What it Takes to Get Attention!

Horrific images of blood soaked hands cover front pages of newspapers and magazines. They are all over the internet news sites. Who could imagine that people could commit such horrors? This must be an anomaly. Hopefully this will not grow from this one incident. Oh My!

Of course I am referring to Wednesday's attack in the Woolwich.

What if  Americans had just not heard of such crimes, particularly in the UK, in jolly old England? You might be interested to know that there is a rich history of knife crimes in Britain.

The number of knife crimes has dropped sharply in the past ten years, but according to a November 2012 House of Commons report written by Gavin Berman, “During the year to June 2012 there were approximately 29,513 recorded offences involving knives or other sharp instruments, The figure was twice as high back in the early 2000s.

That reduction could be at least partially due to an ever increasing number of knife laws. One of those is the 2007 Custodial Sentences and Weapons Act, in Scotland, requiring “knife dealer licenses.” These laws have been ratcheted up in acts from 1997, 1996, 1988, and of course the switchblade banning laws of 1958. This has been a big story for many years in the United Kingdom.

So, why have we not been seeing any of that British horror on the screen here in the USA? I mean after all, we get plenty of reporting from Britain: Royal weddings, Royal funerals and memorials, Royals in the military, and media scandals.

Were there no media resources (pictures and video) available from any of these 60,000 per year knife crimes a few years ago, or the 30,000 last year? I am sure that these butchers in Woolwich have seen the blood, and perhaps lived among the gangs that make street war, the werewolves of London.

It seems that the US Media, who tend to look at the UK in a starburst filter on the shiny objects of medieval institutions, are missing what is in the shadows. And it takes a public beheading, and a butcher who is willing to stick around and be photographed, for us to even take notice.