Knives in Schools

I think that pocket knives should be allowed in school. According to Michigan law, students are not allowed to carry a dangerous weapon.

According to the state laws the definition of a dangerous weapon, in this case, is any firearm, dagger, dirk, stiletto, or knife with a blade over three inches in length, a pocket knife opened by a mechanical device, iron bar, or brass knuckles. I believe that those are good rules, and that schools shouldn’t be any more over restrictive than the state. Having said that, I should be allowed to have my one-inch Swiss Army knife on me. Some people might wonder if I would even really use my knife during school. The honest answer is not usually.

So why do I want it? Sometimes it is helpful. For example, when a screw on my glasses is about to fall out, I can use the pocket knife to put it back in. If I were to lose the screw, I probably wouldn’t be able to wear my glasses because they would keep falling off, and without my glasses I wouldn’t be able to see anything that the teachers put on the whiteboard at the front of the room. There have also been times in certain classes, particularly art class, where it would have been helpful for etching thing or even cutting some paper. You might point out that art class usually has supplies for you to borrow, which it does, but often they are low quality or not as efficient as a knife would be.

One concern that might be raised is that bringing knives to school is a safety issue. That point is almost totally invalid. In shop class kids use saws and hammers. It would be a lot easier to kill or injure someone with a saw or a hammer than a one-inch pocket knife. We are also required to use scissors in most classes at some point it time.

Someone could easily take a pair of scissors and injure someone if they really wanted to. The scissors could also hurt someone if a person carrying them tripped. Kids often threaten to use pressure points on classmates, and while many of them exaggerate, some kids are perfectly capable of using pressure points to cause injury. While the above scenarios could happen, they haven’t happened around me. One reason tor that is that the teachers supervise what we do, and they would still supervise us if we had pocket knives.

In the “olden days” many people carried pocket knives on them. Some people even remember certain teachers showing them how to whittle more safely or sharpen it more efficiently. None of them ever remember someone using or threatening to use the knife on someone else. While there are many pros and cons of pocket knives being allowed in school, I don’t think that there is any evidence concrete enough to ban them. A good compromise might be that a student may be permitted to have one on them as long as they don’t take it out of their pocket without permission.