Idiot here (just temporary I assure you).

Before we jump up and down and decry our guvmint, can we brainstorm a few common scenarios where a knife or other edged cutting tool (defn: the kind of thing the TSA likes to take away) would be useful after an emergency occurs and the general urban population of DC grabs their Go Kits?

Disclaimer: I'm a recent Red Cross shelter volunteer with no working experience in a shelter at the moment, but the protocol is pretty clearly no guns or knives inside a shelter. Maybe this just prepares the population for that scenario, at the expense of using a knife after an emergency but before they take shelter. Basically I would recommend at least 95% of any urban environment to head for a Red Cross shelter if they could find one, assuming they have no where else to go, because otherwise their odds of death and injury go up as the temperature goes down etc.

But what are those knife scenarios exactly? Keeping in mind we're talking evacuation from the DC metropolitan area.

I'm mentally wandering around DC now, and finding not alot to cut or slice. I have a sandwich or meat so far, if someone gave them to me, but the knife is actually not *necessary* to eat those. And for purposes of the mental exercise, gutting and cleaning a deer or other animal is not very common in DC, at least among the urban population of folks who don't already eat rats and squirrels every day. And amateur tracheotomies in the service of dying pedestrians are off the table as well. There's some argument that having a knife can aid in personal protection. Help me out a little here, I'm not being imaginative enough. I don't EDC a knife, so I'm missing out on a level of ingenuity that a DC person will employ after an emergency.