Observations from the Sydney Stabbing By John Steele

      Australians are in shock over the Sydney stabbing spree, which saw a young white sex worker brutally murdered:
  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-14/sydney-stabbing-alleged-victim-identified/11414000

     This incident shows the potential dangers of this profession, for not only do women face these threats from potential murders, but there is the daily threat of being beaten up. So, that is the first message from this. Reality says that there will always be sex workers, so the issue is how to help increase safety, and I don’t know how this would be achieved, but maybe someone will come up with a solution:

“The attack has hit sex workers hard, with many women telling the ABC they often fear for their safety. "It's someone from our community and it does cut pretty deep," said Rose Harper, a sex worker who travels Australia for her clients. "It could have been any of us … It's in the back of our minds." Ms Harper said that the threat of violence was something many sex workers and escorts had to contend with. "It is a struggle to know that we could get up and go to work and just try and put food on the table and then have our lives cut short by something like this," she said. "There's certain safety measures I take, but at the end of the day I'm a five-foot-five (1.6 metre) woman. I could probably be overpowered by almost any man out there. "But that's not to say that we expect to be killed."

     My gut feeling is that this is one argument for women being able to carry firearms even if you did not want to give them to men, just to create a level playing fields, so to speak. In any case sex workers will need to be extra careful after this sad event, as these killings tend to get replicated by crazies, as we saw with the US shooting sprees. Some facts:

“A young man carrying a butcher’s knife and shouting “Allahu Akbar” after allegedly murdering one woman and stabbing another in Sydney’s CBD yesterday had access to materials about this year’s Christchurch massacre, mass killings in the US and other acts of violence. The bloody rampage allegedly carried out by 20-year-old Mert Ney, which caused the city centre to be put into lockdown, was only brought to a halt by the heroic efforts of bystanders who tackled the attacker and pinned him to the ground before police and other emergency services arrived.”

     The knife spree has not been classified as an act of terrorism, on the argument that the killer had no links to terrorist organisations. But, that rules out, by definition lone wolf terrorists. Anyway, the tragic incidence shows that people do not need guns to go on terror rampages, and banning knives has done nothing to London, that has events like this one every day or so now. The other lesson here, and one that is no getting the attention it deserves is that ordinary people tackled the knife man using things like milk crates and actually defeated him, holding him until police came. This is tremendous stuff, real heroism, and maybe some medals of bravery should be given out to these folks.

     In summary, another deeply sad event showing the disintegration of our society, but, there is still some hope with some brave individuals still being out there.