The UK cracked down on guns and essentially eliminated private gun ownership in the home. People had no access to firearms, and what happened? The criminals changed course, and now, blades are the big scourge.
It's so bad that one British man was arrested over gardening tools.
Yeah, seriously.
Admittedly, it was a scary-looking gardening tool, but still...
A man who had returned home from his allotment with a trug of vegetables and gardening tools strapped to his belt was arrested by armed police, after a member of the public said they had seen “a man wearing khaki clothing and in possession of a knife”.
Samuel Rowe, 35, who works as a technical manager at a theatre, had come back from his allotment in Manchester earlier this month and decided to trim his hedge with one of his tools, a Japanese garden sickle, when police turned up on his doorstep.
“I just heard shouting behind me, and then two armed officers shouting at me to drop the knife,” he said. “And then they turned me around, pushed me up against my house, cuffed me, and then they arrested me, put me in the back of the van.”
The tools he had on his belt, he said, were a Niwaki Hori Hori gardening trowel in a canvas sheath, and an Ice Bear Japanese gardener’s sickle.
For the record, an "allotment" is a patch of land that's rented or something so people in a city can grow vegetables. In other words, a garden. Like a lot of cities, not everyone has a yard large enough to grow stuff to eat, so an allotment allows those interested to pay a bit of money, have a patch of dirt they can grow stuff on, and bring the food home to eat.
Now, as for the tools, let's talk about those.
A hori hori is kind of a bastard offspring of a hand-held garden shovel and a knife. It's actually a really neat tool for gardening. I've got one and it does both jobs decently well, especially for vegetable gardening.
A sickle is a sickle. The Japanese ones don't seem to have quite as distinctive a curve as Western ones, but it's still got some curve to it, and it's used for all the same things a sickle is used for.
Neither is distinctly knife-like, though. The hori hori, in a sheath, might, but once officers examined it, they should be able to tell its true purpose. Hell, many even have measurements on the blade so you can make sure you're planting at the right depth.
But my question is, if gun control made the UK so safe, why are the cops freaking out over gardening tools?
Oh, I get they thought they were bladed weapons--and if one were determined enough, both could well be used for those--but we were told gun control made everyone safer. How is it that bladed weapons are enough to make people hysterical? I live in the Deep South, where pocket knives are the norm. No one blinks about me pulling out my Gerber or Kershaw except to make a comment on the knife itself.
Could it be that, like we said, when you eliminate guns, bad people just use something else to hurt innocent people?
Nah, that can't be it. The anti-gunners keep assuring us that if we passed really strict gun control laws, like those in the UK, we'd live in an absolute Utopia.
But is it really a Utopia when gardening implements get people slammed against their house and handcuffed for carrying deadly weapons?
It's bad enough to beat swords into plowshares, which is something I've taken issue with before, but now the plowshares can get you cuffed. Doesn't seem like such a deal to me.
