Gentrification's Latest Victim: Machetes

After attacks, Williamsburg looking to ban sales of machetes

First the stock market throws itself on its sword, and now this.

From the file of Things We Really Never Thought That Much About comes the city's potential banning of sales of machetes, a weapon that looks kind of like a massive butter knife, is often used for hacking one's way through the Amazon and is perhaps most frequently associated with that one scene in the first Indiana Jones where a shrouded enemy makes a big show of his machete skillz, only to be rock-paper-scissored by a bored-looking Indy who fells the guy with a single gunshot.

The Times (via Curbed) says that on the heels of four reported machete attacks (?!?) in South Williamsburg this summer, a local City Council member seeks to criminalize selling the weapon (that's right: you can keep the machetes you already have - they're not banning ownership, just sales of new machetes).

If the Council gets its way, machetes will be the latest in a long line of awesome things you can't buy in New York, which includes nunchaks and ferrets (seriously, you want to click on that last one -- it's a Sears Portrait Studio shot of a ferret with a feather boa). And what exactly are the city's machete vendors supposed to do now? Career-switch to frozen yogurt?

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