highsea

My fillet knife has an 8" blade. It is long, thin, and very pointed. Yes, it could be dangerous in the wrong hands. But it's a very good knife for filleting fish. If you rounded the point, or shortened the blade, it would be useless for the purpose for which it was designed.
If it's not about "knife control", why are there already 17 knives banned? Why are pocket knives with blades over 3" illegal?

However, it's not just about knife control, it's about PEOPLE control. This is why there are efforts to ban toy guns and pellet guns also. It's called liberalism run amock.

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My baby called me up. She said- Why don't you ever take me out? Pick me up in your brand new car....You shake the short change from the old fruit jar...

dalem

12" kitchen knives don't facilitate drunken stabbings - drunken idiots do that.

First handguns, but that's it. Then longarms, but that's it. Then airguns, but that's it. Then knives, but that's it.

Do you really think I'm that stupid? That I can't spot that obvious a pattern?

-dale

Sombra

The free market would although sell A-Bombs, RPGs , machine guns , jelly bricks , anthrax pills is there wouldn´t be a any law. Sometimes something is just cooler if its dangerous.

dalem

Yep, ideally that's the way it should be. I believe we should be as close to that ideal as possible.

-dale

Leader

YOU CUT FOOD WITH IT!

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Confed999

But that's exactly what you're advocating in this thread, a limit to your freedom...

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No man is free until all men are free - John Hossack
I agree completely with this Administration’s goal of a regime change in Iraq-John Kerry
even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act-John Kerry
He may even miscalculate and slide these weapons off to terrorist groups to invite them to be a surrogate to use them against the United States. It’s the miscalculation that poses the greatest threat-John Kerry

barrowaj

Ok, well I can't tell if you are being sarcastic, but I'm going to assume you are.

Aryan

They aren't talking about banning all kitchen knives, just ones with the sharp pointy end, which according to the top chefs, have no purpose. People can whine and complain about it, but at the end of the day its the medical profession who'll be treating people who have accidents with it.

I say allow people to have them, but if it causes an accidental injury, go ****ing treat yourself.

barrowaj

The market hasn't changed its buying preferences because its not the person who buys the knife that has to deal with the damage. Its the person on the receiveing end. The auto industry is a perfect example of where safety features had to be enforced through regulation, as the market failed to deliver them on its own. Only now are car manufacturers putting premium safety features in their vehicles.

Saying to yourself that people and not pointed knives kill people won't make it true. You can't make the assumption that people always act rationally. If someone makes a premeditated conscious attempt to kill someone, yes they will find a way even if they don't have knives or guns. But most homicides occur when one person or the other is intoxicated, and not in a rational frame of mind. Even beyond using substances, people aren't always sane or rational. My classes in behavioral sciences have underscored that point to me.

The assertion is that pointed knives are no more useful than blunt knives in the kitchen. If you look at the issue from an economic standpoint, the extra value added by having a pointed end doesn't exceed the cost of the damage caused by having this feature. The cost is real, and it is not internalized to the market, and so must be borne by society.

Confed999

Ever tried to skin an animal with a round tipped knife?
Unless you're telling me the knife, an inanimate object, can kill people all by itself, it is true.
Now you're saying it is people that do it?
Drop socialism to reduce the cost...

Aryan

"Ever tried to skin an animal with a round tipped knife?"

Not with a kitchen knife.

dalem

Nope, I've said it before - open availability of all weapons (and all products) is my ideal. I am very willing to compromise on many of them because of the nature of living in a complex, compressed society. But my default position leans toward that ideal. I wasn't being sarcarstic, but I may have been a little unclear, sorry.

-dale

dalem

So the next time I'm slicing up steaks into chunks with my 12" chef's knife, and I'm spearing the pieces with the sharp tip to move them into the bowl or skillet, I should call these "top chefs" and reveal to them the glory of my innovation? "No purpose" my ass!

And the people in the medical field have no say in the matter - it's their frikkin' job to treat my injuries. If they don't like the injuries they see they should quit.

-dale

Confed999

Hmmmm, so how would one of these chefs skin a fresh bunny? I assume they are in a kitchen.

Bluesman

In this discussion, I fear we are all losing the bubble on what this is all about.

It is not about knives; it's about the uncontrollable instinct of any heirarchy to arrogate more and more power to itself in order to control us all.

Every single niggling aspect of our lives is up for grabs by an entity that sees every single niggling issue as inherently political. Paradoxically, down the path towards perfect safety of the People lies something far more dangerous to the Body Politic: OPPRESSION AND CONTROL...for our own good, of course.

It's the same instinct that led the government to protect a bunch of supposedly abused kids in Waco by killing them and their parents.

dalem is closest to getting to the point by declaring (and I'm liberally paraphrsing him here, so I run the risk of him stomping all over my argument) that the freest people are the safest people. When government (or any other agent of control) seeks to 'protect' us from ourselves, WATCH OUT, because any number of outrages can be perpetrated on us in our own interest, of course.

This is not a small thing, this regulation of knives. Because the overreach into a cutlery drawer is actually the thin end of the wedge, the camel's nose under the tent. If the small things can be regulated with our consent, then only the big things - the ones we'd notice right away, should they be mucked around with - will be left. Low-flow showerheads, one-gallon-per-flush toilets and seatbelt laws may promote ideas that are individually GREAT ideas, but when collectively enforced by the coercive power of the state, they are the little tyrannies and erosion of freedoms that make a life slightly more risky, but immeasurably more worthy of living.

Get away from my kitchen; I'll be the only person that will decide what features I want when I buy my goddom' cookware. If I use any knives on anybody else, then arrest me. Until that time, I'm a free man, living responsibly.

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"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory."
- George Orwell