i do think that having a small caliber in a hand and a Glaive/Shortsword in the other (short enough so that you could maneuver it in thight areas) should be a given.
small caliber so that bullets don't go through intruders/multiple walls and nail somebody with it because well, the intruders might be armed with firearms and we never know what they have or how many they are before analysis of the situation, so yeah, one handed shortsword/glaive/machete and small caliber
Best of both world, Bayonet. Seriously though in an event where your attacker is within grappling distance both melee and ranged weapons will be far harder to use but a draw cut with a sword would be an easier and faster way to incapacitate or at least inconvenience an attacker than trying to make the time and distance to use a long gun. A long gun is harder to maneuver in close quarters than a handgun but also has a much greater chance of stopping an intruder with one shot, can be used as a defensive implement against a melee attacker(if you know how and are willing to risk your weapon), and is generally easier to shoot for most people. For me personally where I live and my experience with firearms I keep a shotgun on hand but that is impractical for many people and each person should decide what works best for themselves.
Now I want to see an old bastard with a zweihander fall like Hans Moleman.
I know jack shit about swords but I know at home I'd much rather have a shotgun or pistol at the bedside, get that ready and keep distance.
If the invader is also armed, then the risk is equalised to a degree, let's say if I had a knife or sword and they are armed with a pistol I feel that would on their favor.
I'm not very strong, at all, quite weak and feel having an instrument of melee combat would just get me all kinds of messed up. Especially that almost all men are y'know, stronger than me.
Former Washington Redskins player, Sean Taylor, responded to a home invasion with a machete. He was promptly shot and killed. If any of you fedora wearing neck beards think you, and your zatoichi would fare better than a professional athlete with a machete, a go fund me for your funeral is in your immediate future. I carry a firearm daily, as well as a fixed fighting blade. They each have their place, but outside of extremely close quarters (21 ft rule), a firearm wins almost every time.
I rather have a gun than sword. Melee combat always sucks and messed up, and there's a saying that in melee combat, you will ended up either in hospital or pool of blood bleeding out on the floor. But if gun is unavailable (law, etc.), I'd rather have knife than sword for concealability.
Excluding the laws… Because of political destruction.
Guns are easy to aim but hard to control.
Swords are easy to slash but too short in reach.
Collateral and Lethality is the most important for Self Defence. You want a weapon that doesn't go out of control in any way and that can eliminate the threat with ease.
A grim truth: If you leave criminal alive after they committed murder, then YOU can be liable in some States… … … That's why some laws are political tools.
Debunking some of his reasons. 1. Age if you aren’t old enough to have a gun your also probably not old or strong enough to fight with a sword. 2. Penetration, hollow point bullets that penetrate less 3. Reaching your gun, just carry it
I think guns over meelee all day.. But unlike Biden I would not suggest a shotgun, unless you really want to cut the intruder in half lol.. .22 or 9mm preferably hollow point so there's less chance of any round going through the intruder, through the wall and into a loved one or pet..
big issue is not everyone is strong enough or compitant enough to weild a sword (hence Japans history around gun warfare). Also it endangers you to get so close to the opponent. Lastly we all saw indian jones, don't bring a knife to a gun fight XD. I think a sword is only going to be right for the right person at the right time / place. I think a small gun would be more likely to work overall for most people and most situations.
More managable thath a gun, at worst anything of a sword can be used to injure an opponent, a gun is almost useless if the opponent is alredy beyond the exit hole. Sorry for the phrasing
Guns are bad for home defense. Too loud my neighbors works graveyards and I don’t want to wake them up. I seen a samurai split a Airsoft BB mid flight on that Stan Lee show.
Swords actually a pretty good middle ground when it comes to lethality, like baseball bats you gotta get a really hard head hit or just be strong enough to break bones for it to be effective at stopping someone larger then you, which most of us are not, and what a gun can do is pretty scary, and not everyone is down to blast some unfortunate kid whose down on their luck to the point they have to steal, knifes are too short and probably go unnoticed with enough adrenaline
So boom perfect weapon, a sword, can come in any length, shape, or size, you can control how hard you hit, its scary as hell, and yea it can kill but at least you can hold back unlike with a gun where once the bullet hits that person now has a gaping hole in them, yea swords can dismember people but also you dont HAVE to swing that hard but you CAN and it's less likely to be brushed off if youre a smaller person cuz well its a sword
Bayonet or Gun. Sword is exaggerated. Also only if you live in the U.S where 9 mm can pass through walls do melee weapons make sense. In Europe getting ahold of a gun is already pretty difficult. If the Intruder has a gun and you have a sword, you are at a disadvantage.
It will give a psychological fear to your opponent once they see some random guy holding like a Scimitar or something, and just starts swinging it left and right like crazy man while you ,are trying to find a good shot to fend em off.
