Yes to all of this except
- Defend yourself against an attacker. You don’t want to bring a knife to a gunfight, especially a pocketknife, but if it’s all you got, it’s all you got.
You also don’t want to bring a knife to a knife fight. There’s an old line, “The winner of a knife fight wakes up in the emergency room.” If you really have no other choice, then having a knife is better than not having one, but the best way to survive a fight like this is to run the fuck away.
The saying is, the loser of the knife fight dies right there and the winner dies in the ambulance (or in the hospital, or whatever).
But that’s assuming the other guy has a knife, too. Plenty of presumptive attackers go at others fisticuffs, either out of an overabundance of bravado, liquor, or simply because they’re big dude who is used to beating up little dudes whenever they feel like it. Going at somebody who has a knife and is prepared to use it and if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing is not a smart move.
Yeah, but let’s be real here. 99% of the empty sound bites like that one are pushed by people with zero training or experience. Hell, the remaining 1% is mostly made of people just blindly parroting something they learned that’s safe to say.
Truth? Knives are fucking amazing weapons. You can’t use them defensively really, unless they’re massive. But they take training and practice if you want to use one against someone with training and practice. But a total noob with the will to fight can straight fuck up someone that wasn’t expecting said noob to grab a blade and fight back, even if the attacker had a knife.
That bullshit about the winner waking up in an emergency room? It’s bullshit. If you actually win, you’re the motherfucker that walks away.
Yeah, yeah, don’t get in fights you can escape. Of course. But you can’t always escape, and I would argue that a good knife is better than most weapons against an armed assailant, even with little or no training. I might argue that a good steel baton would be better though. Almost as fast to deploy, and because they tend to be those expanding types, you’ll likely have better reach, and that decides almost as much of victory conditions as aggression.
You bring your box cutter to a bowie fight, you’re likely losing body parts, but bowie vs bowie, aggression and training begin matter way more.
And, hey, just to be clear, I’m not trying to rag you, just using the comment as a jumping off point to both vent a pet peeve and attempt to correct the usual ill informed circle jerk.
The problem with knives as self defense tools is the same as guns. You don’t use them as a threat. You can’t rely on scaring someone that’s already doing something that justifies use of force. That’s when people get mangled, not when they deploy their weapon in a timely manner. You can’t wait until the attacker is already engaging you before you go for their throat (figuratively, it’s not a primary target). You pull a damn knife, you go hard, or don’t bother pulling it.
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@southsamurai@sh.itjust.works is one of the very few people on here who I trust to have their head screwed on straight and know what they’re talking about re: knife combat. Even moreso than myself.
They took 7 paragraphs to say nothing more than “knives are good actually”
And your contribution has been what? That’s right, only insults.
Do better.
What insult
13 of them have the word cut in them. Imagine that!
It’s almost like that’s your knife’s intended purpose, cutting things. You know, rather than being used as a prybar, screwdriver, hammer, or chisel.
That would be a fun novelty Swiss army knife though, one exclusively fitted with tools that are unusable at that scale (hammer, prybar, chisel etc).
Best I can do for you right now is to run one off on plastic, which would be equally useless. How does polycarbonate sound? I’ve been messing with that lately.
I’m not really a knife collector, sorry - I’m subscribed exclusively for your awesome writeups. Sorry to get your hopes up like that!
I’ve seen some people modified the spoon tool on the minichamp (if I’m not mistaken) with a “chisel” tip. so it is a bit sharper to wedge into even tighter seams
I’ve been carrying a pocket knife of some kind every day since I was 10 or 12 years old; I’m 55 now. I can tell you from decades of experience that a pocket knife has hundreds of more uses than the 36 “manly” and boring ones listed. Art of Manliness indeed.
I am a believer that everyone should carry a pocket knife of some kind. For years I carried a “basic” cheap pocket knife (yes, grade school and high school), then I carried a Buck lockback knife, and then for a couple of decades I had folding utility knives (I worked retail and then managed a warehouse). These days I am loving my Opinel No.8 carbon.
Everyone should keep a pocket knife of some kind.
👁️👄👁️
“Number 5 will shock your enemies!”
