14 April—A nutter in the Land of Oz has shown yet again that you don’t need a gun to commit mass murder. Yesterday, at a shopping mall in Sydney (capital of New South Wales and Australia’s biggest city, with a population of about 5.5 million, though all of that’s irrelevant—but nice to know) a 40-year-old man with a history of mental-health issues since adolescence stabbed six people to death and wounded another dozen before being shot dead by a policewoman.

Five dead women, one dead man; one nine-month-old baby girl, daughter of one of the murder victims, critically injured. Among others. How the hell, you wonder, could one man stab 18 people before being taken down? That’s not a rhetorical question.

From blurry pictures online, the knife wielded by the crazy killer appears to be about the size of a chef’s knife, with a blade about eight inches long. No further details about the murder weapon are available at this time.

Let’s assume the lethal weapon was in fact a chef’s knife, a common kitchen implement. Kitchen knives are used in many assaults and other crimes, not just hunting knives, switchblades, and other commonly vilified bladed weapons. So shouldn’t kitchen knives be outlawed? At least outside the kitchen?

In Connecticut, it may in fact be unlawful to carry a kitchen knife outside one’s residence or place of business. Or maybe not. CGS (Connecticut General Statutes) defines the few types of knives that may not (i.e., must not) be carried outside of a residence: spring-loaded knives and knives with blades four inches or longer. But nowhere is specific exception made for kitchen knives with long blades.

The Connecticut Supreme Court in 2014 ruled that dirks (daggers with blades normally longer than four inches) are arms within the compass of the Second Amendment and thus are constitutionally protected weapons that may be kept and borne without infringement. Presumably that extends at the very least to all knives that aren’t spring-loaded.

But maybe not. Because this is Connecticut. And the pertinent statutes, like most statutes that govern this state, are poorly conceived and even more poorly drafted. So whether it’s legally safe to carry a nine-inch chef’s knife or foot-long bread knife or even a toy baseball bat in your car or on your person—openly or concealed—tends to be at the discretion of the cop who stops you for whatever reason.

There haven’t been any arrests for merely carrying long-bladed kitchen knives that we know of. But you never know. And in all events consider the damage that can be done with a skillfully honed and wielded blade shorter than four inches that folds into a handle—or one shorter than one-and-a-half inches that springs out of a handle, also legal in Connecticut . . .