Have Rocket, will travel. Have wings, will fly. Have knives, will stab and potentially kill.

The stabbing death of a school-child in central Adelaide on a weekday afternoon comes as no surprise. Many schoolchildren carry knives nowadays.

This is supposedly for safety, but there is no bigger pile of rubbish than that claim. An adolescent child, particularly a male, who is armed with a knife is far more likely to carry it in order to feel brave rather than to feel safe.

Young 'braves' have an alarming tendency to wind up in combat. That fact hasn't changed in many thousands of years.

Curiously, this trend has occurred during the age of academic social solutions. This, we are told, is an era of social improvement through scientific methods rather than age-old rules of thumb.