MP’s ‘stupid’ plan... to fit all knives with GPS

A TORY MP has been mocked after calling for all knives sold in Britain to be fitted with GPS trackers.

Scott Mann, MP for North Cornwall, suggested the idea to his 6,000 Twitter followers and said it could work in a similar way to the licensing of firearms.

Mr Mann, 41, wrote: ‘Every knife sold in the UK should have a GPS tracker fitted in the handle. It’s time we had a national database like we do with guns. If you’re carrying it around you had better have a bloody good explanation, obvious exemptions for fishing etc.’

But Twitter users ridiculed the practicality of his idea due to the number of kitchen knives in use and the need for a battery to power a tracker. Stephen Robinson wrote: ‘A database that would contain every single household in the UK. Millions of knifes being tracked at once. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever read.’

Another shared an image of their kitchen drawer and said it alone would require 27 GPS devices for all the knives inside it to be tracked. Ann Oakes-Odger, founder of campaign group KnifeCrimes.Org, said the proposal was ‘not very practical, reasonable, or easy to achieve’.

The 68-year-old, whose son Westley was stabbed to death in Colchester, Essex, in 2005, added: ‘I think it would be too costly an exercise when there is another way, education. Give children the opportunity to make the right choices.’

Responding to critics, Mr Mann insisted it was simply a thought process and that he ‘wasn’t talking about butter knives’.

‘The majority of knife crimes in the UK are carried out with bladed instruments from kitchens,’ he added. ‘No one else is coming up with any ideas. People can shoot me down if they like but people are being stabbed on the streets and we need to do something about it.

‘We need to start thinking about how we are going to deal with this massive issue.’