LawDog has a post up on his favorite type of fighting knife. I have no knowledge of knife fighting, but his reasoning behind a push knife makes sense to me.
Unfortunately:
Unfortunately, the Great State of Texas classes push knives as “illegal knives” and being caught with one in public will net you a Class ‘A’ misdemeanor — which is why I no longer carry mine.
The same holds true for Michigan too, to the best of my knowledge, although I think it’s actually a felony here.
How strange is that? He’s a police officer but can’t carry a simple knife!
Our laws are a tangled mess when it comes to weapons. For instance, in Michigan any firearm under 30″ is a pistol which requires you to get a “Safety Inspection” done. That means if I drop an 18.5″ barrel on one of my Remington 870 shotguns and a pistol grip with a folding stock it become a pistol, which also means I can legally conceal it under my winter coat and waltz into Meijer to do my grocery shopping. Or, I could just drop it on my passenger seat and drive around town doing my business.
Granted, I have no intention of doing that, nor any desire, but I legally could.
But a double edged knife with a 4″ blade? Nope. Can’t carry that around.
I suspect that the there are a few reasons why our knife laws haven’t changed much in the last 50 years:
1) 99% of the population has no idea how dumb they area.
2) Because of reason #1 people illegally carry knives quite frequently.
3) Nobody ever gets charged for violation of them unless they had it coming. If they have been then I’m not hearing about it.
4) Because of reason #3 there’s no lobbying effort to change these things.
