June 16th, 2009
Kopel: Obama administration moves to ban 80% of knives
I hear so often that gun owner worry over increased gun control is silly fear-mongering because Obama hasn’t tried to ban any guns yet. Only backwoods hicks are afraid of such things.
I’m wondering how that squares with the push for knife rules change.
UPDATE: From the comments:
All the general public will know is that in a few months Target will start selling pocket knives without the easy open feature or “thumb stud” and nobody will know why because it hasn’t been talked about on any TV news or newspaper. It’s such a small inconvenience that most people will not even notice and those that do will learn to live with it after a few months. Meanwhile we will lose a little a few more feet off beach of freedom to the sea of bureaucratic control over our lives.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
From what I understand it isn’t a legislation push. It is a rule change at the department level. According to Knife Rights http://www.kniferights.org/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1 “U.S. Customs has proposed revoking earlier rulings that assisted opening knives are not switchblades. The proposal would not only outlaw assisted opening knives, its overly broad new definition of a switchblade would also include all one-handed opening knives and most other pocket knives!”
The law is already on the books, they just have to change the definition of what is and evil switchblade. That way Obama and the congress doesn’t even have to do anything. It also will not make them “illegal.” Just illegal to import or ship across state lines… So they also have plausible deignability in that it will be next to imposable to buy one through legal means but they never made anything illegal. All the general public will know is that in a few months Target will start selling pocket knives without the easy open feature or “thumb stud” and nobody will know why because it hasn’t been talked about on any TV news or newspaper. It’s such a small inconvenience that most people will not even notice and those that do will learn to live with it after a few months. Meanwhile we will lose a little a few more feet off beach of freedom to the sea of bureaucratic control over our lives.
June 16th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
That’s a great catch, Ryan. I clearly wrote the wrong thing. I’ll change my wording to “push for rules change.”
Thanks.
June 16th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
I carry a Swiss Army Knife with me all the time. Yeah, blame MacGyver (I grew up with that series), but it’s really useful for all kinds of things.
So that means I can’t take it to the US anymore, right? It’ll be illegal to “ship” them across state lines? I can already smell where that may lead to. They’ll be very lenient over what is considered to be “shipping”. If I carry one in my pocket and move from, let’s say, Texas into Arkansas… I’ll be “shipping” the knife.
Because everyone knows that Swiss Army Knives are so bad! Must be the “Army” in the name that scares everyone. Damn those war-mongering, knife-clinging Swiss!