(Courtesy of: Chronicle Sacramento Bureau, by Greg Lucas) Sacramento, CA: Saying he is unwilling to allow knives of any kind in schools, Governor Wilson vetoed a bill Friday that would have allowed Sikh children to wear under their clothes the small daggers that symbolize their religious convictions.

The Republican governor sided with opponents of the measure, who said that irrespective of the religious significance of the three to six inch curved daggers known as kirpans, the knives are still potential weapons and should be banned from schools.

“I am unwilling to authorize the carrying of knives on school grounds and abandon public safety to the resourcefulness of a thousand districts,” said Wilson in a statement.

The bill, by Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer, DHayward,

I was sparked by three kirpan wearing Sikh children in the Livingston “school district near Modesto who were excluded from school based “on the districts no weapons policy.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Circuit of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in favor of the children, overruling a lower court decision backing the school district.

The appellate court said the school district did not try to compromise with the children, who said they were willing to wear shorter, blunt knives sewn securely in to a sheath, med to school with their kirpans.

Wilson said the court’s ruling made Lockyer’s bill unnecessary. The governor acknowledged that the kirpans are religious symbols, but he insisted that they still meet the definition of a knife in the state’s penal code and therefore must be banned.

The bill included a variety of safeguards, including a requirement that if a child brandished a kirpan it would be taken away.

Some 500,000 Sikhs live in the United States. Approximately 40,000 live in the Bay Area, many in southern Alameda County Kirpans have been worn by baptized Sikhs for 300 years, The daggers symbolize a Sikh’s duty 10 defend the weak and innocent, one of their religion’s five major tents.

Three California school districts—Yuba City, Live Oak and Selma—have granted exemptions for kirpans to their no weapons policies, but require the daggers be riveted to their sheaths.

No violent incidents involving the kirpans have been reported. _ Wilson said he would sign a bill allowing kirpans at school if they were made Incapable of use as a weapon.

Article extracted from this publication >>  October 7, 1994