I had the pleasure last night to be a guest on Jonathan Morrisons breakfast show on 2GB Radio based in Sydney Australia. Australia has been horrified by the shocking murder of a young man by other youths, where the boy was stabbed to death in public after an altercation of some sort.
On Jasons show we spoke about my programme, & how I thought we should be tackling violent crime & weapons carrying amongst young people. Jason really hit the nail on the head, commenting that we really need to address the problem of kids not having good lifeskills & make sure that they really understand the simple concept of right & wrong.
I did a bit of research & spoke to friends I have in Oz who train & teach the same bladearts as I do. It turns out that up to now the Australian government seem to have pretty much gone down the same illogical headline grabbing 'lets make it look like we're doing something' lines as our own governments; banning the carrying of knives, & banning certain types of knife. Why is this illogical? Well, the folks who carry weapons with the aim to hurt people are generally criminals & yobbos- they commit crimes, it's what they do, thats why they are called C R I M I N A L S folks. Making it completely illegal to carry any form of knife just inconveniences the decent law abiding people who benefit from being able to carry a knife as a tool for their work or pastime. It's time that governments stopped knee-jerk reactions that tar everyone with the same brush & take more sophisticated & intelligent approaches. Banning types of knife is equally pointless. Generally this ends up as "that looks scary, it must be dangerous so lets ban it". The truth is that no one type of knife is more dangerous than any other. A kitchen knife will out-cut a £30 'non domestic knife' every time! What I'm trying to say is that governments need to look long term at doing things that will work in reality, & stop doing the same tired old rubbish. Do they really think that the gangbangers will hand in their weapons at a 'knife amnesty'? The time & money would be better invested in implementing programmes to teach young kids about civil responsibility & life skills, & on effective law enforcement targeting problem areas aggressively.
Jason Morrison was correct with his concern that kids need to be taught right & wrong. One thing I've noticed is that society has become far more vicious down through the years. Since I was a teenager, through my years working the doors (almost 2 decades), through my years teaching self defence all over the UK & abroad (I've been training for over 28 years, & have been an instructor since 1987), I have seen people become quicker to use more extreme levels of violence. I have seen the troublemakers of my younger days have kids, & I've seen those kids grow up into even more vicious troublemakers. Think for a minute, unless they get good guidence at an early age from somewhere, what are the children of the current vicious generation of young criminals & thugs going to be like?
There is no magic bullet, no quick fix. We MUST start looking seriously at introducing effective life skills programmes for young children at primary school. When I do 'taster sessions' in local schools for our Little Ninjas programme we always get fantastic feedback from the teachers who watch, because they can't believe the way that we can get kids to enthusiatically learn about self discipline & practice it. Very often I hear later that the teachers have pinched a few of our methods. It is possible to really make a huge difference in a childs life if you get them young enough. If the children are getting bad influences at home, or at the least they have no real positive role model, then we have to look at making sure they get that good lifeskills guidence in school. Governments need to stop just looking at the current problem, & need to look at what is going to be a terrible long term problem if left unchecked. There is a tendency for governments to just really think about the period between general elections; well if they really want to make a difference to society they are going to have to think long term strategy, not short term tactics.
Anyway, it was a pleasure to speak to Jason Morrison & to get my ideas out in Australia. Its nice to get recognition from so far away.
