Angry People

This story is 9 months old now but the press never miss an opportunity to write the sort of headline that gets middle class, Daily Mail readers quaking in their semi’s and writing to their MP’s.

‘Life for samurai sword murderer’.

This guy stabbed a young woman and then ran her over with his car. She had managed to escape from the ’sword attack’ and was killed by being deliberately run over.

The local rag shows 10 results for a search on the term ’samurai’ on their website, after running a campaign against swords following the stabbing of a man from Sidmouth last year. And that brings me onto a point worthy of comment…

Almost all the stories of people having been attacked by someone wielding a ’samurai sword’ involve stabbing. Now, you can stab someone with a pencil or a spoon and do some very serious damage. You can certainly stab someone with a screwdriver, kitchen knife or any other long thin implement and the result may well be death.

I wonder if these swords were even sharp?

I would suggest that the general public’s knowledge of samurai swords is slightly less deep than the general public’s understanding of how the internet works. If these were not genuine ‘katana’ (the correct name for the generic ’samurai sword’) and not ’shinken’ (live blades for cutting) then stabbing with the pointy end was the only thing they could do to inflict harm.

The news story offers a little history on the attacker:

At an earlier hearing it was revealed that Penrose had been jailed for five years in 1995 after stabbing a police constable, Richard Green, with a screwdriver while out stealing cars in Scarborough.

If the swords were not available to these derranged people, they would no doubt find some other weapon, such as a screwdriver or… a car. All easily available.
In the words of Judge David Hodson, who pronounced sentence on this idiot,

” This was a sustained, brutal, savage attack on a defenceless woman with two lethal weapons, a sword and a motor car “

It’s the idiots that commit the crimes that represent the danger. How much more legislation can the current government make, to try and pretend that they are addressing the problems in society? Ban cars… License spoon users?
How about accepting responsibility for the state of the country and doing something about it instead of all this endless spin.