To think all knives including religious ones should be banned, after what happened to Henry Nowak

[BritIndianGal]

A more sensible thread this time. I think all carrying of knives should be banned with no religious exemptions allowed , the law should be called the Henry Nowak Bill ....in memory of the young man who lost his life

In the 100 or so years that Sikhs have lived, contributed and integrated within the UK, this is the first case I've come across where someone identifying as Sikh has used a knife on an innocent person. My understanding of the faith is that you should never draw your kirpan except to protect someone from imminent harm, and clearly it is taken very seriously considering that our laws have permitted the carrying of a kirpan for all this time and it's never caused problems. As many have said, the weapon used wasn't even a kirpan so why would you punish an entire faith for the act of one person (who was already kicked out of their Gurdwara)? Perhaps more checks and restrictions on anyone who has had behaviour reported would have prevented the perpetrator in this instance from having access to the weapon he had, and that's the control we need... if anyone is given a warning about use of weapons or threatening behaviour, checks on the items they have at home should be made and items confiscated. That would include confiscating surveillance equipment from stalkers, any weapons, and anything that together could compromise a kit to cause harm from someone who has threatened kidnap etc.

That's completely unworkable. Confiscate any weapons - Every knife in the house? How will they cook? Anything that could could make a kit - confiscate their duct tape? Take their cricket bat? And that's before you consider that pretty much anything can be used as a weapon. I could do a lot of damage to someone with a tin of dogfood. You would have to leave them in an empty room. Rash calls for laws like that are why we shouldn't rush to make changes based on one terrible, but incredibly rare, event

Again though this comes down to personal choice. If it makes you feel safer then that's for you to decide. But I think the problem is that for certain people like Farage they have their own agenda and honestly I believe people could assimilate as much as physically possible and he'd still find a way to scapegoat them to take heat off his own back and to generate influence. The man would sell his own granny if he thought it would gain him power and influence. We are still suffering the aftermath of brexit which farage was highly instrumental in getting over the line and that's ironically created huge issues with COL rising and immigration and processing asylum claims. So it suits farage and reform to blame that on migrants because if people are busy looking at them we aren't looking at him. His party unfortunately won't care how much someone attempts to assimilate they will continue to stir hate because that is benefiting him and he knows exactly what he's doing.

So if someone chooses to do what you are describing then I understand the logic behind it and if that makes them personally feel safer I completely respect that, but I also think that shouldn't be required of people in order for an inclusive and respectful society because I don't think it will make anything better long term. There are many other ways of tackling those issues that don't require uk minitory or global majority groups to give up parts of their identity if they don't want to. For some people it may even make them feel less safe to do so. I work with lots of women who wear hijab or niqab and that's very much their choice and they'd be devastated to be told they weren't allowed to do that and o think they would feel unsafe as a result. I actually don't think they'd comply and rightly so.

It wasn't a kitchen knife though and I'm not talking about a kitchen knife but an actual weapons collection. This guy had a weapon collection. It's also not a random roll of duct tape but finding duct tape, rope, chloroform etc together in a backpack or car boot would clearly indicate someone was preparing to use it as a kit. As I said, perhaps... But we shouldn't be trying to prevent people from practising a religion that's been practised without issue based on the fact that one person of that faith used a weapon (not even the one he's permitted to carry) and the media incorrectly drew attention to the fact that people of that faith are permitted a specific exception for a specific item, which wasn't used.

Did some pulling together of numbers but could not find any really conclusive data either ways

• There were 522 total homicide victims in England and Wales in the year ending March 2025.
• Of these, 205 were killed with a knife or other sharp instrument.
• There were 111 domestic homicides (all methods), including 67 victims killed by a current or former partner. The ONS does not state how many of those domestic homicides involved knives.
• Across all homicides, around 15% of victims were known drug dealers, 31% were known drug users, and police identified motives such as obtaining drugs (7%) or stealing drug proceeds (5%) in a minority of cases. Again, these figures are for all homicides, not specifically knife homicides.

The relationship data is often more informative than the weapon data. Historically, most homicide victims knew their killer; stranger homicides are a minority. Domestic, family, acquaintance, criminal-associate, and dispute-related killings together account for the majority of cases. For the specific policy question you raised about kirpans, the key issue is that:

• The most common sharp instrument used in homicide is a kitchen knife. In the year ending March 2025, the ONS recorded 95 homicides involving a kitchen knife.
• The ONS does not publish a category for "kirpan homicides", and I am not aware of any official dataset showing kirpans as a significant contributor to homicide numbers.

For homicide convictions over the three years ending March 2025, about 61% of convicted principal suspects were identified as White, 24% as Black, and 8% as Asian. These figures are for all homicides, not specifically knife homicides.

