"Flexible Impact Weapons" part 3

Yeah, but ... why?

Nightcafe, and me.

Now that we’ve established my bona fides, and we’ve described saps, the question comes: why saps?

Good question, but first — let’s enumerate why you should not carry a sap.

1. Notoriety. The vast majority of States make saps unlawful, and of the about 20% of States where the carry of saps is lawful, some of the metropolitan areas in some of those States have local ordinances that make saps unlawful to carry inside the city limits. Also, saps may be lawful to carry at the State level, and lawful at the local, but the local police and State Attorney may have a case of the red-arse at saps. If any of these are the case, leave the sap at home.

2. Saps are an extremely-limited range tool. You have to be literally inside touching range to use a sap, so the chance of the encounter becoming — as Craig Douglas¹ says — entangled are very, very good. If you’re not comfortable with a dynamic social encounter at bad-breath distance, you should probably carry something with more stand-off range.

3. Murphy loves versatility. We’ll cover the versatile nature of the sap below, but this is also one of the downsides of a sap. If one of you slips, changes level, ducks, or through sheer bad luck the backhand you aimed for his bicep hits him in the temple instead, either killing him or (quite frankly worse) removing 50% of his available IQ points, your fairly straightforward tussle just turned into a legal nightmare.

I cannot emphasize enough that if you carry any sort of weapon on the regular: have a tame defense attorney. And for God’s sake — sit down and talk to said attorney so that neither one of you is surprised if you find yourself having to utilize said worthy’s services.

Yes — tell your attorney if you plan on carrying a sap.

Now. Why saps?

Simple. A well-built sap, in the hands of a user who has trained in its use and keeps a cool head, offers a spectrum of force options that no other tool available to the Average Joe can match.

You can go from force which has absolutely zero chance of injuring the critter² all the way up to Lethal force, all with the same tool, just by changing target areas.

The most commonly used tools — and with good reason — are OC (pepper) spray, a knife and/or a gun. If you have your OC in your paw, and things suddenly escalate to you needing deadly force, you have to drop the canister and go for something else. If you have a knife or gun in your hand, and all a sudden the situation calls for less force, you have to put it away and find something else³.

These are … sub-optimal courses of action. At best.

If you’re holding a sap, well, you have every option before you. Does your opponent have distinct physical advantages in age, size, gender or otherwise? Apply sap to large muscle groups. Pounding the quads or delts results in massive amounts of pain, short-term paralysis of the muscle group, cramping muscles, and other less than lethal amounts of goodness.

If, during your dance, he figures out he’s losing, and comes up with a weapon, you can switch from muscle groups to the bones of the hands, long bones of the forearms, or the collar-bone.

And, of course, should deadly force be necessary, striking the skull or cervical vertebrae is a textbook definition of the phrase “Deadly Force”⁴.

Saps also don’t trip an unwritten rule I have postulated after watching trials for a long career, said rule being “Don’t Squick⁵ Out The Jury”⁶.

As long as you stay away from the head, sap strikes leave bruises — whacking great bruises, but bruises none the less. It is hard for members of the jury in this area⁷ to get emotional about bruises on a thug. If you have to escalate to breaking an arm, most of the jury members around here either played football, or mothered boy-children. Arms in casts don’t squick them out.

On the other paw … Americans are squeamish about knives. I don’t know why, but American juries purely, irrationally hate knives, and deliberately-inflicted lacerations — even in self-defense — never go over well with the twelve Good Men And True sitting across from you.

So, which would you rather have the oppo attorney show the jury:

1. A cantaloupe-sized bruise or two, maybe an arm in a cast; or

2. An ER photo of 18-inches of open laceration, another ER photo of the 440 stitches used to close it; and the crime scene photos of all the blood he left behind?

Again, however — and I cannot stress this enough: Go talk to your lawyer before you need to.

Personally, I carry a sap these days for the same reason I carried one in uniform: As an adjunct to my pepper spray.

Pepper spray is good stuff⁸, and you should probably have it in your toolbox, assuming it is lawful in your area. However, OC has one minor drawback — you can train to fight effectively after exposure. We train police, jailers, corrections officers, and military to fight after catching a face-full of OC all the time. No reason that a critter — particularly one who’s been in and out of the system for his adult life — can’t do the same.

If you start the festivities by ladling on the Spicy Hate, and things don’t go quite the way you hoped, the spray is still affecting his vision, and breathing. If he's still feeling froggy after getting sprayed add on a half-pound of lead or so vigorously swung into one of his big muscle groups, and, well — he’s got snot hanging to his knees, his eyes are burning, he’s coughing, and now his quads, biceps, or delts are cramping up … Most of them will call it a night. No muss, no fuss, no paperwork.

As an example: In 1994, I got a case of Teh Stoopids and went to the Midnight Rodeo⁹ in Amarillo one Friday night. Since the Midnight Rodeo was a bar¹⁰ (and there was a quite specific policy about Bugscuffle Deputies having firearms on, or about, their person while drinking) all I was carrying was a can of Punch II¹¹ OC in my jacket pocket, and an 8oz Convoy blackjack tucked in my belt.

Somehow¹², during the night I got cross-threaded with another patron, to the point that when I went to leave, he followed me, and started challenging me to a fight in the parking lot. I didn’t want to get into a fight in someone else’s jurisdiction, so I told him I wasn’t fighting, and to go home. He made some dramatic announcement, and started his threat display, working himself up to the monkey dance, I decided, “Bugger this”, and hosed his face with the Punch.

It worked. Mostly. He coughed, blinked furiously, yelled a curse word, and then lunged.

I was halfway expecting that, so I stepped to my right, and cranked that Convoy into his left deltoid; rechambered, follow-stepped, hammered it into the top of his right ham¹³ with a really good hip pivot, and the third missed, because he hit the asphalt squalling like a kicked pup.

His drunk arse probably limped for a week, and maybe swore off drinking. I went home with no torn clothes, no bruises, no busted knuckles, and didn’t spend the rest of the night explaining things to local PD.

I call that a win/win¹⁴.

Anyhoo, that’s the quick and dirty on saps in three posts. Tomorrow I’ll do one about sap-adjacent things, and then back to other stuff.

Ian

1. If you haven’t taken a Shivworks class, you probably should.

2. Most of the time, pulling out the sap — along with body language that screams you’re more than ready to use it — will take the starch right out of your opponent with a quickness.

3. Yes, it happens.

4. Let’s avoid this, ok?

5. “Squick” being defined as: “A negative emotional response, more specifically a disturbed or disgusted one.”

6. It is my observation that it doesn’t really matter how lawful your use of force was, it doesn’t matter how justified you were in using it — if the pictures of your use of force squick out the jury, you’re starting out on the negative side of things.

7. My area. Yours may be different.

8. As long as you buy good quality OC.

9. I can hear the Migraine Salute of any long-time Amarillo resident who just read that.

10. I hear it’s become a church. I seriously wonder how many priests it took before the baptismal pool stopped bubbling?

11. Get Sabre Red, or POM instead of that stuff.

12. Yes, I know. Your shocked face.

13. Hello, sciatic nerve! How you doin’?

14. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.