Knife crime: The laws in the UK banning juveniles from carrying knives are ridiculous and impotent because a) it prevents law abiding teenagers (i.e apprentice butchers or simply someone who needs to use a knife for cooking as some teenagers need to do) from acquiring necessary equipment and b) most criminals, including most kids who own knives for kicks, pay no attention to the law and carry them anyway (in fact, most carry them *because* it is illegal) and c) it is already illegal to attack someone with a deadly weapon and the possession law is more or less unenforced because the police do not have the manpower or resources to trawl every school yard and back ally for knife toting teenagers.

I think the same argument can apply to guns - possession laws are actually difficult to enforce and criminals always ignore the law, that is why they are criminals. The main reason why guns are rarer here is that it is more difficult to get them over a marine border (and as stated, the Channel Tunnel may make that easier now...). Not convinced that legalisation and regulation work either - read a report this morning about a young kid in Georgia who was shot by a stray round from an AK47 fired in the air 'up to 3km away' by someone using it to celebrate the new year. This was a legal firearm fired in what the owner clearly thought was a safe way (despite the fact that you can have the same effect with a perfectly safe blank firer that fires no pellet). Some of the regulations I have heard about in some states of America, for example, either invite the owner to break the law or be unable to use the gun for the purpose it was purchased (i.e. if you have to keep the firearm in a locked case with the ammunition in a seperate case such a weapon is no use for home defence so you have to break the law and keep it loaded in an unlocked case).

As for the police... It used to be the case in this country that the first time you saw a gun of any form was when you travelled abroad to somewhere like Spain where the police are armed as a matter of course - I remember being astounded at the age of 10 by Spainish police carrying pistols. The last time I went on holiday, I saw several police officers in the UK airport carrying machine guns (not sure what sort but they were similar to the ones carried by infantry) as well as pistols. This was not an unusual thing, either - it was not after a major terrorist attack (we travelled not long after the twin towers thing and there were a lot more armed police then) and as far as we knew there had been no alert - they were just normal police officers walking a beat inside an airport.