I hear you: you aren’t too worried about banning weapons.
Fair enough. But you have to be aware of the context. Texas loves weapons. Are these more dangerous than other types of weapons that are legal and celebrated. No.
Is there something especially evil about brass knuckles?
Well, you can inflict the same damage with all kinds of other (legal) things, b) they have been widely and openly available everywhere, despite being illegal.
So what is it about?
Oh dear, the bbs says I’m talking too much:
“A great discussion involves many voices and perspectives.”
I guess this is the last from me in this topic.
And they do run afoul of the law. I’ve seen a fair number of reports of women being charged woth posession of brass knuckles with added concealed weapon goodness for having these in their purses or pockets. AndasI said above they’re shitty weapons. As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.
In terms of destructive power, no. Guns are obviously much more dangerous and problematic.
In terms of how often they’re used for legitimate/defensive purposes vs. how often they’re used for violent criminal attacks, I’m leaning toward “yes” unless someone can give me even ONE example of the former.
Can you establish that the vast majority of time that people use brass knuckles it involves bashing some one over the head. In my experience the vast majority of the time people “use” brass knuckles its to brag about having brass knuckles. And my state’s warnings about their safety when hitting inanimate objects would seem to indicate there’s a lot of that going on.
And also important how often some one is bashed over the head with brass knuckles? Vs the numbers of them in the world.
Are the rates at which this happens greater in areas where they are legal vs areas where they are not. And are the number of head bashing higher where they are available vs where they are not.
Those are the important standards. Is there a practical effects from banning them. Do you achieve a beneficial out come. Not whether you can wrap your head around these things existing without head bashing or not.
If the law will do nothing, why have the law.
And quite unfortunately the laws we have now do do something. And that something is target minorities.
Well technically you don’t actually need to have brass knuckles if you just want to brag about having brass knuckles. They’re like Canadian girlfriends that way.
I can only comment as a machinist, brass is a horrible material for these. Easily warped, marred, and flashy. Too weak and obvious.
If you must have such an item the ideal material would be S7 tool steel, for high deformation resistance under impact, as well as much more rigid than brass. Powdercoat to match skin tone for less obviousness.
Really though, these are a last defense weapon. Not practical for actual defense, because they limit your ability to grasp much more useful things, like anything else. At all. I can only see these being used to attack someone who doesn’t have a weapon, because when you are being attacked by anything else you don’t have time to pull these out and put them on. I say this as someone who regretfully was in a number of streetfights as a teen- though I was never so crazy and bloodthirsty to use something like this.
Random pieces of construction lumber were far more useful to me then I imagine these would ever be (school was tough for fat nerdy guys)
Listen if you want Tommy to be impressed when we’re hanging round the 7-Eleven parking lot you gotta bring it. Dude has a butterfly knife (also a thing that is illegal for weird, less than practical reasons).
It seems to me that, for self defense against an unarmed opportunistic thug, pepper spray or mace and a whistle would be more effective (and easier on the fingers) than brass knuckles.
My sense is that the change in this law will mainly benefit adolescent boys of all ages in Texas who want to put brass knuckles next to the throwing stars and nunchuks in their totally awesome weapons collections. Texas probably has more than its fair share of those wannabe action heroes.
Yeah, I mean I’m having trouble even imagining a realistic use case scenario here. Fighting an unarmed mugger who is close enough in physical size and strength to their intended target that brass knuckles alone are enough to turn the advantage from the attacker to the victim?
Traditionally knucks were cast rather than machined, so the lower melting point of brass was a plus. For hitting people with just the force of a punch they wouldn’t have to be all that thick to avoid deformation. And since they were weapons of poor criminals the highest quality wasn’t all that important.
this makes me sad, you can no longer be a vigilante of the night just by putting on some brass knuckles and a skimpy mask and beating up people in the street.
There’s not a brass knuckles arts lobby in the way there’s a gun lobby. Self-defense stories without a shooting or stabbing are often non-stories, as the survivor may have strong disincentive to reporting the story. If a guy assaults a woman, and she successfully defends herself without a gun, he’s much less likely to be dead. If there’s not strong witnesses, and he’s more injured than she is, she, correctly, may be accused of assaulting him. Every rapist certainly deserves to be hit with brass knuckles. Similarly, rapists and attempted rapists have disincentive to report that they were assaulted while they were innocently attempting to rape. The number or women assaulted and rape is huge, there’s a large percentage of women who do fight back. My memory is 20-40%? Can’t find the stat. The majority of women who do fight back feel it went better than if they hadn’t, and there’s some stats agreeing on that. This is a descriptive stat, no one deserves to be assaulted, and anyone who says, after the fact “What you should have done when you were assaulted is…” is an asshole.
I’m just saying a lot of women do manage to successfully defend themselves. The majority of sexual assaults are someone they know. But it’s very often not a news story.
I know this is not exactly what you’re asking for, but when I was teaching self-defense, a woman who worked at a free eye clinic reported treating many men who had significant damages to their eyes. The men described them as scratches from a cat. Despite more women owning cats, they didn’t see similarly injured women. This is not a story I’ve commonly read about, as both parties have some disincentive about reporting the event, as the police might charge either with a crime.
