Often times, once a place goes after guns hog wild, and finds that in the end that doesn't really help anything, then they go after knives. A fantastic example of this is Great Britain, with their current "knife crime" hand wringing. They pretty much totally outlawed guns. And then didn't they move on to knives? They were trying to outlaw pointy knives. I don't know if that effort succeeded. I think they have outlawed locking knives, haven't they?
There hasn't been any recent change in knife laws here. Pen-knifes are presumed tools, and other knifes are presumed weapons, but both presumptions are rebutable. So it's not so much that they are outlawed, as that carrying a knife that isn't a pen-knife needs a specific justification. A vague, "I might need to cut something" isn't specific enough. The hand-wringing is mostly directed at gangs, mostly teenagers, who use knives as weapons to cause lasting bodily harm. Knife-crime is a real issue here.
I actually think our statute law is reasonable, as it does acknowledge that pen-knives are tools that need no further justification to carry. The problem is that the statute did not consider locking blades at all, and some case law has established precedent that locking blades are classed with fixed blades. The way those cases arose meant that the argument that a lock is a safety feature never really got made. So the case law is bad, but unlikely now to get over-turned.
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