Misinformation about the Virginia Restaurant Carry Ban and Repeal
Every year for the last 13 years, the Virginia Citizen’s Defense League (VCDL) has worked with the Virginia General Assembly to pass legislation fixing Virginia’s ridiculous ban on concealed carry in restaurants that serve alcohol. Alot of the Virginia media completely misunderstand the issue and indulge in all manner of hyperbole and theatrics.
First, some background: In Virginia, there exists no law prohibiting a law-abiding citizen from carrying a gun openly, in public. There are restrictions, including no high-capacity (> 20 rounds) magazines in urban areas, no carry in schools or courthouses or federal buildings, no carry where posted by the private property owner, and a few others, but for all practical purposes, anyone legally able to possess a gun in Virginia can carry it openly in public without any sort of permit or registration. Maybe that scares you and it seems foolish, but it’s true. Thousands of Virginias do so every year, including me.
While open carry is legal and a legitimate way to carry a firearm for self-defense, it does have a few problems. First, many cops over the years have detained or arrested law-abiding citizens for open carrying, using charges like “disturbing the peace” or whatever. Second, even in areas where the police are well-educated as to the law, people still make “man with a gun” 911 calls. So, what if you want to carry a gun for defense, but you don’t want to call attention to yourself, scare people, or attract the police?
In Virginia, you apply to your county courthouse for a concealed handgun permit. As long as you meet the statutory eligibility requirements (older than 21, proof of training, no felony convictions, and a few others) your county is required by law to issue you a permit within 45 days. Once the permit is issued, you can carry a concealed handgun in all the same places you can carry openly, but without the drama.
There is, however, one exception to that rule: under Virginia law, you may not carry a concealed handgun onto the premises of a restaurant licensed to serve alcohol for on-premises consumption. This would include virtually any non-fast-food dining establishment, like TGI Friday’s, Ruby Tuesday’s, Silver Diner, etc. It doesn’t matter whether you drink any alcohol or not; concealed carry is not allowed.
In practice, this forces one of two responses from CHP holders: either leave the weapon in the car, hoping it won’t be stolen and used in a crime, or stop concealing the gun and carry it openly. That’s right; there’s nothing in Virginia law prohibiting openly carrying a gun in a restaurant that serves alcohol; it’s only concealed handguns that are forbidden.
So, maybe you believe that citizens should be disarmed by the force of law whenever they are in the presence of alcohol. I think that’s bullshit, but even if I did agree with you, presumably an openly-carried handgun is at least as likely to turn its owner into a raging gunman as is a concealed handgun, perhaps even more-so if the clearly visible handgun prompts one or more drunken assholes to pick a fight.
Anyway, like it or not, that’s the law in Virginia. VCDL has been working to get this changed, so open and concealed carry are treated equally. For the first time ever, VCDL-endorsed legislation allowing concealed carry in restaurants that serve alcohol has made it through both the Senate and the House of Delegates, and is headed to the governor, whose response is anyone’s guess.
This has Virginia’s liberal media worked up into a froth of colorful rhetoric and hyperbolic hand-waving. “Guns and booze don’t mix”, we’re told. “Guns in bars is a bad idea”, it seems (nevermind there are no “bars” in Virginia; only restaurants that serve food which happen to be licensed to serve alcohol for on-premises consumption). “Why do you need a gun in McDonald’s?”, we’re asked, notwithstanding the fact that McD’s doesn’t serve alcohol and thus one can legally carry concealed there.
A great example of this irrational, poorly-reasoned, profoundly-ignorant rhetoric is an opinion piece by Nick Penning in The Connection newspapers, entitled Grab the Derringer, Honey, We’re Taking the Kids to McDonalds. If you support the right of law-abiding citizens to carry weapons for their own defense, the piece is a painful read filled with misconceptions, distortions, and solipsistic bullshit. If you support government attempts to disarm law-abiding citizens, you probably won’t like the piece either, as it makes a profoundly weak case for restricting gun rights due to the aforementioned flaws.
