Police look to ban daggers following deadly stabbing spree in Akihabara - Mainichi Daily News: "The National Police Agency (NPA) is set to draft a bill to amend the Firearms and Swords Control Law to recognize daggers as illegal swords.

The current law restricts the possession of swords with a blade 15 centimeters or longer. However, the dagger that Tomohiro Kato, 25, used in the stabbing rampage had a 13-centimeter blade and is not subject to restrictions under the law.

NPA officials said daggers are highly lethal weapons and are hardly necessary in people's daily lives."
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Governments seem to look constantly for excuses to render citizens helpless and dependent on government itself for sustenance, safety, community, and anything else they can find. One nutball goes crazy with a dagger and stabs people. Government response: ban possession of daggers. Here in the US we get the same reflex over firearms. Two simple facts: 1) people will always find ways to kill each other, so that problem is insoluble, and 2) governments will always try to seize as much power over people as they can, so they will never stop using the fantasy of a murder-free world as an excuse to disarm us. The result is that we can't protect ourselves from bad guys, so we are expected to rely on the government for that. They will never, ever, be able to do it, but they will become very powerful by virtue of the false promise of eventual success.