- Australia: 10 years

- Singapore: 5 years

- Belgium: 5 years

- Germany: 3 years

- Switzerland: 3 years

- Japan: 3 years

- France: 3 years

- UAE: 3 years

- Italy: 2 years

- Spain: 1 year

We are not alone

Only if

* blade length greater than 3 inches, and

* you lack any reasonable response as to why you are carry it, and

* this happens repeatedly.

Once all the above occurs, you might be charged, you then have the opportunity to present your case and defend your actions, but only if a prosecutor looks at the details of the charge and decides to carry it forward.

To be sent to prison for four years (maximum) you would have also used that knife in a clearly threatening way that cannot be explained away by your defence lawyer. Even so, that is still unlikely to be awarded the maximum sentence, actual lunging and swiping with intent would probably be required.

Many people carry knives in the UK - Chefs frequently carry knife sets to and from work, for example.

Yeah. What's astounding to me, a Brit, is that you guys regularly get folks shot at school and/or work etc. but don't care enough to do anything about it.

Seems that Americans have, collectively, decided that their own right to carry a gun (and all the concomitant knock-on effects of that) supercedes other people's children's rights to life. Because no-one ever believes "it" will happen to them until it's too late.

Stabbings like this are vanishingly rare in the UK (although there's been a spurt of 3 of them recently) and mass shootings are measured as 1 or 2 per year since the country, collectively, said "fuck that shit, get rid of the guns" when we had one in a school. One. Every other week [1] there's another mass shooting in the USA. Perhaps wandering around armed to the teeth isn't the flex you think it is.

And even given all of that, I regularly walk around with a pocket knife in the UK, and it's completely legal - because it's less than 3 inches long and non-locking. You know what ? I haven't come across a situation where a non-locking 3" pocket knife is insufficient for what I want to use a pocket knife for...

[1]: https://rockinst.org/gun-violence/mass-shooting-factsheet/

I agree with a lot of what you've said, just to be clear.

My (mis-)understanding was that all knives were forbidden.

Not sure what your point is here. If this is supposed to be a “bad comparison” to the US, the US has far and away more stabbing deaths than the UK, see [1]. That’s in addition to the gun-deaths, where the US completely eclipses the UK, see [2], being hundreds. Of times higher.

[1]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/stabbing-...

[2]: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death...