But now I think LEOs are encouraged to detect as many crimes as they can, which means examining everything they see with a different attitude - reporting every single infraction of the laws. the knife type would be secondary to the fact that the guy was doing something seriously illegal. My feeling is that in the past the police had far more leeway and they would only charge someone with having an illegal knife if they already suspected that this person was up to no good and was causing trouble. I think the main problem here in the UK is that there has been a shift in the way that LEOs have been advised in light of the fact that many work to crime detection quotas and that the media has hyped-up knife crime and exaggerated/distorted the problems. The criminals will get the weapons and the honest people won't. Some feel that if you eliminate weapons you will at least reduce crime. Knives shouldn't be illegal but if you use a knife in a crime I feel the maximum sentence should be given. What if you had to go to court?Įvery time the subject of illegal knives comes up I just get upset because IMO the whole issue is for the most part stupid. Getting a knife back when taken from you in another state would be even a bigger pain. If all that happened was your knife got confiscated you would need to deal with getting it back and I've got a feeling a lot of these instances happen when someone is away from home and not aware of the local laws. No matter what the penalty, if a police officer decided to persue the issue it would be at least a pain in the butt. Does anyone know the penalty for carrying an "illegal" knife? Is it just confiscated? Could you be arrested? If I even look at it the wrong way the blade will come flying out and lock open. My Zowada is the most notorious for doing this. I don't want to tighten my pivots so much that I need two hands to open the blades but it seems anything short of that could land me in trouble. Although this isn't the force of gravity alone, and these knives weren't designed to be opened through inertia, most of these laws seem to encompass this opening. With freshly oiled pivots I can open almost every one of my Spyders with no blade contact and a quick wrist flick pretty easily. Kingdomgone wrote:These gravity laws scare the hell out of me. that is how UK law applies to gravity knives. The UKPK passes this definition with flying colours. Basically it boils down to the fact that a non-locking knife must be " readily foldable at all times by nothing more than the action of closing the blade" and the user must not have to release any button or device prior to that. This (ironically) comes in an appeal case where a man's appeal was denied because the judges maintained that his knife locked and therefore was equivalent to a fixed blade knife - but in doing that they defined what a lock was. So I went on to find the legal definition of a lock with regards to knives. So, could this be termed a "lock"? Not by any normal sense of the word but you know how lawyers can create doubt from any ambiguity. This seemed obvious but if you take a more mischievous reading of that law you can see that the UKPK has a spring and that the blade has a notch to stop it flopping about. "(b) any knife which has a blade which is released from the handle or sheath thereof by the force of gravity or the application of centrifugal force and which, when released, is locked in place by means of a button, spring, lever, or other device, sometimes known as a “gravity knife”,"Ī UKPK FRN has a very soft back-spring so someone with strong wrists could flick it open. They are not only not vital to public safety, they do absolutely nothing to enhance it. The problem with that is the laws against automatics and gravity knives do not, and have not ever, served any useful public purpose. Those who believe such laws to be vital to public safety would argue that expansions have merely preserved the intent of the law by allowing the definitions to keep pace with technology. We would argue that those expansions are unfair. Most of those expand it to include any knife that can be made to open by inertia, even if it requires extreme effort and creativity to do so. Over the years, that definition, has been expanded in various ways. You could also make them open in other positions by substituting centrifugal force, in the form of a flick of the wrist, for gravity. You held the knife a certain way, which varied depending on whether it was an "out the front" or more conventional opener, pressed a button, gravity caused the blade to drop or swing open and releasing the button caused it to lock open. The original meaning was a knife that was basically an auto without the spring.
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