CR715

Carrying a knife with a locking or fixed blade ( of any length) is illegal in much of the US. Many states have formed judge made law holding such a knife to be per se a lethal weapon and the district federal courts have gone along. The judges simply can't wrap their heads around the utility of a fixed or locking blade apart from some imagined desire to harm others. Any knife of any size or shape - or almost any other object - can be the basis of a charge of unlawfully carrying a deadly weapon. I've defended people who only had can openers. Every single state where I've surveyed the knife laws (and I’ve surveyed quite a few) has very vague statutory structure made more vague by the courts all allowing the arresting officer to form his own on-the-spot ad hoc opinion about whether the item or knife is being carried as a weapon. Then, at trial, the court is likely to just rubber stamp the officer's opinion after he testifies about his expertise on the topic by intoning the usual meaningless talismanic phrases about his experience and training. Yes, Or carpet layer or carpenter or whatever. A Vocational reason for having a knife is your get out of jail card so long as you can show that you were indeed going to or from that vocation. But it all goes to XXXX if the officer is also charging you with some kind of crime for which he imagines the knife might have been useful as a weapon. So when the nice policeman ask you to step out of the car - - - leave your blade inside the car.

I am one of those people who will try to leap into somethign at an advanced level without having troubled myself to "learn the basics." Sometimes this has worked out well for me and some times it ends up with a slew of compromises. I made my first Guitar which I played for decades, until a flood wrecked it , in ecxactly this manner. I knew almost nothign about woodworking or musical instruments but I learned as I progressed on the instrument. I made my first living room set of furnitue in the same way. 36 years later I still have the Coffee table. In fairness, I'd been an old school manual machinist for several years already. Needless to say, it is unlikely that a chunk of a guitar or a couch will break away and open one's throat. This is, I should think, the only real problem with the newbie cum sword maker. Or stated in the colloquy: "You'll shoot your eye out kid." The enthusiastic newbie usually does not want to make a sword as a result of any great intelectual pursuit. He won't have read metalurgical texts or historical materials pertanent to the era of the swords he hopes to replicate. And he certainly won't see the effort as the next logical phase of mastering his trade craft. Odds are, He wants a way-far-cool weapon. A shiny bauble that reeks of action movie testerone. Who can blame him? I wanted a beautiful guitar that would make into Andrés Segovia overnight. Well, I'd been playing a crap guitar for years prior, but you know what I'm saying. In the spirit of: "You'll shoot your eye out kid." I did the same thing with home renovation. I wanted a house but couldn't afford a decent one, so I bought a fixer-uper. It was an ancient huge two family Victorian. For Example: I ended up replacing a lot of of the old peg and post wiring as I tore out walls and rebuilt the living spaces. This meant I needed to learn how to do electrical wiring. I didn't know anything about the trade. I shudder to think of all the Boston Loups I installed in the Romex connectors before I knew that it was a "Boston Loup" or that it was both illegal and a serious fire hazard. "You'll shoot your eye out kid."