Your country's prosecution of self defence?

Knife bans is a literal stop gap. Theres also no technicality in stopping the sale of certain blades. Its down to the shop owners to exercise their right to refuse a sale if they think the sale is susp.

But in the end...we all got knives. Look in your kitchen.

Weapons laws in the UK are clearly stated. Its just that no one reads up on them.

Can I carry a knife? Yes. It depends on itent.
How can I prove intent? Get stopped by Police and see what happens.

A Butcher in full butchery clothing can walk around with a knife in his waistband.

But someone somewhere somehow is going to call Police and say...

Theres a big fella all in white, covered in blood with a blade in his belt.

Blue lights and lots of screaming later. Its a call made in good faith (which is 90% of the time these calls happen). A small misunderstanding.
The stupid thing is, people who already know the above result will simply say
"Oh i knew it was a butcher, cops are just a waste of time. Common sense, etc"

But would you risk it? Guns are legal to openly carry in certain parts of the World.
But if you saw someone with a gun in their hand, that certain "angry" stride and determined look on their face....what would you do? (Rhetoric, no need to answer)

(Further examples are military/authority uniform, religious/traditional dress etc in regards to having blades in UK)

Theres also the cultural aspect, that we all subconciounsly are aware but then also do not factor in our reasoning.

US SD Laws are similar BUT not the same as UK SD Laws and vice versa.
Just because we speak the same language, we are culturally different people with differing points of views on how the World should be run.

"I am shocked it happened over there because over here we wont do that" or phrases similar, in the end....doesnt matter because it didnt happen over here. Laws with all their benefits and flaws are country specific.
There are horrendous Laws in other countries, that are never discussed nor addressed.

Like TV Licences. What the hell?? Thats not even a civil law either!

 

But, and correct me if I'm wrong, didn't the UK used to have teenagers? And poverty? And also knives?

What changed?

Little bit of column A, little bit of column B.

Sure, but then we come back to the legal components of a weapon, which is either made or intended. If kitchen knives are made as weapons, you have a more serious problem. If they're not, then restricting people from buying innocuous objects is....well I believe I've made my thoughts on that clear.

And this is one of the reason's why I think it's not just not beneficial, but actually harmful for government's to be able to enact this kind of performative legislation. If they can simply declaw the public, then they don't care if it's mad that it's getting its tail pulled.

I've carried one daily since I got my first one, with the exception of air travel, and I don't think I've used mine less than twice a day in all that time. Also I think that's more an indictment of children switching from outdoor to indoor activities.

Sure, but again, slippery slope. What's the line where something is so incapable of causing harm that you're finally willing to let teenagers, people who are nearly adults, buy them?

 

Which of course won't happen when the person wants to use it for violence and has it concealed.

And yet I'm pretty sure that even if you went to Texas, or Florida, that scenario would play out the same regardless of the fact you can literally walk around with a katana on your back a bowie knife on your hip, in addition to some of the more rangey options.

And being a Canadian we're the forgotten child in the mix

Sure, but also, we're all human beings. If you have a national problem with, say, sexual assault in the military (yay us /sarcasm), a national rape problem (not naming names), or teens running around stabbing each other, that's a national behavioural problem. It can't reasonably be dismissed the way Americans so often try to with "well that's a different country." That's really just a deflective spin on ad hominem, trying to avoid the responsibility of agency. Ad gentem?

 

Haha...funnily enough on my kids trips to school and down the green to meet their friends or even camping in the lakes the need to skin a squirrel has never come up. Nor has it in my 48 years of life in the UK.
Rope is not really a feature of modern life is it? Don't think I've ever needed to cut any.
Prying things open can ruin a knife edge so I prefer to find a screw driver for those kinds of jobs.
Cutting fruit is better done in the kitchen and almost certainly with a knife you didn't previously use to skin a squirrel! And if it comes to that most fruit can be eaten without needing to cut a slice off and eat that off a blade like some sort of cliched movie villain.
Opening packaging can be a fair one but I find a simple multi-tool blade perfectly adequate for that without the need to carry a folding spyderco or something. In fact my gerber has a tool specifically for that purpose. Most packaging these days (amazon boxes for example) is designed to be opened easily without the use of tools.

Obviously lifestyle can dictate what tools a person uses and needs and I find carrying a multi-tool a useful addition about my person even though my need to skin squirrels is fairly limited. I use it maybe a couple of times a week. Used the tweezers onit yesterday to remove a splinter from child 2.
My gerber (previously a leatherman) is basically my key ring and just sits there until I need it. So much so I forgot I had it on me on a recent visit to the Harry Potter studio tour and security requested I hand it in until I exited the tour. Which I did obviously.

