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Man carrying home his gardening tools arrested by armed police in Manchester
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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UK weapon laws freak my American mind out. You can carry a folding, non-locking knife with a blade of less than 3 inches, without any justification or excuse?! Is violent knife crime a thing over there?
This stupid thing blows my mind. All I see are a bunch of harmless pocket knives.
I know, bag on the American who can carry a gun. LOL, I could carry a sword in public were I so inclined, and I often carry a machete in the woods. Believe it or not, straight to jail.
To practical matters, how do y'all transport kitchen knives, axes and other tools? Serious. And think on this, if you intend harm or self-defense, why not just carry a standard 2lb. hammer?
Also, two of my worst self-inflicted wounds were from non-locking knives, won't touch them any longer.
yes we've had spikes of knife attacks over recent years, a lot of it is gang related, with kids stabbing rival gang members in tit-for-tat spirals of violence.
Knife crime in general is nowhere near as bad as it is in America (and of course as you point out you guys have gun violence on top of that), but the UK is historically a peaceful country and our tolerance of friends and family being murdered in the street is a lot lower than yours.
One note, and not one to say we don't have a gun problem. But when you tear it down, half the gun deaths are suicides, much of the rest is gang related, remainder being family and friends killing each other. The notion that there's random shootings all over the place is false.
Notice what we report on! Brown people killing each other barely rates a blurb in local media, if any. AR-15 involved? ALL the reporting. Guy went bugshit in Maine, killed a bunch of people, no reporting on the weapon. (It was an AR-10, basically an AR-15.) Random violence gets headlines.
Most gun violence sites rate any shooting on school grounds as a "school shooting". I could pop one off at midnight at the local high school. School shooting! Cop shoots a kid. School shooting! While horryfying, it just doesn't happen as much as it's made out. We had plenty of guns when I was a kid, no school shootings until Columbine popularized the sport.
I feel this gets the point across. You might notice the MotherJones numbers, hardly a conservative site.
Maybe I'll contradict my earlier statement; America doesn't have a gun problem, America has a culture problem. I can illustrate using a local anecdote.
Local guy sees someone breaking into the empty trailer which is on his lot. Motherfucker thought it was A-OK to hide inside the treeline and shoot the guy the next night. He felt within his rights to hunt another human being. People on NextDoor.com were defending the shooter. Well, the cops disagreed, that's murder one.
sideeyes all the colonialism
Well. Some of those chaps were carrying knives - without a licence - so we had no choice really.
You cannot carry pepper spray to defend yourself. You don't need it because knives are illegal /s
The pocket knife thing is basically for Swiss army knives.
A hammer wouldn't be allowed either.
You can transfer kitchen knives and tools. That's allowed. And what the guy in this article did is legal. But what happened was the police made him admit to something he wasn't doing.
So what I'm hearing is if you want to commit a violent crime just wear a hard hat/hi-vis vest and say you're going to hammer things at work? Or put on a funny chef hat and walk around freely with your knives? Seems like the regulation only exists as fig leaf for minority profiling and harassing young people.
Or just grab a knife, put it in your bag and don't get caught. The police will only find out if they randomly stop and search you, which I think is probably a sub 1% chance, especially if you're a well dressed white briton.
Forgot the pepper spray thing! LOL fuck me that causes no tissue damage!
Yes, the law sounds very specifically written to allow a Victorinox full size. Was thinking on that writing my post. "Guess I could carry my Swiss?"
It's not full size, Victorinox used to make mostly 91 mm knives, they have a smaller size for UK legal ones. If you get the modern ones (111mm) they'll treat you like you have a nuke in your pocket (even though the army model would be a real shit weapon even if it locks open, it's not that pointy and the blade is mostly serrated).