Here are some choice bits:
Grab the Derringer, Honey, We’re Taking the Kids to McDonalds
Ok, even the title is full of fail. I’m sure some citizens carry a derringer for defense, but most would find it a poor choice. Derringers are typically very small, with small capacities and weak cartridges. I’m sure they’re better than nothing, but not by much.
Notwithstanding the gun ignorance, the debate over this bill has nothing to do with McDonalds. Anyone with a concealed handgun permit can carry concealed in McDonald’s today, just as surely as they can if this bill becomes law.
What could be more “American” than coming home after a long day and deciding to give yourselves a break and the kids a treat? And now the Republican-led House of Delegates in Richmond has made it even more fun, by approving — in a 62-26 vote — your right to pack a revolver in your pocket while the kids eat their fries.
Oh God where to begin. When an author starts to break out the Old West lingo like “pack” and “gun totin’”, you know you’re in for a painful screed. It should be noted that the Democrat-led Senate also passed the bill, and it does not address “rights” or “privileges”, it simply modifies the law to relax restrictions imposed on concealed handgun permit holders. As an aside for others considering penning a gun-hating rant, a “revolver” is a type of handgun, and a “pistol” or “semi-automatic” is another type. The bill does not specify the type of handgun, nor does it specify the mode of carry; just that it is concealed.
What in God’s name is happening to our culture? Or should the question be, what are gun-obsessed politicians doing to our culture?
Expanding the rights of one of the most law-abiding groups in Virginia, concealed handgun permit holders, is somehow detrimental to our culture? Does one have to be “gun-obsessed” to think this is a good idea?
The bill in question SB 476, had been drafted to prohibit the carrying of concealed firearms into Virginia restaurants. Take a look at how a sensible prohibition against guns in eating establishments, especially those which serve alcohol, was twisted into a permit to carry a gun in such places. This is the wording of the bill, as changed by an amendment added before it passed (the original words are crossed out; the added ones are in italics):
If SB 476 was drafted to prohibit carrying concealed handguns in restaurants that serve alcohol, it was a pointless bill to draft, as that’s already prohibited under Virginia law.
No person shall carry who carries a concealed handgun onto the premises of any restaurant or club … which [has] a license to sell and serve alcoholic beverages for on-premises consumption … may consume an alcoholic beverage while on the premises.
Clever, isn’t it? Just amend a well-intentioned “No person shall carry a concealed handgun” into a bar or restaurant, and bastardize it into its polar opposite by changing the language. It went from “no person ‘shall’ carry” a gun, to “no person ‘who’ carries” a gun; and then adding “may consume an alcoholic beverage” at the end.
He makes it sound as though this was some sort of dirty little trick. In point of fact, amendments to laws that materially change the laws are a common practice in legislative bodies, and have been used by anti-gun politicians to sink pro-gun legislation more times than I care to count. It’s, um, representative democracy, not some sort of nefarious plot.
Based on this bill’s provisions, apparently it’s already Ok for you to carry your handgun and holster outside your jacket wherever you go in the Commonwealth. The cause célèbre of gunsters now is hiding them, when you’re in public.
Um, yeah. Open carry has been legal in VA for a long time now. And just what the hell is a “gunster” and why do I get the sense it’s a pejorative term? Anyway, “hiding” them isn’t a new cause celebre; that was back in 1994 when Virginia law was changed to establish clear and simply rules for the issuance of concealed handgun permits to anyone not prohibited by law. The “cause celebre” now is to strike the ridiculous law that requires those otherwise carrying concealed to open up in a restaurant. Surely, Nick would rather he and his children eat their meals in peace rather than experience the trauma of dining in the presence of an openly armed citizen!
Thirty people were meticulously slaughtered by Virginia handguns at Virginia Tech less than a year ago. Have we learned nothing about the insanity of widespread, no limits possession of handguns in our state and country?
