Keevan_Colton wrote:Carrying a machette in your car isnt a good idea with the laws here, what the fuck do you need a machette in your car for anyway?
Can't speak for the other gentleman, and I don't carry the machete
all the time in the car trunk, but ...
One of the model airplane fields my Other Half frequents is surronded by tall grass prarie. When one of the models crashes we try to retrieve for both the salvage value and to prevent littering. Tallgrass prarie vegetation grows 2-3 meters in height and the native grasses have leaves sharp enough to cut bare flesh. It's dense stuff, very hard or even impossible to simply push through. Going in we wear heavy boots, full trousers, long sleeves, gloves... and use machetes or even axes when appropriate.
The primary reason
most sharp blades are made and used by human being is
as tools. In fact, our ancestors were using sharp blades even before we were human.
Do I drive around all the time with a machete in my car? Hell no - for one thing, some places I have reason to go they are illegal, and frankly there's no reason to have such a tool in, say, the Chicago Loop. It's a highly artificial environment, after all - what tallgrass vegetation they have there is part of the gardens in the city park and it's cared for by people paid to do that. It's entirely reasonable to ask people to leave machetes at home when they visit downtown Chicago. Out where I live, or out where we fly the model planes, there are legtimate uses for the tools in those locations and I can't agree that it's right or that society somehow benefits overall by taking such tools from law-abiding citizens. Nor can I agree with extensive licensing and restrictions for every conceivable blade. At a certain point you need to treat adults like adults.
Nor does every violent situation escalate in the mere presence of weapons. The Other Half and I used to be heavily involved in the ethnic Scottish community in the Chicago area, which features men in kilts, and often carrying enough culterly to outfit several professonal kitchens. Add in the inevitable alcohol and we'd get inevitable fights. I can't think of a single occassion where anyone advanced beyond fists be it in Detroit, Fort Wayne, Chicago, or Milwaukee -- even though virtually everyone was wearing real knives, dirks, and even swords. We'd serve beer and scotch in glass bottles, too - somehow, no one thought of using those as weapons, either.
The
mere presence of blades in the vinicity does not automatically mean their use in battle. Confrontations do
not always escalate. I think more purpose would be served to find out what the differences are between groups that ratchet up their arguments to deadly force and those that do not, even when things reach to a physical level of fighting. Unless, of course, you
like restrictions simply for the sake of restrictions.
There are two ways to view freedom: Either you take the stance that everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden, or you hold that everything not explicitly forbidden is permitted. In the former case, you have to continually justify your actions to the government. In the later, the government has to justify it's actions to you. No doubt it comes from being raised in the US, but I prefer to live under the latter system, where anything not forbidden is permitted.
