21 Comments on Australia sets up ‘Machete Drop Boxes’ to counter violent crime

  6. …I had and still have a machete. I bought it at K-Mart back when they were a thing, cost me maybe $5 in 1990s money for a flat, full-tang matte black blade with a somewhat cheezy plastic handle with hand guards bolted onto it, complete with a cloth sheathe to attach to a belt. I believe the original intent was camping, but I used it mostly for gardening but kept it in the trunk as a self-defense tool.

    I used to live in a house one block off the main street, with a bar on the other side of an alley behind it. It could be a lively place, I lost access to various sides of my house over the years due to crime scene investigations after ne’er do wells ran through my yard or murdered a guy in the alley, so the cops were a little sensitive about it.

    So one day I got my machete out, put the sheathe on my belt, and proceeded to cut back the arboreal menaces that loomed over the fences and threatened passersbys on the public sidewalks (corner lot, never again). This was what the machete was made for and so I was lopping off Entish fingers with ease and aplomb. At one point I decided to rid my alley gate of Treebeard’s incursions and so, blade in hand, I walked around my house and into the alley, put a smackdowm on Quickbeam, then restored my jungle-clearing Andúril to its well-earned repose in the quiet of my trunk after ceremoniously resheathing it, and went about some other task on my quarter-acre wood.

    But in just a little while, cops started circling. First one, then another, then three stalwarts of the Home Guard, lights urgently blinking but without a sound, the pre-panicy eyes of those keepers of the peace sweeping me breifly and without interests before moving on down the line.

    This seemed to be something that may interest me, seeing as how I had my then-young family at my back, so I finally stepped up to the open window of an American Bobby and asked what’s going down. Eyes still roaming the bar before us which some of his colleauges had disappeared into, he said distractedly, “A voulenteer fireman saw someone walking towards the bar with a big knife, so go inside and stay off the streets”.

    …at which time I mentioned that I had been trimming the trees…

    …He then actually LOOKED at me for the first time, with an odd mixture of anger and relief as I gestured to the piles of twigs I had been bundling, telling him I had similar just behind the house. He urgently asked the time frame and so I told him, after which he somewhat disgustedly called off his crusing colleauges, telling them “Some guy was trimming his bushes”. One show-up by a presumed VFD and confirmation of no bar incursion later from the owner (who I was freindly with as a neighbor, although not a customer), and the Macy’s parade shut down the light show and went on to add misery to some speeder’s life somewhere else.

    …the point is, knives and guns DO have LEGITIMATE uses, machetes doubly so, and banning them only takes them out of service to the law-abiding.

    But what it does NOT do is disarm the criminal. Criminals are definitionally not following the law, so they will not surrender weapons on request, and will likewise ignore any law denying them.

    And besides that, there’s an old Klingon saying that “THERE ARE ALWAYS WEAPONS!!!” Hammers, saws, pipes loaded with nails and screws, the ever-popular Molatov cocktail, shivs, keys, bones…a never-ending list of things that can augment human abilities to facilitate the taking of a life. Many Martial Arts weapons such as the bo staff and the nunchaku came into being from sword bans, and war hammers and pike poles developed from peasants denied the right to arms in feudal societies, to name a few.

    You cant stop crime by criminalizing tools.

    At the end of the day, a weapon is only a tool, and ANY tool CAN be a weapon.

    The tool is not the problem.

    The hand that wields it is.

    Until and unless they deal with THAT, all they are doing is increasing the pool of victims…

    16

  7. Uncle AL
    Saturday, 2 August 2025, 22:20 at 10:20 pm
    “@SNS — You could get rid of the victim there, too, but you’d have to slice him kinda thin.”

    …not if you murdered a flounder…

    5

  9. “Machete Drop Box”…That’s a good band name, kids.

    If demand is up, for those things, maybe we can sell Oz our old Ballot Drop Boxes. Or are those coming back for our midterms.

    9

  12. At 69 I can pretty much guarantee you I will take that long bladed clumsy weapon away from you and shove it up your ass.
    That penal colony has turned into the land of giant vaginas.

    9

  15. The error was baked in during the years following transition from a penal colony. Government wins without a fight. Conditioned to answering to authority first, thinking afterwards.

    4

  19. I guess nothing makes ya safer than being forced to be defenseless. Good thing that everything that walks or crawls in Australia isn’t trying to kill ya. Oh wait….

    2

  20. …weirdly, you will note that the whole time I interacted with the police about the machete, at no time did they ever feel threatened enough to detain me or put me in cuffs, or do anything other than talk.

    That took a screwdriver.

    …when I first moved in to that house, as most young new homeowners do, we started minor changes to make it our own. Among these was painting, to which end I had got several cans of same and tarps and all, set it in the room to be painted, and had ladders and all good to go.

    Thats when the wife pointed out we had no good way to open the cans.

    Nothing loathe, I recalled a large, flat screwdriver being in my tool trove in my trunk, and left my wife to the considerable prep work while I exited to my car on the street to retrieve same.

    As I went out, I saw a cop, then another, then another zooming about the streets comprising my corner, mostly NOT the local agency. Thats weird, thought I, then got my tool and walked back towards my door.

    When a cop screehced to a halt before me and leapt from his car.

    Speechless, I looked at him for a moment as he glared at me, then he unholstered his weapon and told me in no uncertain terms to DROP THE SCREWDRIVER. As I bore him no animosity and also didnt want to get extra 9mm holes drilled in me I did so, and also the lying down and cuffing thing, during all of which more or less every cop in Hamilton County coalased on on my front yard. At this point no one had mentioned WHY my carrying a screwdriver into my new home had raised so much constabulatory ire, so as my new neighbors stared openmouthed at the apparent new serial killer being removed from their midst, I asked, to be told that I had evidently just robbed a jewelry store and so was being detained.

    Before I could react to this discovery or advance an Evil Twin theory as I was fairly confident I had not done so, another out-of-town cruiser screeched to a halt before me, a window rolled down, and an obvious non-cop said “No, not him, he’s too old!”, and rode away.

    …ok, thanks for that, I guess…

    …the other cops started away at that point while MY cop, Chinese eyed with disappointment, finally told me what was up. Apparently I matched the description of their fugitive jewerly liberator “To a T”, my frustrated felon filcher kept repeating. I said, well Im not, and if you know Im not, can you PLEASE REMOVE THESE HANDCUFFS? They were a type with the wrists joined by hinge and not by chain and were VERY uncomfortable.

    I dont think he would have even then, had we not been surrounded by his fellow keepers of civil order who were now grinning at his discomfortature, but he did so and reluctantly released me to SLOWLY pick up my screwdriver and escape into my new house and my relatively new wife.

    Who, having been completely engrossed in her tasks in our new second floor bedroom knew nothing of all the foregoing, asked me “What took so long?”.

    …well…

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  21. OR — and this is just a thought — you could stop importing 3rd World shit-heads into your country and start deporting the ones you already have. That’d probably do more to solve the problem than these stupid bins you wasted tax-payer money on.

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