Except the VA tech massacre didn’t happen at a restaurant that served alcohol, wasn’t perpetrated by a citizen with a concealed handgun permit, and quite possibly could have ended differently if VA Tech didn’t forcibly disarm its students and subsequently fail to protect them from murderous criminals.
It’s as though I’m writing a screed opposing a tax increase and invoke Mao’s murderous Cultural Revolution as proof increased government spending is bad.
For most of us, this kind of lawmaking is under our radar. Bills fly through our Assembly and, were it not for the press, we’d rarely hear about any of them. Most of the time an entity with the strength of the NRA operates with the wind at its back, sailing its packages of public poison into laws, despite the good efforts of our local Arlington delegates and senators.
Oh, how I wish that were true. Why, then, is this the thirteenth attempt to fix this law? Why does Virginia still have a stupid one-handgun-a-month law? Why does Virginia require proof of citizenship to buy “assault weapons”? Why does Virginia allow its public universities to disarm their adult students by administrative fiat?
Until now things seemed to be changing, in our Virginia and in the nation. We evicted a Republican racist from one of our seats in the U.S. Senate, installing Jim Webb.
Reasonable people can argue the extent to which George Allen was a racist; we can all agree he ran an astonishingly shitty Senate re-election campaign. What this has to do with the subject of the column one can only guess.
However, since we’re on the subject of Jim Webb, it’s worth noting he has a Virginia concealed handgun permit, and exercises his divine right as a one of 534 more-equal citizens permitted to carry a handgun in the Capitol building. How long until Senator Web is driven mad by the presence of a firearm and guns down the Republican leadership in a fit of rage?
Virginia appeared to be joining the nation in ending the politics of violence and hate. Instead, the Assembly snapped a bit of hope from our lives and gave-in to the purveyors of handguns, the only purpose of which is to kill human beings. While rifles are used for hunting and can’t be concealed, easily purchased handguns fit nicely in any pocket and are used all over this gun-infested land to kill spouses, girlfriends, neighbors, and street crime victims. There’s a reason they’re termed “Saturday Night Specials,” since they can be found at virtually every crime scene in every city and village across the country.
It literally pained me to read this paragraph. How one can fit so much ignorance and distortion in so few words is beyond me.
- Allowing law-abiding, permit-holding Virginians to carry defensive weapons in a restaurant serving alcohol, the same weapons they carry everywhere else without hurting anyone, is somehow an aim of the politics of violence and hate?
- This bill was not pushed by the “purveyors of handguns”, if that means dealers and gun manufacturers. It was pushed by groups representing the law-abiding gun owners who demand the government recognize their right to defend themselves and their families against imminent threats of serious bodily harm or death.
- While handguns have a purpose other than the killing of human beings, I will grant Nick this: one would be foolish to carry a handgun for defense if that handgun was not capable of killing a human being. However, that does not mean all who carry handguns are seeking to take human life; if that were true, I hope he would join me in demanding our police officers be disarmed immediately.
- If Nick thinks a rifle can’t be concealed, I’d love for him to try to find my FAL under a heavy coat once I fold the stock
- I’m not sure what “easily purchased” means; if it means “purchased from a licensed gun dealer after passing a federal background check”, then I’ll grant him that. Handguns are certainly no easier to buy than long guns, and in some ways harder.
- If he thinks handguns fit nicely into any pocket, I have a few handguns I’d like him to stuff in his pocket as an experiment. Most lawfully armed citizens carry in a holster, which is both safer and easier to access
- If “gun infested” means having significant private gun ownership, then I’ll give him that. But he focuses on the use of guns to commit murder as though the gun is what makes that possible, but that’s demonstrably untrue. How many of those girlfriends, spouses, neighbors, and street crime victims (that is, the one’s that weren’t already felons and gang members and thus much more likely to be killed by gunfire) would be alive today if they’d armed themselves and prepared to fight back against their attackers? In Nick’s Utopia where everyone is disarmed, there is nothing between the 6″2′ 250lb rapist and his 110lb victim but a law prohibiting rape.
