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.

Sorry, disagree.
I do think that the fact that any person with severe "mental health issues" can buy horrendous bladed weapons online is completely mad and something that needs to be addressed yesterday.
Yes, many other things went hugely wrong here but trying to suppress the supply of weapons seems a no-brainer.

Well, is cheaper and easier to wring their hands and complain about the ease of obtaining knives instead of investing in early intervention MH support. Or you know maybe THREE referrals to Prevent may have triggered enough concern that something was actually done.
It's a ridiculous deflect tactic, if he hadn't got the knife from amazon, it would have been Sainsbury's, or Asda, or Tesco, or txmaxx, or lakeland, or eBay, or Morrisons (you get the point)

My son who was 2 at the time was violently attacked by an autistic 17 year old. The 17yo ran off from his carer. No one cared. The “college” got a call from the police. That was the extent of it.

@LuluBlakey1 I know about special schools . You might be surprised to learn that the law could be amended! There could be schools immediately made available if we wanted to change the law! We don’t.

As for all those excuses. I’m getting towards accepting none of them. Tell DC no knives. No knives on a school trip! Ever. Tell them. Ditto with taking a knife to stab a bully. We all know how that ends. Tell them and mean it. Ditto the family knife! WTF! How stupid are these dc? Get tough and mean it. No one is learning anything. Don’t just exclude them, get them into a residential unit so they are removed. NO knife tolerated for any reason.

The law could be amended but they would not be schools. No ordinary teacher/support staff member would want to work in them- they'd be prisons under another name, as would be the residential units you suggest.It's ridiculous to suggest taking a silly 11 year old away from his family into residential care with criminally disturbed teenagers because of the things I described. You would cause even more damaged children.
I agree there are others who should be locked up away from society for life.

The evidence coming out point to him being obsessed with extreme violence, not with islam. The Al Quaida handbook he had was one of many resources. So focusing on radicalisation is not helpful.

That nut would have gotten a knife somewhere. If not a knife, anything else. It's nothing to do with it at all. Just more gaslighting from a disgusting man who couldn't care less about the children in this country.

My husband has two guns.

Their purpose is to punch holes in bits of paper at a distance.

@LuluBlakey1 Of course teachers work with children who are criminals. Trying to justify dc with knives is wrong and the dc are wrong. They need the strongest deterrent possible. You probably don’t know whether the dc who didn’t like a bullying child would use the knife or not. But it was tolerated. It’s something where dc need to know exactly what will happen if they carry a knife, for any reason. Most of us do not have dc in schools like yours. I would expect far more to happen in response to an illegal act. Putting the threat of being taken away from your home might make them think.

Yes you would have thought so but that would probably have involved joined up thinking or someone with more than half a brain cell, whereas in reality it was more like “Computer said no”

I wonder if KS is going down the accessibility to knives route to get out of answering more uncomfortable questions around these types of cases, it seems the route of least complication.

I certainly do feel that certain things (some of which are not very pc) probably need to be aired and discussed but it is whether he has the balls to do it, I guess not.

I certainly do feel that certain things (some of which are not very pc) probably need to be aired and discussed but it is whether he has the balls to do it, I guess not.

@Lunalovegood00 I don’t want to make assumptions as to what you’re hinting at so I’ll just come out and ask - What things?

Yeah he was also obsessed with Hitler and Genghis Khan apparently.

You get caught with a knife in public, you go down. End of.

The problem is that people of colour are more likely to carry knives, and that is a problem for the left.

I do think it’s massively to do with knives.

He was caught in school with a knife.

He was caught on a bus with a knife.

Anyone carrying a knife in public should get an instant 10 year sentence.

Spot on. Agree with all of this.

Does anyone remember that man who abused women all over the world from his home in Ireland or Northern Ireland? He sat there in his bedroom catfishing young girls, getting nudes out of them then blackmailing them to abuse their siblings. He even encouraged at least one young girl to kill herself when she refused to bring her sibling on camera for abuse.

Men have always been abusive but it’s particularly scary now how many women and girls they can harm now without even leaving their bedroom.

I think if I remember correctly this man had been caught with child abuse images before he was even caught for all the other stuff but yet he hadn’t been jailed for that initial crime.

Agree with other posters that the serious underfunding of CAMHS is likely to be an issue that is being glossed over here.

There is a knife crime problem in many cities including ones which historically have not had a lot of “people of colour”. It’s clearly something that tends to affect more deprived socio-economic groups who will look different in various areas of the UK.

Are you aware that Glasgow was often called the stab and murder capital of Europe at various points in the 90s and noughties?

I don’t how accurate that was but Glasgow and indeed Scotland absolutely had a serious violent crime problem and it was definitely majority white males from deprived areas doing it.

