You know.... IT.Skiprr wrote:When is what gonna be legal?XtremHunter wrote:when it is gonna be legal?
This is exactly my impression of it, and I am not even that knowledgeable about knives. I have a few. I know what I like. I'm no knife historian, nor am I any kind of a knife fighter. But I do know that anytime I see somebody showing off with a balisong, I am reminded of that scene from the first Indiana Jones movie - the one where the huge guy in the black turban and robe challenges Indiana Jones by flashing all of his cool ninja sword moves, and Jones just pulls out his pistol and shoots him because he doesn't have time for this kind of crap.Skiprr wrote: The allure of the balisong (except for those folks who actually use it as a functional pocket knife to open boxes or cut string) is that you can get creative with flipping it up, down, around, open, and closed. That's nothing more than a 1950s Western movie star spinning his revolvers all over the place to show how cool he is.
It's pointless, it's potentially dangerous, and it ain't gonna do nuthin' to stop a bad guy.
In my opinon, the balisong design is inferior to the modern spring-assist folders we have at our disposal today. Very much so: both in speed of deployment and in structural integrity.
That's what the balisong reminds me of. But try explaining this to your teenaged son. It's an exercise in futility. He has to get his own gun before he understands. I am very respectful of the knife as an offensive weapon. Like I said above, I don't know much about how to use one, but I'm smart enough to know that someone else might know how to, and I worked in an ER long enough to see what a knife can do. It ain't pretty. But when I look at a knife that requires you to do a song and dance and pass the hat for tips just to get it deployed, and I compare that to the simple speed of getting any one of a hundred different other kinds of knives into play, and the balisong seems like a pretty useless design to me, and I don't blame masters of the phillippine martial arts for looking down their noses at it.