Inappropriate.

Or a banana.

[/quote]
. . .
We live in a socialdemocratic country where the police is supposed to protect you. But that is of course only a nice dream which does not work in reality. [/quote]

That brings to mind the snarky adage of "when seconds count, the cops are minutes away." Sad, but true for all of the world I would suspect.

Sing the bananaasong to the attacker, he will suffer a lethal laughing attack.

[video:youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFukyIIM1XI[/video]

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/06/westfield_man_hospitalized_aft.html

...

The "Reasonable force" doctrine means you can use a weapon, and use more force than your attacker has, if a reasonable person would have. It's understood that the reasonable person would be scared and a bit panicked; "reasonable" doesn't mean some unrealistic level of rationality.

The bit you may find hard to understand is that although self-defence is OK, preparing for it usually isn't. If you happened to have a knife by your bedside for peeling fruit, you could use that as a weapon, but keeping a knife by your bedside specifically to use as a weapon against intruders wouldn't be. And that's what this amnesty is about. Youths carrying knives intending to use them as weapons.

Knives as tools are not illegal in the UK. I carry more than one, for example, and of course cooks' knives are fine in a kitchen. The amnesty is aimed at knives that have no real purpose as tools.

According to this link

While it becomes clear that certain types of offenses are marginally higher in the UK than in the US (robbery and knife crime being more likely in the UK by an order of 1.1x and 1.27x respectively) a number of other, more serious offenses, are both marginally and substantially higher in the US. Rape of a female is 1.02x more likely in the US, while theft of a vehicle is 1.29x more likely. More disturbingly, burglary is significantly higher at 1.52x more likely to occur in the US. However, it is at the considerably more, well, violent crimes that America really supersedes England and Wales into its own class. In the United States, you are 6.9x more likely to be the victim of aggravated assault resulting in serious injury than in the UK. You are 4.03x more likely to be murdered than in the UK. And more staggeringly (though not surprising) you are 35.2x more likely to be shot dead in the Unites States than in the UK. Before anybody asks, no, these do not take into account justifiable homicide and other “acceptable shootings”, nor do murders for that matter

Comparisons are tricky, but I wouldn't take the initial post's figures at face value.

Advocacy regarding guns removed.

That's an example of a slippery slope.