Tam reports that Indiana is attempting to repeal their dumbass laws on Automatic Knives.
I was just talking at how switchblade-like my CRKT Vertex is, and the kershaw Zing beside it opens just as fast without any assistance at all…and of course if I’m carrying a defensive knife, I’m not fucking with a blade that needs to be opened at all, I’m carrying a fixed-blade.
Of course Tam points out that the laws are generally based on Racism, and Hollywood Stereotypes.
It seems when I read knife laws a few other stupid things show up. Of course “Throwing Stars” are there, and I guess that makes sense if you’re afraid of stuff in general. Still frequently I see Gravity Knife which as far as I can tell (correct me if I’m wrong) was an evolutionary dead-end that terminated as a WWII German Paratrooper knife, and usually Ballistic Knives, which is generally just a ball of failure with the occasional Mall Ninja or regular village-grade idiot claiming the combat effectiveness of said cow-flop.
I assume all these laws were drafted with some bizarre congressional circus where a bunch of people who have never had a real job their entire life, and are only partially literate, telling people who have never had a real job and have their assistance read all the words for them how horrible and dangerous these knives are, and they must be BANNNNNED imminently or the human population will drop to Zero in a fortnight!
When really knife people just go “Meh” and get on with their lives. Also with one of my favorite knives being an assisted blade, I still prefer the simpler non-assisted variants, and certainly adding a switch to make the gun a full-fledged “Automatic” ads yet another unit to make so my blade might not deploy when I have stuff that needs cutting.
Kinda sad when its the dumbest people in the world who make the laws that govern the rest of us…
It’s the exact same mindset that got so-called assault rifles banned. They look scary on paper to ignorant people, movies make them look far more dangerous than they really are, and they make a great foil for the politicians to attack.
Typical unsurprising nonsensical bullshit.
Indiana’s “throwing star” prohibition dates back to the pilot episode of “Kung Fu”. In the training montage one of the monks is throwing metal stars at a wooden man (not a mook jong but a cut out of a man). The son of a rep and his friend then procured throwing stars and chewed up a garage door. The bill was shortly introduced.
thanks for the history lesson. Isn’t wonderful people this stupid get to make laws for us?
For Dumb laws this is a nice progression of the anti’s hatred of everything and love of the creeping police state.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knife_legislation#United_Kingdom
“This development, combined with increasingly frequent application of such laws to marginal or inadvertent offenders by the police and the public prosecutor[34][47][48] can easily result in an arrest and a criminal charge in the event a person carrying a folding knife, scissors, plastic knife, multi-tool, or bladed object is detained and searched, and the defendant may have to wait weeks or months for a trial or other disposition of his case by the public prosecutor.[33][46][49][50][51][52][53][54] HM Customs officials in the Customs Inspection unit at the Mount Pleasant Postal Depot in London, aware of the steadily narrowing interpretation of what constitutes a legal knife in England and Wales, have begun confiscating knives imported through the mails, going so far as to individually test otherwise legal locking and non-locking[55] bladed pocket knives to see if they can be made to open their blades to the fully opened position with a practised “double-action of the wrist”; those that open fully and thus fail the ‘test’ are confiscated and destroyed as illegal ‘gravity knives’ under the Restriction of Offensive Weapons Act 1959.[
Paradoxically, the acknowledged failure of previously-enacted anti-knife legislation in reducing the number of violent crimes involving a knife[57] has led to demands for even stricter measures.[58][59] The likelihood of being detained and searched by the police in the United Kingdom depends frequently upon circumstances and the policies of the local constabulary, but is more likely to occur in areas noted for incidents of random assault and violent crime, where an individual encounters the police in the course of an investigation of a criminal complaint involving a knife, during vehicle stop-and-search operations at police checkpoints,[60] or where the police are conducting mass searches of the public at large in so-called dispersal zones as part of knife crime crackdown operations under Section 60 of the Public Order Act.[34][50][51][61][62][63]”
Good thing they banned guns (and knives). And I’m sure the police just need a bit more power and more checkpoints and that’ll do the trick.
In all seriousness that’s a pretty chilling segment right there.
One of the fun little toys included in the Massachusetts “dangerous weapons ban” AKA: the knife law, are “Clakers.” (Sometimes spelled with a ‘K’.) They are described in the law as if they were some form of nun chucks or other martial arts weapon. The only even remotely weapon-like thing they resemble are the “laser bola” used by the Borellian Nomen of the original Battlestar Galactica. And these don’t even light up! (Call special effects! My prop’s not working!)
In actual fact they really are toys! Back when I was around eleven years old and living down by Crystal Lake (off of Broadway past the Water Department’s pumping station) I had a pair or three. They were glass or possibly acrylic balls about an inch and a half in diameter molded onto opposite ends of a piece of string that was about two feet long with a metal ring tied in at the exact center. In use you hold the ring so the balls on the ends of the string dangle off of your hand like a yoyo and you bounce them up and down, slowly at first, until they bounce out horizontal past your hand. Then you can bring your hand down rapidly and get the balls to bounce off each other above your hand. By skillfully moving your hand up and down very rapidly between the balls you can get them to make a very loud and rapid ‘clacking’ sound. Hence the name.
The problems started when the occasional unskilled kid would get whacked in the wrist by the balls. It hurt! After a couple of broken wrists the .gov stepped in to save us from ourselves and banned them. But rather than writing a whole new law, it was more convenient to add them to the ever growing list of other dangerous things they were already protecting us from. Knives with blades longer than 3” and such. (I think they’ve kicked that down to 1½” since.) So that’s where this ban was put. Some forty years later very few people even remember what the hell they are! As a result, it is now a felony in Massachusetts merely to be in possession a vintage child’s toy.
Government in action. Doesn’t that make you feeeeeeel safe?
Me neither.
Oh look! There’s even a video of them on Youtube!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLHftISLNHE
Shit, those are illegal here? I think I have a few sets at my parent’s house in Maine!
Yes, sadly they are. “For the children!” There was an interesting discussion of this particular law over at the Volokh Conspiracy a while back. (Just came across it when Googling the law.) The comments are worth a read.
http://volokh.com/2010/05/20/what-is-a-zoobow/
Actually here’s an even better clacker video. This kid’s good. And if you watch all the way to the end it also shows why they were banned…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAXj70Pkehg