From Knife Rights . . .

If you are a Texas resident, use Knife Rights’ Legislative Action Center to urge members of the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs to push for a vote on HB 956. Time is running out. Every indication is we have the BIPARTISAN votes needed to pass the bill in Committee and on the floor of the Senate, but the bill is stalled. Governor Abbott has indicated he would sign the bill. The Chairman has not allowed a vote to be held.

HB 956 would remove from statute a number of places where Location-Restricted Knives (having blades over 5 1/2 inches) are banned.

If you are a Texas resident, use Knife Rights’ Legislative Action Center to EMAIL Chairman Hughes and committee members TODAY and ask them to set a vote on HB 956: https://kniferights.org/resources/congressweb/#/45

DO IT TODAY!  Monday is too late!

Background:

In 2013 Knife Rights’ repeal of Texas’ switchblade ban was enacted. In 2015 Knife Rights’ signature Knife Law Preemption was enacted, nullifying all local knife ordinances more restrictive than Texas state law, including two of the “10 Worst Anti-Knife Cities in America” at the time, San Antonio and Corpus Christi. In 2017 our bill removed all of the “illegal knives” in Texas law, finally allowing Texans the right to carry a Bowie knife, dagger and others in public. In 2019 our bill removed the ban on carry of clubs (including tomahawks) and possession of knuckles (including trench knives and the like).

Unfortunately, during the 2017 legislative process, as a result of a tragic University of Texas stabbing just blocks from the Capitol, a minor amendment was added to stipulate that knives with blades over 5 1/2 inches are now defined as “location-restricted knives.” These knives may be carried throughout the state except in a narrow list of places such as schools, colleges, correctional facilities, amusements parks, houses of worship, and bars that derive more than 51% of their income from alcohol sales, as well as some other locations. Minors are also restricted as to when they can carry these knives. CLICK HERE for a complete listing of the current bans for Location-Restricted Knives.

As noted above, HB 956 would remove a number of commonly visited restricted locations from the list.

 

Knife Rights (www.KnifeRights.org) is America’s grassroots knife owners’ organization; Rewriting Knife Law in America™ and forging a Sharper Future for all Americans™. Knife Rights efforts have resulted in 33 bills enacted repealing knife bans in 23 states and over 150 cities and towns since 2010, as well as numerous litigation victories.

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50 COMMENTS

  1. Should have included a provision that table knives can never be regulated, or require registration.

    • you can currently purchase switchblades if you meet the criteria offered on their sale…or are willing to lie on the release form….

      • Never understood the fear of switchblades, or spring opening knives. Why are they more dangerous than someone carrying a four inch blade in a sheath hung on a belt? Did/do people really thing an attacker will stop and manually unfold a pocket knife before attacking? As if the effort to pull open the blade will make the attacker lose interest?

    • Knives? Knives are not the problem!

      I’m not so concerned about kitchen and table knives. But forks and spoons are killing people in Texas and other places. There should be a maximum calories per fork or spoonful limit. Ban all high capacity forks and spoons. The only legitimate use of large capacity forks and spoons is by trained chefs and waiters and waitresses. There is absolutely no reason an American needs a serving fork, a ladle or even a soup spoon to eat cake and ice cream!

      Fork & Spoon caused obesity is a blight upon our country!

      • “Fork & Spoon caused obesity is a blight upon our country!”

        Our ancestors used fingers to transport food from table to mouth. If that method had been a failure, none of us would be here. Regulation of tableware is useless; ban all eating utensils !!

  2. Makes me wonder: what percentage of the USA population Carrie’s a knife every day?

    I carry two: a Kershaw blue and the blade in my Leatherman Wave+.

    • “…percentage of the USA population Carrie’s a knife”

      Oh, the image of a bloody Sissy Spacek that just flashed in front of my eyes… 🙂

    • I carry a Bowie on my belt, a cobratec in my boot and a swiss army knife in my pocket.

      I always got stories but this one is funny.
      Walking out of a store one day a large fellow with a snide expression commented on the Bowie knife.
      ” And just what do you think your going to do with that knife?”. My reply, “Shoot you with my fcken gunm.” His expression changed all of a sudden.

      • Possum,

        Brilliant!!!

        Why people gotta get up in other folk’s business, I don’t understand.