- The term “Saturday Night Specials” has been used to ban a certain class of handguns, usually cheap, small-caliber guns like the Lorcin. As these have been regulated out of existence, the law-abiding poor are less able to afford firearms, while the gang-bangers that prey upon them seem to manage to spring for Glocks and Sigs. Nick seems to suggest that handgun == “Saturday Night Special”, which is absurdly ignorant, even for a gun-hating opinion columnist
And now Virginia, if the governor should fail to use his veto, could see a metastasizing of gun violence in bars and eateries all over the state, thanks to this insane legislation.
So, let me get this straight. Law-abiding gun owners with concealed carry permits can and do carry concealed handguns all over the state, as they have for 14 years. Those same gun owners can and do openly carry those same handguns in restaurants that serve alcohol (NIT: legally speaking there are no bars in Virginia), as they have for at least that long. The proportion of concealed handgun permit holders who have been convicted of a violent crime is lower than the number of police officers locked up for violent felonies. And yet should Governor Kaine choose to allow those very same permit holders to carry those very same guns concealed in restaurants that serve alcohol (provided they do not consume alcohol while carrying), gun violence in Virginia will metastasize out of control?
Here’s the thinking, apparently:
Concealed carry everywhere but restaurants that serve alcohol: no bloodbath
Open carry everywhere including restaurants that serve alcohol: no bloodbath
Concealed carry in restaurants that serve alcohol: bloodbath
Even if you oppose civilian gun ownership, if you’re the slightest bit intellectually honest you have to admit this doesn’t pass the smell test.
“Sure, you can hide your gun under your shirt or in your bag; but we made certain everything will be safe in the restaurants,” say those who voted for SB 476, ‘because you can’t drink while you’re packing a gun.’
So, when you’re arrested for killing someone in a late night shootout, heaven help you if you took a drink, because that’s illegal.
Nick has unwittingly parodied himself here. Usually when a gun-banner is proposing some new disarmament scheme, it’s us gun-rights advocates that point out murder/kidnapping/assault are already crimes, so it’s wishful thinking to believe criminals will obey gun-ban laws when they don’t obey violence-ban laws. Now, Nick is turning it around, but in an absurdly implausible way.
As a statistical matter, concealed handgun permit holders are extremely unlikely to commit violent crimes, especially with their carry guns. It’s not the prohibition on drinking that makes this the case (though I don’t oppose prohibitions against alcohol consumption whilst armed), but the nature of permit holders. If one has no respect for the law, or no self-control, one will carry a concealed handgun without a permit. After all, it’s just a misdemeanor, and if it’s concealed you won’t get caught. A permit holder has jumped through legal hoops, spent money, and inconvenience him/herself in order to respect the law. This is, generally speaking, not someone who will fly into a blind rage and gun down the wait staff in a late-night shootout.
If, by some statistical anomaly, a drunken CHP holder were to commit a murder, a Class 1 misdemeanor for drinking while armed would be irrelevant; felony murder charges are what would ruin his day.
Maybe you and I can help this national change process by stopping the NRA here; by showing we reject the insanity of all guns, all the time; because they can only lead to more dead bodies too much of the time.
The problem with this argument, apart from the slanderous smear against gun owners as represented by the NRA, is that it’s been made against virtually every attempt to roll back gun control in the last 100 years. When many states were considering making it easier to obtain a concealed handgun permit (now some 40 states are so-called “shall issue”), police chiefs and gun-ban groups warned of “blood in the streets” and “road rage turned violent”. None of that has materialized, for the reason I mentioned above: murderous hot-heads don’t generally apply for concealed handgun permits.
