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A key question here is what has changed to make these attacks more prevalent. One possibility is it is related to immigration and changing demographics. The area with the most acid attacks by far, Newham ( http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/acid-attack-capital-bri... ) is also very immigrant heavy ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Borough_of_Newham#Demog... ). In this NPR article, the example is of a guy with a white/British name attacking someone of middle eastern heritage -- but I know from experience on news coverage in my own region that NPR cannot be trusted on racial issues to select anecdotes that match the real patterns of behavior. Do any of the Brits here have any more insight on how immigration and changing demographics might be related to these attacks?
Honestly, I used to live in Tower Hamlets, another "immigrant heavy" area for three years, and never felt remotely threatened.
Neither have the demographics in these areas "changed" much. The east end of London has had a large immigrant population since the 1970s and arguably since the 1700s when the Huguenots arrived from Northern France.
The most danger I was ever in was when they discovered an unexploded WWII bomb next to my flat ("The parties we've had in here, if it was going to go, it would have by now").
Acid attacks are so incredibly rare (350 last year) that any increase at all in them is going to represent a large statistical increase. If I had to hazard a guess as to why acid attacks were on the increase, it's because carrying a knife carries with it the chance of losing your own life as well and a life prison sentence if you kill someone. It's also (marginally) easier to argue that you're carrying a corrosive substance innocently than if you're found with a gun/knife. You are still 70x more likely to be involved in a knife attack than an acid attack.
Asking why immigration and changing demographics has caused this presupposes there being a racial motive at all. Explicitly asking for evidence which supports your theory suggests you've already made up your mind.
I live in Tower Hamlets and witnessed an acid attack a few weeks ago, the attacker was white and the victims were white. I don't feel unsafe here either.
The US political alt-right narrative doesn't translate well to the UK, there were many news stories about the acid attacks and the TL:DR; was that these attacks used to be directed towards women in conservative muslim immigrant communities but these days it's just a convenient weapon for gang activities and jealous or vindictive lovers - immigrant or not.
Why it is a convenient weapon? Cheap to buy and readily available, easy to carry around in a bottle and completely legal(I think that part is changing).
Some Immigrant neighbourhoods being poor is nothing new, and poor neighbourhoods suffering from criminal activities is again nothing original. Again, these neighbourhoods are not new and the immigrants hadn't moved there recently. So it doesn't look like some kind of immigrant critical mass was reached and they start throwing acid.
So no, you hadn't uncover a mystery or spoken the words that nobody dares to.
My guess would be that someone used acid for their criminal activities and had positive(from offender POV) results and it spread out as MOW.
A lot of the UK is "immigrant-heavy" (I've lived in Leicester and Boston, both of which fit that bill). Seems highly unlikely to be a causal link unless you can show a pattern across many areas.
Seems highly likely to me this is a result of improved and increased pressure over knife crime, pushing criminals into new methods, alongside increased exposure to the idea of acid attacks from news.
it could be that these immigrant areas are host to immigrants because they are poor areas. immigrants coming in with no connections or history in that country, and who probably came from a less wealthy country, would naturally take up residence in a poor area. and in a poor area, crime is higher. including acid attack crimes.
True. But I think it is the rise in acid attacks that is intriguing. Indeed, a rise in crime in general, and it is correlated, moderately, with Muslim % of population.
Something that is prevalent in the Middle East is now also prevalent in the place where large numbers of people from the Middle East have come to.
Something tells me its not a coincidence.
"The global pattern is very much males attacking young women and girls, relating to rejected sexual advances or marriage proposals or dowry-related attacks," he says.
But most of the attacks in the U.K. are random and are often connected to robberies or gang violence. Many of the perpetrators are in their teens."
I don't follow how we can lay the responsibility for this increase in attacks at the feet of people from the Middle East coming to the UK if the motives are so different. The method is the same but the motivation is fundamentally different.
Perhaps the simpler explanation -- that it's a method of assault that is easier to get away with, has lighter sentences if caught and is not illegal to carry the weapon -- is more likely.
> Something tells me its not a coincidence.
Yes, that something being racial prejudice. Sad to see this attitude rife on HN.
Pretending that cultural differences don't exist on this planet is just plain silly. It's sad to see this level of virtue signalling on HN.
No one is pretending that cultural differences don't exist. They're just not statistically connected in any way to these acid attacks.
