10 Possible “Good Reasons” for carrying a knife in public in the UK
Вставка
- Опубліковано 17 жов 2024
- 10 possible “good reasons” for carrying a knife in public in the UK.
Relevant Law in England and Wales
Criminal Justice Act 1988 S.139
www.legislatio...
Cps Guidelines
www.cps.gov.uk...
I have prepared this series to explain the law on knives - something which I believe should be taught to young people at school and college. Many of the 10 poss good reasons given are ones I have dealt with and advised at police stations and courts over the many years. Hope you find it informative if not based much on “common sense”.
SUBSCRIBE LIKE COMMENT.
Please also visit our website www.clevideos.co.uk
Please DONATE via our Patreon page so we can continue to make and publish legal video explainers. Thank you
A very clear and concise video. With a clear and well written message.
Thank you.
A friend of mine got himself into trouble when he was about 15 which resulted in a trip to the magistrate's court, his father going who worked for a building supplier went straight from work and met his son outside, when they entered and were asked to empty their pockets he produced a Stanley knife, which caused all sorts of panic as you might imagine, the poor kid going to court was actually embarrassed by his father, after some explanation he was allowed in although they did insist on keeping his knife until he left.
Well that was interesting thank you.
Thanks - some were used or raised in police interviews successfully to defend against a poss offence under s139 resulting in NFA ie recent purchase, camping, camper van…
Thank you.
As a knife collector the laws in the UK are getting increasingly insane. Soon many of my bushcraft knives might get reclassified as "zombie knives" because they have serrated backs and "a hole" in the blade. It has become ludicrous. I literally cannot count the number of items I have had to bin because of changes in the law over the years. The only other alternative is handing them in during an amnesty ... where you receive a fraction of the knives value, and are frequently required to leave personal details. (no thanks)
The irony is that 99.9% of all UK stabbings involve kitchen knives, and young, poor, urban males, under the age of 25. The other irony is that you get more draconian sentencing guidelines for illegal possession than the actual crimes perpetrated with weapons. The guy who tried to murder another kid with a spiked baseball bat only got 8 years... but a guy who who was legally transporting a knife he just purchased was arrested because the police didnt believe him, then despite it being his first encounter with the law, he got a mandatory 5 year prison sentence.
Personally I think we fail on violent crime in the UK because the Police are obsessed with arresting people for possession, whilst the judges are more concerned about the "welfare and rehabilitation" of actual gang members.
Thank you for sharing your experiences and observations about the law on knives.
Have you any thoughts about why so many Japanese named knives are banned in private as well as public? Was death stars and other items prevalent to extent they required the Gov to criminalise even possession in the home?
@@communitylegaleducation8438 You are very welcome mate, and in response to your question..... Optics, ignorance, the media and cheap political posturing.
At the end of the day, violent crime maps almost perfectly onto social deprivation metrics, but fixing THAT problem costs lots of money, and wont produce results within the timeframe of the electoral cycle. However, sensational headlines about getting "tough on crime" and banning random martial arts weapons is good for your political image, and will fly through parliament because nobody wants to stand up for knife rights (its not a political hill anyone wants to die on.)
Obviously, nearly all knife crime is committed using pound-shop kitchen knives, but what makes the headlines is video footage of kids running around with machetes and katanas. THAT is sensational, so banning THOSE kinds of weapons makes for great headlines for the politicians, even though these bans are functionally useless.
I cant stress enough, knife laws in the UK have had zero traction on violent crime.
I grew up doing martial arts, and Im old enough to remember the moral panic about Japanese weapons and particularly "ninja" weapons. I guess they were the "zombie knives" of their day. They were barely ever used in real fights, but just a couple of national news stories later they were public enemy number 1, and the government set about systematically banning all of those "ninja" style weapons, and then a load of Kung Fu weapons too, like Tonfa and Nun Chucks. All this was done in the full knowledge that statistically, nearly all knife crime was being done with stanley knives and kitchen knives.
I guess there is a little cyclical engine going on here.... popular culture like films and TV popularise something (like ninjas), teenage boys go out and buy the weapons and hide them under their beds, then ONE person uses a ninja weapon in a crime and suddenly its front page national news, the politicians see an opportunity to look "tough on crime" without spending any real money on social poverty, the police get more reasons to arrest people which makes their day (the police are also a driving factor in this), everyone is a winner ..... apart from the law abiding British public. Rinse and repeat.
