ONE of Scotland's leading forensic psychiatrists has called for the widespread sale of non-stab kitchen knives in order to cut Scotland's murder toll.
Dr John Crichton, who was the main Crown psychiatrist at the trial of triple child-killer Theresa Riggi, believes making it harder to buy the most common of all murder weapons will help prevent knife killings.
He said knives with blunt tips would be equally effective for cooking but less likely to become weapons.
Dr Crichton, an honorary fellow at Edinburgh University's school of law, said Riggi, who murdered her children in August 2010, had planned to gas the youngsters but chose an easier option, and killed them with ordinary kitchen knives. He said the case made him think of research showing suicides fell in the UK after changes such as having natural gas instead of more lethal coal gas in cookers.
"If you make it more difficult then the rate reduces," said Dr Crichton. "What that shows us is people who are suicidal are ambivalent. They are quite impulsive in what they are doing and if you put barriers in people's way then they think again.
"The suggestion is that something similar goes on in terms of homicide perhaps."
David Sinclair, spokesman for Victim Support Scotland, said: "We would certainly be happy to see anything which helped make that type of weapon safer."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article