Got any cites people were killing others with the “ninja” weapons in any sort of numbers?:dubious:
Throwing stars are pretty much useless.
I doubt there have been many people killed by “ninja stars”, but I’m sure there have been plenty (including the users) injured by them, which is also a problem worth addressing.
Chronos:
“Physicists With Knives: A Troubling New Trend”
I never got one as spam, but they exist. A search on the term “tactical pen” at Amazon.com will get you a great many examples.
I don’t have any particular position on the knife ban, pro or con (I like the idea of fewer weapons in circulation, I guess), but just on a point of principle regarding risk managment, do you believe it is always necessary to wait until a risk starts producing actual deadly outcomes before acting to try to control it? I don’t.
“Ninja stars” and “zombie knives” are more or less toys. The stars are mostly harmless (sure, I guess you could put a eye out with one, but a tavern dart is more dangerous). Those zombie knives are made to look dangerous, not be dangerous, your home butcher or chefs knife is far more deadly.
It’s a stupid law, as are all laws passed when “we have to do something!”.
A butcher’s knife or a chair leg is more deadly, but it’s less cool and badass - the law (and I happen to agree, it’s a bit absurd, at least in parts) is not, IMO, targeting violence by determined criminals, but rather, trying to exert a steering influence on a segment of idiotic youth culture that is, for want of a better word, believed to be prone to worshipping things that ‘look dangerous’.
I think I am right in saying that the notion of needing or wanting to arm onesself in daily life is generally considered dysfunctional here in the UK - it’s not normal for us to do that, or to want to do that, or to want it to be especially easy to do that. I know this view isn’t shared by people the world over.
No, that wasn’t relevant at all. What was relevant was media scare stories. The possible existence of a few people who might or might not have created a problem in a slightly different way to the ways in which it already existed is not a reason for such an extreme reaction. Fantasy ninjas were not a genuine threat to society, a thing that needed a blanket ban…a ban which would have been useless if the threat was real.
What I mean by “fantasy ninjas” is the modern fantasy of a ninja, as opposed to actual ninjas of the past or modern re-enactment (if there is any). The black outfit (which was actually worn by stage hands in theatres a couple of centuries later), the shuriken, the “tiger claws” and all the rest of the nonsense.
A tactical pen is just a pen. but it will be made of steel, and typically has a glass-breaking tip on the other end.
I have one in my car. They can be used for lots of common things, like punching a hole in a can if you don’t have a can opener. As a weapon, they are purely defensive. Held in your hand, you can use the end to punch a pain point on an opponent. of course, you can do that with any hard, cylindrical object. A trained nartial artist can use oneas a ‘Kubotan’, or a small hand held steel rod which can be used in joint locks, on pressure points, etc. They only way you could do serious damage to someoe would be to poke them in the eye. But for that, a Bic pen is just as functional.
Banning tectical pens is a sign of legislative hysteria. You might as well ban all pens.
For that matter, have we considered the horrible scourge that is the screwdriver? As a stabbing weapon, they would work better than those stupid zombie knives.
In a way it’s good. The idiocy in the UK with knife banning is helping to support the argument here that gun controllers won’t stop until every gun is gone. And then they start on the knives. Soon it will be illegal to sharpen a stick. We are governed by morons.
But people find a way. In Germany, almost all weapons are illegal, so people make killer slingshots. You cannot legislate away social problems by restricting weapons.
That sounds to me like Germany did, in fact, legislate away social problems by restricting weapons.
No law is ever going to be the sole, 100% guaranteed solution to any perceived problem, but laws like this can make enforcement of those social problems more clearcut - ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ is, I believe, the idea driving this, not ‘we are scared of imaginary ninjas’
We just have a different view of weapons, and the concept of arming onesself here - it’s regarded as abnormal, not a fundamental right.
Sure - a person can arm themself with a screwdriver or a pointy stick, and there’s not really much can be done about that, but that does not mean nothing can be done about anything.
I wonder if some of this is being pursued as a distraction to take attention off the real scandal: The rise of rape across Europe.
According to that data, while assault and murder rates are up slightly (3-10% in the last two or three years, which is bad enough), the rate of rape has gone off the charts. Compared to the 2008 baseline off 100, rapes have gone up from 115 to 147 in just two years, and that’s where the data ends. It is likely even higher now. That should be terrifying. Why is no one talking about this? My guess is that there is no obvious easy political ox to gore, and that it’s a dangerous subject because it touches the third rail of immigration. But that shouldn’t matter. In the #MeToo era, how does the world yawn while women across Europe are becoming fearful of traveling alone? It seems to me that a 30% rise in rape in two years should be a crisis, and plans to solve it should be headlining the news instead of whatever stupid tweet of the day came out of Donald Trump’s tiny fingers, or especially with that whole scary zombie knife crisis that must be addressed very publicly and often.
I think that’s a fair suspicion to have. Knife bans are very simple to get excited about and adding a new category of dangerous weapon on the ‘banned’ list is as simple as editing a document - tackling rape at root cause is difficult, and politicians and the media are fickle.
Of course you can’t. But you can provide the means for one arm of the response (policing) to try to reduce lethality, without which other forms of response (economic and social interventions) are meaningless (no point trying to encourage the creation of jobs and the raising of ambitions for dead people, is there?)
Or one can wonder if that’s an issue being pursued by you as a distraction to take attention off the point at hand.
European lawmakers - and voters - can presumably juggle addressing multiple different threats. Can u?
Germany still has a violent crime problem, so no, they didnt.
To the extent that any nonzero amount of violent crime is a problem, and the crime rate in Germany is nonzero, yes. But if the best that people can do with respect to weapons is homemade slingshots, then they have solved a great deal of the problem.
The point I was (poorly) trying to make is that you can turn anything into a weapon. I used slingshots because there’s a fairly popular youtuber from Germany who makes extreme slingshots that can punch through cars or fire bolts the size of a leg. But I don’t know of any being used in crimes.
Germany’s problem now, like the rest of Europe, is the rapid rise of violent rape and stabbings. But if you are at the point where you now need to ban pointy things to stop people from stabbing each other, you haven’t solved your violence problem with laws - you’re just taken the law to extreme and almost farcical ends. What’s next? You need a mechanics license to own screwdrivers? Perhaps people without a chef’s license should only be allowed bread knives? You may think those are extreme examples, but then I’d say banning a dull knife because it says ‘zombie’ on it is already at parody-inducing levels.
Europe has imported millions of people, the majority been young disaffected men who come from violent cultures where women have few rights. It should be no surprise that violence in general and particularly violence against women is rising rapidly. Thus should also be evidence that violence is not controlled by access to weapons, but by problems within society. America’s violent crime problem is not the result of guns - it’s the result of failed government policies that have destroyed a number of large cities and left a huge disaffected underclass in its wake. Couple that with the drug war and insane incarceration rates that institutionalize criminal behaviour, and you have the disaster we see today.
Germany has the fourth highest gun ownership in the world, and yes they have gun crime.
There’s also the question of to what extent if any that disarming women emboldens rapists. Probably not relevant to Europe because of the rarity of carrying weapons there to begin with; but in the USA there is a small but vocal number of women opposed to gun control for that very reason.