GREAT meeting last night
One of the club members and an LEO gave a brief- maybe half hour- introductory presentation on self defense against attackers armed with knives.
A couple of salient points:
10% of gunshot wounds are fatal. 30% of knife wounds are fatal.
Guns are a recently introduced tool, in the scheme of human history. We have been hardwired to attack with knives (all the way back to sharp sticks) for a million years, we can attack with a knife instinctively. Learning how to defend against those attacks can also be instinctive, if you train yourself to get out of the line of attack.
A knife fight can just look like a fistfight until the blood starts flowing
Get off the killing floor. In any altercation there is an area where killing can or may take place, train yourself to recognize these places and stay the hell out ofthem,or have an escape route out of them.
These are all pretty simple things that seem pretty commonsense, but the demonstrations he gave really did open my eyes. There are some other resources, he says, that he will share and I will take advantage of.
And we hope, share some of them.
Knives can be exceedingly dangerous. Wait till the gun fearing wussies learn that.
10% of gunshot wounds are fatal.
You aren’t doing it right.
The best way to win a knife fight is to stay out of them. Same thing for a fist fight.
You can reduce your vulnerability of dying in a knife fight by 65% by doing this one simple thing: Don’t be black.
“Don’t be black. ”
RACISSSS!
“You aren’t doing it right.”
I don’t make the statistics, I just report them. Does it treally come as a great surprise to you that criminals as a group can’t shoot?
Having been in a knife fight or three, I can wholeheartedly get behind “Stay out of them”. My problem was the guy with the knife wasn’t as determined as I was to stay out of it.
Kershaw Model 1920. Not only does it have a righteous bit driver and four bit holder integrated into the handle that is far more useful than the screwdriver in my Leatherman Skeletool, it has a blade that when kept touched up with a Smith’s Pocket Sharpener is fucking terrifying.
The Kershaw Ken Onion Leek is a gentleman’s blade through and through, if you need a knife to stay firmly in your slacks until the moment the modern gentleman absolutely positively must have the closest thing to a stiletto that a modern gentleman can carry. If you REALLY want to terrify your assailant, get it in rainbow.
I would have long ago gotten my father an Opinel #10 folder with beechwood handles and the corkscrew, except that Parkinson’s makes it tough for him to open wine bottles with a cork, and I don’t want him to think I’m trying to influence his choice of an evening glass of tipple.
You nailed it, Og: determination. I knew about knives when younger, but they became tools. I have a .45 for a weapon. Let’s leave aside the fact that most tools are weapons for now; lots of folks are fucked up every year because they annoyed a just-off-work carpenter or roofer.
Had an eye-opener a couple of years ago & replaced my “just a work knife” Buck 110 with a more useful blade. Inside a a few feet, a knife can be a more effective weapon. Not my first choice, but if a competent knife-fighter is within 5 feet of you & you don’t already have a weapon in hand, you’re probably going to bleed. Maybe not lose terminally, but you may not really win.