Knives in modern times

There is one aspect of this situation that I simply do not understand. That is, who is buying all the knives that more and more manufacturers are making? You'll not persuade me that the nearly 11K members of this forum have launched CRKT, Outdoor Edge, SOG, and assorted other knife manufacturers, while allowing Spyderco, Benchmade, Kershaw and others to flourish. Somebody is buying the knives. That goes for customs also, tho indeed a more substantial portion of those may be bought by knife knuts.

AKTI is truly doing something on the political front, I believe. While I'm not at all prepared to sneer at commercialism/greed as a motivator, it nonetheless bothers me that one has to contribute $2K per year to have a voice/vote in the organization. Clearly it is funded and serves the wishes of the manufacturers primarily.

I believe that what is necessary to do is to somehow identify all of "us" and somehow provide some means of our expressing ourselves. Am afraid tho, that I have no ready suggestions as how to do that. I think that Jason has the best handle on the situation. Given his eloquence and that of other forumites, I believe that the best brains here need to brainstorm the vehicles or methods of communicating what must be the general feelings of millions of Americans needs to be done. Or, persuade AKTI to widen its approaches towards it's goals.


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Asi es la vida

Bugs
 
The battle for the hearts of the population is not going to be won through the machinations of the courts. If the AKTI wants to avoid becoming a joke like the NRA it will have to focus on the image. That means, policing the advertizements and markets that knife makers go after, coordinating multiple avenues for public education, and using relevant icons to build recognition and support.

Forget Charlton Heston, we don't have an issue with the over 65 crowd, we need to involve icons that are meaningful to the 20 something to 40 age group. Go after pop musicians, and the stars of popular TV sitcoms; leverage sports icons, and decorated military heros. I am sure that many of these folks would support our cause.

It is the 20-40 year olds that we need to motivate. Not, becuase they vote, but becuase they spend; and their spending will drive advertizing dollars and broader media support. Not to mention that they are also the age groups that are currently raising the next generation of voters.

The NRA had the formula right at one time. Then the dollars got sucked into the political process, and they have been loosing ground ever since. Who cares if you have the right to bear arms, if you no longer have a good gun range to practice on, a good training program to give you the skills, or a nearby state park to hunt on. Lets hope the AKTI can avoid these pitfalls.

 
<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by Bugs3x:
There is one aspect of this situation that I simply do not understand. That is, who is buying all the knives that more and more manufacturers are making? You'll not persuade me that the nearly 11K members of this forum have launched CRKT, Outdoor Edge, SOG, and assorted other knife manufacturers, while allowing Spyderco, Benchmade, Kershaw and others to flourish. </font>
Click to expand...

Good point. If Camillus alone produces 2 million knives a year, somebody besides the 11K of us has to be doing some knife buying.

Dave
 
The two uses of knives, tool and weapon, weren't so far apart originally. The use of blades as weapons could even have superseded their use as tools in importance, from a social perspective. Mediaeval European social structure was to a significant extent based on military service to one's immediate lord. Chivalric literature spread a value system in which a high price was placed on martial skill. (Before gunpowder came into widespread controllable use, this martial skill meant shooting with bow and arrow, or causing injury or death by a wielding a bladed, pointed or blunt instrument. Of these, wielding a sword or a lance were pretty much the noblest means of doing violence.) The noblemen could go off and fight their own little wars independent of their overlord for perfectly sound reasons like gaining land. And at the level of people who worked the land, there was the possibility of conscription. Point is, war was a yearly item on people's minds and the nobility's standing relative to each other was essentially based on military prowess and this was ultimately based on iron and steel.

But at some stage, states developed clearly out of the Christian unity and these states developed economies and so sovereigns also developed professional armies and started to be able to restrict their nobler subjects from going off and making war except under the sovereign's auspices. So war became the province of paid soldiers and the age of chivalry passed.

In sum, what I'm thinking is that man's memory and use of blades as objects for the taking of life has always been there. But our social valuation of that use has changed with time. Where it used to be noble and even necessary (for defense and the increase of wealth), it is now limited (very much so in many countries other than the US) to armies which are a recognised unit of a political state, but which do not form a distinct rung in the social hierarchy. Most soldiers tend to fit in their societies based on their families, not on their rank. For the many who do not ordinarily participate directly in war, blades (especially big blades) are perhaps linked subliminally with guns and explosives and other warmaking paraphernalia by which large numbers of human lives can be and are destroyed and are simply "not our province".

Equally subliminally, the little pocketknives that boy scouts use to learn woodcraft etc. and kitchen knives and cleavers are not associated with war. So they didn't share the general opprobrium. At least not in Europe or Asia that I know of. But then of course, man's ingenuity, whether through Hollywood or newspapers, makes sure you never look at ice picks or scissors or chainsaws with the same eyes again. And so we get suspicious of things in the same category; like those same boy scout knives and kitchen cleavers.

And for what it's worth, I don't think MacGuyver and his ilk and their SAKs balance this out much in favor of blades, as highly as I think of SAKs. This is because it seems to me the SAKs are often shown being used and praised for the features they carry which are NOT the knife blades. They are "handy gadgets". Blades, on the other hand, are not gadgets. Blades are blades and they cut. And really, how many non-knife knuts would pay to sit through a movie in which non-injurious uses of a knife were lovingly featured? Come on now, an UNBIASED opinion on that?

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" ... for I am a bear of very little brain and long words give me trouble."

