A Ramble And A Query

TheAmericanDagda 2:31 AM (5 hours ago)

Hey Mr LaFond heard about the pendin' Third Rail appearance, congratulations and all that, had some limited interactions with Mr Boskovic he seems like good people. And for what it's worth, I don't know if you listen to the boys over on the Rail yourself, if you wanna get into the nitty gritty on the denaturin' aspects of technology and society he's probably your man.

More to the point, while I procrastinate puttin' together a Celtic mythology primer for ya, I had a bit of a dilemma that's considerably more mundane I figured I'd get your opinion on. So I got a daughter who's gettin' of an age that I'd trust her with a knife and is developin' an interest in bladework. Question is train point or edge dominant? Feels like the common wisdom would say point, make the best of a bad situation, maximize reach and statistical lethality on an already short and weak person, but I lean towards edge. Bein' a smaller man myself I never liked the idea of tryin' to shore up a handicap to average performance when you can just use what you actually have, namely the ability to still strike from inside a longer reach, and then all goin' well and a good carver to hand, goin' to town like its Christmas dinner.

James LaFond <jameslafond.com@gmail.com>

7:49 AM (11 minutes ago)

to TheAmericanDagda

Thanks for the heads up, Sir.

I will post an article on your mundane query, but the short version is:

If you are training the apple of your eye to assassinate British officers—point to edge. Stick it in and then rip.

If she is going to be preparing to Deny the rude advances of Hessian soldiers, edge.

Will get into more details on the post which should go up Sunday.

Man, thanks so much for helping me out with the Celtic part, the direction of my reading having taken me far away from the font of my breeding.

take care.

James LaFond <jameslafond.com@gmail.com>

7:57 AM (3 minutes ago)

to TheAmericanDagda

Doing it now.

Point of Edge?

Generally, the point is more lethal but commits you to the main line and is therefore favored by the larger, stronger aggressor with the short blade, where, with swords, the larger stronger man likes the edge and the twerp leans towards the point as a general rule. This is due to the fact that lateral control with the short blade tends to be maintained with the empty hand, in the grab and stab so common in prison violence.

In a survey of 274 edged weapon attacks only three stabbings were lethal from a single stroke, which puts your darling in jeopardy if she shanks some gorilla and can't get the blade back out. So, when stabbing, stab below the ribs and then rip, spilling all that shit out on the floor and avoiding the murder charge with proof that you only stabbed once. Since almost all stabbing deaths are the result of 3 to 40 stabs, sometimes as high as 90, states attorneys are in the habit of seeing a second stab as "intent," an instruction I was given by a prosecuting attorney while sitting on a murder jury.

In the multi-gendered future, with female army men scattered about the family floor, your little girl will be subject to increasing levels of state scrutiny when she defends herself, as women will be regarded more and more in a a traditional male light.

The big reason why cutting is preferred with the short blade as well as the long is that evasive movement and movement in general sync-up with slashing and slicing more than stabbing. A good stab generally stops your movement.

The problem with slashes are that they are short, and with slices that they start in close, keying off a stab often and sometimes out of the clinch.

There is also the aspect that since a slash never really stops anyone unless it is with a sword or heavy cleaving blade, that the use of multiple slashes will look like intent. Further legal problems could come from accessing the face [maiming charges] and throat [intent] during the struggle.

Defensive Doctrine

-1. Practice movement behind an X-pattern of slashes in which the elbow of the slashing hand does not leave the body frame.

-2. Roof-bock-paintbrush highline defense. Grab for her neck, shoulder, hair and have her do three things at once:

-raise her left hand behind her knife hand into a roof peake to intercept your offending limb

-brush outward and away against your wrist with her left forearm as her knife is cutting upward and to the right

-as she is moving off to her right

-3. Grab her by the shoulders than have her trap your right hand with her left cupped palm, not wrapping her fingers around it, as she deploys her blade, then slides the blade up between your hands and slashes your right wrist as she steps back. The best defensive use of the knife is to open the veins of one wrist so that the attacker will have to apply pressure with the other hand to keep from bleeding out.

-4. Train her not to show the knife, lest some goon pick up a brick, block or bat and put her in a horrible spot.

-5. Give her a knife handle only trainer, with no blade sticking out to protect her wrist from torque. Then, as you practice grappling with her like an abductor, have her do reach around stabs to the lung and kidney, making sure to always pull the blade out so that the lung will collapse and the kidney will spew.

-6. She must practice using her empty hand to shoulder-check, defeat grabs by sliding down to the elbow with her hand and otherwise goon surf around you. Just like a murderous goon, the twerp with the knife maintains his ability to work the blade by deploying the empty hand as a space maker, angle creator and escape lever [the latter being the opposite of the goon's grab].

-7. The best disabling strokes against a larger attacker are:

-a. put your empty hand on chest or shoulder, stab under his heart and ribs on his left with your right, [the spleen is housed here abouts], twist, rip across the belly through the liver and then step off to your left to keep from slipping in all the yuck spilling out of his guts, or

-b. slam that blade into his solar plexus, then brace either empty hand on chest or on the wrist of the knife hand and rip downward until the pelvis kicks you out...

Overall, point precision with the knife should be understood, outside of dueling context in survival situations, as the acquisition of an access point for a long, debilitating, exsanguinating pressure cut, doing maximum damage from one point of mechanical access from a single point of self-defense intent, minimizing immediate and legal liability. Ripping a dude's guts out still gives him a good chance of getting fixed at the ER while debilitating him in short order, while pumping stabs into him may well result in a sprinkler system that cannot be fixed by all the king's horses and all the king's men and which types like murder on the forensic plane. Sepuka practitioners were attended by an assistant who would cut their head off to spare them the further agony of dying from blood poisoning when their shit spilled into their blood. At the ER they have antibiotics for that.

As a general readiness/mobility drill, put on lacrosse or hockey gloves and stalk her, trying to grab her, while she does diagonal forehands or backhands according to the short-stroke method described above, moving off as she cuts, always moving, always hunting angles, always improving position.

Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival