A ‘weapon’ is simply a tool for expressing violent intent. They are tools to make violence easier and more efficient. This is why everyone takes it very seriously when someone waves a handgun around. A handgun is a tool that is really only useful for one thing: killing people. They’re carrying it to show their intent to do harm, whether to actually shoot someone dead or simply to indicate the seriousness of their intent and make everyone around them capitulate through fear.

The gun, by itself, cannot do either of these things. Without a brain, without intent, the tool is useless.

Shutting off the brain takes the intent away from the tool.

What Weapons Do:

Weapons will do one or both of two things:

• Increase Trauma
• Extend your reach

What Weapons Don’t Do:

Weapons don’t give you ability. Having a knife doesn’t make you good at using it, and having a gun doesn’t make you a good shot. The use of a tool is a skill separate from the tool itself.

A shotgun does not protect your home. It does not look out for intruders or call the police when it sees someone breaking into your house. You must pull the trigger while pointing it at a person, with the intent of killing them.

Weapons can’t protect you from harm or, otherwise, ‘defend’ you. Guns do not project a magical force field around you. If showing the weapon scares someone off, then their retreat was something they chose to do, not something the weapon did to them. And the same is true of a knife. It does not protect you, unless ‘protection’ is another word for ‘making someone die’.

Edged Weapons

Many young men carry knives for ‘their protection’. The only reason to carry a knife is to kill another human being, and you are sugar-coating the act under the pretence of self-defence. If you are carrying a knife for ‘defence’, then you must be prepared to pull it out and show it. If you are prepared to show it, then you must be prepared to use it. If you are prepared to use it, then you must be prepared to be able to kill.

Does this sound like a sensible idea now? This is why knife-carrying penalties are harsh.

Slashing vs. Stabbing

While slashing can seem dramatic with plenty of blood, it’s not nearly as effective as deep body penetration. A single deep stab wound, through the liver and into the aorta, will kill a person much more quickly and efficiently than multiple slashes. Slashing that doesn’t penetrate the skin or cripple by severing muscles or tendons might only result in a slow, venous bleed, but the injury does not decrease the ability to function. The deep stab to the aorta, on the other hand, will plunge them into a state of shock and initiate a fatal arterial bleed; every time their heart beats, it will be pumping blood straight out of the circulatory system. They’ll be unconscious in moments and dead not long after that.

This is why being stabbed is far worse than getting cut. You can survive serious lacerations.

Slashing will open up veins, which are closer to the surface, resulting in what looks like a lot of blood – but venous bleeding is slower than arterial bleeding. Such slashing injuries are painful and messy, but they are slow to shut a person down.

You will not die or go into shock from a slash to the arms or torso, though many people think that they can and have been known to ‘shut themselves down’ because of this belief. You should carry on neutralising the threat until you are physically non-functional, not when you think you are non-functional.