The way they successfully addressed it ultimately was partly by using a health model approach.

https://www.theguardian.com/membership/2017/dec/03/how-scotland-reduced-knife-deaths-among-young-people

In 2005, Strathclyde police set up a violence reduction unit (VRU) in an effort to address a problem that had made Glasgow, in particular, notorious. Later that year, a United Nations reportillustrated why that strategy was so urgent.
The study concluded that Scotland was the most violent country in the developed world. Based on telephone interviews with crime victims conducted between 1991 and 2000, it found that excluding murder, Scots were almost three times as likely to be assaulted as Americans and 30 times more likely than the Japanese.

It’s always the same. Find some pathetic, non-reason to take peoples attention away from the real reasons why these things happen. First, they tried to cover it up and now trying to distract the public.

Crossbows are legal in the UK. Same as knives. I have one, I'd hope every other crossbow owner is as responsible but they're not. It just takes one sicko to use whatever he can get his hands on to murder innocent children if that's what they want to do. The balaclava wearing child scumbags around here carry knives and think nothing of using them to stab other children. Not a one over 18. They've even attacked adults. There's such a state of underfunded police that they can't even deal with these kids setting houses on fire (which I've seen firsthand). The little fuckers posed in front of the fire engines while the flames were higher than the house.

This evil man has a long history of violence
Why wasn’t he taken off the streets before this?

It’s absolutely mind boggling that everyone pussyfoots around these violent young men.

Lessons are never learned.

On the knife purchase:

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/23/amazon-delivered-knife-parent-southport-killer-rudakubana/

Amazon delivered the Southport killerr_’s knife to one of his parents, it is understood.
The Amazon driver who delivered the knife used in the murders handed the package to an adult at Axel Rudakubanaa_’s home address who was visibly over 25, according to the retailer.
Under Amazon’s two-stage age checkss, the driver could hand it over to an adult other than Rudakubanaa provided he had established that they were over 18, either by looking over 25 or through checking a recognised ID.
The details emerged as Amazon said it was investigating how the then 17-year-old Rudakubana circumvented the company’s two-stage verification designed to enforce the Governmentt_’s ban on the sale of knives to under-18s.
Amazon bars the sale of knives to anyone under 18.

Its first stage of checks requires the prospective customer to provide their name, address and birthdate, which is then verified by Experian, the credit checker, using sources including the electoral register and bank details.
Rudakubana circumvented these checks by deploying a piece of software that encrypted his personal data and disguised the internet address being used.
He is understood to have bought two Apollo Cerbera kitchen knives with 20cm long blades on July 13 2024, one of which he used in the murders of the three young girls in Southport just over two weeks later.
It is understood that Axel Rudukubana’s name was on the Amazon package delivered to the home where he lived with his parents.
Amazon said that in Rudukubana’s case, its records showed the driver recorded a year of birth consistent with an adult and marked the recipient as visibly over 25, in accordance with its policies and industry practice.

Amazon continues to list what appears to be the same knife used by Rudakubana – a Cerbera Apollo chef knife with a 20cm blade – for £1.70. A note on the listing says age verification is required to order the knife.
The note reads: “This product is not for sale to people under the age of 18 and will require an online age verification check.
“To confirm the recipient is over 18, valid photographic ID with a date of birth may also be required upon delivery.
“The driver will input your year of birth into their device and may then require an ID check to complete the age verification process.”
Amazon said it took its responsibility around the sale of bladed products “extremely seriously” and had launched an urgent investigation into “this tragic case”.

Police searches of Rudakubana’s computers found images of knives and machetes, which originated from Amazon.
There were also emails regarding Amazon deliveries and inquiries made with other knife sellers.
Police found a machete in a scabbard, a set of arrows and a black holdall in his bedroom.
He also used Amazon to buy the equipment he needed to make ricin, having downloaded a manual on how to create the toxin.
The court was told a key ingredient found in his home was bought from elsewhere and that he could have made enough of the toxin to kill more than 12,000 people.

It's got nothing to do with knife availability. My son has 2 sets of very sharp knives (he did cheffing at college) and is no danger to society

Sorry but nonsense. Most people can get their hands on a knife easily. Distraction at best.

CranfordScones · Yesterday 14:57
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Politicians can't address their own failings. Something must be done - this is 'something' - so let's do it even though it completely misses the point.

Politicians have many failings but I don’t know how they can prevent the devastation one very sick person can cause if that person is intent. Sadly, I think Matthew Parris was correct on Any Questions last night: we could have the best funded social and mental health services in the world, there will always be psychopaths.

I suppose the only way would be to force people under suspicion to engage with those services but I don’t know how that could be achieved? Whether people could lawfully be incarcerated because experts believe they will one day harm others, I don’t know?