It’s my fervent hope that Gov. Kaine sees the light and signs this bill. Then Nick can spend a few years studiously avoiding restaurants serving alcohol for fear of spontaneous gun violence, and perhaps then he’ll notice the conspicuous failure of the sky to fall and the world to end, and rethink his ignorant and poorly-reasoned position.
Exemptions To Journalistic Integrity – Tech, Guns, ?
It seems the journalism profession allows itself a few exemptions to its self-imposed integrity requirement, such that journalists covering exempt subjects are free to misinterpret, misconstrue, and misinform without consequence. From my observation, two broad categories which enjoy this exemption are technology (computers, the Internet, hard science, mathematics, maybe to some extent medicine) and guns.
Back in 1995 I could understand the MSM’s inability to properly grok the Internet. However, it’s 2008 and they’re still getting it wrong. Don’t believe me? Read the mainstream coverage of Microsoft’s recent decision to release more protocol specs to third-party developers without a license agreement or royalty payments. Now go to MSDN and look at what Microsoft actually released. Any resemblance? No, I didn’t think so.
Then there’s the “gun” issue. Stock footage of full-auto AK-47 fusillades when discussing semi-automatic AR-15s, confusing a “pistol” with a “revolver”, the dreaded “high-powered military-style assault rifle” (read: cheap surplus SKS), and on and on. I suspect in most cases there’s a propaganda element to the inaccurate coverage, but I also suspect it’s more basic than that; guns are a topic few journalists are interested in, and thus few are competent to report upon. They’re left to the mercy of “experts” with their own biases and blind spots.
Imagine if a political reporter submitted a story that clearly demonstrated ignorance of the electoral college, or the bill of rights (insert NYT joke here), or the three branches of American government. The storm of ridicule that would inevitable follow would be amusing at least.
But I didn’t write this post to opine about ignorance and bias in the mainstream media. If after the last four years you still regard the MSM as a credible source of information, well, there’s nothing I can say to change your mind. Really I wrote this post as an excuse to make fun of the most glaring bit of anti-gun ignorance since Carolyn McCarthy’s “shoulder thing that goes up” episode on Fox. Behold:
Oh my. Let’s see. The handgun is an M1911-style .45, as issued to our military during WWII and beyond. The 1911, like most handguns, has the safety lever and slide stop on the left side of the gun, and the stock photo the artist ripped off was clearly taken from the left side, but Captain Photoshop really wanted the gun to point to the right; mirror to the rescue. That’s why the writing on the slide is not legible; it’s backward!
Second, the M1911 has a solid trigger extending back into the frame, not a “hook” shape trigger extending down from the top of the trigger guard. Our artist apparently didn’t like the 1911-style trigger, so he photoshopped another trigger in front of the one already in the photo. Nice work.
Third, it appears this 1911 is firing the entire cartridge, not just the bullet. When you look at the cartridge it makes sense, seeing as how those cartridges are 9mm Luger, not .45 ACP, and thus would fit down the .45 barrel casing and all.
Yes, you probably didn’t notice these things looking at the picture, but you have an excuse; you’re just looking at it. Whoever came up with this willfully flipped the image, photoshopped an extra trigger, and pasted 9mm cartridges coming out the barrel. Either the culprit doesn’t give a shit about the accuracy of the clipart on the front page of the paper, or he/she had no idea that level of munging would result in a woefully inaccurate depiction. I can’t decide which is worse.
Upgraded apocryph.org to Drupal 6
Today I took the plunge and upgraded apocryph.org to the latest version of the Drupal content management system. Drupal 6 has been in the works for what seems an eternity, and has a number of big improvements which made it hard to resist. Unfortunately, I now somewhat regret the decision, as there were considerable gotchas to cope with.
