A baseball bat is a wonderful and extremely useful sporting good item. It’s also a vicious weapon, if swung at one’s head. It’s not the fault of the bat that it can be both, but the nature of its use. Knives work in a similar way, great for cutting one’s food, opening boxes, cutting rope and threatening to gut someone if they fail to hand over their money.

But then, New York’s gravity knife law wasn’t directed at the possession of all knives, because everyone understood that knives, per se, weren’t objects of evil. Instead, it was a reaction to a quirk in time, a moment’s hysteria. GIs returning from WWII brought back Luftwaffe Fallschirmjäger-Messers, German paratrooper knives, which were without question gravity knives. They scared people, because the knives came out of nowhere and who, but for someone evil, would carry such evil knives? Continue reading →