Manager of throwing-star gallery calls Indiana’s law ‘a double-sided blade’

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Throwing stars thunked into wood on Tuesday at a facility along East 82nd Street near Castleton Square Mall.

That sound — and the safety concerns attached to it — became legal this month thanks to a new Indiana Law.

“It’s a double-sided blade,” said Patrick Arnold, manager of Ragnarok Axe Throwing, a throwing gallery in a strip mall off Center Run Road.

Arnold admits legally throwing stars of all shapes and sizes is fun, but his concern about the new law centers around safety for people who are not in facilities such as Ragnarok. “Recreationally, if people are untrained and unsupervised, accidents can happen.”

If throwing stars are even a little damaged, they can create one of the easiest ways for someone to get hurt. “The pointed edges can roll completely over and create a hooked blade and, if somebody isn’t aware, that’s a possibility they can very easily lacerate their hand.”

State Sen. Linda Rogers, a Republican from the community of Granger near the Indiana-Michigan border, authored the law. Originally, the measure called for legalizing the stars for use only at axe-throwing businesses. “But as, I think, people looked at it more, they realized that these throwing stars are really no more illegal than other weapons that are constitutional right now.”

So, state legislators dropped the limit to use throwing stars at businesses before the measure was signed into law by Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb.

Arnold says he would like to see the focus on throwing stars’ use to be totally centered around safety. “Ideally, we could help set a standard for making sure that, just making sure that whether its knives, axes, stars, that everyone is just being as safe as possible.”