Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hunterb123 1594 days ago
I said knife bans happened because there are knife attacks.

Guns are already banned and there weren't many with civilians already so it was effective.

So that leaves knives as the main weapon of choice. There are mainly knife attacks, so there are knife bans.

1 comments

You said, "They have knife bans because they never let their citizens have guns, so there are knife attacks, so they ban knives"

Texas has numerous bans on knives, despite letting their citizens have guns. Your causal logic is incorrect.

> Your causal logic is incorrect.

It's not, I'm sorry you can't follow the simple logic that people pick up a knife because they don't have a readily available gun, so there are more knife attacks than anything else, so they ban knives more aggressively.

> Texas has numerous bans on knives,

Texas does have bans on specific types of knives, but not a blanket ban or anything w/ length.

It's like saying because full autos are banned Texas has a gun ban.

> It's not, I'm sorry you can't follow the simple logic that people pick up a knife because they don't have a readily available gun, so there are more knife attacks than anything else, so they ban knives more aggressively.

I get that this statement sounds intuitive to you, but I would challenge you to substantiate a correlation between gun restrictions and increased violence with bladed weapons with some data before talking about causality. I personally think the majority of such violence is opportunistic, so I would be surprised if such a correlation were truly borne out by any data.

> Texas does have bans on specific types of knives, but not a blanket ban or anything w/ length.

When I was growing up in Houston, it was a felony to carry anything with a blade over 5.5" on your person. (I distinctly remember my scoutmaster warning us about locking or fixed blades >3.5", but that may have been a Houston or Harris County ordinance.) It looks like this was effectively repealed in 2017 per https://www.houston-criminalattorney.com/texas-switchblade-l...