This process of moral panic, followed by ridiculous legislation has gone on for decades ..... flick knives, ninja weapons, kung fu weapons, zombie knives, and now .... its machetes.
None of these genre of knives has represented a spike in violent crime statistics, they have however, been a significant spike in media coverage. See where Im going here... its not the reality, its the perception, because banning things being sensationalised in the press is great optics, and costs nothing.
Sadly however....it does criminalise a lot of normal people who forget they have a certain (now banned item) hidden at the back of a closet... or tucked in the glove box of their car. Seriously, most people dont realise that if they took their tool kit and left it in their car, they would almost certainly have at least one item in there which would be considered an "offensive weapon" under current law.
Ninja throwing stars (or shuriken) primarily got completely banned because they made great news coverage.
People were sitting at home being convinced that they would have to be ducking these things on the way to the shops. They look scary, the news can show corresponding combat footage from ninja movies (popular at the time), and politicians would win cool points for banning these "deadly" weapons.
Ironically NOBODY has ever been killed in the UK with a shuriken. In fact I dont know of anyone ever being killed by one in modern history. For a start most are blunt, not sharp. They are primarily used for target practise in the garden. They are very short range. And most critically, even when they WERE used in feudal Japan, they were an instrument of distraction used to slow down pursuers. They are designed to stick in people and make them more concerned about themselves, than they are about pursuing you.
As for being banned in the home, all I can say is this....
Everything seems to gradually migrate from the "banned in public" list, to the "banned in private" list eventually. Its just legal mission creep. Lets face it, we live in a country which put ALL types of blow pipes on the offensive weapons list, and pepper spray is now treated like a firearm. These guys never stop.
As for ignorance.... being a bit of an amateur expert, its crystal clear to me that the people making these laws have zero understanding of knives, edged tools, social policy, crime statistics or in some instances .... reality
For example, in the last revision to the offensive weapons act, they banned Japanese Shuko (Ninja hand claws.) Now clearly some idiot at Westminster was just sitting on google, doing random searches on "ninjas" and was picking out anything that looked scary, just for optics. Well here is the kicker.... as far as I am aware, nobody has ever been killed using these ever, anywhere, in the world. They are not even a weapon. They are used for climbing up the outside of traditional Japanese wooden houses. But if you are a low level intern at Westminster and your brief is "find scary ninja weapons to ban" then you would be entirely ignorant of the fact that they are NOT weapons.
Similarly, the current classification of "zombie knife" is going to extend to anything with "holes" in the blade or "serrations".
Lots of bushcraft tools have serrated back edges for processing wood, and lots of larger knives have holes in them to reduce friction when passing through homogeneous, damp material. (something to do with not forming a vacuum, dont know the science). My main point is, they are sleep walking into a situation where many legitimate camp knives and military collectables will become "zombie knives". MANY military survival knives used for bushcraft have a saw back. (The Glock combat knife, the classic KaBar etc)
Then there is the fact that during a lot of this discussion, the law makers dont seem to appreciate the difference between traditional kukris, machetes, parangs billhooks and other tools. Now if the lawmakers dont have a clue, what chance does your average police officer have. And seriously go read the consultation paper, where they openly ask for help and clarification on the knives and machetes. Let that sink in .... these guys are claiming that banning these "things" is a matter of public safety, but they dont even know what these "things" are.
To hammer home the utter idiocy and ignorance of a lot of these guys I will provide you with a perfect example. During a knife amnesty in London about 15 years ago, a photo of a police officer holding a vicious looking weapon was on the front page of the Metro Newspaper..... its was a replica Klingon bat'leth .... it was a Star Trek prop ffs. These guys are clueless. The Met later had to issue an apology and retraction, but at the time they were lauding it as a huge win for law and order.
I should also mention the insidious hypocrisy of many of these knife laws....
At the end of the day, these are rich people making laws for poor people to suffer under, and you can tell this from the exceptions and revisions which get slipped in before they become law.
Take the case of Katana. They were about to be banned, but rich people like hanging swords above the mantlepiece in their stately homes, so there was a lot of scurrying about and amendments, so that wealthy people with antique sword collections could keep their swords. They didn't want cavalry sabres accidently being classified as a "sword with a curved blade". So by the time these laws hit the streets, they always have exceptions to make sure that anything a rich baron might have in their stately home is legal, .... but if you use something for martial arts.... well they dont care about that.
It is also worth noting that there is clearly also corporate interests involved.
