Okay so I was trying to find out more about why nunchucks. A relatively obscure weapon that's hard to use and more likely to hurt some random kid using it than anyone else
Apparently the ban was just something they did pre-emptively after Enter the Dragon came out, and it was enforced by a censor named James Ferman. Who cracked down harshly on weapons like nunchucks and shuriken, but did nothing to touch, like, normal knives and swords and guns
I thought cutting someone twirling sausages like nunchucks was absurd, but apparently he was so fanatical about it he demanded they cut a shot from the Dragnet movie...bc you could see nunchucks in the background on a Enter the Dragon poster
That piece quotes a writer named Justin Wren who points out the elephant in the room: they were fanatically banning...what was probably the least violent weapon in the cast, versus the big stick, the literal sword, and sai, which I have been corrected are pronged metal batons you can stab people with and not knives. Apparently by the time the film came out everyone on the British Board of Film Classification besides Ferman agreed: that focusing on them over more dangerous weapons made no sense
Apparently he wanted to prove nunchucks were super dangerous, actually, so he pulled some out at a meeting and swung them around and promptly managed to nearly strangle himself. When told no one had used nunchucks in a crime in years, he attributed this to his own ban on them in a movie about turtles
So there you have it: it was all the result of one film censor who imposed his ridiculous crusades on British film as a whole. Who couldn't tell the difference between a sausage and nunchucks and thought kids couldn't either. Who...released David Cronenberg's Crash with zero cuts or censorship???