Criminal Justice Act 1988 (Offensive Weapons) (Amendment) Order 2008

I thank noble Lords for those valid points. I hope I will be able to answer them all, and I appreciate the views. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, mentioned, correctly, that the definition does not pick up cheap ninja swords, which are straight, and that it touches slightly on krises. I remember reading about krises in the Wizard years ago in a story about a chap in Borneo. They are unpleasant, sharp, double-sided knives. In my initial speech, I tried to put across that the intention is to try to pick on ninja swords, which are very attractive to some young people. They watch films such as ““Kill Bill”” and think it is frightfully clever to have them to show off with. That touches on the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, about the pornography of violence. There are violent films with such swords, and some young people think it is very clever to have them. My initial position is that people kill people, not the things they have, but there are people for whom such swords make a difference to their ability to kill, so it is right that we try to constrain them. The noble Baroness, Lady Hanham, was right about straight swords, but we felt it was too difficult to get a definition that would not mean that we would have a problem with buying a set of Sabatier knives. It is difficult to differentiate between them when laying down rules. We are still looking at this and, if we can come up with a definition that is properly enforceable, we intend to outlaw straight swords as well, but it is proving extremely difficult to do so. We keep offensive weapons policy under review all the time. I mentioned the large number of identified weapons in the order, but noble Lords identified a number of weapons that are just as unpleasant on which we cannot produce an enforceable definition at the moment as it is too tricky. The noble Earl made a point about bending sword blades, and he is right that that can be done. We shall have to keep looking at this, and perhaps at some time in the future we shall say that any blade over 50 centimetres—which is long—should be banned. At the moment, it is difficult to do that. [The Sitting was suspended for a Division in the House from 4.49 to 4.59 pm.]