Starting this fall, adults in Texas can openly carry knives with blades longer than 5.5 inches.
In fact, swords, spears, daggers, sabers, bowie knives and machetes are all perfectly fine to tote around. Pretty much anything you can whip out in a Dungeons and Dragons battle is fair game.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill into law last month, but it doesn’t go into effect until September 1.
Under the existing law knives with blades longer than 5.5 inches could be purchased but not carried — with only limited exceptions.
There are some places where the new law won’t apply — including schools, prisons, hospitals, amusement parks or places of worship. Long blades are still banned at sports events. And you can’t bring your sword into a bar, either. The tiny colorful plastic ones that you stick on top of a cocktail, however, are under 5.5 inches, so those are still OK.
“House Bill 1935 provides a common sense solution by prohibiting any knife with a blade over five-and-a-half inches in certain location restricted areas,” Rep. John Frullo, the Republican representative from Lubbock who authored the bill, told CNN in a statement.
Texas now joins Montana and Oklahoma. Both have both passed laws lifting their bans on certain bladed weapons, including swords.
The legislation stalled in May after a man was accused of using a hunting knife to kill one student and wound three others at the University of Texas at Austin. Frullo postponed debate on the legislation until a week later — but stood by his bill.
“It’s not making criminals out of people who have no intention of creating some type of criminal act,” Frullo told CNN affilliate Spectrum News in Austin at the time. Knife Rights, a national advocacy organization, supported the legislation but said there is still a ways to go to strike “those last remaining minor knife restrictions in Texas.”
“We won’t stop until Texas is as free as everyone thinks Texas is,” the group wrote in a statement on its website.
