Met a knife idiot

[Fadcode]

I don't want to belabour the point but I'll paint a slightly different scenario to the OP.

I arrive at someone's property to do some work. I notice they are wearing a rather tacticool neck knife (not my cup of tea). As someone interested in knives we talk and they tell me about their collection of knives, air guns etc. As I'm leaving they ask if I'd be interested to see their knife collection. I say yes so the owner invites me inside and proceeds to pull out a very large 'Rambo' style survival knife (not my cup of tea either) we talk some more and they tell me how great this survival knife is and how it could be used in all sorts of exaggerated ways. I have in my toolbox some bushcraft knives. A mora, a wood lore clone, a nessmuk (maybe choose 3 knives you like) They are all sheathed and in a separate compartment to my other tools. I explain to the owner the different merits of the different knives and how each is suited to particular uses. I also talk about the search for the perfect one knife to do everything at camp and the pros and cons etc. I get my phone out and show videos of feather sticks and batoning and skinning a rabbit etc. The owner is polite and seems interested asking questions etc. We leave on good terms.

In this scenario am I reporting the owner to the police? No obviously not, the person is interested in things that aren't for me but that's a question of taste. He was on his own property and at no point did anything that warrants suspicion from me. He may have exaggerated or lied about his prize survival knife but again that's not unexpected in the circumstances.

However what if the owner reported me to the police?
Would I be happy? No.
Would he have been within his right to report me? I'd say obviously. I went on his property with knives that I had no business taking and which under current laws are illegal (when I say that I don't mean the knives are illegal I mean the carrying of them in public is.).
If/when I get a visit from a police officer it is then down to me to explain my good reason for carrying the knives.

We could go further and I could give any number of reasonable excuses as to why those knives are in my toolbox. I use them to process firewood/ food lunchtimes etc. Maybe after work I'm going camping and I dint want to leave them in my back pack in my van. Or maybe I try to say they are work knives and give examples of when I use each in my work.
Depending on the police officer and what they think, anything could happen, from I've done nothing wrong or a warning or end up arrested. In this instance we will say the officer believes I have done nothing wrong.

Now although I might not like the attitude of the owner for reporting me. Can I really argue that they have not done things correctly. I really don't think so.
We could maybe say they should have voiced their concerns to me directly. But they might not have felt comfortable to do so.
We could also say that since the officer believes me they were wrong to report me. But I'd still argue that the owner was still correct, it's not their job to decide on the law.

I don't know what planet you are on, but the original OP said nothing originally about reporting him to the police, that was another numpty.
The only thing you could be reported for was carrying knives in your toolbox..........but your first few words of your fairy story, cleared you of that.........".I arrive at someone's property to do some work..." which is stated in the appropriate Law as an acceptable reason to carry a fixed blade knife..........now if you were going onto somebody's property to carry out work, the property owner would expect you to be carrying tools, but he would have no say on the type of tools you carried, so again, unless he is a numpty as well, what would he report you to the Police for?, I think as soon as he said, I had a tradesman in to do some jobs for me and he had a knife( or several knives) in his tool box, to the Police............you could probably hear them laughing as they fell off their chairs.

There are Laws, and any Law that is passed by Parliament, has to have exceptions, virtually no Law, even murder is absolute, their is always an acceptable reason to break it.

 

[Jaeger]

Aye Up Ken.

I think that it is time to let this one go.

You have made your point(s) - to me most of them make perfect sense and I apply them myself.

Make no mistake, I like my knives. I've carried and used them from a time when people wouldn't look twice at a kid with a deer's foot handled sheath knife on his belt in public.
Times have changed however.

It is clear that some can't see the danger (to themselves or others) in taking the written word on offensive weapons and carriage of knives in public without understanding the way that the written word has to be practically applied by the police on the ground and acceptance or not of reasonable excuse by a magistrate in court.

I'm also quite surprised (disappointed really) that someone in the BCUK community heirarchy hasn't stepped in at least to state what the ethos (as Toddy put it) of the site is with regards to carriage and use. (Perhaps they haven't returned from a weekend out with their knives, axes, saw etc)

As I stated earlier - there may be impressionable people viewing this.

 

[ValeTudoGuy]

Well, they might say law is an bottom..... But theres for sure some legalistic asses about.

 

[Fadcode]

As well as my completely legal EDC penknives, I myself sometimes carry fixed blade knives, lock blade knives, axes, even my skrama in public. I am aware that this is prohibited by law without a good reason.

However I only carry these things with what I feel is a good reason.
I do not show them in public, they are not carried on my person directly.
I tend to use them on private land with permission, so more often than not I am travelling to or from somewhere, when in public.

However I have used fixed blades to process firewood and food, cut walking sticks and practice 'bushcraft' whilst on public land.
I can only remember meeting someone else whilst doing my bushcraft thing twice. Both times I put my blades away when I became aware of their presence. I'm not very social but luckily I was with someone else who was.

Now I am confused, you admit to carrying knives in Public, even a Skrama, yet you feel justified in reporting someone who you may see carrying a knife????

And your Skrama is bigger than a Rambo Knife, yet you feel intimidated by someone who has one.................

Know getting away from reporting people.............

Lets say you had to go into a enviroment for a month, and you totally had to fend for yourself, build a shelter, Hunt, protect(against wild animals), and you were only allowed to carry one tool, axe, bow, rifle, gun, etc, but only one........................what would you choose to help you survive?

