a bully anymore in the UK.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @07:15PM (1 child)
NRA propaganda? Right here on SoylentNews? Wow, they must really be in trouble if they have to aim this low!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 01 2019, @08:52PM
Presume much? Or is it just a convenient talking point every time facts are brought up in the firearm context?
Carlisle Moody was used as a fact witness by California in the recent CA magazine ban case: http://michellawyers.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Duncan-2019-03-29-Order-Granting-Plaintiffs-MSJ.pdf [michellawyers.com]
See page 70 of the order.
One of the plaintiffs in that case was the NRA (CA was the defendant). Moody was providing testimony against the NRA -- makes him somewhat of a crappy shill dontchathink?
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday May 01 2019, @11:06PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves