no idea if it had anything to do with gang culture or not, but i've been on the receiving end of a shank very recently and it's not cool. (wasn't actually stabbed but was threatened with the very real possibility of it.) this was all john eden's fault, btw.
i was a long way from being liberal about this in the first place, but actual personal experience has only solidified my view that a culture of going out tooled up needs to be tackled with extreme prejudice — both as punishment for the person carrying the weapon and as a deterrent for anyone else considering carrying weapons.
it's ridiculous that a stupid argument can turn into a murder so easily in many cases. of course, there are also tons of root causes that need to be tackled, like allowing kids to have a *positive* sense of ownership of their neigbourhood, better facilities, funding for youth programs etc and this needs to be done at the same time as the tough stuff, otherwise neither will work.
the thing about this being a problem specifically based around council housing is a red herring, really, given that london is a very integrated city in many ways. rich people live next door to poor, £4 million houses sit next to sink estates and some kids not involved in gangs are carrying weapons for their own protection now, because everyone else has one. my local shopkeeper told me about having to give his kid a hiding after finding out that he'd been carrying a blade for this very reason. he's a good kid, too, and shouldn't be in a position where he feels like that, so this is a problem that affects the whole city and one that needs to be tackled even-handedly, involving all members of the community. private schooling and the fact that a significant number of londoners can insulate themselves from working-class life — until something bad happens — certainly doesn't help, either.
the thing about gang culture in london is that it's not just allegiance to a certain postcode, it's more often than not allegiance to a certain *subsection* of a certain postcode. i find it interesting that this is where grime fell down, by taking american-style neighbourhood allegiance/pride and applying it in microcosm, to such small geographical areas that it no longer worked as a susainable economic model. with london street gangs we're we're not talking about neighbourhoods being involved, we're talking about sections of certain roads and it's ridiculous. not that bigger gangs are the answer, mind. i do think it shows britain as a very parochial little place at heart, though.