A blanket ban on edged weapons on German trains and buses may shortly become reality, despite the obvious challenges of compliance and enforcement.
The idea has been germinating since last January’s Brokstedt tragedy, the mass stabbing that occurred on a train in Brokstedt, Schleswig-Holstein, claiming two lives.
Using a kitchen knife, a 33-year-old stateless Palestinian killed a 17-year-old girl and her 19-year-old boyfriend. A few weeks later, the deadly stabbing of a 12-year-old girl by two girls of similar age in Freudenberg, North Rhine-Westphalia, likewise shocked the nation.
Half a year later, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser is now taking the next step to introduce a knife ban on all public transport and associated venues, hoping to bring down the number of such incidents, which more than doubled last year.
336 knife attacks—82 on trains and 254 at train stations—were recorded, an increase of 102% compared to the previous year.
In an interview with Bild, published Saturday, June 10th, the SPD politician said she would propose “a general ban on knives on trains and all public transport at the interior ministers’ conference next week.”
“I am in favor of a ban so that stricter controls can be carried out and terrible acts of violence can be prevented,” Faeser added.
She first announced her plan last April, when she told Funke Mediengruppe: “Violent criminals can do terrible things with knives,” pointing out that “even with a kitchen knife, one can injure someone very seriously.”
Knives, she concluded, must be removed. Anyone who violates the new weapons law would be committing a crime that can incur “severe punishment,” according to Faeser, as she added that “after all, if you travel by plane, you are not allowed to take a knife with you.”
While she said that both federal police and state police forces could increase “spot checks at train stations,” the rub lies in its enforcement, a point raised by Germany’s police union (GdP), which is less enthusiastic about the prospect of adding to their members’ workload.
Neighboring Austria is similarly in the grip of knife crime, seen at its most acute in its capital of Vienna.
It is yet unknown whether Austria’s Interior Minister will follow Germany’s lead. Police sources, however, told Exxpress:
Someone who cuts off his victim’s hands and legs with a machete at a Vienna subway station is unlikely to be deterred by a knife ban.
In the larger European context, the idea of banning knives is not a novel one. To address the skyrocketing knife crime in his city, London Mayor Sadiq Khan famously implemented such a ban in April 2018.
One year later, however, his intervention had not produced the desired result. Between April 2018 and March 2019, police forces recorded 43,516 offenses involving a knife or sharp instrument, in comparison with 40,215 in the year ending March 2018—an 8% rise for England and Wales alone.
The increase, based on data from 43 police forces in England and Wales, excluded Greater Manchester police (GMP) due to the force’s undercounting of knife-related crimes in previous years. When crimes involving a knife or sharp instrument recorded by GMP over the past year were factored in, the figure for offenses in England and Wales was 47,136—the highest since records began. Of those incidents, 32% happened in London.
Spooked by the surge, in July 2021, the UK Government passed a general ban on a wide range of knives to tackle the violence.
According to the UK’s latest figures, despite an overall decrease in knife-enabled crime, knife-enabled threats to kill increased by 22% (to 5,942 offenses) in the year ending December 2022, compared with the year ending March 2020 (4,861 offenses).
Statistics such as these point to a deluded notion that to ban the weapon is to stop the crime. Barring an honest appraisal of underlying societal ills, and a robust defense of norms and standards to address them, such bans should be regarded as what they are—over-the-counter salves for a skin wound, as infection spreads throughout the body.
