links for 2008-06-29

• Channel 4 – News – Dispatches – The Truth About Street Weapons
  2008 has seen a staggering number of teenage gang and knife attacks on Britain’s streets with a death toll comparable to that of our troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• Guns and Knives
  This morning four officers from the Armed Response Unit brought the ‘Guns and Knives Take Lives’ presentation to my school. The aim is simple: to reduce the number of young people who get caught up in incidents involving guns or knives.
• My first rant
  Everyday I go on the Tube at Balham, I see this ironic juxtaposition of billboards and it makes me wryly amused, angry, but mostly sad. Left: a Channel 4 advertisement for “Disarming Britain“…
• BBC NEWS | UK | Report questions gun crime policy
  Policies on gun crime are flawed because ministers overlook its root causes – poverty and inequality, a report by criminologists claims.
• Why do children carry knives? The view from the streets
  “I went to get bread for my mum and some guy with a knife threatened me,” one of the little boys says earnestly, sitting by his bike on the grass. That knife to his throat was for 80p.