UK Sword Ban Campaign - Make Your Voice Heard!

Saz · Mar 6, 2007

As many of you are aware, the UK Government are considering a total ban on sword ownership.

You may not think this directly affects you if your martial art style does not use weapons, but the consquences for many schools could be far reaching. If you care about the practice of Martial Arts in Great Britian and want to see all martial arts practiced freely and without predjudice, you should put your weight behind this cause.

A petition has been placed at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/swords/ in an effort to get Tony Blair to reconsider this move.

In addition to signing the online petition, Aegis has written the following letter. To bring extra attention to this issue, we ask that you take a copy from here, edit it and post it to your local MP. MAP has thousands of UK visitors, if even a small fraction of you contact your MP about this, we might be able to generate the right sort of response to this. You are free to do this if you are a MAP Member or MAP Guest. (all we ask is you leave the footnote with mine and Aegis's contact details in)

You can locate your local MP on this site http://www.writetothem.com/

Aegis said:

Dear <insert MP name here>

I have recently been made aware of a potential UK-wide ban on the owning of all types of sword. Although I have been unable to find a reliable source of information about the proposal itself or indeed any details on when or by whom the issue will be debated, the issue concerns me and I wanted to get in touch with you to voice this concern.

No-one argues against the fact that swords are weapons and require laws to control their use and transportation, but the current laws already forbid the carrying of swords in public without at least two bags, and even then they are only to be carried to and from a place of legitimate use (re-enactments, sale, displays, martial arts training, etc.). As a sword is a rather conspicuous item to carry about, this rule should be fairly simple to enforce with adequate police presence on the streets.

Benefits gained from banning swords would be minimal. At present, bladed weapons are involved in around 5% of violent crimes in London(1), with the vast majority of these bladed weapons being knives, a much more easily concealed weapon that can either be acquired with very little effort or made from perfectly legal materials. Swords are therefore responsible for a small fraction of 5% of violent crimes in the UK, meaning that even if all swords were removed from the hands of criminals the absolute best outcome would be around a 0.5% drop in violent crimes, and that would be assuming that one in ten blades used in violent crimes could be considered a sword.

In short, I feel that this ban would be a waste of time even if successful, and this doesn't even consider the fact that criminals would be much less inclined to adhere to the ban than those of use with legitimate reasons for wanting to own swords.

Banning swords would cause major problems for the following: students/instructors of traditional martial arts, re-enactment societies, retailers, collectors and other interested parties, all for very little benefit.

If you have any information on this issue that you can share with me, please contact me <insert contact details>. Alternatively, an open discussion of this matter exists on Martial Arts Planet (http://martialartsplanet.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63922). Membership there is free, or any information that you feel can be passed on could be e-mailed to one of the administrators(2).

Yours sincerely,

<insert your name>
<insert your occupation/past-time/MA grade if relevant>

References:

(1)http://www.london.gov.uk/gangs/docs/guns-weapons-report.rtf
(2)Martial Arts Planet Administrators willing to receive information to hand out to others:
1.Ian Hawkes (aka Aegis) - Aegis@martialartsplanet.com
2.Sarah Evans (aka Saz) - Saz@martialartsplanet.com
Click to expand...

Lets make our voices heard on this! The discussion thread can be found here http://www.martialartsplanet.com/forums/showthread.php?t=63922

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UK Sword Ban Campaign - Make Your Voice Heard!

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UK Sword Ban Campaign - Make Your Voice Heard!

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