What is it with

I agree, and in fact it makes them less safe in the end, as they end up stabbing someone and going to jail or being attacked back with a knife.
Same as in the US, where so many carry guns.Without weapons it may only be a few punches.

Around here, where we have many E.Europeans, it seems to be a way of life for them to carry knives on their persons, there have been lots of incidents of stabbings in the last couple of years, some of them fatal.

DH always carries a pocket knife-the kind with scissors and a few other tools included. It's renowned in the family as Grampy's 'trusted Swiss Army penknife!' He would never dream of carrying a knife for any other reason other than the gadgetry of these multipurpose ones.

When I was in my teens and twenties, a lot of people carried pen knives of various kinds around with them. The difference was nobody thought of them in relation to defence or aggression. They were useful for cutting string, paper, fruit, getting stones out of horses hooves etc.

I think knives came in with cultural diversity. In Britain we had a culture of defending oneself, or bullying and intimidating using fists. The word fistfight was in common parlance. Literature admired the school boys and men who sorted out differences with a fight, man to man. Now we, justly, abhor all physical violence, hit someone, kick them, push them over and you will quickly end up in court. Even boxing once a sport taught in schools is in decline.

Those inclined to violence have had to look elsewhere for their weapons. Cultural diversity has brought into this country groups who have had a different attitudes to knives and these provide an obvious and easily obtained weapon, for those who in a previous time would have fought with their fists.

I don't think knives came in with cultural diversity.

I remember in the 60s & 70s the singer Frankie Vaughan, who was active in the Boys' Club movement, organising knife amnesties in places like Glasgow and Liverpool.

Small penknives in pencil cases were normal in the 1950s. Up to about 2000 some older male teachers preferred a penknife to sharpen pencils in their classrooms.
At 14 I went to and from Guides, sometimes alone, on city buses with a sheath knife on my belt getting home about 9.30pm. A few years later my boyfriend and I were threatened with a knife by a teddy boy, I burst into tears and he went away.
In the mid 70s I was told that a third of boys in a friend's son's class in a West London comp carried knives. Told, the male head refused to believe it.
In the late 80s a 16 year old boy who occasionally was in my house was jailed for murder. His mother had given him a knife for protection, in a busy city street he had chased another teenager into a shop and stabbed him in the back.
There are far too many weapons about. An ex pupil I happened to see at a bus stop told me he was worried about the number of guns in his suburb about 1990.

As Riverwalk says, knives are nothing new. Perhaps it's because more young people are housed 'lumped up' together these days (think tower blocks, housing estates) and gangs are more likely to form. Perhaps it's down to over-population in our cities. And things are set to get worse, with the refugees having to be housed. (Don't shriek 'racism')

When DS was about 14 and a weekly boarder, he went on a school day trip to France and innocently bought what turned out to be a flick knife. Another boy back at school stole it then lied. This boy was expelled. The school quite rightly were very strict about knives, though my son was not blamed for this as he was not aware of the laws regarding flick knives which were at that time easily available on the continent.

I decided to talk to our local policeman whom I knew well, and I understood from him that carrying a knife was only legal if it was used for work. At any other time the knife should be left at home. Swiss Army knives seemed to be a grey area.

I think I'm a bit ridiculous. Its only a few minutes since I struggled to chop up a large sweet potato because the cooking knives I own are pathetic.
In my head I see me disturbing an intruder - he picks up one of those really sharp, large cooking knives and stabs me. So I only buy small not that sharp knives!

Now someone is going to tell me that a clean wound from a sharp knife might be easier to deal with than a jagged one from a semi blunt knife. My answer is that a sharp knife might also be a lot more efficient at finishing me off!

I understand you helma - am quietly alarmed when in someone's kitchen and there's an array of sharp knives up on display on a magnetic strip on the wall, or standing to attention in a wooden knife block.

My knives are in a drawer!

I Think we've always had gangs. Think Just William .That was my brother and his friends. My father had a sheath knife which was sharpened very carefully and used for whittling "useful" things. Does anybody whittle nowadays? I have a Swiss army penknife as a key ring. It's silver and has travelled with me . I forget it's a weapon as it has scissors and is very useful.

My knives have always been on display and convenient. We have had four break-ins over 40 years and the miscreants were far too busy looking for jewellery and money to waste time going into the kitchen and meddling with my knives.

My dad was apparently in a gang in his teenage years. He used to say they met up for fist fights regularly with other gangs, and as a point of honour that they'd never have used knives or other weapons. Then he let slip one day that he'd been cornered by someone wearing knuckledusters This was in the 1930s.

The east Europeans ? How we would miss them if they all left the country, who could be blamed for all the ills then

Am I the only one who remembers the headlines re teddy boys and flick knives . And it was English men who stabbed Stephen Lawrence not east Europeans , an English boy who stabbed a female school teacher , in fact most stabbings are carried by British knife carriers

Did any of you see peaky blinders? Such weapons have been around for centuries.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1120288/The-hoodies-Warring-yobs-utterly-powerless-police-No-2009-Victorian-England-terrorised-teenage-gangs.html

www.outlawsandhighwaymen.com/history.htm

It has been around for centuries. Highwaymen, petty thieves. Then there was duelling over a mans honour.

Knives were always around but their use as weapons tended to be limited to certain groups. Children did not take them to school and knife fellow pupils.

I agree with MOnica

I used to have a little Indian knife that I had with me when I was playing at the weekends. Never felt the urge to stab anyone though. In the 70s one of my mother's neighbours was killed by a burglar who stabbed him with his own kitchen knife.

I found someone's mother's bread knife in a cupboard in a classroom in 1980. Needless to say it was never claimed.

Perhaps the child's packed lunch came as a self assembly kit.

Everyone seems to agree that carrying a small knife of some sort was very common at one time, but it was rare that we heard of young people being stabbed either at school or in the street. This is the trend that I find really worrying. Brawls are one thing, knifing is another, and whilst we maybe hear more about incidents, because of the media, I still find it disturbing. Don't know what the answer is, unfortunately.

Life has got much worse in many respects. When I started teaching in my nice, outer London school in 1982 there was never a hint of violence with weapons but by the noughties the police used to come onto our premises with a 'knife arch' and make all the children coming onto the site walk through it. The intake had changed by then.

I remember teddy boys and flick knives, Ab, and in those days every self-respecting boy wanted a sheath knife, whether he was in the Cubs/Scouts or not. Mine was absurdly large, and quickly became very blunt. By the time I was a teenager it would never have occurred to me to wear it.

There should be more knife arches about. I've only seen one when the Conservative Party Conference came to town. Many bus routes were diverted then too.
I'm told that knife arches are very expensive to employ. Is this true?