>Jumping to conclusions that fit your anti-immigrant racial prejudice, pretending that it’s actually about “cultural differences”, complaining about “virtue signalling”. It’s like playing a game of alt-right bingo here.
You forgot to call me a "Nazi" and "bigot" and "facist" and all the other things you ANTIFA folks call those who have different opinions than yourselves.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle, which is seriously not ok here. This is explained in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> He says assailants use acid today for many of the same reasons as they did in Victorian times:
Ok but there is a recent rise. Why the recent rise?
I heard that it's because guns are banned. But that didn't happen just in the last few years. So did acid become cheaper to purchase or gun and knifes got harsher penalties recently.
Wonder if there is sort of a copycat thing going on, people hear about it and some say "Oh my, how horrible" maybe the criminals are saying "Yeah, good idea, look how horrified everyone is. I know what I am using next time I am going on a rampage".
What about parts of UK. Where are these attacks happening? Financial district, suburbs, drug trafficking areas, maybe that might provide a hint on the underlying reason.
it is interesting how this topic intersects with gun control and society at large. the solution to this acid attack problem is the same as the solution to a gun violence or knife violence problem: somehow reduce the number of violent nothing-to-lose people that are on the streets. and the number one way to do that is to structure society in a way that gives children a safe and productive environment, and in a way that makes good behaviour much more profitable than bad behaviour. with current public schools and current job prospects, it is no surprise that their society has come to the point of considering a ban on domestic drain cleaner. if you have a well structured society, then eventually it will be filled with good people. and a society full of good people has no need for bans on guns or draino. i think that we could come closer to that vision simply by reaching out to a child in your area and teaching them something.
Do you think that a well structured society has no need for a ban on nuclear weapons? If not, how do you draw the conclusion that such a ban is unneeded for guns?
this is an excellent observation and it is actually the point of nucleation from which my current point of view was spawned. one can imagine a kind of scale that could be used to rate an individual person. left to their own devices, in many, many different scenarios, what kind of behaviour does that person exhibit? maybe the scale could be non-violent to violent or un-productive to productive. it is tempting to abandon the idea of "rating" people because people are complex, and their behaviour changes depending on the situation and various other factors. but there are examples that show that such a scale is useful. but we all know, anecdotally, that people can be rated on such a scale. people who benefit from great parents and mentors, who had excellent educations, had excellent nutrition and so on, reside on the more positive end of the scale.
so the people are the building blocks from which a society is built. everything in that society is a function of the people. so it is possible to assess a given society on a similar scale to the people: a certain society that has a certain distribution of certain kinds of people will experience certain outcomes. let us imagine that we take a large sample of societies and subject them to this idea where everyone gets their own personal nuclear weapon. in fact, lets boil it down to its logical core: let us imagine that every single person in society is given a button. if they press the button, the entire society will be instantly destroyed. they are all aware of this when they get their button.
on one extreme side of the scale or spectrum, a society filled with extremely smart, well educated, well adjusted and emotionally healthy people who all have great jobs and lives, in other words a properly structured society filled with very good people, not a single instance of button pressing would occur. you could in fact give each person the power to end the world and the world would go on unharmed. this is the goal. it can never be achieved because sometimes people go insane or have a bad break up or what have you, but its no different than an electronic device trying to use power as efficiently as possible: electronics strive for zero power consumption and societies should strive to reach the point where the aforementioned scenario is possible.
now we look at the real world. we see that gun control, voting, and all kinds of other things are actually the same thing: different ways in which citizens are trusted or not trusted with power. we see that in a healthy democracy or republic, the vote is far more powerful than the gun. we see that any healthy democracy or republic requires that its citizens are up to the task of handling power responsibly. and i think that if you agree with all the previous statements, you agree that much of the western world is in a lot of trouble right now. and say that without even the smallest shred of arrogance or snobbery.
so, this leads to a very interesting consideration of the limits of power that the citizens of the united states or the united kingdom might handle before something bad happened. and it is also fun to consider what the maximum amount of power the citizens are capable of handling after some kind of focused effort to make them ready. how much power could they handle if schools and jobs and everything were made better? what is the best outcome we might hope to achieve?
so the answer to your questions is that no, individuals probably shouldnt have nukes but they could probably handle some really dangerous stuff like chemical weapons or heavy machine guns if you just gave them the tools they need.