 

To start, the causes of the spike in teenage knife crime is correlated to social deprivation, particularly austerity measures that slashed local budgets after the 2008 financial crash. Youth services and gang interventions pretty much stopped. The government has zero interest in fixing the actual root problems, because that would involve promoting socio-economic equity, which they are ideologically opposed to.

Age restrictions on buying knives and police stop-and-search powers don't appear to have had much impact on the stats. Like most legislation, it's written by woefully out of touch people in knee jerk reactions to newspaper headlines.

However, your slippery slope argument could be applied pretty much any law. I don't see why this one is any different.

But it does seem fairly obvious to me that inner city kids in gangs wouldn't have a problem finding an adult to purchase weapons for them. You also had the very silly "zombie knife" ban, because cheap zombie apocalypse machetes were used in some high profile cases.

Having said that, the age restrictions do help parents who want to keep tabs on the weapons their kids own, which, while their children live under their roof, I don't find unreasonable. I would not be opposed to an exception for kids who move out of their parents' house before they are 18.

 

But you guys also don't really hunt much.

I mean, I cut string, paracord, zip ties, etc on a regular basis.

Nah, you just need a better knife.

Don't have to carry a container this way. Some of us wash our knives. And as for the squirrel thing, if I'm out hunting I'm carrying multiple knives in addition to my usual anyway.

Your choice. But, sharing, cutting cheese, summer sausage, etc.

That sounds like a you choice, not a choice you should be making for other people though.

I too carry a multi-tool....an 8-13cm folding knife. It works for a variety of jobs for which I don't have to then carry a multi-tool. Just the other day I too had to get a splinter out of my hand, something I wouldn't have been able to do with tweezers anyway, and if I could do it with tweezers I could pretty easily scrape it out.

But either way, this seems like a choice I shouldn't be making for you, you shouldn't be making for me, and we shouldn't be making for others, and the government certainly shouldn't be making for any of us.

 

Yeah! Everyone should be allowed acces to knives and nuclear material!

 

Because the cycle of government induced paranoia with regard to safety from violence so regularly goes like this:

1. Tell people you have a problem, often as a political distraction from other issues or to make points during an election.
2. Enact performative legislation which doesn't fix said problem but looks like it treats the symptomatic portion, usually with some sort of ban, licensing, age restriction, etc.
3. Inattentional blindness means people eventually stop seeing the legislation as novel and forget it was to fix a problem, instead becoming just a part of every day life.
4. The problem persists because the solution in point two didn't actually address the problem.
5. Repeat steps one through four as needed for political machinations.

I mean, I find the default classification of any blade as a "weapon" whether it is purpose built to be one or not to be unreasonable, and you're the second person I've seen make that implication.

 

Is that what you had before you banned knives? My goodness, the UK was somehow both able to control its the impulse to use nuclear material for evil, while simultaneously being unable to cope with simple kitchen cutlery. What an odd land.

 

Remember - nuclear materials aren't just weaponry, they're primarily used for energy. Why should a government restricted simple energy production?

 

I think you are misdiagnosing the problem. There are no political machinations. The fear is generated by the media, politicians are enacting hasty, performative legislation to appease constituents. If anything, with recent attitudes to children and knife crime, it was the population that whipped itself up in paranoia and their representatives reacted. I guess that's representative democracy for you!

Our government's machinations lie elsewhere, in matters that affect their power: unions, protesting, thought crimes against the state (terrorism laws)... I'm sure they could not care less about poor kids hacking each other up with machetes, until it makes the headlines.

That's a fair point, and the bias comes from being a 14 year old boy myself once, and being in the company of 14 year old boys at the time. Hunting knives, butcher knives, kitchen knives, pocket knives, butterfly knives etc. weren't seen as neutral tools. Also, my work involves studying post mortems and crime scenes of murder victims, so I see how innocuous bladed tools are used on a regular basis. I fully acknowledge this is a sampling error on my part.

The thing is, for blades to be used responsibly you need the correct context and guidance. No-one needs a Bowie knife if their life is spent within 3 miles of a tower block, and there is not the political will to supply the correct context and guidance to educate kids on how to use blades as tools.

 

Exactly this man.
Only someone who has never lived in the UK believes a child needs a knife for everyday carry.

