In a perfectly peaceful world, or, failing that, a world where there were other weapons I could have which would be better than a knife under all conditions, I would still carry knives, and maybe a bigger knife than I carry now, because nobody would be afraid of it any more.
A knife is the universal tool that makes possible, at one stage or another in their creation, all useful material things that we cannot find in nature. The hairy-armed person who first put an edge on a suitable rock, perhaps to peel the fruit of the tree of knowledge, allowed our species to alter nature, making moral choices both necessary and possible.
And one kind of moral choice is to attack, or to defend, or not. Any knife that one can use to do the sort of work a knife is made to do is probably a knife that one can use to do lethal damage in a fight, God forbid.
And a knife, when seen as a weapon, is one of the most politically incorrect weapons an individual is likely to own - worse than a sword or a gun. A knife is a sneak's weapon (thieves, spies, assassins), or it is the weapon of people who are not expected to defend themselves (peasants, women).
There are jurisdictions where one may fairly easily qualify to lawfully carry a gun, which are very restrictive on knives. Try asking your local law enforcement people how to apply for a permit to carry, not a gun, but a concealed dagger.
Knives, as weapons, have been "politically incorrect" for a very long time, from before anybody heard of a liberal, and probably from before Julius Caesar went for a walk on the Ides of March. The prejudice against going about
armed with a knife (as opposed to going about equipped with a knife) may be due to the very necessity and universality of knives. Knives are everywhere, and we can't do without them, and that, and not just the up-close-and-bloody aspect of it, is what makes their use as weapons so much more frightening.
So we are going up against centuries of cross-cultural tradition in advocating that good people should be prepared to defend themselves with knives (as well as with other objects) against the other kind of people. But people
have gone up against centuries of cross-cultural tradition before and
succeded. For example, if you said over in our Politics forum, that women should not be allowed to vote, you would be considered either a commedian or a lunatic. A mere hundred years ago, you would have been "mainstream."
So maybe there is hope. But we need to understand that we "enlightened knife people" are surrounded by benighted heathen, and we need to go easy on the hellfire and brimstone as we seek to convert them.
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- JKM
www.chaicutlery.com
AKTI Member # SA00001
[This message has been edited by James Mattis (edited 08-07-2000).]
