To me this seems to be a "liberal city" or location problem. Recently, at the local steak house, my steak knife was dirty. I politely asked the waitress for another, and she went to get me one. After about 5 minutes, she was still a no-show.
In olden days, people would always use their own knives to feast. Can you see a bunch of Vikings sitting around with butter knives with tiny serrations? Because of the occasional misunderstandings where people got drunk, found themselves in heated debate and everyone having their own weapons in hand, well, one can see why the gentry devised less lethal instruments upon which to eat their peas and pork chops.
The secret is, of course, that until fairly recent times, people were too smart to go anywhere totally unarmed. The Good Lord did not design human beings with a whole lot except their intellects. Not only did most of us lose a substantial part of our body hair, many find it difficult to keep it on the tops of their heads! In short, we have no claws, no fanged teeth, nothing to keep us warm in blustery weather, or even mildly chilled weather.
We are a pathetic lot.
The problem is, the more intelligent amongst us devised means of self protection in the form of tools. And the less intelligent amongst us keep trying to take those tools away from us because they think we'll get hurt. So they hired professional agents to protect us. Only they never seem to be around when we need them. So they devised forensics with the idea that if they couldn't prevent us from being murdered, at least they could catch the people who killed us (most often with weapons). If we treat them cruelly, by putting them in prisons, it might keep someone else from killing us. Only our prisons are overcrowded and they're having to let many of them go.
It's very complicated, but it's worked for the past hundred and twenty years or so. Basically. Of course there are those miscreants who carry weapons for their own defense and we put them in prison too when we find them. They're the ones who gum up the works. If they selfishly use weapons to protect themselves, our society ceases to work. In fact, it could face complete annihilation, as if there were any other kind.
So what they do is punish children for drawing pictures of knives and other implements in grade school, then try taking them away from them in high school. Even using a tiny 3-inch bladed knife is enough to cause some to panic entirely. Start whittling in front of the Wal*Mart that sold you the knife, guys, and you'll be explaining yourself to a cop withing a half-hour.
In the gun world, many are objecting to harsh gun restrictions by wearing empty holsters. And you can imagine how some people feel woozy just by seeing a holster with no gun. Anyway, this is our world. When people in New York, Baltimore, Chicago and other cities make the laws for the rest of the nation, then we're in bad shape.
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If the cows don't outnumber the people, you must be urban. 
