"Flexible Impact Weapons", part 1.

TCLEOSE was so proper.

Me, via Nightcafe. I asked for a fox, rough, and it gives me a fox in an alley. It’s like it knows me.

When I started at my first Sheriff’s Office back in 1993, it was small, rural, and remote. When I received the issue kit, only two things were either new, or relatively new: A pair of fencing pliers¹ and a beavertail slapper².

The slapper was a Denver model, from— if I remember correctly — Boston Leather Company; and during my two (2) nights of Field Training, the Sheriff started each evening with a couple of hours of training on how to effectively use that sap.

I, being young, was secretly appalled. It was 1993! The modern age! Century of the Fruitbat³, and all that! And I had a brand-new certification from a well-respected, nationally-known company on the use and care of expandable batons, along with a 26-inch version of same.

My feelings probably weren’t as well hidden as I thought, because at the end of the second night’s training, the Sheriff looked at my baton, and said, “You know these things are designed to fail before they actually do any damage, right?”

Well, yes. That was the point, in these enlightened times!

Come a couple of months later, and I roll up on one of our Frequent Fliers, drunk and berserk. During the course of festivities, I wind up applying the baton in the approved manner, front-hand and back-hand to his extended left leg.

Well, sort of. The front-hand went swimmingly, but the back-hand was … missing something. And then I realized that my baton was also missing something — mainly the forward one-third. Apparently the adrenaline had turbo-charged everything to the point that I was swinging the baton with a force that some corporate lawyer sitting in a air-conditioned office somewhere had determined might cause legal issues, and so the slip-joint at the far end had failed — as designed — and the important bit had departed into the night, never to be seen again.

All well and good for said lawyer, but the mustachioed kaiju that I had just smacked took exception, screamed, leapt, got ahold of me, and we went down in the gravel.

We went at it like a couple of cats in a bag⁴, until the Chief Deputy butt-stroked kaiju’s kidneys with a Mossberg 500 a couple of times, and he decided that peace was an option, after all.

In the aftermath, the Sheriff walked up to where I was hyperventilating on the bumper of the Super Scooter, made a walrus noise, walked around to the passenger side, retrieved the slapper from where I’d left it on the seat, smacked me in the chest with it, and said, “Dead Dog PD is hosting a class on saps and blackjacks in a couple of weeks. Be there.”

That class was actually — if I remember correctly — one of the last “Flexible Impact Weapons Instructor Development” courses that TCLEOSE⁵ held in the State.

All of that is a long-winded way of saying that I not only Have An Opinion regarding saps and blackjacks, but I have some experience and training to back up those opinions.

So, I’m going to take a three-part⁶ series to expound on blackjacks and saps.

Ian

1. Just purchased and still in the package. Which is a good indication of the priorities of a rural Texas Sheriff’s Office.

2. New-ish, but lovingly maintained.

3. If you’re not reading Terry Pratchett, I despair.

4. I think that’s a poetic description. However, the Chief Deputy said it “Looked like two lizards [having marital relations] on a hot rock.” Rude.

5. Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education. Later replaced by TCOLE in 2014.

6. Or four. Probably four.