        I was in the park today and saw a overweight guy trying to chase down his toddler. As we passed I laughed and said “She’s enjoying out-running you”. He started laughing, also, and said “She’s fast and I’m learning something”.

      • I do the same. I open carry a large knife which as far as self defense goes is mostly just there to mislead observers. The one or two concealed firearms are the primary self defense weapons.

      • In the days of the alamo most pistols in texas used flint and held one lead ball.
        Bowie knives were the pinicle of edged weapons because they were nowhere near as clumsy to carry as a full sword.nowadays i like em for man bling.
        Cause now guns work well

    • I have one on my belt right now, but only one because I’m at home and working in the yard. I typically carry a large, a small, and a multi-tool (which also has one, albeit more like a tool).

      Pretty much every guy I know carries at least one large knife, usually visible. Yep, even here in SoCal.

    • I’ve had knives in one form or another as far back as I can remember. Started carrying when I was 16 with my first real job. I’ve never had any problem with any of them as long as they were properly maintained. Of course, what I had as a teenager wasn’t all the high quality but that improved with experience and money. It’s been some of the handiest things and has become just another part of getting myself together every day. The funny part is that I’ve had more paper cuts in life than anything else. All the craziness and paranoia surrounding knives has always been nothing short of confusing.

    • Leatherman and Benchmade AFO II.
      This is in addition to M&P 9c with Viridian light/laser in a Tacloc holster, providing instant activation when weapon is drawn.

  3. Right, because a 3″ knife in the hands of someone with a basic knowledge of anatomy (or five minutes on the internet) is totally not dangerous when the person gets all stabby and slashy.

    I swear to Christ, there’s an rule on IQ for legislators that states “You must be <70 to legislate".

    • Curious –

      Having never been in (and hope I never do!) a knife fight, in your opinion, is the slashing part more damaging than the stabby part?

      • A throat slash might set you back, a bit.
        But, then again, a knife to the heart might also cause some inconvenience.
        Was threatened with a knife, once, a long time ago. I said “go ahead, give it a try”. Nothing happened. He was just a punk teenager showing off. Did not really want to hurt or get hurt.

      • The slashing is easier and draws a lot of blood, getting stabbed is worse. I got stabbed in the guts once, must have been in the right place because I was done. I also stabbed a guy in the side and the blade broke he fell down the stairs of an apartment but took off running( meth). My cousin killed a guy with a machete whacking him in the neck, witnesses said it took a lot of whacking. My cousin died in the pen last year. My girlfiend killed a guy in a bar fight by stabbing him in the chest a bunch. Law called it justified. I seen a couple mezkins go at it, they was cutting up each other pretty bad slashing I suppose they’d have bled out eventually. I’d say getting stabbed in the right place is worse.

        • “I’d say getting stabbed in the right place is worse.”

          Bad, bad Lee-roy Brown (the baddest man in town) might differ. After a legendary bar fight (over some babe named, “Doris”), he looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a a coupla pieces gone.

        • Possum,

          Sounds like it is dangerous to be anywhere in your vicinity. Does the Sherriff have someone watching you 24×7?

        • “My girlfiend killed a guy in a bar fight by stabbing him in the chest a bunch. Law called it justified.”

          Sounds like a woman not to piss off… 🙂

      • Kind of a complicated question there Geoff.

        Possum is correct, like real estate, the key here is location, location, location.

        The TL;DR version is this: My general advice for a knife fight is don’t have one. If someone wants to have one and you know it, run. Most of the time a gun isn’t going to beat a knife because the gun guy isn’t going to know the knife’s in play until it’s too late to do much of anything about it in terms of getting a gun out.

        Generally slashing someone is easier and it’s also quite useful for degrading but not necessarily killing them. Stabbing someone is generally more effective at incapacitation/killing with a quickness but it requires getting past their defenses. Poke someone down between the collar bone and the shoulder blade on the left shoulder and no amount of meth will keep them upright more than a few seconds if the blade makes it more than a couple of inches in. This was a preferred method of sentry elimination using the British FS knife in WWII. It’s VERY effective if done correctly. The size of the target means getting the person from behind is generally preferred.

