5) Knifes are us

There has been much panic and alarm about teenage knife carrying and murders but I wonder if this is a single or even a new phenomena. I was surprised to find the Sun newspaper contributing something worthwhile to the debate
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/justice/article1418367.ece I think it important to note that it was the cutting, the slashing, that was the purpose for these gangsters, not murder. The cultural and social context of knife use is important and not just in London, for decades Glasgow has had a much higher level of knife crime than the rest of the UK but as I understand it, once again the aim is to slash, hurt, humiliate but not kill. Silly boys carrying knives does not automatically lead to murder.

Are we even dealing with a single phenomenon? Details of these murders are hard to find but in at least one instance, murder followed a perceived slight in a bar where the attacker then went home, armed themselves with a knife and returned to kill the victim. This would seem very different to the theme of government and popular commentary where it is assumed that these fatal stabbings are the result of ‘situations get out of hand’ where young men carrying knifes find themselves using the knives, spontaneously and unplanned, resulting in an unintended death. The gangster slasher, the revenge stabbing, the panic wounding are all very different and I worry that they are being grouped together as a simple single phenomenon. If there are these differences then solutions might have to be both specific and different, depending on the detail of what is really happening.