Prior the final revisions, the previous changes to the offensive weapons act might as well have been called "The Amazon market dominance Act"
The original draught explicitly stated that sending any knife by mail would be criminalised. People would have to have them sent to some third party agent for collection or delivered by said agent. Unamended this would have destroyed the British knife making and craft knife industry, because they would not be able to ship knives. Amazon however, well they deliver their goods using their own delivery delivery drivers...... and in a single pen stroke, Amazon would have become the only company in the UK that could sell knives of any kind on online. Someone was expecting a pay day for this sinister clause.
At the end of the day I dont think its wise to use knives for self defence, because they are a lethal force weapon if used in that manner. I also appreciate that the cops want more powers.... because they ALWAYS want more powers. Its societies job to balance the powers of the state against the interests of the public and it is this that I see as the problem. Our knife laws are horrifically strict, aggressively enforced, frequently misunderstood by the police on the ground, and regularly result in law abiding people ending up in prison for the first infraction. Meanwhile you have an average chance of 0.000004 % of being murdered with a knife. Im not convinced that the stabbings are more of a problem than the incarceration of the public for knife possession.
Apologies for the wall of text. I am just in a state of shock that thanks to lazy politicians I might have to throw thousands of pounds worth of blades in a skip.
Are you not even allowed to keep your collection if they never leave your home?
@@OffGridMadMan you are allowed to keep knives in your home save for banned knives eg zombie knives
@@communitylegaleducation8438 that sounds ridiculous and I'm sorry to hear your problems with this, all the best 👍
How about taking it to a tradesman to get sharpened?
Such a shame it's come to this. As boy scouts we all had sheath knives, some were quite big. Strangely, we never thought about stabbing people.
Times change and so do laws and how they seek to deal with a “problem” in this case knife crime.
UK knife crime laws seem to be the very opposite of the laws in other parts of the world where they are allowed unless they are used for the wrong purpose. Here in the Uk knives are generally not allowed to be carried unless a person has a good reason.
@@communitylegaleducation8438 You are absolutely right. I live in Czech Republic, there are no knife restrictions by type and the only carry restrictions are, not on a public demonstration or a court house.
Thank you brother
Thank you for watching
Hello. I just want to clarify that I would not need a good reason to carry a non-locking knife with a blade shorter than 3 inches please. I ask this as I go walking in the local countryside daily and I always thought a small knife could potentially come in very handy but have never carried one as I thought it was illegal. Cheers 👍
You do not need a reason to carry a non-locking knife with a blade shorter than 3 inches if questioned by police during a search. However, if questioned and you reply with your reasoning being "self defence" (ie. it's a bad neighbourhood etc.) this changes things because the tool then becomes a weapon. The same thing applies if you were to present or use the otherwise legal knife in a way that could be considered threatening or likely to cause harm/distress to others.
From your statement it sounds like your reasons are completely normal and therefore you are not breaking any laws by carrying a legal pocket knife.
@@DjDolHaus86 thanks for that reply, clears things up a bit. I was aware that the self defence reasoning was a big no-no and I can understand that. I carry a torch too if I go out a bit later than normal and might get caught by the darkness. I actually can't think of a time when I'v needed a small knife but you never know. Cheers 👍
@@OffGridMadMan I carry one out of habit because its something I need throughout the day while working but it does come in useful from time to time outside of work. I'd maybe recommend something like an opinel no.8 as they're a handsome, well made little folding knife and can be picked up for about £10 so if you don't find it fits your lifestyle then you're not overly invested.
@@DjDolHaus86 thanks so much, I'll check that out. There are a lot of beautiful little legal knives to choose from isn't there? I'm still wondering if I'd ever need it to be honest but better to have one than not I reckon. I still feel uncomfortable about the legality knowing how our police can be silly sometimes if they're having a bad day 🤔
@@OffGridMadMan As you said, better to have one and not need it. My question on the police issue would be how likely is it that you're going to get patted down by an officer while out in the countryside?
The blade is allowed to exceed 3inches, it's the cutting edge which is not.
This is from the CPS,
“The article does not have to be sharp: a butter knife, with no cutting edge and no point, is a bladed article. The only exception to the bladed or sharply pointed provision is a folding pocketknife, and only if the blade does not exceed 3 inches”
www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/offensive-weapons-knife-crime-practical-guidance
I had a hunting knife always in London
What were you hunting
@@alexanderoddy4916 Only incase something hunted me or my bicycle.