Reframing the Southport killings as being about knife availability

[Macrodatarefiner]

AIBU to think that's the least of it?

I can't stop thinking about it, it's so horrific. The poor families and neighbours and everyone involved or touched by this. Hearing it said that its somehow Amazon's fault sounds completely absurd to me. He produced ricin for goodness sake, if he didn't get the knife from Amazon it would have been somewhere else. This incident should (and will I believe) change history. And it has NOTHING to do with where or how he got hold of a knife.

Yes! Where was the support for this autistic child when he needed it? Where was the support for the family bringing up a disabled child? Where was the early diagnosis, let alone the intervention? He didn’t get diagnosed until well in to his teens. He’s probably had a childhood of not having his needs met.

As the parent of an autistic child this is what I fear happening because I can see how my child’s obsessive nature, his limited understanding of others’ feelings and motivations, his naivety and his susceptibility to grooming, his desire to shut himself away from the world, his love of screen time, the anger he develops when he feels people have mistreated him and the trauma he faced in the few years he spent in a mainstream school could turn him into someone who could do something like this.

We need to treat all children and families humanely and provide the services they need if we do not want to continue churning out killers.

That's a good point.

If he had been thoroughly assessed I imagine at the very least a personality disordered state would be apparent. Sociopathy or psychopathy - I think I'm right saying these are personality types rather than mental illness. How you manage such, that I don't know.

Based on personal experience across these threads when any requests for basic support are made by parents, it's dangerously and terrifyingly lacking. Usually the kids themselves suffer and aren't killing people. Yet the system here probably missed a significant amount.

Much easier to blame a corporation as opposed to his family, school and the authorities he was known to

I don’t know if there were errors. I suspect that it might be more a case of what do you do when you know someone is a significant risk but they don’t meet any of the criteria for being placed in some kind of secure unit.

He was reported 3 times in under 18 months to Prevent by schools but, possibly because he wasn’t committed to one specific ideology, each time it was NFAd. He was known to have been violent and threatened violence but he obviously didn’t meet the threshold for being detained as a risk. I have no idea about his parents but I’ve seen posters on here talk about struggling trying to get help for their children who are violent to them and their siblings.

I think your fears are understandable. The guy was vulnerable to grooming and extreme ideology based on being Autistic alone. What other issues were going on we don't know.

I appreciate so many people are just after his blood but it helps no one. His parents were probably on their knees knowing he was on the edge and where could they go.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/southport-attack-knife-sales-amazon-starmer-b2684132.html

Let down by multiple agencies

This is the result, it’s not the first time

That is not taking away his guilt he made choices but with interventions this is less likely to happen

There has been another knife attack in Croydon this morning but let's not do anything about the availability of knives.

I wasn’t able to buy a potato peeler recently as a 31 year old. Did not occur to me to pick up my wallet with my id.

The issue lies with the parents, school and authorities. The attacker had exhibited many disturbing behaviours in the lead up to the attack. And not signs that are only concerning in retrospect and with the gift of hindsight. His classmates at school had to subdue the attacker on at least one occasion.

Im just so grateful that this disturbed person did not have access to a gun. It doesn’t bear thinking about how many more innocent lives would have been lost.

If I had the inclination, there are plenty of knives in my drawer. I can access a lighter and flammable sprays and start an inferno if I wanted. This is just silly. It's the easiest action to show, well, some action. Waste of time.

He can't fix the dire situation right now across public sector provision but it might help to at least mention it. Not even the Prevent element.

This kid was a problem that people knew was going to build way before he started reading his extremist manuals.

It's heartbreaking, but what can we do? By all means ban the massive samurai swords and zombie knives, but how can we seriously limit the availability of everyday kitchen knives, to make sure that only responsible, non-violent people can buy them? How?

Do we make everybody have an interview and psychological assessment with a panel of experts every time they want to buy a new bread knife? And what about people who want to buy cars, golf clubs, battery hedge trimmers, bottles, bricks........?

Totally agree OP. He could have got it from the kitchen. I dont understand how knives could be so restricted.

