What kind of emergency do you expect to find while doing laps in the swimming pool?
Drowning perhaps? Next time he finds himself drowning, maybe one of these responsible knife-carriers will throw him their knife so he can save himself. Because a knife will clearly solve any problem ever.
If people want to carry a knife in the gym, fine, that's their business. I leave mine locked in my locker most times. It's easily accessible in case a tornado blows my car away (cause that happens on a regular basis), and I can get to it quickly if I should ever need it. But the reasoning needs a bit of work, in my mind. The shoelace example was probably the best one.
I think the escapees from Prac Tac who think that a tiny folding knife is going to somehow be the ideal weapon to defend themselves against the hordes of terrorists who are just lining up to storm a gym are the ones I find the most amusing and least plausible in this thread. Entertaining to be sure, but seriously. Really? With all of the perfectly good field-expedient weapons, you're going to go for the tiny folding knife? At least my quip about carrying a BK2 would mean I'd have a decently sized knife. By that reasoning, I ought to carry my 18" Ultimate Fighter khukuri to the gym, and keep it on me at all times. After all, you never know when those crazies with a gun are going to attack.
Or wait, I've got a better idea. How about just carrying your own GUN? If self-defense is really your main reason for carrying your knife in the gym, your insistence on carrying a woefully inadequate tool in comparison to most of the things just lying around a normal gym puts the lie to that reason being at all sensible.
I'm not saying I can't envision a knife being useful at the gym under some incredibly rare circumstances. But I could also envision some circumstances in which carrying a knife at the gym resulted in more serious injury to a person than would otherwise have occurred. Say you accidentally have a weight bar drop on you, and it happens to land in just the wrong spot, and your light folder ends up breaking, and the blade stabs you, or flies out and stabs someone else. Now, instead of just a bruise, you need stitches. Or you trip and fall. You land on your knife, and it accidentally opens and stabs you in the gut. Unlikely, but I've had a knife pop open after falling out of my pocket. All I need to do is to fall on that wrong, or not notice, and kick it, or have someone else step on it and slip to end up causing a big issue that will give Doug Ritter and the Knife Rights folks more work to do. This doesn't mean that I think you shouldn't have a knife at the gym per se. I DO think you need to work at improving your rationale though. The honest answer would probably be something more like, "I carry a knife all the time, and I feel naked without it. I'd rather have it than not." Most of us will be able to sympathize with that, more than with ludicrous answers meant to suggest that carrying a knife at the gym is somehow the wisest and most prepared course of action.