[This message has been edited by kmclye (edited 04-27-2001).]
 
Brothers & Sisters of Steel,

Mnblade, Seth Thomas and Kmclye are close to reality. The rest of you favor media.
Here's how it shakes down:
mnblade - "Sheeple are less used to seeing..."
Seth Thomas - media induced fear.
kmclye - Social awareness.
R Dockroll - "dumbfounded"

The base aspect of life is predicated upon fear and comfort. If it's comforting we treasure it. If a thing, (event, task, place, scenario, et alia), causes us discomfort we tend to avoid it.
We feared the bear in the woods, so we "hid" in the cities. We feared war so we waged "peace".
What we have here is a classic desription of the "fight-or-flight" syndrome.
Society's awareness (kmclye) abhors that which frightens us. Hence laws to make us "safer" by wearing safety belts, moving smoking out of the collective presence, pacifying ourselves with the media twist of how good we have it (as long as we're afraid of what we're "baited" with) during the evening and late-night news.
[Ever notice how little "bad" news is put out for the early morning news?]
So we ARE affected by media!

But, basically, we are afraid. Human nature and will always be there. What some of us do is to aggrevate those of "flight"/!We "scare" them, Society.
Society has been afraid of : the dark, the cold, the mean, the vile, the suspicion of pain or threats of pain.
What does the media tell us? Knife woungs are traumatic; gun shots are traumatic...Du-uh! What we see are powerful lobbies to disuade media from the belief that: cars are not safe, alcohol is not safe, planes are not safe and so forth.

It's all fear and the control of it.
It's all control of us.
It's all power to control our money and tell us how much we like being protected by that control.

So then we are in great fear of losing that protection by media presentations of crime statistics and how we MUST be afraid of losing our protection. (Ooooh, f-e-a-r!!!!)

Regards,
Lance Gothic
Shibumi
 
I have to say kmclye strikes many truthful notes above for me. A good grasp of what has gone before is essential to understanding what is going on now.

At the same time, things are supposed to change. Society and culture evolves and our uses of and attitudes towards some things and practices can, over a long period of time, radically change. This applies especially to anything that is (like gun) or has traditionally been (like the knife) primarily a weapon.

To me one of the great ironies of the radical pro knife and gun crowd is that a significant percentage of them (more than the general population I sense) consider themselves "Christian" and believers. If you believe in a "divine plan" and at the same time "God is love", then the outcome of that plan must somewhere down the line (I'm talking hundreds [or more] years hence) result in a weapons-free society. Not that there wouldn't be any weapons - animals may still be taken for food for example, but no one would even think of directing them at humans!

I note that this applies even more to guns than knives, precisely because knives are also tools, while guns are more exclusively weapons, certainly today if not 200 years ago.

Knives and knife use/ownership is not going to disappear ever, especially if you consider their usage world wide. But the popularity and weapon-suggestiveness of certain kinds of knives may someday evolve out of existence, except in collections maintained for purely historical purposes.

Of course if you happen to be one who doesn't believe there is a "divine plan" then all bets are off. If that is the case, then it may be equally (or more) likely that humans will become extinct on earth before anything close to a weapons-free society evolves.

 
Mmm... only thing is that the crusades and the military religious orders like the Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights, Knights of Malta, Calatrava etc were all based on it being a virtue for Christians to kill non-Christians, just as a jihad is based on it being a virtue for Muslims to wipe out non-Muslims. Relying on religion to ensure the evolution of a weapons-free society might not necessarily be a recipe for success, though of course one can always hope.

And yes, we think we have evolved since the crusades, but race and religion are still such emotive and sensitive subjects that so long as the wonderful variety of differences among mankind exist, many of which arise precisely from race and religion, it will be a long long time before friction is eliminated.

A blade's use is up to the user at each instant. Any blade can be used either as tool or weapon. We already legislate that one use is legal and, for reasons everyone else has discussed, the other largely illegal in civil society. One thing, two different uses, and two different connotations. So of course the potential for harm ensures that the shadow of illegality hovers over the one thing.

And yes, blades can be beautiful. But what IS this beauty? How many people spend the time and expense of making or buying a blade TO USE AS A TOOL that is much more expensive and beautiful than they actually need? To cut cardboard boxes, we pull out our Opinels and SAKS (so OK, for some of us also our Sebenzas and LCCs) but not our $1,000 damascus blades. The latter we display. But display is also associated with ceremony or ritual. And just what do we celebrate about these beautiful blades, ultimately? The ability they give us to whittle a branch into a toothpick, or the ability they give us in potential or in fantasy to do somewhat more heroic things with an instrument personalized by its distinctive beauty? And what do those heroic things involve? Just as some of the funniest humour is also the cruellest, perhaps some of the deepest beauty of many blades lies in their deadliness.

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" ... for I am a bear of very little brain and long words give me trouble."
 
I wonder if it is just the general disarming of society. Most of our hunting is doen in the supermarkets. We're not supposed to fight one another. Everything we buy has been pre-cut with indistrial knives and such. Thus, the powers that be say that knives aren't necessary, so we shouldn't have them. I'd love to walk around with a daisho tucked in my belt! I think they look awesome! But I'l look kinda funny. Strap on a fixed blade and in many places you get funny looks. Whoever has convinced the masses that keys are for opening mail and cutting tpe on boxes, not knives, has done a very good job.

By the way, didn't you know that the same goes for guns too??? Nice thread.

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"Come What May..."
 
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