Illegal
Posted on 01/28/2006 6:11:13 PM PST by Copernicus
OPPRESSIVE KNIFE LAWS
by Bernard Levine (c)1998 published in BLADE Magazine
In BLADE Magazine, back in the first half of 1997, I offered a six-part compilation of the many and varied knife laws of our fifty states. But what are these laws really about? Why do we have them? Do they actually do any good?
To me these questions are far more interesting than the details of the laws themselves. Here is how I see the answers.
* * *
> THE LAWS ON THE BOOKS
Nearly every state has knife laws. So does the federal government. So also do countless cities and towns -- except where the state legislature has pre-empted this sort of ordinance, retaining a monopoly for itself.
These knife laws are artifacts of fear -- of prejudice and uncertainty. If you know a little American history, you can look at a knife law's wording, and tell when it was first enacted.
* If it speaks of bowie knives and Arkansas toothpicks, it dates back to the second quarter of the 19th century, to the rapid and sometimes lawless expansion of settlement in the Mississippi River basin.
* If it speaks of concealed dirks and daggers, it dates to the wave of anarchist and pro-German terror bombings around 1915-1918, which frightened an entire generation of Americans into surrendering their liberty.
* If it speaks of switchblades and gravity knives, it dates to the "West Side Story" era of the late 1950s, when the mass media drummed up fear of teen-age gangs, and of violence by immigrant refugees with too many vowels in their names.
* And if it speaks of school grounds, and "dangerous" weapons, it most likely dates to the convulsive expansion of puritanical prior restraint of our own politically correct era.
*
> THE GREAT DIVIDE
Ever since its first European settlements, in the early 1600s, America developed as two completely different republics. We have been politically divided ever since, and will always remain so. This is because our two founding republican traditions are both opposite and irreconcilable.
On one side of the divide were the agrarian republicans like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. They gave us the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, with their foundation stones of equal creation, personal freedom, and the inalienable rights of every citizen. Theirs was a republic of innate virtue, where crime and vice were nothing more than aberrations. An individual's misbehavior was only of concern to the State when other citizens had been harmed by it.
On the other side of the divide were the puritanical republicans like the autocratic clergyman, Cotton Mather. These men believed all citizens to be innate sinners, irresistibly driven to dastardly deeds unless rigidly restrained by the State. Their puritan republic, their City of God, was like a brittle chain, which a single weak link would sunder. In their world, even the slightest mis-step from pious purity had to be prevented at all cost. Countless detailed laws and regulations were devised, and then constantly revised, in order to eliminate every possibility of straying. To the true puritan -- whether pious Christian, secular humanist, or leveling socialist -- notions of rights and responsibilities are meaningless. All that matters is the prevention of sin. No form of prior restraint can be too severe, if it advances this fundamental goal.
Guess which side gave us our knife laws.
> WHY THEY DO IT
The puritanical impulse is a deep one. We all have it. It is founded in the fear that other people's freedom of action is a threat to our own safety, our own sanctity. It is the impulse to make the other fellow toe the mark.
The puritan knows that his own motives are good, but he does not trust yours. By regulating every detail of everyone else's life, he believes he can prevent crime before it happens. This is so much neater and safer than waiting to punish actual crimes after the fact.
The puritan impulse is the wish to make all risk disappear. This seems much more direct than learning how to manage or avoid risk, and much less demanding than arming oneself to defend against risk. The puritan, like the primitive shaman, seeks to make everything right in the world by magical words of command.
Has it ever worked? Can it ever work? Look at the record -- it has never been successful. Puritanism is, at bottom, simple tyranny, and tyranny is doomed to failure.
But puritanism's unbroken record of failure will not stop people from trying again and again. Every new generation is born with faith in the power of magic words -- written laws -- to prevent sin. And every American generation for the past century and a half has produced its own new wave of oppressive and futile knife laws.
