THE escalation of murderous knife crime has prompted the folks in charge to begin pushing through a series of new regulations.

They include making it a criminal offence to possess so-called zombie knives - they’re a bit like any other knife except painted green and sometimes made in odd shapes - even in private.

In addition, anybody purchasing any knife online will be obliged to collect them in person from a post office or shop authorised to accept online deliveries, and their age must be verified.

These are clearly brilliant strategies which go right to the root of the problem and will be 100 percent effective. We must all give them our support and not indulge in critical thinking, as critical thinking is dangerous and counterproductive.

We must on no account, for example, reflect on the fact that there is a huge moral gulf between the vast majority of us and people who are willing to stab and slash their fellow human beings.

We must not conclude that those who have crossed that gulf do not particularly care what sort of knife they use.

We must not believe that they would just as cheerily use a kitchen knife to kill and maim - or for that matter a lump of wood with nails through the end, a hammer or a half brick.

We must not entertain the notion that the ban on zombie knives will protect precisely nobody, and that the only people likely to suffer are responsible, productive members of society who happen to be fans of zombie films and collect lurid memorabilia.

When we think about the new law saying knives ordered online must be collected in person from a post office or shop, it is imperative we dismiss any idea we had that there are many means of obtaining knives.

We must forget the fact that they can be bought in shops by anybody who is 18 or looks 18, and who is then free to distribute them as they wish. We must forget any idea that there are countless online knife suppliers based overseas whose activities are impossible to police.

On the subject of things being impossible to police, we must shut our minds to the fact that there is an entire section of the internet, accessible by anybody with a little ingenuity and patience, where anonymous vendors sell not just knives but fully-functioning automatic weapons, boxes of hand grenades and all manner of other horrors.

If we allow ourselves to fall into these dangerous ways of thinking, we might allow ourselves to fall into even more dangerous ways of thinking.

We might, for example, begin to suspect that for the most part, responsibility for knife crime rests not with the knife but with the person wielding the knife.

Indeed, we might ponder the strange truth that as far as most of us are concerned, if we had a garage full of yard-long zombie knives, the net danger we presented to society would increase not one iota. For that matter, the same would apply if we had a Bren gun in the loft and an atom bomb in the shed - provided we didn’t inadvertently set off the atom bomb while looking for the barbecue coals or whatever.

Were we to begin thinking along those lines, we might decide that the best way to tackle knife crime is through deterrent sentences for those beyond hope and a raft of measures to catch those at risk before they cross the moral gulf I mentioned a few paragraphs back.

If we all came to that conclusion and demanded action, our lawmakers would be faced with the prospect of having to do something a lot more complex, expensive and effective than banning knives with a bit of green paint on them.

And that would never do.