There comes a time when you have to admit that good intentions aren’t what it takes to solve a problem. The UK’s intention was to solve the problem of knife crimes. The solution that they came up with? It was pretty much “We’ll just leave this box here, you put your knives in, and then things will be peachy-keen.”

How do you think that went?

No prize for guessing that criminals stole the knives. That was exactly what happened. If you have to be brought to the finish line, then let’s go over a couple points; go over them as slowly as you need to:

• Criminals seldom surrender the implements they use to commit crimes,
• Criminals steal things.

Therefore, the main people who deposited their knives into the boxes were those whose heartstrings were tugged by the good intentions of the deposit boxes, and they put them right where criminals could steal them, which they did. The end result is fewer knives in the hands of people who wouldn’t commit crimes with them, and more in the hands of those who would.

Here in the US, we got it right. We made guns legal for ordinary members of the population to possess, and it was so important to us that we made it the second amendment of our Bill of Rights. Because of this, criminals are terrified to commit crimes. Someone who thinks of threatening a random person on the street with a gun is hesitant on the chance that they might be carrying one, too.

One who has never been to the US might imagine that the US is riddled with gun violence. But, on the contrary, most Americans have never witnessed a shooting. There’s relatively little gun control, and gun violence is scarce. That pretty much demolishes the misconception that gun rights breed gun violence.

Anywhere that gun ownership is restricted, if someone manages to get their hands on a gun, they have an advantage over the rest of the population. Gangsters don’t give a care about a “criminal” moniker, and if there’s a possibility that they may be armed, the unarmed population is terrified to so much as gainsay them, and they can exercise control over entire neighborhoods, effectively becoming a form of underground government.

The obvious solution to knife violence is to give the general population license to fight back, as it has been with gun violence. However, the leftist ideal of weapon control is so dominated by fairyland happy thoughts that they actually believed that a surrender box would work. Again, the only people who would have surrendered their knives to these boxes would have been the ones whose heartstrings were tugged by the good intentions, which sadly would have contributed to a false sense of progress in the event that these boxes filled up.

From my observations, it appears as though a certain ideology is predisposed to encouraging acts of fanaticism with sharp objects. I know that correlation does not equal causation, but it’s interesting that Britain’s recent spike in knife crimes coincides with a recent increase in the ideology described. Wouldn’t it be far more productive to acknowledge and address the ideology that bears primary responsibility for the recent surge in armed crime?