It started out with mild curiosity sparked by a SHTFPlan.com headline: With Knife Murders Spiking After Gun Ban, UK Urges ‘Save a Life–Surrender Your Knife. After all, this is the country that developed blunted “anti-stab knives,” after “doctors … lobbied … for kitchen knives to be redesigned [because] it could help to save lives.” What new foolishness were they up to in Piers Morgan Paradise? Why not follow some links, pull some threads and find out?
First stop: the Lancashire Constabular. It advises subjects in mortal peril to run away (assuming they can), to make noise (let the howling in agony like a terrorized animal begin!), to carry an alarm instead of a weapon, and most importantly of all, “Don’t fight back.” Not exactly Churchillian advice.
Even the Illinois State Police sanctioned using rat-tail combs and vomiting. “Lancashire Constabulary has joined forces with the ground-breaking national anti-knife crime campaign ‘Save a Life, Surrender Your Knife,’ a national initiative designed to raise awareness of knife crime and encourage the surrender of dangerous weapons,” their web page advises.
That leads to a website urging Her Majesty’s subjects to do just that, replete with what looks like a sword-wielding (!) angel logo. It also features a pair of Demanding Mums, both grinning like blissful ignoramuses, and neither one looking like they’d be any use at all defending themselves, let alone any young ones left to their protection and care.
No matter. Their anti-knife blog keep us up to date on activities and efforts to shelter everyone from technology that’s thousands of years old, with knife banks, amnesty bins, and more. And they also claim affiliations with some interesting partners, among them a group declaring “Only Cowards Carry.”
The first thing noticeable from that registered charity’s website is a logo centered around the Sesame Street Cookie Monster character. And it’s not just that it looks the same — public event appearances by their mascot are labeled “Cookie Monster Photos.”
That raises the question of whether the use of a valuable trademarked property is authorized. Cookie Monster is owned by Sesame Workshop, and a media inquiry sent via contact form last week remains unanswered at this writing. If the use of the registered character continues, the reasonable assumption is that it, and the message it bears, must be approved.
Before being too hard on the Brits, the same attitude — only cowards carry weapons — is being directed against Americans who believe in possessing the means of self-defense. Admittedly, we generally think in terms of guns, although the essential group Knife Rights reminds us the Second Amendment articulates a right to keep and bear all arms.
There’s a Guns Are for Cowards Facebook page, dedicated to the proposition that if you believe in owning one, you’re a gutless yellow-belly. And The Daily Kos insists “Only cowards carry guns.” No less an authority than “The Gunman” actor (and impossible-for-non-elites-to-get carry permit holder) Sean Penn dubbed guns “cowardly killing machines” (albeit in his case, you’d think a wife-beater would know).
We’ve all see the bloviators and the trolls, the same ones who seem to think they’re being original invoking Markley’s Law, insisting (generally anonymously) that anyone who won’t take on all comers with his fists is less than a man in terms of both fortitude and prowess.
The point of segueing from UK anti-knife activists to U.S. anti-gunners is to not lose sight that what we’re really dealing with are “progressives” on both sides of “the pond.” It’s instructive that a mother pushing knife control lost her son, an aspiring rapper, in an argument over a girl at a club while commemorating the anniversary of the stabbing death of another rapper — and that her son’s father is in prison for murdering a man with a gun.
The Opposite Day truism that defines everything about “progressives” once more proves out in all respects.