        Generally, penetrating trauma from a knife that makes it into the thoracic cavity is lethal on the order of 80% of the time when done with a blade. Bullets are significantly less effective as a percentage game in this regard. Your body’s better at closing off torn arteries than cleanly cut ones. [If you want more information on that look into the overall tactics of employing something like an FS knife against someone who knows you’re there and is resisting you. It generally revolves around getting into a position to grab them with one hand and, mostly, pull them bodily onto the knife in a way that attempts to get it up under the ribs and then twist the knife or gets them in the cuts and “waves” the knife back and forth once it’s in.]

        OTOH, slashes are easy to administer to whatever your opponent presents and degrade function pretty quick. IME, people tend to protect major arteries by nature. They don’t offer you the inside of a forearm or a leg. But, that said, if it’s well placed what seems like a relatively shallow slash can catch the brachial artery or, if you’re nasty, a sharp knife drawn across the inside of the thigh with gusto probably won’t be survivable. That would be opposed the same knife to the outside of the thigh which would mostly disable your opponent and look pretty gross but not have the high percentage mortality that the inside of the leg would. A good, deep slash to the inside of a forearm in many cases will incapacitate people fairly rapidly too if you catch the radial or ulnar arteries and sever them.

        Sharp knives are less dangerous to their user than dull knives but they’re far, far more dangerous to other people if you decide to go that route.

    • I carry a knife daily. Concealed. Unless I go in a po-leece station or post office. And the post office is a mite optional…

      • I fucked up once and carried a gunm into the county jail to visit my son. Lucky they didnt have a metal detector. Coming back out my girlfiend said are you crazy, didnt you see that sign. I said yeah but the picture was a Berreta and this is a tt33…. once not again.

        • Remember when James Campbell told us that he snuck a gun through the metal detector at Globe Life Stadium? Because I do! What ever happened to the dude?

        • You just carried TT33 that so that if you had to shoot someone you could say “Here, have a Tok” [pronounced “toke” obviously for comedic purposes].

          Ice water in those veins of your possum.

        • I used to practice getting a NA mini through a metal detector when I worked the night shift…possible, but tricky…a lot depends on the sensitivity setting…

  4. What about carving knives, if they are legal then you can carry one and if questioned about the 10 inch length, Hey we’re having turkey for dinner….

  5. I can not believe how the government try’s to regulate self defense. SBR’s, sawed off shotgunms, sound suppressors, high capacity clipazines, and now the length of a blade.
    Gimme a break, the only people that dont break the laws are the law abiding, and they dont cause no trouble, on the other hand outlaws dont give a chit about laws and do what ever they want. The system is wasting it’s time with these infringements.
    Well maybe not. Most law abiding people spend a lot of money trying to beat the rap, and that’s where the pressure lays.

    • And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

      That tells me everything I need to know about a government that fears my weapons. This man was a citizen of stalins soviet union and was a inmate of the gullag. Even today in the Russian federation weapons are strictly prohibited for most people.

  6. 6″ blade assisted opening stiletto, every day, everywhere.

    My favorite one has this etched into the blade: “REDNECK TOOTHPICK”….. 🙂
    My largest Bowie has a 13.62″ blade.
    Also have a Gil Hibben toothpick with a 10.63” blade.

    As someone mentioned above, knives are more dangerous than bullets to an enemy.

  8. Growing up everyone carried a knife of some sort from fixed blades to swiss army. Even girls in my school. I still have some sort of knife on me at all times unless I am at an airport. I have a few knives stashed outside airports where I have forgotten to put them in my checked baggage. I have recovered most of them.

    And oddly I can remember getting into or seeing fights in school, and no one pulled knife. Even when knives were readily accessible.

  9. FormerParatrooper said”
    “And oddly I can remember getting into or seeing fights in school, and no one pulled knife. Even when knives were readily accessible.”

    As you can tell from my name, I have been around for a while. Lived in Chicago south side, and there was more than normal showing of knives, with some minor blood on cheeks and arms.

    Outside of band-aids, not much damage, but it definitely was exciting… 🙂

    • still remember when razors were pretty popular among certain members of the population

  11. The law banning the knife sounds like a stupid liberal law that needs to be removed. People can carry what they want and if somebody pulls a 6 inch knife out on someone who pulls out a 45 on them the gene pool was just cleansed. If they leave it where it belongs then they are smart and should be able to carry it.

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