Another game of "Would you?"
Just to be clear up front, this is not a veiled reference to my ex-, Kate hasn't been injured or anything like that. My family is not involved at all.
1) Would you give your 8 year old a pocket knife?
2) Would you let your 8 year old use a pocket knife unsupervised?
3) As an adult, would you ever play a game with children that involved "stabbing" at them with a knife? A real knife? If they were, say, about 8 years old?
4) If a boy in your group had just been taken to the ER for stitches after cutting himself with a knife, would you, as an adult, choose that time to play a "stabbing" game with the rest of the kids?
5) If your irresponsible behavior with a knife resulted in another boy being slashed in the leg and needing 13 stitches, would you lie about how it happened?
6) If the child who needed 13 stitches was yours, how forgiving would you be of the knife accident? Would you feel differently if you found out your friend lied about how it happened?
7) Which would you find worse: the irresponsible knife game or your friend lying about how your child was slashed?
1) Would you give your 8 year old a pocket knife?
2) Would you let your 8 year old use a pocket knife unsupervised?
3) As an adult, would you ever play a game with children that involved "stabbing" at them with a knife? A real knife? If they were, say, about 8 years old?
4) If a boy in your group had just been taken to the ER for stitches after cutting himself with a knife, would you, as an adult, choose that time to play a "stabbing" game with the rest of the kids?
5) If your irresponsible behavior with a knife resulted in another boy being slashed in the leg and needing 13 stitches, would you lie about how it happened?
6) If the child who needed 13 stitches was yours, how forgiving would you be of the knife accident? Would you feel differently if you found out your friend lied about how it happened?
7) Which would you find worse: the irresponsible knife game or your friend lying about how your child was slashed?
You can take my answers to 3-7 as read. But as for 1-2...
I was at boarding school, as you know, from the age of 8. Every boy at that school had a knife. It wasn't part of the standard equipment but every boy had one nonetheless, either a sheath knife or a Swiss Army knife. Swiss Armies were more versatile, having saws and stuff, but sheath knives were better balanced for throwing at trees.
My father had been at the same school some forty years before me, and the custom was the same in his time. Nobody could remember any incident where one boy had injured another with a knife. Threatened, yes. Two of my contemporaries were sons of one of the bodyguards of the late Shah of Iran, and they were psychos. But nobody could recall a knife being used to actually injure someone.
1) Probably not, but I would evaluate it on their maturity, not their age.
2) If 1) was yes, then yes.
3) Probably not, but I could see me doing this with a wooden knife as part of martial arts training or something...it could evolve to a knife if the kid was a prodigy.
4) Hell, no. It'd be a sit down about the dangers of edged weapons and tools.
5) Never.
6) Depends on the circumstances; I'd fooken kick his/her ass.
7) Lying.
Bob