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by YZF 3293 days ago
I'm one of those Karate dudes.

A big part of martial arts training is awareness and readiness. If you're already in close quarters with a knife wielding attacker you've already failed and it doesn't matter if you carry a knife, a gun, a stick, or a flamethrower. You have to always be ready and you have to sense the intentions of would be attackers. Easier said then done...

The psychological factors are what you train for.

Those fighting arts come to us from the messy realities of the past. If you were a Samurai in Japan you were always ready to fight for your life against much scarier weapons than a knife. But getting that sort of mentality takes a lot of work, it's more than a hobby...

1 comments

> Easier said then done...

Indeed. I have trouble imagining how - or why - cultivating this mentality would be possible or useful. Given one doesn't have access to a pool of "would be" attackers, nor anyone who has had said access, it seems far more likely that one will develop a acute sense of the intentions of "martial arts dudes pretending to be would-be attackers".

At the very least, it was always possible (though shockingly rare in practice) to pad up and see you how things would go against a fully committed rugby tackle - or at least get an approximation. I don't see how the equivalent reality check can be done for weapons; at least not without the luxury of having a pre-gunpowder battlefield to experiment on.