The first rule in medicine is simple: first, do no harm.
Unfortunately, that rule doesn’t translate in one important areas where do no harm would be helpful for everyone: government.
Politicians seem driven by an irresistible urge to do something.
It’s why we wind up with bridges to nowhere, white elephant VA hospitals that treat neither veterans nor elephants, and geriatric legislators whose mental acuity isn’t even at room temperature.
They won’t accept Burt Bachrach’s lyric that says: “knowing when to leave can be the smartest thing that anyone can learn.”
Like the drunken uncle at the holiday party, they just don’t know when to say when.
The U.S. isn’t the only country to be infected. Which is my point.
We are no longer cutting-edge (ouch) when it comes to protecting people from inanimate objects.
Germany has experienced a rapid rise in “knife crime.” In 2023, there were 13,844 knife crimes in Germany. Unfortunately, there’s another inconvenient truth the government is working assiduously to ignore: a large percentage of those “knife crimes” were committed by young Muslim men.
Conservatively, a million (or more) of them have come to Germany. Unfortunately, a number of them, including the young man who decided to slash the throats of people attending a “diversity festival” are also known ISIS terrorists. They bring their way of solving disagreements with them, too.
This is the point when the story goes from bad to worse.
Rather than cracking down on the criminal element and following through with promised mass deportations, the German government took another tack: they put yet another regulation on the tool of choice for slicing, dicing, filleting, and slashing: knives.
Right now, a knife with a blade up to 4.7 inches long is legal in Germany. Under new (improved) regulations, law-abiding citizens will only be able to carry blades up to 2.4 inches long.
The use of “law abiding” was intentional.
Criminals, by definition, don’t care about the laws.
It gets worse. They’re proposing “knife free zones” around railway stations and other areas where incidents seem to happen with alarming frequency. In May, an Afghan Muslim man attacked attendees at an “Anti-Jihad rally” at a train station. He injured several people, including a policeman who was trying to restrain the people being attacked. Yes, he was trying to protect the attacker from the victims who decided to fight back.
Germans are being told the fact that nearly one in five criminals since 2023 were committed by refugees is “not really helpful” when it comes to solving the problem of “knife crime”. The problem isn’t people, it’s knives. Thankfully SUVs didn’t get together with knives in the 1990s. It would have been West Side Story with leather seats.
So, the German intellectuals are relying on the shopworn, but proven, tactic used whenever one group wants to restrict, or eliminate something they don’t like: they objectify the tool.
They imbue it with the malevolent equivalent of Mrs. Potts, the talking tea kettle in Beauty & The Beast. Instead of wanting to serve tea, the nasty old knives want to harm innocents.
It’s not really that different from the steps to eliminating whole categories of people. First, vilify them. Then, dehumanize them. Viola! You’ve arrived at step three: the “final solution.”
Glad I’m not in Germany or the UK.
There, I could face prosecution for hate speech. In the UK, I would likely be jailed until the courts could find time to hear my case. In the UK, speaking out about criminals who happen to be refugees brings a visit from the local constabulary. The same constabulary that books, then releases, the refugee who just finished posting his latest ISIS recruiting video.
Doug Ritter at Knife Rights sent me a Gatestone research report outlining all this foolishness. What I first believed was a well written but not well-received joke, turned out to be the opposite of a joke.
If we ignore what’s happening in Europe, Ritter pointed out, we’re ignoring the fact that our system is progressively moving along the same track.
I know, it’s just another piece of evidence that politicians, social justice warriors and other well-meaning dunderheads are running the asylum.
It’s enough to make sane people consider crazy things, isn’t it? It may be too late, but I’ve always heard there were consequences when you confuse civility with weakness.
We’ll keep you posted.
— Jim Shepherd