Of course, I started out with a complete backup of my Drupal 5.x site and database, just in case. I went through the upgrade steps in UPGRADE.txt, but despite being logged in to the site as the root user, I had to bypass security checks by adding the $update_free_access = TRUE; line in sites/default/settings.php. The upgrade itself went fine, but as another consequence of Drupal seemingly ‘forgetting’ I was logged in as superuser, after the upgrade the site was still in maintenance mode, and I couldn’t log in to change it!
Fortunately this post got me out of that particular jam, but it was still a gotcha that was definitely not present the last time I did a Drupal upgrade.
The next gotcha was one I’d anticipated: Due to major changes improvements to the theming system, my custom Drupal theme that implements the distinctive apocryph.org look and feel sucks hard under Drupal 6. I had to compare it to one of the themes that ships with Drupal 6 to figure out what was wrong. The big thing was that themes now need a themename.info file that contains some metadata for the theme. Since my theme uses custom regions, I also had to declare the regions in the .info file. Apart from that it was things like $language being an object instead of a string, and similar stuff. The Converting 5.x Themes to 6.x page helped alot, as did the writing .info files for themes page.
Once the theme was working, I set out to install the 6.0 versions of the various modules I use to run apocryph.org. Here I was in for an unpleasant surprise. The following modules were used in Drupal 5.x, and are not (yet, anyway) ported to Drupal 6:
Since akismet and commentrss aren’t available, I’ve had to disable anonymous comments to avoid a deluge of comment spam. Without gsitemap Google has to crawl my site the old fashioned way and won’t pick up the structure of the site. The other modules I can live without.
Once I was resigned to the limitations imposed by the missing modules, I pulled up the site as an anonymous user to make sure it looked ok. Imagine my surprise to find that the site was blank! When viewed as an authenticated user all my content from the last two years was there, but to an anonymous user, the site looked empty. I tried pasting in the URLs to some of my blog posts into the anonymous browser window, but they all came back “access denied”. The Drupal log reported the access denied errors, but didn’t offer a clue as to what caused them.
I suspected this had to do with the fact that I ran Drupal 5.x with the taxonomy_access module, which let me specify access control rules for different vocabularies. Since this wasn’t in 6.0, I thought maybe the taxonomy_access module might’ve left some cruft in the Drupal database that was messing up the access control rules.
I did a little poking around, and ran into this support request for taxonomy_access. It turns out you have to go to Administer | Content Management | Post settings and click the Rebuild Permissions button to clear out access control cruft left over by taxonomy_access. Once I did that, all was well.
I hope the modules I need get ported to Drupal 6 soon, so I can reopen anonymous comments. In the mean time, I’ll try to convince myself all the spiffy new Drupal 6 features were worth the hassle.
UPDATE: I also had trouble with the pathauto module. The configuration left over from Drupal 5.x used token names like [user] and [title], but the new 6.x version of pathauto issues errors strongly urging you to use [user-raw] and [title-raw] instead. What’s more, it was configured to use the underscore (_) as a separator character in the generated paths, but was also defaulting to removing underscores from path names. I don’t know how it got that way since I wouldn’t have set that up in Drupal 5.x, but I changed it to leave underscores in place.
Test post
I just upgraded apocryph.org to Drupal 6, and it’s not going so well. This is a test post; I’ll post a detailed AAR later.
Lesson Learned: Face Detection is Hard
A while back I thought it would be a good idea to implement face detection in Gallery2, based on a similar feature in Facebook. I downloaded the OpenCV computer vision toolkit and ran the facedetect sample app against a collection of 60 photos from my gallery, some with no faces, others with a single face, still others with multiple faces, faces in profile, etc. No matter which training file I used, the face detection was horribly unreliable. I would estimate 10% of actual faces were detected, and of all the faces reported by the tool, maybe 5% were actual faces.
This was pretty disappointing, so I uploaded the same corpus of photos to Facebook to see how well it did with them. Imagine my surprise when it didn’t detect any! The face detection I was seeing on my sister’s profile was due to manual tagging of the photos from within the upload applet, and was not driven by computer vision algorithms. That explains that.
