Becoming a swordsman?

[Kentucky Fried Panda]

Samurai swords, most swords really, were designed for battle on open fields. Unless you can slap your opponent with a leather gauntlet and invite him to do battle in the field of honour, I'd skip swords.

If you want your adversary to know exactly how you're armed, choose a sword. If you want to be incapacitated by a flurry of bricks and other missiles, choose a sword.
If you have a tiny, tiny penis, choose a sword...

Hatchets, machetes and baseball bats are far easier to wield in the classic urban environment where escape is not an option. Also far more inconspicuous to practice with. Chop wood with the hatchet, clear scrub with the machete, batter a few tennis balls over the wall. Improve the old eye hand co-ordination with these common implements, legally available.

[tattercoats]

Phooey. You're all being far too sensible.

Swordfighting is fun.

Tea and biscuits and a nice sit down after a jolly good training session, anyone?

[Ludwig]

Toadstool, see the old self-defence thread

You could also try some psychological techniques. In his book "Tricks of the Mind", Derren Brown claims to have reduced a drunken aggressor to tears by responding to his threats with a disquisition on the heights of walls around Spanish houses (p. 216). The guy was so confused that the advantage immediately fell to Brown.

[kenneal - lagger]

Samurai swords, most swords really, were designed for battle on open fields. Unless you can slap your opponent with a leather gauntlet and invite him to do battle in the field of honour, I'd skip swords.

If you want your adversary to know exactly how you're armed, choose a sword. If you want to be incapacitated by a flurry of bricks and other missiles, choose a sword.

The Roman sword was designed as a stabbing weapon to be used in close, confined combat from behind the safety of a shield. The Roman legionnaire also carried a spear for longer range fighting. The spear would be used to either throw at the enemy to break up a massed charge or as a longer range stabbing implement before the sword would be drawn for close range combat.

So what you need is a shield, spear AND sword with preferably at least a hundred similarly armed friends around you.

If you can afford a range of weapons, a rifle and a sawn off shotgun would give you a long range and short range defence. The sawn off shot gun gives a better spread of shot, so accuracy is not so important, and is much quicker to turn. But if you were using up your supply of cartridges quickly, and couldn't go into the gunpowder manufacturing industry, learning to use a crossbow or preferably longbow, which is faster to use and often more powerful, would be a more sustainable option.

In the middle ages people learned to shoot a longbow from a very early age so that by the time they were 18 to 20 they could handle the military and hunting bows with a draw weight of over 100 pounds. These, with the correct arrow heads, could pierce armour at long range. It is quite easy to detect the skeleton of a bowman of that era as they have much heavier bones in their left arm and much larger muscle attachments in their right arms from the extreme compression in the left arm and the high tension in the right arm from pulling the bow string at very high draw weights. The accurate use of a longbow with a heavy draw weight is a very highly skilled operation so perhaps we had better stick to crossbows.

[careful_eugene]

But if you were using up your supply of cartridges quickly, and couldn't go into the gunpowder manufacturing industry, learning to use a crossbow or preferably longbow, which is faster to use and often more powerful, would be a more sustainable option.

In the middle ages people learned to shoot a longbow from a very early age so that by the time they were 18 to 20 they could handle the military and hunting bows with a draw weight of over 100 pounds. These, with the correct arrow heads, could pierce armour at long range. It is quite easy to detect the skeleton of a bowman of that era as they have much heavier bones in their left arm and much larger muscle attachments in their right arms from the extreme compression in the left arm and the high tension in the right arm from pulling the bow string at very high draw weights. The accurate use of a longbow with a heavy draw weight is a very highly skilled operation so perhaps we had better stick to crossbows.

Longbows are great fun, but to be effective in a combat situation you'd need hundreds of archers all shooting together. Buying a longbow for self defense would be like buying a model T ford to travel to work in every day. If you want accuracy you need to go for a modern recurve or compound bow. However I would suggest joining a club first before buying any equipment, archery is a great hobby. Crossbows are for girls and frenchmen

[Kentucky Fried Panda]

Why not pillows?
Even the toughest of street scum shy away from a well trained and aggressive pillow fighter!

[Catweazle]

If I was going to carry a weapon for self defence on an every-day basis (and that's when you need one) it would have to be something small and easily concealed. I'd go for a short barreled pistol in a large-but-slow calibre - probably a Smith & Wesson stainless snub nosed revolver in 0.44 Special calibre. I've used 0.44 Special and 0.44 Magnum and the Special is much more controllable.

Assuming that firearms were not available I'd carry a rubber-gripped 6-8" sheath knife and an electric stungun.

[Vortex]

What do skilled nasty people use, when they have a choice?

Well, mercenaries tend to go for a carbine version of an assault rifle such as the AKMS:



Failing that, gangsters etc seem to favour the similar(ish) MAC10 submachine gun:


Either would be fine with me.

[eatyourveg]

This is legal and takes 3 seconds to reload:

http://www.swisscrossbow.ch/html/twinbo ... age=370fps

The downside is it will cost you about £1000, but then the money is better spent here than a plasma tv.

[Kentucky Fried Panda]

Gun pictures? Have I logged onto LATOC by mistake?

[chris25]

Why not buy a CO2 pellet pistol if you want to protect yourself and your family?

They fire about 350 feet per second at about 3.5ft/Lbs of energy. A real gun fires at about 1200 feet per second at about 80ft/Lbs energy.

So they are non lethal, but will sting the hell out of an attacker.

[Vortex]

The snag is that in the UK this class of weapon counts as a firearm in many situations, although they are essentially non-lethal.

Go to jail for many years, do not pass go.

(RGR and other non UK bods: the UK gun laws are VERY strict.)

[Kentucky Fried Panda]

Why not buy a CO2 pellet pistol if you want to protect yourself and your family?

They fire about 350 feet per second at about 3.5ft/Lbs of energy. A real gun fires at about 1200 feet per second at about 80ft/Lbs energy.

So they are non lethal, but will sting the hell out of an attacker.

Never happen, a charging man with his adrenaline pumping won't even feel the sting. An amped up soldier can take a full power AK round and sometimes think he's been clipped by relatively harmless flying debris, until he notices he's bleeding.

As for sword wounds...

A lowly .22lr fires about 1100ft/sec with 140 ft/lb of energy. The legal limit for pellet pistols in the UK is 6ft/lb of energy, 12ft/lb for air rifles.

[Vortex]

Never happen, a charging man with his adrenaline pumping won't even feel the sting.

.. which is exactly why the US Army dumped the .38 revolver and adopted the M1911 .45 high power automatic.

Phillipino Moro tribesman back in the early 1900s could be shot several times with a .38 and could STILL kill an American before keeling over themselves.

The heavy duty .45 round soon put a stop to that sort of un-American activity!

[Kentucky Fried Panda]

Yup a projectile delivering 520-640ft/lb of energy should do the job nicely.