> THE RATIONALE OF REPRESSION
No one but a puritan would imagine that a particular TYPE of knife, lying in a drawer in someone's private home, should be construed as a crime. "Some knives are just inherently dangerous," said a New York state senator in 1958 -- a sentiment often echoed since then. To a puritan this is self-evident truth. To an agrarian it is poppycock. Here is why the two outlooks are so different.
An agrarian republican recognizes that other people are his equals, no better and no worse. Curtailing another man's freedom does not enhance one's own, but merely encourages the other man to return the "favor," in a descending spiral of mutual repression.
But to a puritan, on the other hand, repression is the whole point of law and government. Without repression there would be chaos. Then sin would prevail, and we would all go to hell in a handcart.
The agrarian republicans, when they were in power back in the 1780s, generously extended their 'live and let live' philosophy to every citizen -- including even their puritan opponents. Since that time, the puritans have made full use of this grant of liberty, to enact all the tyrannical regulations and prior restraint that they desired. And they generously extended their increasingly oppressive rule to every citizen -- including of course the agrarians. For the puritans it was a 'heads I win, tails you lose' proposition. To this day, the few remaining agrarians have never figured out what hit them.
But puritans can be selectively tolerant -- in their own distinctive way. They insist upon extending their repressive laws to people who disagree with them. But they generally exempt one small group from all of their laws and rules -- namely their own leaders. I guess the theory must be that their leaders are so exalted and pure, that their foibles are not really sins at all. Their transgressions will not endanger the community, the way yours or mine would. This was just as true in William Bradford's Plymouth and Cotton Mather's Boston, as it was three centuries later in Joseph P. Kennedy's Boston and Adolf Hitler's Berlin, and as it is today in Bill Clinton's Washington.
Best regards to all
if you don't like the knife laws...get a gun.
Illegal
I love these trips through history. Maybe Cindy Sheehan can add it to her Department of History. lol Some knives are inherently dangerous? Nooooo. I just can't believe it. Sometimes you have to wonder how many moths have set up residence in the minds of such politicians.
a few months ago a man got his clothing stuck on an escalator in the porter square T stop in boston. No one had a knife to cut him out and he was choked to death by the machine in front of a crowd that could only call 9-11.
I would love to be able to carry a switch blade. One-handed operation!
They are trying to ban knives in Britain. Are they puritans?
I was in a local Army/Navy store last week and looked at switch blades. The cheapest was $50, the next up was $160 and the most expensive was $600. They were all well made knives and I coveted even the least of them. :-)
I don't know the laws for Montana. I suppose with CCW one could carry a switch knife, but I'm not certain.
Perhaps the law has been changed but I suspect thousands of people were or are in danger of being a convicted felon. I do suspect it wouldn't hold up in a serious court trial.
I believe the current technical term for the British Left is "idiot". (With apologies to congenital idiots everywhere)
Best regards,
This is really silly when criminals are using guns and a big kitchen knife is a better weapon.
Takes a good bit of practice, but the "butterfly" blade is one handed. Quite a display watching someone who is really good work it. Picture a Leatherman tool with the blade folded inside the two handle halves instead of the pliers.
The puritan reference brought to mind an old Andy Capp comic strip. (Bit of Puritan there. Really witty English comic, rarely seen any more. Most papers dropped it after the domestic violence people got outraged. Andy and wife Flo would betimes roll about like Beetle Bailey and Sarge.) Anyway, Andy, speaking of his mother-in-law once; "She's the sort would have people arrested for walking around naked underneath their clothes."
The Gerber "Gator" is the easiest to learn the "start with the thumb and flip of the wrist" method. The "old reliable" Buck knife works well too but takes a little more practice.
From the Gospel of Bill: Bring Not A Knife To A Gun Fight.
Have a look.
But puritanism's unbroken record of failure will not stop people from trying again and again. Every new generation is born with faith in the power of magic words -- written laws -- to prevent sin.
Thanks for the advice. I'll be on the hunt for one fitting to me, and non-stainless, unless someone knows how to keep a stainless blade sharp, which I do not.
Thanks also.
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