 

[KenThis]

I really have no interest in trying to explain myself any further than I have already.
As I've said I struggle socially and in communicating ideas especially by text, I'm not always able to correctly gauge undercurrents in people's meanings.
I feel like some are either not undertanding me at all, or are wilfully misrepresenting what I've tried to say.
I also don't like the implication that because my opinions aren't agreed with, they are not valid and I am by association some sort of idiot.
Although I enjoy exchanges of ideas I have been 'trolled' before and didn't enjoy it so I'm out.

 

[boatman]

Wonder if there will be a Migration Syrian kit in the distant future?
Complete with a mockup of an iPhone, an inflatable dinghy and wellworn Adidas NMDs?

Just a crude joke, but seriously, what will they dress up as in the distant future if they want to do our time?

To partially answer this I invented an imaginary reenactment group called The Here and Now society. Because there are groups reenacting the past and assorted groups doing Star Wars etc it seemed reasonable that there should be a group reenacting the present. This means that the costumes and kit are 100% authentic, the ultimate goal of reenactors.

 

[Klenchblaize]

I'm off to the woods in the morning and in a mood that will see me pack the largest knife suitable for the task at hand and its all this thread's fault!

K

 

[jmagee]

I really have no interest in trying to explain myself any further than I have already.
As I've said I struggle socially and in communicating ideas especially by text, I'm not always able to correctly gauge undercurrents in people's meanings.
I feel like some are either not undertanding me at all, or are wilfully misrepresenting what I've tried to say.
I also don't like the implication that because my opinions aren't agreed with, they are not valid and I am by association some sort of idiot.
Although I enjoy exchanges of ideas I have been 'trolled' before and didn't enjoy it so I'm out.

Don't worry about it. We all have different ideas. Some people just resort to name calling when you disagree with them.

I still think some people are isolating particular parts of this story.

As for the law. I don't agree with it, I'd like to carry a larger folding blade that can be fixed but i don't because it's the law!
Unless i have good reason to be using that knife of course.

Which is the same as others have said.

For me the OPs post comes down to the attitude of the owner. Something we can only make assumptions about. As others have said my point was it's not our place to decide on the law or if it's a waste of police time or not. Doesn't matter if i agree with the law or not.

Ultimately how would the op feel if that guys picture is in the paper next week after he pulled the knife on an awkward customer or in a disagreement in the street? Extreme I know but better safe than sorry?

The fact he created this thread raises enough concern for me. If the police had a quiet word regarding his choice of tools then what's the harm?

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3003 using Tapatalk

 

[ValeTudoGuy]

Ultimately how would the op feel if that guys picture is in the paper next week after he pulled the knife on an awkward customer or in a disagreement in the street? Extreme I know but better safe than sorry?

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3003 using Tapatalk

You could say they same for every Chef....

I imagine the chainsaw the bloke potentially had in his van was entirely innocuous?

 

[jmagee]

You could say they same for every Chef....

I imagine the chainsaw the bloke potentially had in his van was entirely innocuous?

Indeed. Which is why i say the OPs gut feeling about the guy comes in which only he knows.

Plus you expect a chef to have knives for cooking. Again this comes down to what's seen as a suitable tool. Again opinion but who's opinion?

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[mrcharly]

It was me that used the term 'walt', and it comes from the film 'walter mitty', a character who lives in complete fantasy, imagining himself as a spy, a soldier of fortune, etc all the time (we all suffer from that a little bit, but a true 'walt' starts to lose sense of reality).

I was also one of the people who agree that the right approach is to try to teach some sense into this lad about using the appropriate tool (knife) for the job. So, a billhook for hedgelaying, maybe (rather than a Rambo knife).

 

[SoldierPalmer]

It was me that used the term 'walt', and it comes from the film 'walter mitty', a character who lives in complete fantasy, imagining himself as a spy, a soldier of fortune, etc all the time (we all suffer from that a little bit, but a true 'walt' starts to lose sense of reality).

I was also one of the people who agree that the right approach is to try to teach some sense into this lad about using the appropriate tool (knife) for the job. So, a billhook for hedgelaying, maybe (rather than a Rambo knife).

If you know Walt's then you will know they can not be taught as nothing seems to sink in.

 

[sunndog]

I'm off to the woods in the morning and in a mood that will see me pack the largest knife suitable for the task at hand and its all this thread's fault!

K

Wow, trip down memory lane there...i soooo wanted that knife as a kid. Cant for the life of me remember its name just now though?



Also can we stop saying illegal knife? An 'illegal knife' would be a balisong, flick knife, ect
If i drive my car down the pavement nobody would call it an illegal car would they

 

[Janne]

Well, there was an incident today outside the Parliament, knife related sadly.

 

[spandit]

Well, there was an incident today outside the Parliament, knife related sadly.

Your point being?

 

[santaman2000]

Your point being?

Likely that the publicity will make the situation worse.

 

[Janne]

Your point being?

Well, let me guess.....

Maybe the Powers will not relax the rules?

Incidents like this will just make legit knife ownership even more difficult.

 

[Klenchblaize]

"Large kitchen-like knife"

Apparently

K

 

[spandit]

Well, let me guess.....

Maybe the Powers will not relax the rules?

Incidents like this will just make legit knife ownership even more difficult.

They were never going to relax the rules anyway. Making an improvised shiv is so easy anyway it's impossible to control ownership.

 

[Adze]

If i drive my car down the pavement nobody would call it an illegal car would they

That was remarkably prescient of you sunndog. You never know, after yesterday that might well be what people start calling them.