one in three teenagers think it's OK to carry knives

[AMAZINWOMAN]

A survey by ipod on nearly 500 teenagers in inner cities, think that it is OK to carry knives. They believe it is self defence.

I think the results are scary and frightening. And I would be mortified if my children felt under pressure to carry one.

Now this is a measure of how old I am, that when I was a youngster, we all carried knives in our belt; they were supposedly for whittling, but I think they were really about feeling grown-up enough to have tools. I don't think it ever occurred that knives could be used to deliberately hurt people. (cory goes off to the bathroom to seek for blond hairs among the grey)

Seriously though, before I react in any way to this survey, I would like to know how that particular statistic sample was made. Having trained as a historian and actually done an introductory course in statistics, I've seen some weird things in that field.

The survey was carried out by Tuned In, a market research company specialising in youth issues. I agree, there are weird things in the field of statistics, but I do think knives are becoming more common.

If you are confrontod by a gang, and you pull out a knife, you would imagine the gang would back off.

The webpage is:

www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/18/ukcrime

I think the inner city bit is what makes this statistic perhaps more believable for me.

Out of the cities/big towns I suspect it's very unusual.

In our rather sleepy village, the kids often do have Swiss Army knives (given to them by parents!) but a lot of them do weekend work on farms etc/have boats so I don't think there's a sinister motive {naive emoticon]