Who goes unarmed these days?

The Graun says that a third of young people living in cities thinks it's acceptable to carry a knife for self-defence.

One in three young people living in cities thinks it is acceptable to carry a knife in self-defence because violence is so rife, according to research revealed today. Teenagers and twenty-somethings have lost faith in politicians, the police or schools to protect them and increasingly believe they need to be armed to defend themselves against people of their own age. Nearly half said they knew someone who had been a victim of knife crime.

And with depressing predictability they wheel out the old fallacy about carrying a knife making you more at risk of being a victim of crime - it's far more likely that people at risk of being a victim of crime decide to arm themselves with knives, which is the point of the article in the first place. 

It's odd to think that we seem to be approaching the situation where criminals go armed and chidren go armed but law-abiding adults don't. Isn't this the wrong way round?   

Comments

[Peter Risdon]

Yup, it is the wrong way round.

[Jack Hughes]

A bit off topic, but a great way to hype anything is to say "X% of the population know someone who ....."

You can easily turn a tiny number into something that sounds big.