The latest comprehensive figures come from the 2021 Census for England and Wales (population: 59.6 million). These are the official ONS figures still used as the benchmark today.
Ethnic group% of populationApprox. number
White
81.7%
48.7 million
Asian / Asian British
9.3%
5.5 million
Black / Black British
4.0%
2.4 million
Mixed / Multiple ethnic groups
2.9%
1.7 million
Other ethnic groups
2.1%
1.3 million
Total
100%
59.6 million

A more detailed breakdown of some major groups:
Ethnic group%
White British
74.4%
Other White
6.2%
Indian
3.1%
Pakistani
2.7%
Black African
2.5%
Bangladeshi
1.1%
Black Caribbean
1.0%
Chinese
0.7%
Arab
0.6%

A few points relevant to your earlier questions:
White British (English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British) was 74.4% of the population in 2021.
All White groups combined (including Irish, Polish, Romanian, Italian, etc.) were 81.7%.
Asian was 9.3%. Within that, Indian was 3.1% and Pakistani was 2.7%.
Regarding Sikhs specifically: the census records religion separately from ethnicity. Sikhs are mostly found within the Indian ethnic category, but not all Indians are Sikh and not all Sikhs are Indian. The 2021 census recorded about 524,000 Sikhs in England and Wales (roughly 0.9% of the population), a figure that is considerably lower than the 2% assumption you mentioned earlier.
One caution when discussing crime statistics: ethnicity, nationality, immigration status, and religion are separate variables. The available homicide data generally reports ethnicity of offenders (when known), but not religion, so it is not possible to reliably estimate the number of Sikh offenders from the published homicide tables.

Everyone always talking about agendas just because they don’t agree.

Yanbu and it’s good to see the majority say the same.

The ONS does not publish a category for "kirpan homicides", and I am not aware of any official dataset showing kirpans as a significant contributor to homicide numbers.

You can be sure Tommy and Farage would have found kirpan murders if there were any.

Your statistics missed out the one demographic that means anything. Men. Always men.

I think we should ban cars, more people are killed and/or hurt by people drink driving and drug driving than knives.

If we're going to ban something then make it a worthwhile ban.

I don’t think Sikhs with kirpans are a particular risk.

But specific exemptions from laws for named religious groups is a bad idea anyway.

Both on principle and for public faith in/support for the law. That gets more important not less the more diverse society gets.

(If a proposed law said Methodists must get a double helping of pudding in restaurants, you’d probably oppose it even if I could prove there was no safety risk).

There still needs to be thought given to what men have access to here.

It makes sense to remove that weapon the perpetrator used, and ik it wasn’t the small version in your post.

Or bringing home a knife they’ve just bought, @Soubriquet.

I carry a Stanley knife for work, as do many others I work with. It’s part of my tool kit. What do you suggest I do with it?

Make the knives rounded and blunt

I think until males have been eradicated (or they are only allowed to be kept as pets in cages) nothing is going to improve the statistics surrounding violence/rape/murder.

Whilst they are free to roam the planet it will always be an unsafe place regardless of what laws are implemented.

People can and do legitimately need sharp, pointed knives, @DiscoBeat - chefs and cooks, for example. Try finely dicing an onion or cutting up a butternut squash with a butter knife.

Humans are no different from any other animal in many ways. They are violent, selfish and will take what they want from someone else if they can.

Anyone who believes otherwise is naive. Bring your children up to be ‘kind’ or whatever but lurking under the surface is that instinct whether or not they give in to it

And how is including more knives in the ban going to impact knife crime. People aren’t accidentally stabbing each other. Do you think they will suddenly stop it?

No one needs to carry a knife capable of injuring or killing someone. I don’t give a shit what their religion says.

Sikhs can choose to adapt to modern society or accept that people will be suspicious of them, following Henry Nowack’s death.

Absolutely.

When it comes to evil individuals, no “knife law” is going to stop them from killing another person if that’s what they want to do.

And no law is going to stop then carrying knives either,

Yep.

I don't know if this would be appropriate or not but if the followers of that branch of Sikhism have carrying these knives openly as part of their religion , why can't they be fake? Just rubber ones, like from films? If it's always in a sheath then it wouldn't make any difference? But maybe they'd say then it's not a proper one so it doesn't count?

But anyway I think open carrying of anything that even looks like a knife isn't a good idea as it could cause social unrest. And normalise weapons. So really they should only have them when doing specific religious ceremonies.

Like most Londoners I travel a lot by public transport, so have carried a new kitchen knife home from the shop multiple times.
I bake and have frequently taken sharp knives to work so people can cut slices.
I travel on public transport to sport competitions where I often need a stanley-knife for tapes, cables and ties to rig our equipment.
I camp & hike; so I keep (and use) a penknife for multiple small jobs while doing that.
A full ban on carrying knives is totally unworkable - how would you police it anyway? It is so easy to just stick one in a sports bag and walk down the street with it, that there's a vanishingly small chance that anyone who actually wanted to stab someone would be caught before it was too late.

I hope @AlphaApple and the other posters who say no-one needs to carry a knife, read your post, @TunnocksOrDeath.

Your last sentence sums it up perfectly!

Knives are very easy to hide on your body/in your belongings. It’s not like there are people walking around the streets proudly waving their knives around in the air to make it easy for the police to spot them and arrest them 🙄

Unless people think that the police are going to start searching random people on the streets for possible hidden knives then seriously, what’s the point of introducing a ban on carrying knives?

People who carry knives for genuine reasons are not the kind of people who are going to use them to murder people.

The people who carry knives with the intention of killing people will not give a shit about a knife law. It will not act as a deterrent to them in any way at all.