I still think a similar feature in Gallery would be nice, but with the CV aspect removed it doesn’t seem quite so fun.
Fairfax County granted my Virginia CHP Application!
A while back Fairfax county denied my CHP application because I refused to provide proof that I live in Fairfax County, notwithstanding the clear language of Virginia state law which does not permit counties to bolt on additional requirements for carry permits.
My attorney, Richard Gardiner, sent me a letter articulating his position that the Fairfax requirement was extra-legal, which I submitted with my new CHP application in place of the residency proof. Today marks 47 days since I submitted the app, and since Virginia law requires the court to issue a temporary permit after 45 days I called the permit desk to see about getting my temporary permit. I spoke to the deputy clerk responsible for permits, and she reported my permit was approved and about to be mailed out! I stopped by a picked it up today without incident.
So, the morale of the story is, justice is expensive and time-consuming, while capitulation pays off right away. Make of that what you will.
UPDATE: I’ve posted digital scans of the Gardiner letter for others to use. The raw PNG images of each page are 10MB in total, while the PDFs of the two are 9MB or so. I’m afraid I don’t have Adobe Acrobat installed, so I just used the PDF save-as option in Photoshop CS2, hence the enormous file size.
You can access the PNG scans at the corresponding Gallery album (click each thumbnail to see the bigger version of the image, and click that bigger version to download the huge full-rez version).
"From my cold, dead hands", steak knife edition
There are few cliches more often repeated in the gun community than the British gun control experience. It’s as though the British gun bans are part of a fiendishly clever NRA plot to prove the fallacy of gun control. Just when you think the Brits can’t get more absurdly clueless about the nature of human violence, they do.
The latest bit of foolishness is years old by now, but it came up again recently and I couldn’t resist remarking upon it.
Back in 2005, the British Medical Journal published a breathless editorial titled Reducing Knife Crime calling attention to the public health scourge that is knife crime, and putting forth a modest proposal to solve the problem.
The piece is short and should be read in its entirety, but some choice excerpts follow:
Violent crime in the United Kingdom is increasing; figures from London show a 17.9% increase from 2003 to 2004, and one easily accessible weapon used in many incidents is the kitchen knife. Unfortunately, no data seem to have been collected to indicate how often kitchen knives are used in stabbings, but our own experience and that of police officers and pathologists we have spoken to indicates that they are used in at least half of all cases.
…
To tackle this increasing problem, various measures are being considered by the government, particularly targeting the adolescent age group. These include raising the minimum age for purchasing a knife from 16 to 18 years and allowing head teachers the power to search pupils for knives. However, not all crimes are committed with newly purchased knives, and every household and home economics department in schools contains a plethora of readily available weapons. The modern stainless steel kitchen knife has a high quality blade that makes it unnecessary to look further for another lethal weapon.Most domestic kitchen knives are based on two designs, the dagger variety with a pointed tip—for example, vegetable knife or carving knife—and the blunt round nose variety—for example, bread knife. When using a knife to harm, a blunt nosed knife is unlikely to cause serious injury, as penetrating clothing and skin is difficult with it. Similarly an assault with a knife with a short blade such as a craft knife may cause a dramatic superficial wound but is unlikely to reach deep structures and cause death. A dagger type knife, however, can penetrate deeply. Once resistance from clothing and skin is overcome, little extra force is required to injure vital organs, increasing the chance of a fatality (likened to cutting into a ripe melon).
As knives are so readily available, does a culinary reason exist for so many domestic knives to be of the dagger variety, or are we just sticking to tradition?
