OK, I'll try to respond to all the above points.
Tinytim and just-want-peace, the point I was making was that in these teen fights, very rarely is it the settled intent of the protagonists to kill their opponents, but rather to beat him (usually) up. Such fights are rarely fatal with bare fists but often become so when knives are involved. Your argument is based on the assumption that the protagonists set out with the intent to commit murder; however, few do so. These are in general 'fights which went wrong', the common factor in the 'going wrong' being the knife. Your argument that all weapons should be banned and we should thus be 'consistent' is analogous to saying "because we can't cure cancer, we're not going to try to cure heart disease". Banning knives in public would be a massive step in the right direction.
sag38, I have a large set of kitchen knives and golf clubs in my house with which I can defend me and mine, should the need arise. I just don't carry said items round with me in the street, which is what this thread is about.
poncho, the answer to your question is that the risk of a fatal stabbing is halved. BTW, both sets of boys in your example are acting in a criminal fashion (committing the offence of affray for starters). If you arm both sets of criminals with knives, you get double the number of stabbings! Happy?
abcgrad94, you raise an interesting point which applies I believe more in the UK than anywhere else in Europe (the Swiss, for example, still retain the notion of the levee en masse and require each household to have a firearm; other practices vary from country to country although the emphasis tends to be on guns for hunting rather than self-defence; that said, one of the factors behind the bloodiness of the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was the high prevalence of gun ownership). In the UK, we do have a fear of guns; one of our 'proud boasts' is that we have one of the few police forces in the world who don't, as a rule, carry firearms. We tend to associate gun ownership with the more 'nutty' end of the spectrum (guys who go beserk and shoot up schools, those sorts of people) and there is a widespread consensus that the more liberal the gun ownership laws, the more likely that kind of thing is to happen; we look at your more liberal laws but also take note of the higher prevalence of mass shootings (Columbine, Virginia Tech etc) and heave a sigh of relief each time that our own laws are much tighter and that, as a consequence, we only seem to have incidents like that about once every ten years or so. The 'gun hatred' thing is most pronounced amongst Christians; most if not all of the Christian parents we know (including us) won't even allow their children to play with toy guns or weapons.
Re the Hitler comment, I can't really comment in detail but I do know that gun ownership in Germany in the 1930s was more prevalent than today, and yet Hitler still asserted his tyranny (there were gun battles for example between the communists, social democrats and nazis in Berlin in 1933, which the nazis won because they were more numerous; conversely the SS managed to slaughter the (well-armed and much larger) SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934) whereas today Germany is a democracy. Likewise, the UK has very low gun ownership, but has never in recent history been under a dictatorship. So I'm not sure there is a correlation.
Tinytim and just-want-peace, the point I was making was that in these teen fights, very rarely is it the settled intent of the protagonists to kill their opponents, but rather to beat him (usually) up. Such fights are rarely fatal with bare fists but often become so when knives are involved. Your argument is based on the assumption that the protagonists set out with the intent to commit murder; however, few do so. These are in general 'fights which went wrong', the common factor in the 'going wrong' being the knife. Your argument that all weapons should be banned and we should thus be 'consistent' is analogous to saying "because we can't cure cancer, we're not going to try to cure heart disease". Banning knives in public would be a massive step in the right direction.
sag38, I have a large set of kitchen knives and golf clubs in my house with which I can defend me and mine, should the need arise. I just don't carry said items round with me in the street, which is what this thread is about.
poncho, the answer to your question is that the risk of a fatal stabbing is halved. BTW, both sets of boys in your example are acting in a criminal fashion (committing the offence of affray for starters). If you arm both sets of criminals with knives, you get double the number of stabbings! Happy?
abcgrad94, you raise an interesting point which applies I believe more in the UK than anywhere else in Europe (the Swiss, for example, still retain the notion of the levee en masse and require each household to have a firearm; other practices vary from country to country although the emphasis tends to be on guns for hunting rather than self-defence; that said, one of the factors behind the bloodiness of the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s was the high prevalence of gun ownership). In the UK, we do have a fear of guns; one of our 'proud boasts' is that we have one of the few police forces in the world who don't, as a rule, carry firearms. We tend to associate gun ownership with the more 'nutty' end of the spectrum (guys who go beserk and shoot up schools, those sorts of people) and there is a widespread consensus that the more liberal the gun ownership laws, the more likely that kind of thing is to happen; we look at your more liberal laws but also take note of the higher prevalence of mass shootings (Columbine, Virginia Tech etc) and heave a sigh of relief each time that our own laws are much tighter and that, as a consequence, we only seem to have incidents like that about once every ten years or so. The 'gun hatred' thing is most pronounced amongst Christians; most if not all of the Christian parents we know (including us) won't even allow their children to play with toy guns or weapons.
Re the Hitler comment, I can't really comment in detail but I do know that gun ownership in Germany in the 1930s was more prevalent than today, and yet Hitler still asserted his tyranny (there were gun battles for example between the communists, social democrats and nazis in Berlin in 1933, which the nazis won because they were more numerous; conversely the SS managed to slaughter the (well-armed and much larger) SA leadership in the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934) whereas today Germany is a democracy. Likewise, the UK has very low gun ownership, but has never in recent history been under a dictatorship. So I'm not sure there is a correlation.