I agree with you to a degree. But I think a more useful way of thinking about it is through the lens of risk. Each citizen carries a risk of violence. Weapons multiply that violence, education and socialization reduce its probability. So we have an equation:
ExpectedHarm = P_incident * Harm
Weapons multiply harm, and education reduces P. Nuclear weapons cause ExpectedHarm to approach infinity almost regardless of P_incident, so they are out. But guns, knives, acid, and other weapons all sit along a continuum.
Increasing access to guns unquestionably increases ExpectedHarm (arguments like 'if everyone had guns, people would be well behaved' are, of course, ridiculous on their face), but there are social benefits to guns. Some people enjoy hunting, sport shooting, and carrying a gun makes many people 'feel' safer (which, though hard to quantify, remains a true social good, in some sense). Guns are also, to some degree, a check on government power. I don't particularly like the Bundy's position or what they stood for, but their access to guns is absolutely what gave them the power to make that stand. You can count this as a positive or negative depending on your perspective. I tend to count it as a positive even though most uses of it, like the Bundy's, I strongly disagree with.
And finally, there is the sort of 'constant' boost to the positive side you get from the general bias we ought to have against banning things (you may choose to set this to zero or negative if you hate freedom). So, the full equation is:
SocialGood + LibertarianBias - P_incident * Harm * BanEfficacy
If this expression is greater than zero, you should leave it alone. This does ignore some theoretical nonlinear terms (e.g. banning guns increases the probability of other forms of violence, or vice versa), but it more or less captures the idea. Depending on which values you input for various terms, you'll get a different answer.
All of that is to say that whether or not any given weapon ought to be legal should be evaluated according to a framework that looks something like the above.
right, but what is missing here is the observation that all the duties of a citizen also carry power to do harm. therefore, in order for society to prosper, its citizens must be able to handle guns and draino, because voting and going about their everyday lives have just as much potential to ruin things.
I've upvoted you but we also need to crack down hard on the people that commit these terrible crimes. Worse than murder, this is a way of causing someone lifelong suffering, and in the lag time before utopia arrives we have to be pragmatic.
i would view this as a good way of making bad behaviour expensive.
If anyone wonders why, it is because the UK over here has a little legal loophole where carrying acid in any reasonable (non-truckload) amount is not in any way a criminal or incriminating act, where-as guns, knives, and loads of other things are.
What is sad is it's taking so long for policians to wake up and realise that some non-scientist carrying a huge jug of acid in a backpack is kinda obviously incriminating...
so carrying a shopping bag with domestic drain cleaner inside is obviously incriminating? and carrying a shopping bag with a new knife set is incriminating?
If you're young, in an area with frequent attacks, moving with a gang, and not on a trajectory from the store to the location of your claimed clogged drain, then yes, I'd say it's pretty incriminating.
Street officers are usually pretty experienced and capable of making a judgement whether this should be looked into further. If needed, the evidence and circumstances can be reviwed in court.
It's not an all or nothing situation. We're capable of nuance.
> British retailers are now talking about licensing the purchase of sulfuric acid.
Banning or controlling something that could be used as a weapon is not the solution. As has been already demonstrated by controlling firearms and knives, criminals will just find an alternative.
"Better apply for a gun licence and do my 3 weeks of training before I hold up that petrol station." - Said no one ever.
Really? I think making guns extremely hard to get has been pretty good for NYC.
I'd be more inclined to blame the reduction in violent crime in NYC on it's staggering large and well-equipped police force. If a criminal really wanted a gun in NYC, they probably aren't going to obtain one legally so making them harder to get only creates a minor inconvenience.
Guns aren't a major industrial commodity chemical with hundreds if not thousands of valid non-violent civil uses, however...
Could people conceivably keep a package of baking soda or calcium carbonate with them? would that be an effective on-the-spot antidote? Hmm or maybe get to the nearest kiosk and get some alka seltzer...
Potentially, but the neutralization of sulfuric acid releases a ton of heat (sometimes enough to crack glassware). By neutralizing the sulfuric acid without giving the heat anywhere to dissipate, you might just end up making things worse.
Also, as a small unrelated note, I doubt calcium carbonate would work well for neutralizing sulfuric acid-- the calcium sulfate formed is for the most part insoluble and stops the reaction.
