OPPRESSIVE KNIFE LAWS

> 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.



> EXAMPLES

     From an agrarian perspective, examples of bad knife laws abound.
Indeed an agrarian recognizes that there can be no good knife laws. Good
law is about human behavior, drawing a bright line between harmless and
harmful actions. It is not about things.
     From a puritan perspective, however, knife laws are inherently
good, although some are better than others. The best would be the French
system -- simply ban all knives, and then let the police decide whom to
prosecute. England has just applied this system to all guns, and knives
are scheduled to follow soon. But here in America that pesky old
agrarian Constitution won't let our puritans do this, so they devote a
lot of creative energy to finding ways to get around it.
     They are always pushing the envelope. A decade ago the city of
Portland, Oregon, banned all pocketknives, and then defended its
ordinance through four levels of appeal -- until the new law was finally
expunged by the state's Supreme Court. But with two new puritans
recently appointed to that court, the city may well try the same
maneuver again.
     And how about state laws that ban certain "inherently dangerous"
types of knives by name? Some ban bowies, others balisongs, still others
daggers. What most of them neglect to do, is to define these names with
any precision, or even to define them at all.
     Since 1917 California has made it a felony to be a person "who
carries concealed upon his or her person any dirk or dagger." Until a
couple of years ago, neither "dirk" nor "dagger" was defined in the
state's penal code. This gave the state's appellate courts free rein to
declare all sorts of knives and other tools to be types of "dirk or
dagger" (if "God is in the details," as a philosophical architect once
said, then the devil must be in the appellate decisions).
     Then the California legislature decided to "fix" this. They had
already revised the law several times, adding more types of "inherently"
dangerous knives ("ballistic knife, belt buckle knife, shuriken,
lipstick case knife, cane sword, shobe-zui, air gauge knife, writing pen
knife...").
     Early in 1996 they labored hard, and brought forth this new
definition of "dirk or dagger:"
>     PC 12020(c)(24) "a knife or other instrument with or without a
handguard that is primarily designed, constructed, or altered to be a
stabbing instrument designed to inflict great bodily injury or death."
     In plain English this means, "any pointed implement at all."

     California is hardly unique in its broad interpretations of knife
terms. Here is an appellate ruling from Alabama: A "butcher's knife" 11
inches long overall is a knife "of like kind or description" as a bowie
knife.
     How about these two rulings, from Connecticut? "[A 3-1/2 inch
knife] could be found to be a dangerous weapon... as being approximately
four inches long..."  "Ordinary bone handled jack knife containing blade
which measured 3-3/8 inches in length did not fall within
prohibition..."
     Or this one from Hawaii: "A 'diver's knife' is neither a 'dangerous
weapon' nor a 'dagger.'" [I wonder if the Navy SEALs would agree with
this?]
     Or how about that supposed bastion of liberty, Idaho: "The right to
bear arms may not be denied by the legislature; it only has the power to
'regulate the exercise of this right'; that is, among other things, it
may... prescribe the kind or character of arms that may or may not be
kept, carried, or used..." [Try substituting the word "speech" for the
word "arms" in this ruling, and see where it takes you.]
     This 1957 ruling from Tennessee shows that New England did not have
a monopoly on puritan dread of sin -- indeed Tennessee courts attempted
to nullify the Second Amendment in 1840, and again in 1878. "The purpose
of the... provisions was to discourage the using of certain weapons
which tend to lead to crime."

     If you would like to read more of this sort of thing, point your
browser to:

http://pweb.netcom.com/~brlevine/sta-law.htm




> EXEMPTIONS?

     What about states that offer exemptions and other loopholes to
their knife laws? What about the collector exemptions to the switchblade
bans of Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and
Virginia. Aren't these an improvement over across-the-board bans?
     Hmm, let me see... We start out with a law that is unjust,
unconstitutional, and ineffective against crime. Then we add to it a
layer of corruption and discrimination -- of special treatment for a
narrow class of citizens. Could you please explain to me exactly how
this is an improvement?



> IN CONCLUSION

     Perhaps we should let an expert have the last word, on what sort of
knife (and gun) law might be appropriate to the United States:

"Every able-bodied freeman, between the ages of 16 and 50, is
enrolled in the militia... The law requires every militia-man
to provide himself with the arms usual in the regular service."
                               Thomas Jefferson (1781)

"...all power is inherent in the people... it is their right and
duty to at all times be armed."
                               Thomas Jefferson (1824)


This system worked just fine in old Virginia. It works just fine
right now, in Switzerland.

Footnote:  Bernard Levine 1998   published in BLADE Magazine