Originally posted by Rain:
<STRONG>
It is quite recent.... in Soul Caliber on DC (UK) Maki keeps his Nunchuk's but they were still illegal to buy, crazy I know.... a few months later, they were made legal again. Why ban a pair of sticks with a chain in the middle though? Bah, British law is fucked up <IMG SRC="smilies/smile.gif" border="0"></STRONG>
Well, as I said, they were banned because too many people were getting killed trying to be Bruce Lee. (Of course, by that logic, they should have banned windows higher up than the ground floor, perhaps, due to kids in the '50s trying to be Superman and breaking their legs and worse.)
And as for British law, you haven't seen the Zero Tolerance laws in the US <IMG SRC="smilies/tongue.gif" border="0">. They involve ultra-Draconian punishments for relatively innocuous acts (hear about the kid who got suspended for kissing a girl?), they force arbitrary punishments (which are usually Draconian), instead of the conventional "teacher punishing the perp as s/he sees fit," and they can actually serve to trivialize the actual acts (kissing -- sexual harassment, possesion of a water gun -- actual possession of a firearm; unrecognized candy -- distribution of drugs.
For more information, I recommend you take a look at
http://www.thisistrue.com/zt.html for a pretty interesting look at these laws. Suddenly, British law doesn't seem so horribly mangled. At least the nunchaku ban had a semi-valid basis (interest in public safety), rather than paranoia disguised as concern.