> I don't think the allowed shapes of formed metal should be regulated either.

I hear you. I collect knives as a hobby, and always have some kind of a cutting tool on me - they solve a surprising amount of little day-to-day problems (unpacking things bought in a shop being a prime example). I lost one of my folders to the UK border guard because, while a 6.5 cm blade was OK, they said its locking mechanism is illegal in the country. What's particularly funny is that I was actually trying to get back to France then - when entering, nobody asked about any knives. I never got that one back. :(

I wish I knew what the people who wrote this law thought. A folder without a locking mechanism is just as dangerous to others in violent scenarios, but way more dangerous for the user in typical EDC tasks. In Poland, there is no limit on the length of the blade nor on the locking mechanism. Technically, carrying an automatic foldable scythe or a zweihander is legal; you can't, however, carry a sword-cane or any other blade that is disguised as another item, like an umbrella. To put that all in perspective: in both countries, just like almost everywhere else in the developed world, the most lethal type of knife is the good old kitchen knife - ubiquitous, solid, with a tip ideal for thrusts, with a handle that protects the user's hand during the thrust, and so on. Such knives are generally not within the scope of knife-related laws.

So yeah, I don't get the logic behind the knife regulations at all. I'm not sure if completely dropping all of them is the way to go, but they would definitely benefit from a rational reevaluation. As an example, making the locking mechanism mandatory, instead of banned, would have no impact on knife-related deaths while allowing quite a few people each year to actually still have all their fingers.

I'm afraid a similar thing will happen with LLMs and later AIs. Regulators will "compromise" and focus on some kind of danger that's not entirely impossible, but also not very probable (assassins with blades in umbrellas...?), will fight for months over semantics, then pass the regulations to absolutely no visible effect - and the really dangerous uses will become either normalized or at least will move to the gray zone. The judiciary will try its best to apply existing laws to new situations, and in some cases, that will inevitably fail. We'll all deal with the consequences of these failures, unfortunately.