Open Thread, and also: The Dumbest Knife Law of All Time

On Friday, the German Bundestag will vote on their “security package” – legislation they cooked up in the wake of the diversity knife attack at the Solingen Diversity Festival back in August. There’s been a lot of fighting about this within the coalition; for a while it looked like the market-liberal FDP would break ranks, perhaps to support stricter measures proposed by the CDU instead. But, the Social Democrats are now telling the press that they have secured majority support, so perhaps it will pass after all.

Don’t hold your breath: This law is not going to make Germany more secure or stop mass migration, although it does contain provisions to enforce the “Dublin system,” by denying government benefits to asylees who first registered in another country. On the other hand, it also expands the powers of our security services, because heaven forfend the people in charge miss a single opportunity to do that.

But perhaps most absurd, as NiUS reports, are its amendments to our knife prohibitions. Every time there’s a stabbing, we have to go through much handwringing about how dangerous knives are and how many people they’re responsible for killing, even though terrorists manifest a relentless indifference to no-knife zones and are strangely unlikely to observe criminal statutes on things like blade length. Prohibiting knives, as they are a useful tool, also turns out to be an extremely awkward legislative project, and one to which the clowns who rule us are particularly unsuited. In internal negotiations, these slow and confused people were confronted with things they had never thought about before, such as what actually constitutes a knife, and all the inconvenience a blanket prohibition on knives might cause, and in what contexts knives might still be legitimate. What they came up with is deeply emblematic of the state of German governance in the Year of our Lord 2024.

Particularly amazing is this section, which claims to prohibit knives at “public events,” but actually just ends up affirming, after a great many words and overburdened noun clauses, that everyone can still carry knives as they did before:

Those ten items in the middle of the page outline all the exceptions to the no-knives-at-public-gatherings rule, and by the time you finish reading them, you’re left wondering who isn’t allowed to carry knives. We can all agree that exceptions for rescue and emergency services (no. 6) and building maintenance personnel (no. 4) are reasonable. Then we have an unqualified exception for “delivery traffic” (no. 1), and as we’ve gone that far, we need further exceptions for tradesmen and their employees (no. 2) for balance if nothing else. Then of course restaurants, catering services and their customers have to be excepted (no. 9), and that seems reasonable too, but we’re about to round the corner into nonsense land. We read that everyone will still be able to display and sell knives at fairs and markets, so all these people are excepted (no. 5). That’s right, knives are to be forbidden at public events, but selling and displaying knives at these selfsame events will be totally allowed. That makes sense. The further exceptions for “Participants in photo, film or television shoots … or theatrical performances or historical re-enactments” (no. 7) hardly matter at this point, and as they’ve gone this far, they might as well keep going. Thus people carrying knives for hunting or sporting purposes are excepted, as are people carrying knives for “the preservation of traditions” (no. 8), whatever that means. If the police hassle you about your knife, just say you’re a hunter or that it’s a traditional accoutrement and you’re good. People who are merely transporting knives from one place to another are also excepted, so long as the knife is not “ready to hand” (no. 3). Nobody should worry too much about that, though, because as a kind of cherry on top, all “persons who are carrying knives for a generally recognised purpose” (no. 10) are also excepted.

I guess the good news is that everybody will still get to bring all manner of knives to public events. The bad news is that police will soon have abundant pretence to harass people about their knives, but not much statutory authority to do much more than that. And of course the migrant stabbers will go on stabbing people as before, perfectly undeterred by our brave knew ban on all knives that are not being carried for a reason. The government can claim that they did something, though, which is all that this is really about.