Texas Legalizes Brass Knuckles, Similar Items

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If you’re too young to purchase a handgun, but you still want to be able to defend yourself, your choices are limited. Severely limited. For women, especially, this is a real problem. Women tend to lack the upper body strength to fend off someone like a potential rapist, so they need tools to help even the odds.

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When guns aren’t an option, you need something else. Things that help increase how hard a woman can hit could be extremely useful in such a circumstance.

Unfortunately, many states restrict such weapons. Nevermind that criminals still get them or worse despite those regulations. That never entered into the legislator’s minds.

Well, it has. At least, it has in Texas where the state legalized those tools.

Gov. Gregg Abbott signed House Bill 446 over the Memorial Day weekend, making it lawful to carry things like brass knuckles, wild kat keychains and clubs for self-defense.

State Rep. Joe Moody filed the legislation, saying too many people were being charged with a crime for owning the self-defense tool, the Texas Standard reported.

“We recently also lifted the prohibition on switchblades,” Moody said. “We aren’t living in ‘West Side Story.’ Maybe at one point this was used to identify criminal elements, but it’s just not the case anymore.”

Moody is correct. These aren’t the preferred tools of the criminals. Further, when they were, they were tools that pretty much only criminals carried. The law-abiding citizen didn’t worry about such things. They just handed over their wallets and called it a day. They’d speak to their friends of their harrowing ordeal and go back to their lives.

Today, the world is very different. We live in a world where people will kill you for your shoes, and the bad guys are far more likely to carry guns.

More to the point, the good guys have figured out that they need to be armed as well. We’re not a nation willing to let things happen to us anymore.

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While some may not be able to carry guns for whatever reason, there are still weapons that they can use to effectively defend themselves in certain circumstances. No, brass knuckles aren’t the ideal tool for an armed attacker–you never want to take brass knuckles to a gunfight, now do you?–but there are a lot of times that can be the difference between life and death.

I applaud the Texas legislature for legalizing these tools. The right to keep and bear arms has never been about legalizing only some weapons. On the contrary, we must remember that knives, swords, tomahawks, and artillery were all in private hands at the time the Second Amendment was penned, and all used to fight in the American Revolution. These are all weapons that should be considered protected by the Constitution.

While brass knuckles aren’t on that list, it doesn’t matter. The Second Amendment says, “arms.” Not “guns” or “swords” or anything else. That means weapons of any stripe, and that’s precisely what brass knuckles and similar weapons are. I’m glad to see Texas going back and repealing its previous mistake.

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