Senators Nugent and Tomes have introduced SB 301 which would prohibit political subdivisions from regulating the possession, carrying, transportation, sale, purchase, transfer, licensing, registration, or use of a knife or components used to make a knife.
A political subdivision would be prevented from regulating the manufacture of knives in a manner more restrictive than regulations in place for any other commercial good.
This bill paints with an awfully broad brush. It’s handy to have a knife around sometimes. And it’s annoying when you find yourself in a place with restrictions and you’ve forgotten to take a knife out of your pocket. I used to carry a small one on a keychain that, pre-9/11, caused me some slight delays at security screenings, but was never confiscated. Post-9/11, I just took it off my keychain, because I like the knife and knew that at some point I’d forget and it wouldn’t be allowed through security.
As for manufacture of knives, I have no idea what the potential issues might be or what political subdivisions are doing to regulate the manufacture. Under this law, however, if there was – say – some environmental concern about processing the metal involved with a knife, the political subdivision would not be entitled to address that concern because other commercial goods (without that metal) aren’t so regulated.
Makes sense. Knives are arms, and regulation of arms is reserved solely to the State government.
At what point does the state just dissolve every form of local government and say we’ll be running things now? Because that’s where they’re heading.
On arms, you like the ability of anti-American local busybodies to truncate rights. I suspect you’d be running about, arms-a-flailin’, if Bedford attempted to ban homosexuality.
Regulating where weapons can be carried is more like setting rules, vis a vis homosexuality (and heterosexuality), where people may have sex. Now, if we also allow people to openly have sex in places where they are also allowed to openly carry weapons, that might be a place where we can meet in the middle.
Infringing rights is now “setting rules?” Shameless, though I must remember that this forum doesn’t believe in rights.
Holy hyperbole, Batman!
In any event, rights are usually subject to limitations. For example, the First Amendment has long been subject to time, place, and manner restrictions. The government can tell me to move if I set up my protest in the middle of a busy intersection.
Ordinarily, possibly, because the argument in favor of eviction claims that your protest may cause you to go through my unsuspecting windshield and make me spill my Chick-fil-A lemonade, thus infringing on my rights. Those advocating the argument hold that you still have the right to bellow on your street, just take it to the curb, if you please, or do it in the street when your “Walk” sign is displayed.
Even this limitation is a challenging matter, because you do have the right to get out onto your public way and make your point, so perhaps all we can ask of you is that you don’t get hit. Perhaps we can ask nothing of you, at all. It’s your street. Perhaps we should be forced to meet your demands if we want our commerce to flow. Removing a man from his own street is a grave matter that should receive the greatest consideration and restraint prior to attempting even the most minor action.
If enough of you congregate on the intersection precisely for the purpose of shutting down traffic to make your point, that’s a vigorous exercise of the right, and good for you.
It is right to suffer inconvenience in the exercise of liberty. Expedience begets tyranny.
Despite this explanation, I fail to see the application of your 13:09 post to knives. Is an unsuspecting walker going to rush headlong into the Case folder in my pocket? In such a meeting, my shoulder would be more injurious than the folded metal.
You must admit that “Time, place and manner” is one of those self-serving doctrines conjured by the Supreme Court and nowhere accepted as authority in a discussion of rights, so don’t attach too much intellectual weight to their pronouncements. Court rulings change. Correct arguments are eternal.
Further, do you believe in rights? You know, the demands we can make upon others, which others are obligated to obey, prior to and in absence of any government?