…
Knives were used to spear meat, lifting it from plate to mouth, so pointed tips were vital for this function. Also, with repeated sharpening of a flat blade, a pointed tip inevitably develops. However, now domestic knives do not need sharpening, and numerous other kitchen utensils can be used to spear food. The current practice of eating with forks and blunt ended table knives was introduced in the 18th century to reduce the injuries resulting from arguments in public eating houses. In 1669, King Louis XIV of France noted the association between pointed domestic knives and violence and passed a law demanding that the tips of all table and street knives be ground smoothPerhaps the pointed kitchen knife has a culinary purpose that we have failed to appreciate? We contacted 10 chefs in the UK who are well known from their media activities and chefs working in the kitchens of five leading London restaurants. Some commented that a point is useful in the fine preparation of some meat and vegetables, but that this could be done with a short pointed knife (less than 5 cm in length). None gave a reason why the long pointed knife was essential. Domestic knife manufacturers (Harrison-Fisher Knife Company, England, personal communication, 2005) admit that their designs are based on traditional shapes and could give no functional reason why long pointed knives are needed
…
Many assaults are impulsive, often triggered by alcohol or misuse of other drugs, and the long pointed kitchen knife is an easily available potentially lethal weapon particularly in the domestic setting. Government action to ban the sale of such knives would drastically reduce their availability over the course of a few years. In addition, such legislation would make it harder to justify carrying such knives and prosecution easier.The Home Office is looking for ways to reduce knife crime. We suggest that banning the sale of long pointed knives is a sensible and practical measure that would have this effect.
(emphasis mine)
It’s the same rhetoric we hear time and again to justify registration/restriction/banning of this or that scary class of weapon. First, the weapon is demonized as exceptionally dangerous (“The modern stainless steel kitchen knife has a high quality blade that makes it unnecessary to look further for another lethal weapon”). Once the evilness of the weapon is established, the legitimate use of the weapon is called into question (“None gave a reason why the long pointed knife was essential”). Having established that the only use for the weapon is evildoing, point out the ‘sensible’ solution (“We suggest that banning the sale of long pointed knives is a sensible and practical measure that would have this effect”).
As foolish as this editorial is, if one accepts the gun control proposition that violent crime is caused by the legal availability of weapons, then this proposal makes sense. If on the other hand one recognizes the fallacy of the gun control argument, the absurdity of the proposal is evident.
Time and again gun rights advocates use the example of a hypothetical kitchen knife ban as the logical next step after guns are banned, only to be dismissed as absurd and alarmist. Now, we have an example, in writing, in a reputable medical journal, in which paternalistic medical professionals suggest a government ban on pieces of metal in certain shapes is the solution to violent crime. Now who’s being absurd?
C'mon Virginia, we can do better than this
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence (formerly Handgun Control, Inc back when such terms actually focus grouped well) released their 2007 state-by-state scorecard reporting on the degree of each state’s commitment to disarm law-abiding citizens. Though this list is put out by a rabidly anti-gun organization, those of us who oppose gun control efforts also use it as a measure of each state’s support or disdain for second amendment rights.
As much as I hate to boost the Brady’s pagerank, you can research their assessment of various states here. Virginia’s gun control report card has it tied for 14th place, where 1st place is a peaceful and quiet land of disarmed citizens frolicking in endless fields of pansies (California), and last place is a hellhole where armed gangs shoot children and police at will (Kentucky and Oklahoma). The Commonwealth scored 18 out of 100 gun control points on what appears to be a fairly arbitrary point schedule.
While 14th place sounds shitty, 18 points out of 100 sounds pretty good. Why weren’t we 0 out of 100? Good question. Brady says:
- Child Access Prevention: Yes
- Gun Dealer Regulations: Partial
- Record Keeping: Partial
- Limit Bulk Purchases: Yes
Yet if you read into these, the only one that represents any sort of gun control victory is the stupid one-handgun-a-month law, which does NOT apply to Virginia CHP holders, and does NOT apply to private transactions (that is, sales between two VA residents neither of whom are gun dealers). So, imho, Brady are cooking the books to make gun control policies look a bit more widespread than they really are.
Not that I’m complaining. Hell, they can give us all 100 points if they want, as long as that makes them leave us alone!