Bread Knives and Knife Rights

The Dexter Bread Knife

My wife has acquired a new bread knife.  She has a short story about it, but it is more of a precautionary tale than a story about a knife.   You can read it at http://tactical-talk.blogspot.com/. 

There’s also a link on my sidebar.

Knife Rights under Attack

It’s not often I recommend an article about knives in an NRA publication.  Some of you may see a distinction between the knives you own or collect and a handgun.  There really isn’t one.  Knives can be used in a very deadly fashion.  Just watch any Cold Steel video as they slice and amputate with single strokes of their knives.  Knives can be clearly more dangerous than handguns. 

Our government’s response to anything is to pass laws.  It is the only thing, other than spending your money, they can do.  Few laws are passed for one specific reason.  The bill, its supporters and the author may tell you it has only one purpose, but there’s always more.  We are way too complicated to do much of anything for one single reason.

For example, Boston is considering requiring businesses that sell knives to be licensed.  It was pointed out to the city council that stores operating in Boston are already licensed and regulated by law.  They are restricted from selling any knife with a blade 2 inches or longer to anyone under 18.  This made no impact on the city council because “The modern way of approaching these issues is to go after the source of the items rather than the criminals themselves.”  Remember, we’re not talking about drugs or white slavery, but pocket knives.

That do you think? Is Boston interested in protecting you or raising money and making businesses more easy to manipulate?

Knife laws are passed not to protect you, but to control you and make you dependent on the government and its agencies.  I have a blog about the British government telling Boy Scouts not to carry their scout knives when in uniform (http://knifesearch.blogspot.com/2010/06/hells-angels-and-boy-scouts.html) .  Seems those friction lock knives with can opener and awl are just too dangerous.

New York has declared war on any knife that locks open, can be easily opened, and clips in your pocket.  England lost their knife rights through the usual tactics of separate, divide and conquer.  

Read “Will Knives Fold?” in the NRA’s December 2011 issue of America’s 1^st Freedom and you’ll see a history of those tactics continuing to this day.  You’ll find it on page 38.

You may not like the NRA, but they will tell you a different side of the story.

Benchmade Auto

The knife business isn’t all edged steel and handle choices.   There’s a lot of basic business involved.  Determining demand, placing orders, overstock, profit margins and, of course, dealing with mistakes.

A Benchmade Auto-Rift (9555SBK) arrived the other day.  I have a customer who has been waiting quite some time for it.  Unfortunately Benchmade shipped my wholesaler the black serrated blade, not the black plain edge he ordered.  The wholesaler just assumed it was the right order and shipped it to me.

Benchmade Auto-Rift  Model 9555SBK

 I was so happy to see it, I didn’t check it either.  My wife caught it right before we finished packing it up.

I checked with the customer and I’m ordering him another knife.  I can send it back to my wholesaler, but I’d really like to save myself from jumping through flaming hoops to return it and get all my shipping back.

I’m going to try to sell it locally.  It’s a nice knife and the picture in Benchmade’s catalog doesn’t do it justice.

Want to find out more about the Auto-Rift?  Here’s a link: http://www.benchmade.com/products/9555

I just keep telling myself it’s all part of the adventure of life.

Reflections on Veterans Day

By the end of the War-to-End-All-Wars, the cream of Europe’s best was ground into hamburger and the Spanish flu pretty much ended any nation’s ability to field men.  To celebrate not having any more men to kill, the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month of 1918 was declared Armistice Day.

Following the war, President Woodrow Wilson celebrated Armistice Day by inviting 2000 soldiers to dinner at the White House.  The main course?  Ravioli, the canned fad food that was sweeping the nation.  Hey!  It was 1920 and canned food was so new and novel, it was almost as good as the second coming.  Woody’s meal started the now forgotten tradition of eating ravioli on Nov 11.

Sweeping changes don’t always start on the west coast or in trendy New York discos.  Alvin King, the owner of a shoe repair shop in Emporia, Kansas, was the epicenter of Veterans Day.  

“Why not,” I imagine him thinking, “remember all veterans on Armistice Day?”  Alvin did more than just think about it, he acted.  The following year President Eisenhower, a veteran himself, signed a bill May 26, 1954, making Nov 11 Veterans Day and a Federal holiday.

Since Ike, world wars have been called police actions and I can’t begin to recount all the places American service men and women have been stationed at and therefore died in.  Despite their sacrifices the theaters of war have expanded.  It was called total war and now we call it asymmetric war.  But it means the same; each of us has a stake in the outcome and duty to participate.

Clausewitz codified most of it in the 1830s.  Clausewitz observed that conflict causes an erosion of separation between the military and the civilians.  He wasn’t the first and he isn’t the last.  The battlefield has arrived and is living in our parking lots.  The woman in the bunker with an M-16 has only a few degrees of separation from the woman pushing the grocery cart down the store aisle.

Law enforcement, in all its facets, is only one degree.  The average citizen who picks up their phone and drops a dime on suspicious behavior is another.  The fireman who goes into a burning building looking for victims or the postman who notices mail building up at the home of the elderly and acts, all soldiers of the conflict.  They are all part of the total war.  Our national character forms from our behavior and willingness to be involved.  Each of us sacrifice some, some sacrificed all.

It isn’t a perfect system.  We let strangers feel us up at airports for the illusion of safety.  Politicians pimp to voting blocs.  Citizens sell their votes and freedoms to the empty promise of safety and security in an unsafe world.  

So if you sit down to an Italian meal tonight, enjoy your ravioli. Spend a second remembering all the veterans, who have, are, and will stand up and be counted.  Think about how every day we need to act to preserve our freedoms and way of life.