They’re Banning Swords

This moment we’re living in feels like it has the rhyme of history to it.

In the past couple of years, state and federal governments have fallen over themselves to protect kids from accessing anything that might harm them.

Online, this has taken the form of content blocks, particularly in the United Kingdom, where a new law requires users to verify their age with either a picture of their ID card or a scan of their face. The result, at least thus far, has been an absolute surge in the update of virtual private networks, or VPNs.

Nearly half a million Brits of people have asked the law to be rolled back in a public petition. (Uncomfortably, it unexpectedly puts a lot of people on the side of Nigel Farage.)

Combined with other recent actions the government has taken—a failed attempt to force Apple to put a backdoor into iOS stands out—it feels like PM Keir Starmer is trying to see how unpopular a leader he can become.

But the thing is, if the U.K. was alone here, it would be one thing. But they’re not. Many states in the U.S. have put in age-verification requirements for racy content, which a few key adult websites have absolutely refused to follow, citing privacy reasons. (That, too, has led VPNs to become very popular with non-nerds.) And in Australia, a well-intentioned ban on social media for most teenagers has become highly controversial after the country announced that an exception for YouTube was going to be removed, likely offering a starting point for a potential lawsuit.

Back to my point with rhyming history. We are essentially doing the same stuff we already tried three decades ago, with slightly newer technology, and hoping that it works with a fresh coat of paint. It’s all well-intentioned. But good intentions sometimes lead to disastrous results.

People are much more tech-savvy than they were 30 years ago, so many online users know this. And the result of many of these policies is inevitably going to be a backlash.

This week, Visa and Mastercard are getting utterly slammed with complaints from gamers angry about the payment processors’ capitulation to an advocacy group that led many video games to be banned from Steam and Itch.io. These protesters have become brilliant social engineers, having figured out that, calling, rather than sending emails, is most likely going to create maximum pain for these companies.

I have no doubt that annoyed internet users are going to work around and protest dumb regulations, they always do.

But it’s the repetition of history that gets me. Having lived through the initial protests over the Communications Decency Act, I just find it so strange that we’re trying to re-litigate settled battles without considering why those battles ultimately petered out in the first case.

A new ninja sword ban has a familiar ring to it

Oddly, I don’t think it’s just the internet having this problem, though. On Friday, another new law in the U.K. is taking effect that involves the banning of “ninja swords,” a style of long, thin blade. People aren’t only banned from buying and selling them, but from owning existing ones, which led to an amnesty period over the past few weeks, when people could give their swords to local police, no complaints.

(Folks have noted the cultural component behind the ban—the U.K. has a lot of cultural touchpoints related to swords, not the least of which is Excalibur, the legendary “sword in the stone” wielded by King Arthur.)

Much of what I have seen online is mocking this law, but I want to be clear. There is a prominent, high-profile reason for this ban occurring: A pair of real-life incidents made it clear that swords were a concern.

Last year, a teenage boy died in a mass stabbing involving a samurai sword wielded by a man with a background in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. (Four others were injured, some severely.) The motive, despite the man pleading guilty and being sentenced to 40 years in prison, remains frustratingly unclear.

(Samurai swords, which are curved, are different from ninja swords, which are straight, by the way, but I think many people wouldn’t make that distinction. However, the law does.)

On top of that, the law is named for Ronan Kanda, a teenager who was killed two years earlier by pair of teenagers who mistook him for someone else. A campaign in Kanda’s name helped to push the law through.

It took only a handful of deadly, violent incidents to turn the tide against these massive blades. I think many Americans would be thrilled if a similar law was passed requiring people to hand in their semiautomatic weapons. (Many would not be, hence the reason it’s never happened.)

But what I’m finding strange about this situation is the parallels it has to a situation I covered a while ago, which at least a few people on Bluesky have independently pointed out.

Back in 2019, I wrote about the tale of James Ferman, the longtime head of the British Board of Film Classification. Sparked by a handful of real-life incidents, he became infamous among film fans for his aggressive censorship of nunchaku, particularly in relation to the Bruce Lee film Enter the Dragon.

(Nunchucks were never banned in the U.K., though many European countries do have restrictions or outright bans.)

This overly aggressive approach to Lee’s film ultimately bled into other film and television properties, even though Ferman wasn’t in charge of censoring TV shows.

The knock-on effects were such that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles appeared on British television with a completely different name, because “ninja” was too edgy. And in film form, one of the Turtles movies was censored for a scene that featured sausages thrown around like nunchucks, one of the most comical things I’ve ever personally heard.

People mock his work today, believing it to be a sign of overzealousness. But it sort of feels relevant to the current moment, as we have a story about an aggressive weapons ban and a story about content regulation trending in the same country at the same time.

I feel conflicted about the sword situation: The issues that led to the ban are clearly not the norm. There are likely thousands of responsible sword owners in the U.K. (OK, were.) But, at the same time, a society with fewer dangerous weapons in it is one I feel like I can get behind.

Still, though … given the climate in which it hits, it sort of feels complicated to me. In an era in which backdoors are fair game and the government has no problem asking for your headshot over the internet, there’s a chance someone in the U.K. government is going to take things too far.

(To provide a counterpoint: There was a mass-stabbing at a Michigan Walmart recently, stopped thanks to the help of bystanders, but nobody is talking about banning blades here. Maybe the Brits have it right?)

One of the people who I quoted talking about the Turtles censorship in my piece noted, by sight alone, that Leonardo’s swords were significantly more dangerous-seeming than Michelangelo’s nunchucks. But it was the nunchucks that were voluntarily removed from the cartoon worldwide, thanks in part to the U.K. censorship.

Given the slippery slope we seem to be sliding on and the U.K.’s track record on banning content, are they gonna go back for the swords soon? And, to bring it all back, what if it’s not swords, but our hard-fought free expression online?

I’m not saying they will. But history is starting to rhyme.