Eight people this morning are wishing they had stayed home and watched TV last night, in the early hours of this morning a knife weilding youth went on the rampage and stabbed eight people, five of them including three women are in hospital classed as stable. This guy didn't even know these people, they were just there.

So where did this happen? London? Liverpool? America?

No, this incident happened in my little town, not a big city with lots of nightclubs and occurences that are sadly, far too regular. This incident involved people I knew personally, people that my son knows, we could quite easily have been taking flowers to funerals instead of taking flowers to the hospital.

Knife crime is/has become so serious that even little backwaters like us are feeling the violence that emanates from the lack of sufficient detterants and laws to deal with the issue at hand. Youths carry knives and openly flaunt them, or they carry them hidden on thier person 'just in case' they should need them. The fact that the ones that carry them just in case are the ones that usually end up hurting someone does not seem to enter anyones head, well at least not the heads of the youths involved.

The one last night has been detained under the mental health act, does this make what he did any less serious? Does the fact that he has 'problems' mean that he is to be absolved rom all blame for what he did to those people, well probably, in the same way that drug users get away with commiting crimes, because they are classes as 'not responsible' for their actions. So if the people perpetraing the crime are not responsible then it is down to the Government to take that responsibility and to make it a priority to actually do something about knife crime instead of just discussing 'possible' ways of dealing with it, to make the laws that they are supposedly introducing count for something instead of using the same old softly softly approach that they normally use.

Perhaps then people wont have to worry about whether they should go for a night out or stay in, parents would not have to worry so much about their children going for a night out with their mates, and we aowuldn't be mourning so many wastes of so many young lives.