A teenager in London doesn't need a knife while walking down his local highstreet.
Even when I lived in the Scottish countryside I never needed a knife for daily carry.

 

That was my point about carrying a multi-tool as opposed to carrying a knife. A knife is a totemic item.
I find that people who carry knives are more wedded to them than simple tools. They try to pretend they are neutral but really there is cultural "baggage" with a knife.
Whenever people mention how they use pocket folders day to day to justify carrying them, 99% of the time a smaller multi-tool would do everything they mention just as well or even better (and more besides like also being a screw driver, tweezers, tooth pick, pliers, scissors, etc). And yet they don't have the same cache.
A multi-tool would be pretty much useless for self defence (too fiddly to find the small blade on it in extremis) and so doesn't feel as comforting to carry on the belt like a true knife does. Even though it is, for the most part, a more practical item.

Now that's not to devalue the totemic nature of blades and knives. I get it. I like a good knife as much as the next man. I have a cheap mora that, for the price, is amazing. I have a whittling blade my wife bought for xmas one year I value highly.
I'm just not fussed that my kids have to have me there to buy such items until they are old enough to make a decent decision about it.

I also get that a person in Canada who goes hunting, fishing, etc on the regular has a different relationship with knives than a 15 year old kid in Brixton or my kids in rural (but nor very rural) Yorkshire.

 

Yeah, the UK is a high density population with almost no wilderness. It's too small to have local criminal law. Police can and do use their discretion when applying the law to a 16 year old camping versus a 16 year old loitering outside a nightclub in the middle of a city.

I believe Canadian law also applies intent to tools in the same way.

 

I would argue it's still political. Just like race-baiting in US media, or pushing divisive narratives to keep people afraid. Are the media politicians? No, but the social is the political.

It's a convenient distraction. Law of triviality and whatnot.

Cut things, not people, unless you really really have to. That's really all the correct guidance you need and it could fit on a post-it note.

No one needs to be telling someone they can't carry a simple, useful tool though. If people are absolutely terrified at the thought of someone walking around with a folding knife in their pocket, your society has enormous problems.

But the law apparently doesn't have enough intelligence to just leave people alone who are minding their own business not causing problems...

 

I would counter from the other perspective. A knife is a totemic item for people who are so terrified of the people around them that they need an object they can imbue with that fear. Really, they're just used by nearly everyone for innocuous tasks. I find that people who are terrified of people carrying knives are wedded to their fear over legislative practicality. They try to pretend they're about practical considerations, but there really is a lot of cultural "baggage" with a knife. People could easily have terrified themselves with something like a screwdriver or an awl, and take away all the knives, and they most certainly will.

Who are you to determine what tool I need to do my tasks though? Would you be okay with me digging through your home and your pockets and deciding which items I think are suitable to the tasks I think you need to carry out? I don't think very many people, even the self-panic-inducing busybodies who think they should decide whether people should be able to carry simple tools, would answer in the affirmative.

A knife is a multi-tool. It's just about having the knowledge to actually use it. And speaking of multi-tools it's almost always: tiny blades, often no lock or a poor lock, awful steel, bad design, poor geometry, awful grip, large and heavy if they're big enough to have a reasonable sized blade, difficult to clean... And if I need a screwdriver, I'll go get a specialized tool like a screwdriver, I'll go get a screwdriver. There are a slew of reasons I prefer simple utility over a multi-tool, and when I do find occasion to carry one, it's in addition to my normal knife, not as a replacement.

I object to government treating teenagers like they're toddlers, and especially to the suggestion that carrying a simple, fundamentally basic tool which early hominids invented before we had fire or the wheel, is somehow malicious.

I've found just as much use for a pocket knife in the city as outside of it.

 

Children have the same right to carry a blade as adults, they just can't purchase them.

As for context and blades, I would argue that until you are learning cooking, bushcraft, butchery, carpet laying or whatever, you don't have a need for those specialised blades. I don't find it unreasonable for the police to have the right to take a machete from a 14 year old riding his BMX around a sink estate (police powers of stop and search being a separate issue).

 

I've carried a knife since I was 6.Used on the farm,@work(A LOT),fishing,hunting,camping,hiking & all the frequent moments in daily life when they come in handy.

The idea I should have been carrying a heavy bulky multi tool the last 59 years is just....sorry,stupid.

I suppose I should state I'm not one of those US "knife nuts" nor a collector nor I do not belong to the National Knife Association with their constant lobbying of congress to block knife registration laws.

I do live in a state where nunchaku,wrist rocket slingshots and shuriken are illegal!