2008-07-15 - 7:07 p.m.

'Panic on the streets of London, panic on the streets of Birmingham, I wonder to myself… Could life ever be sane again?'

You can wonder all you like, Morrissey. Just know that while you’re flouncing around in a foppish reverie that there are kids – real actual kids – being murdered to death with KNIVES. Yes, those Leeds side streets that we slip down are now awash with extra virgin child blood. Maybe that’s what makes them so slippy. Cowled and resentful teenagers are offing each other at an alarming, media-teasing rate. The statistics are there, etched in crimson for us all to cower at: the average teenager who walks by night now has a 63% chance of being stabbed four times or more before he can drink half his body weight in stolen alcopops. It’s shocking, disgraceful. Something must be done.

The kids are no longer content to wage extended psychological campaigns of playground hatred upon each other. Demanding money with menaces has become passe. There has been a sinister shift in the manner of childish cruelties, a severing of old bonds. The rough kids from broken schemes, those who aren’t merely content with applying eyeliner and cutting their skinny little emo arms in the oppressive tranquillity of their bedrooms, have taken to stabbing. The knives are out. The knives, in fact, are fucking everywhere. Whereas once your disillusioned youth could content itself with a simple sneaker mugging, times have changed. Now the only way for the aspirational young rascal to gain kudos in this godless world is to take a knife, preferably stolen, and thrust it into the undeveloped body of one’s identical quarry, then run away and upload the crime onto youtube so there is proof you is fo’ real, man.

This stuff is everywhere. You can’t move for knives. They glint, they prod, they threaten and maim our scowling children and, let’s not be myopic, our children’s children’s children. Should you be of tender years, expect to find yourself penetrated, rent and butterflied before your acne clears. Why, only this very afternoon the newsstand outside my palace of boozeness informed potential customers of a ‘Gentle Giant Killed By Knife Thugs’. I wondered why giants are so often described as ‘gentle’. Why does one never hear of a violent giant, or an asshole giant? A friend of mine recently described stargazer Partrick Moore, wonderfully, as a ‘monocled giant’. Although I wish no specific harm upon Mr. Moore, ‘Monocled Giant Killed By Knife Thugs’ would make for a far more gratifying headline than yet another allusion to the death of some common-or-garden gentle giant. Giants are being slain on our streets, just as the brutish and short have sharpened their tools up to11 on their thug amps. Amputees are subsequently swelling in number.

Oh, what to do? How can we reverse this gruesome, yet oddly captivating, trend? What can be done to temper the tempers of these special little snowflakes? Maybe we should look to the government, that protective safeguard against life’s abrasive diversions. When people start having slightly too much fun, it’s up to our elected rulers to take a stand and confiscate things. After all, prohibiton was a roaring success. Bizzarly, the gubment have decided against simply punishing stabby criminals in the tried and tested manner of jail sentences. Instead, the bright idea now is to take the perpetrators to meet their victims in hospital. This, the thinking goes, will somehow mend the violent ways of the little buggers. What it certainly won’t do is give psychopaths the chance to admire their handiwork in failing socialist hospitals, oh no. I quote from the godawful BBC: ‘The prime minister, who backed more curfews for young people, aimed to make it "unacceptable" to carry a knife. Meanwhile the home secretary denied she wanted to make youngsters caught with knives visit stab victims in hospital.’ How about we, the people, decide that it is morally unacceptable to penetrate someone with a knife against their will, rather than inventing the heinous faux pas of innocently carrying said inanimate object? Not that anyone actually needs to be lectured about the pitfalls of taking a knife to another human, yet the government needs to feel wanted. Spastics.

This is the same shower of busybodies who forbid gun ownership. If this knife crime ‘epidemic’ (as it must always be known) teaches us anything it is that humans will always find ways to visit harm upon each other if they so desire. That poor, undernourished teenagers should resort to such a messy and inelegant method of dispatch is nothing if not a clear endorsement of the need for firearms. A gun is a focused, clinical piece of technology. A knife is barely one step above a fist. Nobody goes to knife ranges or practices their knife throwing skills. Knives are a circus prop. They are eating utensils. Would you try to stab someone if you thought that person was likely to be carrying a gun? Of course not. If Crocodile Dundee has taught us anything, it is that the other guy might pull out something far scarier. Rather than these wacky bleeding heart (oh the irony!) initiatives, the solution to knife crime is staring us in the face and demanding our rationality: Let us have guns, Mein Führer, and our children will only penetrate each other as god intended.

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