THE Daily Echo's Get Knives Off Our Streets may be a well worthwhile campaign, but the fact is we are going about it from the wrong end.

Knives are no danger to anyone. It is the people that carry them!

Mine and all other households have large, deadly knives in our kitchens. Does this make us a threat to our neighbours? I think not.

The trouble is not knives, but the lack of discipline and punishment in our schools and family life. We must accept responsibility for the way we have brought up our children since the end of the last war. We teach them no respect for the police, teachers or their parents.

You only have to look at films, TV, children's games, etc, it is all violence and bad language, then we wonder why our children grow up to be violent. That is where we have gone wrong.

Recently there was a case of a young lad being surrounded by police for firing a cap gun.

How paranoid can one get? Pre-war, when I was a young man, most children had cap guns and six shooter revolvers and would spend many a happy hour, playing cowboys and Indians, or cops and robbers. But was there all this violence? No, just good fun.

Most children would have a large penknife or dagger in their belts, the bigger the better. But no violence, just innocent fun! Yes, we had gang fights, but this was never violent, as it is today. If you knocked someone down, you would most likely say sorry and help him up.

We were not brought up in a culture of bad language and violence.

So we are now paying for our mistakes.

Taking knives off the streets will not in itself stop the people that are violent, they will only find another weapon!

A W HANLON, Southampton.