Picker: Your level of pedantry is appreciated.
SteveG1: Your level of pedantry just makes you an ass.
The use of the word “Ninja” is supposed to be overly dramatic for the sense of levity. I’d think that if you know what the word “Ninja” means, you’d also know what the word “Levity” means.
The way this argument is going, I’d imagine that the people saying a Ninja isn’t good at straight out fighting has never been in a fight themselves. If you are trained in hand to hand combat, and can manage to break into a noble’s compound, and kill the noble, odds are you are a badass, any way you slice it. I hope your .357 makes you feel safer, but the truth of the matter is that there is an art to shooting, and target shooting only takes part of that art into account. Shooting in combat is QUITE different from shooting a target, even a moving target.
To say that a Ninja wasn’t battle trained is ridiculous at best. They weren’t trained for FIELD COMBAT for certain, but they were definitely trained for close quarter combat. A formidable warrior going into a melee with another formidable warrior is always serious, no matter what the differences in their training is. In a break-in situation, the Ninja is at an advantage, whereas a Samurai cutting down the Ninja on the battlefield is at a distinct advantage. So even if the Ninja has lost the initiative against the Samurai in the break-in situation, that doesn’t mean that a Samurai, even an armed Samurai is at an automatic advantage against the Ninja. Two trained warriors must take each other seriously, period. Any Army Ranger, or Delta will tell you that.
If you need an example of this. Turn on Quake 2 or 3. Give one person the Rail gun, and the other person has to use his fists. The rules of the engagement being that the first one to score a hit wins. The reason for this rule is that in real life you won’t have power armor on that can thwart a knife. So for this purpose the rail gun is a .357, and the fist would be a knife or bare hands. Me being someone who is fairly good at Quake, I believe that I could get in close and punch the person with the rail gun, more likely than they can hit me with that rail gun if they had little to no Quake experience. So for purposes of this simulation, I’d be the trained warrior, and the other person would be the average person with a .357. (The railgun is the weapon that hits instantly and is basically an automatic kill but has only a localized area of effect, it’s the sniper weapon)
There are a lot of realities that go into shooting a gun that aren’t being taken into account.
- You have to be able to hit a moving target
- If you do hit, you have to hit a vital organ
Now take into account being lethal with one’s barehands. The likelihood of missing your target is MUCH lower than the untrained person with the gun. The ability to adjust to a miss is easier. You don’t have to deal with recoil, and you can use any number of other striking surfaces on your body to disorient them. Once the trained warrior starts working their opponent, it is pretty much over.
As we’ve been (Jokingly for those of you immune to wit) referring to Ninjas in this debate, you’d probably not be aware of the Ninja until he’s in the same room you are in, and he’s much more likely to be aware of your presence.
We haven’t even touched upon other skills that come with the superior skill that a warrior has over a lay person. More attention to detail, training in fighting while disoriented, enhanced senses, greater ability to discern detail in the dark. None of these skills are super human in any way, yet they add to the advantage the trained warrior unarmed has over the armed untrained suburbanite.
I have limited training to be certain, and am far from being a ninja. However, I have trained to fight in the dark, and even trained to fight in flickering light where I cannot depend upon my night vision. So even with my minimal training, that creates an advantage I will always have. I can only imagine how much that advantage would increase if I attained mastery. I’ve learned disarms, and I’ve seen how easy it was for my teacher’s to take the object we were using to simulate the weapon from me.
Once with my Budo instructor I had the wooden knife, he took my arm back over in an arm lock and I instantly dropped the knife caught it in my other hand, stabbed him in the thigh, and then drew it across the back of his knee where the artery will exsanguinate anyone in less than 5 minutes. This surprised my teacher, he was even stunned for a moment when I stabbed him with a fake knife that did no damage. Of course, I wasn’t in as much pain as I would have been had he actually broken my arm, but my point is to illustrate what even minimal training can change in a fight.
I do recognize that these examples are not actual life or death scenarios, and the one thing a life or death scenario brings into the equation is fear of death. I think it is important to remember that the trained master won’t be paralyzed by his fear of death, and will be thinking much more clearly as a result.
In short, having a gun is a false sense of security for anyone that doesn’t have combat training. They aren’t nearly as lethal as many people think, and the number of shots fired at people that don’t hit their target is far greater than the number of shots fired that actually hit their target. With a gun, your point of impact is about 1/3 of an inch trying to hit a target that is about 1.5-2 feet wide. When you fire the gun, the point of impact has to be centered on the target, it only moves in a straight line, so the area that can be potentially damaged by that bullet is a 1/3 inch cylinder going straight out from the barrel of that gun. A knife however, doesn’t have the range that a gun has, but it can pierce, or slash, and the area within which it is lethal is much greater at close range than that of a gun. Not to mention that once the knife penetrates it can move around inside a person’s guts, and does not require a vital hit when it first penetrates.
So I know this thread isn’t about knives vs guns, but I wanted to give that as an example, because I think most people are more viscerally aware of the impact of a knife upon the human body than they are of the impact against pressure points. Most people don’t even know pressure points. When I give massages I can look at the way someone is standing and tell where in their body a knot is and just take my finger and put it right in that area, and I know some pressure points throughout the body that can either be used to relax a person, or severely hurt them. There are many ways that knowledge of such things gives someone a supreme advantage over one who does not have knowledge of such things. These are not necessarily super human, and can be explained scientifically.
So I still think that the average person with a gun is at a distinct disadvantage against a trained warrior.
I could go on forever about the transfer of inertia through one’s body in order to strike, the ability to sense the other person’s inertia, awareness of where the gun’s point of impact is at any time, and so on to illustrate my point.
Erek
