Starmer’s seeming ridiculous announcement will do nothing but slap a symbolic bandage on a far deeper generational psychological wound.

S ome important breaking news: Britain’s long ninja-nal nightmare is finally over. Yesterday U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer proudly announced: “Confirmed: Ninja swords will be banned by this summer. When we promise action we take it.” This is good news, because up until this point my primary reason for resisting travel to the United Kingdom — for resisting all foreign travel in general, really — was the fear of getting caught in the middle of a gang war between pajama-clad assassins.

This is only the latest and most outrageous development in a long-standing trend of British bigotry against the Bushidō code: Shurikens have been banned in the U.K. since 1988 — presumably as a hair-trigger response to the then poorly understood emergent threat of ninja turtles — and katanas since 2008, but now it’s time for the ninjatō to go as well: no more short swords. The Labour Party is finally serious about ending the shinobi menace once and for all. It is a moment heavy with regret: With this move Britain is no longer a land fit for the Way of the Warrior, and it’s difficult not to feel as if some core part of Merrie Olde England’s ancient identity is dying, akin to when Tony Blair’s quisling government banned fox-hunting in 2004.

Now let us dispense with jocular pretense. There is of course more to Starmer’s “ninja weapon” announcement — roundly mocked across American social media — than a dislike for exotic Japanese weaponry. Behind the seeming utter ridiculousness of the boast lies a much more serious problem: the outbreak of violent stabbings that has swept the United Kingdom over the past decade or so, stabbings primarily committed by maladjusted youths. Britain is still reeling from last year’s stabbing atrocity in Southport, where 18-year-old Axel Rudakubana stabbed three girls to death — and wounded many more — with a machete during a Taylor Swift–themed dance class for children. His motive, near as it can be determined, was nonideological. (This is of little comfort to the survivors.)

Mass violence in Europe takes a different form than it does in America but is no less barbaric for that: Great Britain has extraordinarily strict gun-control laws, most of them instituted by the Conservatives back in 1997 in the aftermath of the 1996 Dunblane school massacre. That 1997 handgun ban proved extremely effective, in the sense that it successfully disarmed a citizenry either unwilling or uninterested in fighting to retain their right to self-defense. But it proved incapable of banning psychopathy, and since evil always finds a way, the weapon of choice for apolitical mass-murderers and amateur terrorists alike shifted quickly to the use of edged weapons. People who wish to kill — kill in numbers, kill with indifference toward their own lives — will strive to kill nonetheless. So now Starmer’s Labour government, under the auspices of “Ronan’s Law” — named after the victim of a mistaken-identity katana stabbing (of all things) by Indian youths in 2022 — has decided to address the problem the only way it knows how: not by attacking the problem of youth violence, mental health, or cultural alienation, but rather, to the extent possible, by banning knives.

It will not work. And in the certainty of its failure, it is a perfectly tragicomic epitome of the absolute inability of modern Western governments to properly address the outbreak of civic violence engulfing us all in recent years. To be clear, many on the right make a similar category error: Progressives look at gun violence in the U.S. or stabbing violence in the U.K. and think with reflexive instrumentality: “Ban guns and ban knives.” By the same token, far too many mistakenly reduce the stabbing spree in the United Kingdom to a crude anti-immigrationist argument premised on the inimicalness of Islam to the West. (This was in fact a mistake many made with Rudakubana, the son of Rwandan Christian missionaries and a natural-born U.K. citizen, not a Muslim — although far too many lazily assumed as much in search of a nonexistent terrorism connection.) The easiest way to demonstrate the folly of that excuse-making is to point to the United States’ own densely traumatic recent history of school shootings by kids, nearly all of them motivated as much by social isolation and/or severe autism as anything else. This is not a “screenable” problem with a simple (and, frankly, ethno-racist) solution; it is a civilizational cultural sickness affecting the most vulnerable among all of our children.

Most everybody else bellowed sarcastically yesterday when they read the news that Starmer’s only answer to reducing youth violence is to reduce youth access to weapons. And they have every right to be deeply cynical about how pathetically ineffectual this response is: When nonpolitical mass-murderers in the U.K. inevitably shift from blades to cars as their chosen method of destruction — as Islamist terrorists all throughout continental Europe (and in the U.S.) already have done — will the Labour Party respond by banning petrol and motor vehicles? Or by raising the age for a driver’s license?

Of course they won’t. And at that point they will be out of options, for while the violent impulses of disaffected youths can be suppressed — at the cost of infantilizing an entire nation — they can never be fully extinguished. At some point Britain (not just Britain, really, but all of us in the West) will need to seriously engage with the uncontrollable social and technological forces shaping our children, and do it without political cowardice or partisan intent. Banning ninja swords does nothing except slap a symbolic bandage on a far deeper generational psychological wound.