Best thing would probably be a lot of water. Here's a video of someone willingly pouring 98% sulfuric acid onto their hand, they just wash it off: https://youtu.be/XeVZQoJ5FdE?t=284 . Plus, if someone pours a random liquid onto you, it's kind of hard to know if it's water, acid, lye...
I was about to say that adding water would be bad in the case of lye, but after some research it seems I was wrong. Probably watched/read "Fight Club" too often. Apparently using an acid like vinegar to neutralize lye is more painful than flushing with water and creates a lot of heat because of the strong reaction.[1,2] So the recommendation actually is to just flush with water for 15 minutes.[3]
[1]http://itonlyadds.blogspot.co.at/2012/08/on-chemical-burns-v...
[2]https://www.soapqueen.com/bath-and-body-tutorials/tips-and-t...
Good to know
There is a rich literature on culture-bound syndromes [0], but the same phenomenon is visible in certain criminal behaviors. To state it succinctly, crimes can be memes.
In the US, for instance, the school shooting is a meme: it's just what you do when you are massively angry at society and want to take revenge on it. Previously, "going postal" [1] was a meme amongst angry postal workers.
In Italy, several years ago, there was a string of incidents of rocks being thrown from highway overpasses, striking cars. The government reacted by numbering all overpasses to make reporting easier, but AFAIK what really kept it from becoming a meme was an informal agreement with the media to relegate such news to small articles in the inner pages. When this was done, the number of imitators quickly petered out, and the meme disappeared.
As for acid attacks, this is a meme that came from south-east Asia (e.g. Pakistan), where it was endemic a few decades ago. It spread to the UK due to its large population of immigrants from those countries, and for a while it was mostly confined within the Asian (in the UK sense) community, but it has now spread into the general population.
This is clearly an unpleasant observation, but it is quite obvious if you have paid attention to the crime news over the last few decades. I remember acid attacks in the UK making the international news when I was a child. Back then they followed what the NPR article calls the "global pattern" ("males attacking young women and girls, relating to rejected sexual advances or marriage proposals or dowry-related attacks"), and the attackers were not native Britons. But if we could look at detailed statistics for this crime, I bet we would see both an increase in prevalence, and an increase in the percentage of British perpetrators.
It is very tempting to ascribe these criminal memes to purely non-cultural factors, such as the availability of firearms in the US, and their limited availability in the UK, but it does not really work. School shootings were not always as prevalent in the US as they are now [2], nor is their prevalence proportional to that of guns across countries [3]; rocks and overpasses still exist in Italy [citation needed]; and the availability of acid in the UK has not increased relative to other cheap instruments of harm (e.g. knives, hammers), nor relative to other countries.
BTW, the fact that acid attacks existed in Victorian times (but how common were they?) has no bearing on any of this. A meme can die out in a place and later be reintroduced from another source, just as a living organism can (e.g. horses in America).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_postal [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting#cite_note-nyr2... [3]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/small-arms-survey-countries-wit...
Why was this flagged?
it is really sad that the first thing that comes up with this issue is, "omg immigrants are causing this" vs, why this crime is actually happening.
this article points to a case of someone who most likely isn't an immigrant yet that is the first thing people rush to.
edit: according to the wikipedia page, a disproportionate number of the attacks using acid are against women. why not talk about that instead?
Just like the Jews in post WW1 Germany, it's great (from a certain point of view) to have some group you can point at and blame everything on. Much easier than actually addressing problems and gives people targets to hate.
The UK has been using immigrants, and by extension the EU, in that role for a long time.
(To be clear, I think this is wrong, but it's definitely how it is.)
Did you actually read the article? It says that two-thirds of the victims in Britain are men while, globally, most are women. It's not about women in the UK.
Would you please read the site guidelines and follow them when commenting here?
Please don't insinuate that someone hasn't read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
I find it amusing that you didn't shorten this to "The site guidelines mention that". If I would have written Would you please read the article instead of asking if they had read it, would that be ok, or do you reserve that right to yourself only?
I will try to refrain from asking people if they have read anything. I've read the guidelines several times before, but this specific prohibition just slipped my mind. Your comment does feel effectively the same though.
Yes, moderation comments suck—to write as well as to read. If the community ever gets to the point of not needing them, it will be a dream come true.