They Got the Guns, Are Working On Knives...

and have identified the next weapon of choice for gangs and criminals everywhere: pencil sharpeners.

A schoolgirl was refused a Glee stationery set at a shop in case she used the pencil sharpener as a weapon.

Emily Davies, 14, tried to buy the kit based on the hit TV series that contained a pen, pencil, ruler, rubber and a sharpener from a 99p Store.

But she was stunned when she got to the check-out and was told by the cashier she couldn’t buy the innocent item because she was under the age of 18.

The female member of staff explained that the sharpener could be deemed as ‘lethal’ or ‘dangerous’ in the wrong hands.

mily had to ask her 18-year-old brother, Mikey, to show his driving license to the shop assistant to prove he was old enough to purchase the school set.

The traditional sharpener is covered in a round purple plastic encasing that has the words ‘Super Gleek’ on.

A spokesman for the national chain of 99p Stores said that they had no such age policy in place regarding pencil sharpeners, but defended the actions of the cashier in question.

He said: 'Pencil sharpeners are not an age restricted product and if we have refused a sale on this occasion we would rather that our staff are over cautious rather than under cautious.'

Pic of the girl holding the assault sharpener:

While It's Good To See...

...a pro-gun op/ed in The Washington Post, it comes at the cost of being anti-knife:

On the other hand, never underestimate the knife.

In some places, such as the District, the knife now surpasses the gun as the weapon most commonly used in reported assaults. In the past six months, from September to Feb. 26, there were 397 reported assaults with knives, compared with 278 with guns. This year, there have been more than 110 reported knife assaults and 73 with guns.

There’s a service station at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Sheriff Road, at the District and Prince George’s line, that sells assault knives for about $10. The most popular is a spring-loaded Army-style tactical knife with a nasty, three-inch serrated blade curved like a raptor’s claw.

In a kind of “West Side Story”-style gang fight, a large group of youngsters from two rival neighborhoods met up last month for a showdown in Southwest Washington. When D.C. police arrived on the scene, the brawlers ran off — leaving behind a girl bleeding on the sidewalk.

The fight had apparently been arranged on Facebook, according to police. And the knives used were comparably high-tech. But the business end is still just a blade — as convenient in a kitchen as it is deadly in the streets.

"Assault knives?" The writer is still a hoplophobe, he's just changed his focus a bit, is all.

h/t David Codrea.

Meanwhile, Over At The New York Times...

...Editorial Page editor Andrew Rosenthal talks about the AK-47 clone used to fire at the White House recently.

The WASR-10 is a Romanian version of the AK-47 assault weapon and definitely not for hunting deer amid the fall foliage in the Pennsylvania hills.

The WASR-10 is imported into this country by Century International Arms in Florida. You can buy it online for less than $500.

Why am I taking up your time with this? Because the WASR-10 was the weapon that Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez allegedly used to shoot the bullets stopped by ballistic glass on the second floor of the White House this week.

Mr. Ortega-Hernandez is said to have obtained his WASR-10 from a friend who purchased it in Idaho Falls, ID.

It’s a reminder of how lax American gun laws are and why that matters.

And this goes far beyond whether an unbalanced person tried to kill the president. The WASR-10 sells for about $400 in shops on the U.S.-Mexican border — but $2,000 to $3,000 in Mexico. Why the premium? Mexican gun laws are much stricter than those in the United States. So the re-militarized gun has to be smuggled into gun-shy Mexico from gun-crazy America.

According to the Center for Public Integrity, more than 500 of the Romanian AK-47/WASR-10s have been recovered in Mexico that were first imported by Century from Romania into the United States.

He then does the usual NRA-bashing. Nowhere in the article, however, are the words "Fast," "Furious" or "gunwalking" mentioned.

Go on over there and leave him a comment, won't you?