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Comment by specialp | Hacker News Reader

My brother got charged as a result this law as the police wanted information about one of his friends. It is enforced very selectively too. If you can swing it down very hard and it opens, it is a gravity knife and thus criminal possession of a weapon. It is a bad law, and according to their definition nearly every pocket knife is a gravity knife.

There was an effort to repeal it, but for some reason governor Cuomo decided to veto it. https://kniferights.org/legislative-update/new-york-gravity-...

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It was a few years back, but I first learned about this in a documentary that had police officers practicing to flip knives open and teaching each other how to do it with different brands/styles of knives.

Try as I might, I can't come up with an ethical justification for this behavior. They were literally training to make knives do things beyond their design, for the purpose of charging people who had no intent to do anything of the sort with their knives. There's nothing just about that.

If we rethought whatever quota system is in place for arrests it would be a great help. Cops need to make lots of arrests, this is an easy arrest to make, and the cop is a step closer to the quota. It seems to create a system where people arrest people for profit instead of to "serve and protect."

I had typed out a huge response about quotas and how they actually, at least as I have been told, use something more insane. I deleted it, to see if I could be less wordy.

I believe quotas are illegal, at least in many jurisdictions. So, they use something even worse. They use performance metrics. This perversely incentivized ever-increasing arrests, citations, and summons, by becoming a heavily weighted consideration for raises and promotions.

They are, theoretically, supposed to pay attention to those who don't perform at about the average. Instead, they only scrutinize those who are below average. They promote those who have performance metrics that are above average.

A search for 'police performance metrics' is illuminating.

Most weapon bans are pretty silly and arbitrary. Look at the old AWB... Flash hider? Banned.. Muzzle Break? ok... Bayonet Lug? Banned... Grenade launcher oh sorry I mean “flaregun attachment” is ok as long as you can’t fix a bayonet on it...

"Flash hider? Banned.. Muzzle Break? ok"

In all fairness, muzzle breaks have practical civilian use as a way to reduce recoil for target shooting, while flash hiders just make it difficult for authorities to spot the location of a shooter. Muzzle breaks actually increase the noise level of a firearm, making more detectable than a stock barrel.

Flash hiders don’t hide a flash. They’re used to protect the shooter’s eyes from the flash affecting their (night) vision.

Flash hiders don't actually make gunshots harder to spot, the change the direction of the flash away from the shooter line of sight allowing the gun to be used in low light conditions without blinding oneself, and in modern days allow you to use nightvision devices. Muzzle breaks don't make a gun louder, the make it louder at the muzzle which is why some ranges don't like them. Muzzle breaks don't reduce recoil they reduce muzzle rise which is only really useful for follow up shots.

Might want to ask yourself where you learned that, then discount that source as a valid source of information in the future.

Video games is where I “learned” it. Outfit a gun in, say, Call of Duty or Rainbow Six. Highlight whatever the particular game calls a “flash suppressor”. I’ll bet it says something like “hides your location from other players when fired”, or something like that.

Which of course is not what a flash suppressor does at all.

> while flash hiders just make it difficult for authorities to spot the location of a shooter.

Flash hiders vent gas to the sides/down instead of straight out so that the shooter isn't blinded as much while firing at night. It does virtually nothing to hide a flash from the person you're shooting at. I get that the articles you've googled say that it hides the flash, but that doesn't make sense logically. It should make the flash a similar size except down/to the sides instead of a cone centered on the muzzle. The gases/gunpowder have to go somewhere.

Flash hiders make shooting at night less terrible.

> Muzzle breaks actually increase the noise level of a firearm, making more detectable than a stock barrel.

Muzzle breaks increase perceived noise for the shooter because the gas is vented towards the shooter and towards the sides. It is not a sound amplifier. It likely slightly decreases the noise in the direction of the muzzle because some of the pressure waves will go sideways/backwards instead of forward.

Muzzle breaks make shooting more pleasant with high powered rifles.

Also, suppressors. They don’t make a gunshot silent. They make it so you won’t instantly lose your hearing without protection.

Most of these are literally based on movies, as I read somewhere. Automatic knives were common accessory of a villain in the movies of the period. Movie silencers allow you to shoot in a library undetected. Others are likely a misclassified "the shoulder thing that goes up" (from Predator?)

From what I’ve heard, they’ll even hold it by the blade and flick it so that the handle’s greater momentum swings it open, even if it’s physically impossible to do that with the blade end.

Handle swings out? Gravity knife. They have a very strange understanding of what “gravity” means.

Well, here's a quote from your link that shows that governor Cuomo didn't veto it because he was in favor of putting innocent people behind bars. He actually just wanted the law to be even more clear:

"In response to the Governor’s objections to last year’s bill, this year’s bill removes “centrifugal force” from the definition of a gravity knife and adds “solely” to create a bright-line definition that even overzealous New York City law enforcement and prosecutors can understand, as desired by the Governor. It would preclude the unconstitutionally vague “wrist flick” test that has resulted in over 60,000 arrests and prosecutions in New York City which the Governor himself described as “absurd” in vetoing last year’s bill on New Year’s Eve."

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