From owner-freebsd-chat Wed Mar 29 11:37:20 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from smtp02.primenet.com (smtp02.primenet.com [206.165.6.132]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0E67F37B5D9 for ; Wed, 29 Mar 2000 11:36:26 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tlambert@usr05.primenet.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp02.primenet.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) id MAA29958; Wed, 29 Mar 2000 12:35:17 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr05.primenet.com(206.165.6.205) via SMTP by smtp02.primenet.com, id smtpdAAAbCaGA6; Wed Mar 29 12:35:11 2000 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr05.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id MAA23741; Wed, 29 Mar 2000 12:36:07 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <200003291936.MAA23741@usr05.primenet.com> Subject: Re: Guns and freedom [Was: Re: On "intelligent people" and To: noslenj@swbell.net (Jay Nelson) Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 19:36:06 +0000 (GMT) Cc: cjclark@home.com, blk@skynet.be (Brad Knowles), mark@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org (Mark Ovens), freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: from "Jay Nelson" at Mar 28, 2000 06:22:46 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL2] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org > [snip] > > > >But rarely, see we all agree. And wouldn't it be nice if in most of > >those cases, neither one of the people in the situation had a gun? > > The preferred weapon on the street is a knife and knives are > consistently more lethal than firearms. I stand a better chance of > surviving a gunshot than a knife wound. You should worry more about the > knives than guns. There are two rules for an unarmed martial artist, when someone comes at them with a knife, and they can't avoid the situation: 1) Expect to be cut. 2) Expect to kill the other person. I definitely agree that knives are more dangerous that guns; I have seen a Tai Chi Chu'an swordsman at work. Even with a practice sword, he was able to defeat 6 well trained unarmed combatants. With a real sword, I suspect he could hold off 12, until all 12 were dead. This is a heavily trained person, but the people he was fighting were also heavily trained. In a street situation, most knife-fighters are not so heavily trained, and an unarmed marital artist could defeat them; but they would have to go in expecting to be cut, even by an amatuer who was intent on harming them. A knife is far less restricted in its ability to do damage than a gun is; a gun can only do damage where it is pointed, but a knife can do damage in a plane, starting from in front of the business end of the knife. Consider the difference between kicking a gun and kicking a knife, given a two seconds window in which the kickee is unable to react because their neurons are still processing the fact that a kick has occurred. You are much more likely to cut yourself on a knife through its inertia than you are to cause a gun to fire while it is still being pointed at you. > When you handle a weapon, there is no excuse for _any_ unplanned > event. Period, end of discussion. If you spent any time at all around > people who use firearms, you would realize that there is _zero_ > tolerance for "unfortunate events." The weapon is under control at all > times, under any circumstance. Ask some of your police friends about > that. Returning to the kick, it is the momentum imparted to the gun relative to the inertia of the hand holding it that results in the trigger being pulled and causing an unintended-by-the-wielder gun discharge. For this to occur, the gun has to be significantly displaced, generally so much so that it can not possibly be pointed at the originally threatened person when it discharges. The knife, if firmly held, cuts the hell out of your foot, which has the aditional negative effect of making it harder to run away, even if you succeed in kicking it out of the assailents hands. > The few times I have been in that situation, here in the States, it > was a knife they pulled. I would have preferred they pulled a gun; they > would have been easier to disarm with less risk. But, they don't show > that in the movies, either. Agreed. It's also a fact that most handgun echanges take place at close range, without anyone getting hit for an insanely large number of rounds fired. That's isn't very exciting to watch in a theater, either, since you are really waiting for Mel Gibson to shoot the thugs in a subplot, and then get back onto the main story line... Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message