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.
In the 1960's very few young people in Adelaide carried a knife. Those who did were often carted off to reform school. Those who actually used one, even as a threat, usually wound up in jail.
Academics label such a response draconian and even barbaric.
Yet, they themselves agree to tolerate destructive acts for which they can identify an environmental or family cause, thereby largely excusing the individual for bad behaviour.
They do this based on a claim that the key to eradication of crime lies in preventing causes either from occuring or from actuating criminal behaviour. They hold that simply retaliating against bad behaviour is futile.
The academics also maintain that the public ought not to disagree with their suggested causative factors or proposed solutions because they are the experts whereas the lay-person is deemed ignorant.
We cannot disprove their theories.
But the lay-person is entitled to ask why it is that in this era of scientific social betterment so many children are carrying knives when that was never the case in the bad old days.