It's like that song. Guns don't kill people....

Knives don't kill people.

There was the devastating case about the man - who also had known and ignored severe mental health concerns - who pushed a French boy from a height at a London museum and left him fighting for his life and (thankfully, having survived) serious lifelong disabilities.

What can we do? Ban balconies, ban windows, ban museums, ban in-person visitors to them and make them view the exhibits online instead?

We can 't simply ban everything.

He was referred to an anti-terror programme three times. And was known to social services. If he fell through the cracks due to the way things are currently structured then that is still more of an issue than our current knife restrictions

It doesn’t have to be one or the other. But it does appear that Starmer has decided that knife access is easier to tackle than the multiple failings of the various services involved.

fundamentally though, if an individual is bent on violence, how can they actually be stopped before the event? Without pre-emptively depriving them of their liberty in some way? It’s not something we do usually.

Total slopey shoulders. Anyone could grab a knife from the kitchen or shoplift one from Asda. They're not hard to get hold of. The media saying 'how could he get a knife!?' as if he managed to secure a machine gun.

Obviously it's easier to point to that as a problem to be solved though than acknowledge the real issues in this very sad case.

You've perfectly summarised the absurdity of these proposals. On a different note, Ryanair were recently pressuring the government to limit the amount of alcoholic drinks pubs could serve to passengers before boarding, to limit anti-social behaviour. Again, the majority have to suffer because some idiots can't make sensible decisions and rather than the airline actually doing something their end ( which would require effort and rejigging their boarding policies), everyone else has to. It's called passing the buck, which is now happening with Amazon.

I feel sorry for his parents. I bet they knew no help was coming.

I don't. Their child wasn't literally butchered.

They've lost their child too and the world hates them.

So as uncomfortable as this sits with people, I really do have compassion for his parents.

The victims' parents, that's a given.

They haven't lost their child. And they are responsible for how he turned out. Being hated is something they'll have to live with. It's nothing compared to the terror brought to the girls that day, to the adults who tried to save them, to the families, to the emergency services who faced the aftermath.

No. Some people don't deserve sympathy.

@ResisterOfTwaddleRex if I had lost my child to him, my compassion from a distance would go down the toilet and I'd want him dead. I can see that it's easy from a distance to say what I have.

I know that it is not so simplistic as to say the parents made him the way he is. I'm a real crime fan and spend too much time reading cases and watching these programmes 🤦. What is now so apparent is that this idea we have of ' bad' parents or just feckless parents is in the majority of cases wrong.

This kid has something very different in him that was present at birth. More will come out on this in time. There may be more info to say the parents could or should have done more. My only question would be, where would they go and who would have helped them?

I get what you're saying and no one here in all seriousness is going to claim they're the model parent. But how bad do you need to be, that this is where you end up? Watch now as all the agencies pass the buck. And now we know his dad successfully stopped him going to his former school. Well what happened after that? Were the police informed?

They'll reframe it as anything except for violence by men against women and girls.

@ResisterOfTwaddleRex yes that's a really good question. I wonder if we will get any more details and how that comes out to the public.

If dad didn't tell anyone about that then it makes you question what the hell was going on in his head. If he did that's scary in another way.

The reports on the news so far are missing important bits out so I'm hoping for more reliable information at some point.

The school system knew he wasn't right. I wonder what support if any Social Services were able to provide.

There are multiple threads here every week with parents in turmoil with suicidal self harming teens ( nearly always Neurodivergent). They are regularly left to it with no help. The support for any type of need in this area is virtually non existent.

It’s a total tragedy.
total tragedy.

he was bullied so aggressively at school that he began looking at aggressive violence.

he became so violent that he wasn’t able to be at school.

his father called the police on his own son to stop him from taking a taxi to the school where he had been bullied as he was frightened he was going to do violence.

and just a few weeks later this awful thing happened,

it sounds like there were so many opportunities to stop this happen.

first perhaps by stopping the bullying.

Sky news seemed to suggest we don’t yet know how much of his plans were known to his family, and that there could yet be further prosecutions.