The Martialist: The Magazine For Those Who Fight Unfairly

In 1997, Blade offered a seven-part compilation of switchblade and
non-switchblade knife laws of every state in the union (the respective February
through April and June through September issues). However, those were simply the
laws. What, many of you who read them probably were asking, are they really
about? Why are they on the books? Do they actually do any good?

Such questions are far more interesting than the details of the laws themselves.
Here’s how this writer [Bernard Levine] sees the answers.

Nearly every state has knife laws, as does the federal government. So, too, do
countless cities and towns, except where the state legislature has pre-empted
said laws, retaining a monopoly for itself. These knife laws are artifacts of
fear, prejudice, and uncertainty.

If you know American history, you can look at a knife law’s wording and tell
when it was first enacted. For example:

– If it speaks of bowie knives and Arkansas toothpicks, it dates 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 1915-18 that 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 1950’s, when the mass media drummed up fear of teenage
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 prior restraint of today’s
politically correct era.

Ever since its first European settlements in the early 1600’s, America developed
as two completely different republics. The country has been divided politically
ever since and always will remain so. This is because its two founding
republican traditions are both opposite and irreconcilable.

On one side of the divide were the “agrarian republicans,” such as
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. They gave us the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, with the 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 that behavior.

On the other side of the divide were those who comprised what would become
today’s anti-knifers [AND GUN CONTROL ADVOCATES- ed.]. These
men believed all citizens to be potential criminals, irresistibly driven to
dastardly deeds unless rigidly restrained by the State. The republic
was like a brittle chain that would break apart if it had but one weak link. In
their world, even the slightest misstep had to be prevented at all cost.
Countless detailed laws and regulations were devised, and constantly revised, to
eliminate every possibility of straying. Notions of rights and responsibilities
were meaningless. All that mattered was the prevention of wrong. No
form of prior restraint could be too severe if it advanced this fundamental
goal, the thinking went.

Guess which side gave you your knife laws?

The impulse to prevent wrongdoing is a deep one. Everyone has it. It’s
founded in the fear that other people’s freedom of action is a threat to
everybody else’s safety and sanctity. It’s the impulse to make the
other fellow toe the mark.

The anti-agrarian (from here on, “anti-knifer”) knows that his motives
are good but he doesn’t 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 anti-knife 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 anti-knifer, like the primitive
shaman, seeks to make everything right in the world by magical words of command.

Has the anti-knife approach ever worked? Can it ever work? Look at the record —
it’s never been successful. However, its unbroken record of failure hasn’t
stopped people from trying again and again. Every new generation is born with
faith in the power of”magic words” (translation: written laws) to
prevent wrongdoing. And every American generation for the past century and a
half has produced its own new wave of oppressive and futile knife [and gun
control] laws.

An agrarian republican recognizes that other people are his equals, no better
and no worse. Curtailing another man’s freedom doesn’t
enhance one’s own but merely encourages the other man to “return the
favor” in a descending spiral of mutual repression.

To an anti-knifer [or gun control advocate], on the other hand, repression
is the whole point of law and government. Without repression there would be
chaos and everyone would go to hell in a handcart.

The agrarian republicans, when they were in power in the 1780’s, generously
extended their live-and-let-live philosophy to every citizen, including their
opponents. Since that time, the members of the opposite faction have made full
use of this grant of liberty to enact all the tyrannical regulations and prior
restraint they desired. What’s more, they generously extended their increasingly
oppressive rule to every citizen, including, of course, the agrarian
republicans. For members of the opposing faction, it was a
heads-we-win-tails-you-lose proposition. To this day, the few remaining agrarian
republicans [we could call them Libertarians – ed.] have never figured out what
hit them.

From an agrarian perspective, examples of bad knife laws [and bad gun laws]
abound. Indeed, an agrarian republican recognizes that there can be no good
knife [or gun control] laws. Good law is about human
behavior, drawing a bright line between harmless and harmful actions.
It’s not about inanimate objects, such as knives [or guns].

From an anti-knifer perspective, however, knife laws are inherently good, though
some are better than others. The best would be the French system — simply ban
all knives and let the police decide whom to prosecute. England has applied this
system to all guns, and knives are scheduled to follow [I think they’ve already
been banned – ed.]. Here in America, meanwhile, that pesky old agrarian
republican Constitution won’t let the anti-knifers do this, so they devote a lot
of creative energy to finding ways to get around it.

They’re 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 finally was expunged by the state’s Supreme Court.
However, with two new anti-knifers recently appointed to that court, the city
well may try the same maneuver again.

How about state laws that ban certain “inherently dangerous” types of
knives by name? Some ban bowies, others butterfly knives, still others daggers.
What most of them neglect to do is define these knives with any precision, or
even to define them at all.

Since 1917, California has made it a felony to be someone “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 reign to declare
all sorts of knives and other tools to be types of dirks or daggers.

The California legislature then decided to “fix” the situation. The
legislature already had revised the law several times, adding more types of
“inherently” dangerous blades, including ballistic knife, belt buckle
knife, shuriken, lipstick case knife, writing pen knife, and others.

Early in 1996, California legislators “labored hard” and brought forth
the following “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 the preceding means, “ANY POINTED IMPLEMENT AT ALL.”
(Blade magazine editor’s note: California Assembly Bill 78, which became law
January 1,1998, exempts manual one-hand-opening knives from the state’s dirk or
dagger law. [This was a great relief to all of California’s knife enthusiasts –
ed.].)

How about the following 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 long 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 Hawaii’s assessment
of diver’s knives?

Or how about that supposed bastion of liberty, Idaho: “The right to bear
arms may not be denied by the legislature; [the legislature] 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 the preceding and see where it takes you!

The following 1957 ruling from Tennessee shows that the Volunteer State had no
monopoly on the anti-knife movement. 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.”

What about the states that offer exemptions and other loopholes to their knife
laws, such as the collector exemptions ot the switchblade bans of Minnesota,
Missouri, Montana, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Virginia? Aren’t these an
improvement over the across-the-board bans?

Let’s see: Start with a law that’s unjust, unconstitutional, and ineffective
against crime. Add a layer of corruption and discrimination or special treatment
for a narrow class of citizens. Could you please explain to me exactly how this
is an improvement?

Perhaps an expert should have the last word on what 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 provided himself with the
arms usual in the regular service.” — Thomas Jefferson (1781); and
“…all power is inherent in the people…it is their right and duty to at
all times be armed.” — Thomas Jefferson (1824).