Just a couple points on issues raised.
...In basic terms you are ok carrying a simple folding penknife with a blade length of less than 3 1/2 ''. Anything longer/locking/fixed blade/gravity assisted/inertia assisted/spring loaded etc is liable to get you arrested if discoverd.
The only excepition to this is if you can provide reasonable cause for you to be carrying the item. For example a chef travelling to work probably has 'reasonable cause' to be carrying a set of sharp, fixed blade knives, tools of the trade and so on..... The same chef found carrying an 18'' Bowie knife to a rock concert may well find himself in prison.....
Emphasis mine.
It is incomprehensible to me that so many could feel that defending one's own life or that of one's family could
automatically be deemed
unreasonable. The idea that this should be imposed on others, against their will, is tyrannical. The justice system should try to do better than just a simplistic reduction of self defense to the basics of
might makes right. Even assuming that any kind of Gun/Knife Control reduces violent crime -- a huge assumption -- it will just mean that the bigger thug will
always win when he attacks your wife or mother. That's not good enough for mine.
As far as the Andy Murray story goes:
...I wonder how each of those 16 dead children might have grown.
Since we're wondering about things, I wonder if
all of those 16 kids would have had to die if they hadn't been legally prohibited from carrying the means of protecting themselves? I refuse to consider all humans as helpless wretches who are incapable of defending themselves and others. I carried a knife to my government school every day and never killed even one person, although, strangely there are no statistics that show that. Hmmmm...
When your rationale that all victims of mass shootings are helpless idiots is projected onto adult victims it becomes even more absurd and dissembling.
A good example would be the famous
Luby's Restaurant Massacre. Here's a bit from Wikipedia:
"On October 16, 1991 in Killeen, Texas a man named George Hennard drove his truck into a Luby's Restaurant, and then opened fire on the restaurant's patrons and staff. He killed 23 people and wounded 20 before he killed himself. As a direct result of this massacre, in 1995 Texas lawmakers, led by Suzanna Gratia Hupp (whose parents were both killed in the massacre), passed a law that allowed Texas citizens to obtain a concealed carry handgun permit in part as a reaction against the massacre."
The interesting part (which Wikipedia carefully does not mention) is that Suzanna Gratia Hupp
had a handgun in her vehicle and thought long and hard about whether she should
break the law and carry her gun, concealed, into the cafe. She did not. She thought about it, but she
obeyed the law.
That is the reason that she became
obsessed with changing the Texas concealed carry law. Do not automatically assume that everyone who has been disarmed by the state is incapable of defending themselves and others.
If anyone thinks that they are too stupid or too helpless to defend themselves and others it is very unfortunate from a societal point of view, but it's OK, if they feel they are not worth protecting from violence, perhaps they are right. I won't argue about their value to society.
The real problem for me is that those who feel that their lives and those of their families aren't worth defending often think that the lives of me and my family aren't worth defending, either. That's not their call.