Competing Federal Knife Bills Blunt Reform Efforts

With Donald Trump as President, now is the time to reform federal knife laws and to protect knife owners from abusive state laws.

Two different bills have been introduced, one in the House, H.R. 84, by Knife Rights, and one in the Senate, S. 1092, by American Knife and Tool Institute (AKTI). The two bills are based on continuing efforts by both groups. They are superficially similar, but differ in crucial details. Both bills are fairly short.

As with all legislation, you have to read the language very carefully and critically to understand some of the differences.

The Knife Rights bill creates serious reform and institutes significant protections for knife owners across the nation. While based on the concept of the Firearms Owners Protection Act (FOPA), it corrects numerous flaws in that legislation.

It provides penalties for local officials who violate the law. It protects all legal acts of possession, carry, or transport. It eliminates the federal ban on the interstate commerce, manufacture, or importation of automatic knives. The repeal of that ban is long overdue.

The AKTI bill is also based on FOPA. Unfortunately it offers only minimal improvement over existing law, and contains all the flaws that have been noted in FOPA. There is no means to enforce the law against local officials who ignore it.

There is no repeal of the federal ban on automatic knives. The wording is such that the protections only apply to knives that may be legally possessed and carried at the beginning and end of the travel. Note the phrase “possess and carry” at the end of the excerpted section of the bill. From congress.gov AKTI's S. 1092:

I find it somewhat discouraging that liberals have managed to demonize something as harmless and useful as a pocket knife.

Recently, I was with my wife in a tourist area, and I sat on a bench while she shopped. I looked down and saw an unusual piece of wood on the ground, and picked it up and was turning it over in my hand when a young man (mid-late teens?) saw me pick it up. I saw him looking at it, and he said “What is it?”

I told him it looked like a knife handle that might have broken or fallen off of someone’s knife, and he looked puzzled. I said “Looks like a pocket knife handle.”

He still looked puzzled, and said “Huh. Who would carry around a knife?” and I said “Well, I do, I always have a Swiss Army Knife” and showed him. He said “I didn’t know people carried those around...”

He wasn’t making the face a liberal would make if you said you carried a gun, but general puzzlement that anyone would carry a knife. I felt kind of bad for him. When I was a kid, we all had knives. He didn’t know any better.

As I was talking, a guy in his late twenties or early thirties came walking up, looking fixedly at the chunk of wood in my hand. Our eyes met, and before he could say anything, I said “Is this yours?”

He said he had been sitting on the bench carving the knife handle I was holding (he sold knives) and it must have fallen out of his box when he got up.

It was a really nice handle. But it struck me how society frowns on anything like that now. What a frikking hot mess we are these days.

Every time I fly somewhere, or we go to some event, my wife tells me to leave my knife at home.

I roll my eyes, but she is right.

I went to an air show a couple of years ago, and they wouldn’t let me bring the knife in! A damned Swiss Army Knife. An air show?????

What pray tell is an “automatic” knife? Is that a switch-blade?

The term includes switchblades, gravity knives, and others.

Some laws include almost any knife that can be opened with one hand. Others require that mechanical button or lever on the handle be used to open the knife.

None of the laws make much sense. Here is how the “switchblade” ban came to be:

http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2015/02/how-switchblades-were-banned.html

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