D’you know (well, yes, yes you do, most likely, being a historian) that really was the plan of the then international socialists. It was so obviously, so painfully a war in the interest of capitalism and large capital and against humanity in general that they thought that they might get it to stop by just refusing. The great proletariat masses made it possible, after all, and it could not proceed without their consent.
But the attempt failed. Narrow national interest won.
I often wonder what might have happened if they managed to agree and blocked the Great War. Hah. Now there’d be a alternate history that’d never make it to TV.
Interestingly, the law makes it legal to give knives to children under 18. I hope there is a reckless endangerment law or something so you can’t just stand on the corner and hand out daggers to 9 year olds legally now.
intentionally or knowingly sells, rents, leases,
or gives or offers to sell, rent, lease, or give to any child
younger than 18 years of age any firearm or[,] club[, or illegal
knife];
Actually, I just read John Reed’s 10 Days that Shook the World (which if you haven’t read it, were articles written by Reed during the Bolshevik revolution), and that idea is all over the book. The hope of Lenin and Trotsky was that they could get the proletariat in the trenches to just stop, and revolt against the capitalists instead. Didn’t work out so well for them, and by the end of the civil war inside Russia, Lenin began to shift to small scale capitalism, etc. then he died, Stalin came to power and it was 5 year plans all over the place. I’m not sure it was an entirely crazy plan on their part - after all, there were socialist parties railing against the war all over the place. They just assumed that all of the proletariat were with them.
Most sensible and normal gun owners would never display a gun in a way that would be deliberately intimidating to people.
Open carry for us mostly means having a gun that is not concealed, which is an important legal difference. My wife sometimes has a pistol when she is leaving the clinic late at night. If it is in her purse, it becomes a concealed weapon, which was a big deal before she got a concealed permit. Also, we carry guns up in the mountains, which might mean being on forest service roads or transiting public lands.
“Menacing” someone, or threatening them with a gun remains a crime, and should be. It should be the same with knives or anything else.
Of course I come from people who pretty much always carry knives of some sort. Good to know that what I have always done is now legal.
I was collecting swords and daggers at that age. Actually, I was working at a custom knife shop in Texas at 16. I was unaware that it could be an issue.
Hey, uh, kid, wanna a Kriegsmesser? 's technically a knife.
True, but a lot less socialists than there ought to have been. A lot found some residual patriotism somewhere and… WWI. It was all bound up in various terrible social features of the period, of course, the skewed view of masculinity embodied by the white feather campaign and all the rest.
A shame. A real, honest-to-goodness shame. If people had been just an ounce less blinkered and we might have avoided WWI and WWII (which in many respects is WWI, part 2, now with better guns) both.
A damn fine one, too. I’ve taken a look at Wikipedia’s list of AH fiction as well as Uchronia’s timeline and I can’t find anything of the sort. WWI, in general, is not something the AH community seems to like very much. It’s all American Civil War and WWII as far as the eye can see. Seems oddly… unimaginative. How about a world in which the attack of the Sea Peoples never happened? A world in which the treasure ship fleets never stopped sailing?
(And I mention TV because while a ‘Germans Win WWII’ story is fine, of course, ‘Socialists Make World Better’ would be anathema. I find this… curious.)
Oh, dear lord. Land of the Bud K catalog.
I don’t suppose that they might take a tip from fantasy novels and make it legal to open carry if the swords are in a sheath and fastened with peace cords?
You need a super-profitable weapons industry to back you, though. Maybe we can get people excited about the idea of open-carrying cruise missiles…
Right, got to do it for exposure, in the hopes that some other weapon industry association will actually hire you at some point. Or for crowdsourced tips, I guess.
To be fair, Governor Abbott was assaulted by a tree once. That’s why he’s in a wheelchair. It’s no wonder he hates them. He probably doesn’t want any pesky local ordinances getting in the way of tree-toppings like this one in a Dallas neighborhood.
I lived there from 6th-Sr. grades/yr, i don’t remember them really bringing that up now that i think about it, most they said was it was one of the reasons for their revolution (Mexico had outlawed slavery), and then a long glorified crappy defensive campaign where they got massacred twice & won by catching the guy in his sleep >_>
Are you telling me an open-carry gun owner has more rights than an open-carry +9 Mjollnir owner?
Why can’t I bring my open-carry sword into schools, colleges, churches and bars?
People of Texas-- When will you learn? The only thing stopping a bad pupil/scholar/parishioner/drunk with a sword is a good pupil/scholar/parishioner/drunk with a sword (or gun).