Lethality is another reason why I think a sword might be better than a gun. When a person fires a gun AT another person (a warning shot is not shot AT another person unless someone wants to spend some time in Cell Block Tango), it's with intent to kill. They may not want to kill the person, but the only control over the force a gun releases is the construction of the gun, which usually isn't adjustable in an actual self defense situation. If a person is actually under threat, they often don't have time to line up a precise shot with intent to maim. So guns are inherently lethal weapons, and should be treated as such. And sometimes a self defense situation is not actually a self defense situation, it's one or both parties making an innocent mistake or misreading a situation, so lethal force is unwarranted. Arguments can be made about whether or not lethal force is warranted even in actual self defense situations, but that's a deeper debate than I want to touch on here. A sword, on the other hand, offers a great deal of control over how deadly it is. If lethal force is warranted, a home defender can kill someone with a sword. People have been doing that for thousands of years, swords are known to be lethal. If lethal force isn't warranted, though, a home defender can swing with less force and inflict less grievous wounds. Because the force applied is an extension of the force applied by the wielder's body, it can be as lethal or as harmless as the wielder desires.
I have a wooden training sword (the hard wood ones not that bamboo) for self defense at home because in my country even defending yourself with a blade can land you with a criminal charge. Blunt weapons are a better go-to than swords where I live. (guns are very hard to come by legally)
Cutting off the hand someone is holding a weapon with or putting a chunk of steel in their brain tends to end their ability to hurt you faster than punching a tiny hole through their torso and hoping they fall into shock or bleed out before they can injure or kill you.
Swords take less training and practice to get and maintain basic reflexive proficiency with than guns.
If you're defending your home, you get to choose the engagement range and lie in wait. Choosing a weapon with the main advantage of range in that context when all likely engagement distances to pick from are less than the distance where a knife has an advantage over a gun makes no sense.
Swords don't tend to misfire and kill people.
You're unlikely to mistake a family member for and intruder at sword using distance rather than trying to shoot them from the top of the stairs to maintain as much distance as possible.
People usually don't kill themselves with swords if they have a sudden mental break.
Sword skills are less common and if you have them, you're far, FAR more likely to survive someone getting their hands on your sword and trying to kill you with it than happens with guns (as people are more likely to die to a firearm they own than to be saved by a firearm they own).
It's far easier to trust children and pets around swords than it is around guns.
They don't jam.
They don't run out of ammo.
And people holding a sword are (for complicated and simple reasons) far more likely to be actively evaluating the situation when the adrenaline dumps into their system than people holding guns who have a tendency to slip into tunnel vision of "get gun, chamber round, turn of safety, drop into (typically square and static) shooting stance, align sights, control breathing, notice what is between you and your target, notice what is behind your target, put finger on trigger, squeeze trigger instead of pulling it" and use up roughly all of their available attention to just run through all the steps of operating that machine they practiced on the range. This leaves them often forgetting to maintain situational awareness, stay mobile, assess if they should even be attacking instead of retreating, etc.
That's why (outside of the extreme amount of training that almost no-one outside of professional soldiers has) when they do high tension tests of simulations of an active shooter barging into a room with someone with concealed carry, what tends to happen is that most of the people without guns immediately dive for cover. Meanwhile the guy playing the concealed carry roll gets overwhelmed by the addrenaline and just stands up, still, and starts fumbling with trying to deploy his gun. This results in him being one of the very first people shot because he's just simultaneously made himself an imminent (but not instant) threat and a perfect target.
Guns have their uses, but in MOST situations they are absolute garbage for self defense and we haven't even gotten into how a LOT of people freeze/hesitate when they put their finger on the trigger with a real person in their sights with often fatal results and would have been far better served with a taser or can of mace.
Not only that, but in a lot of situations, you are statistically better off unarmed than you are with a gun, as you're more likely to avoid direct violent confrontation and if violence is used on you, it is less likely to be of the lethal variety.
Like bows and spears were in the middle ages, they're good for hunting and good for war, but for individual self-defense they are entirely sub-optimal in all but the most niche situations when you're actually in the real world rather than imagining how it would go down in your head.
Yeahi can think of alot of situations, but heres one. Someone is pointing a gun at you. You have a sword. That sword takes time to swing. His gun does not.
One thing to consider is the indimitation factor, as optimally you would not actually fight with either weapon, but threaten the attacker. With firearm, the attacker might (or not) try to close the distance, because you are a threath at range. A bladed weapon, they might stay away from you, because that is the surest way of not getting hurt.
But if they have a gun or armament themselves, having any weapon might escalate the situation, which is something you'd want to avoid. Imho, getting killed, shot or having to kill someone are all worse outcomes than getting robbed, so not having a weapon at all can also be advantageous of the attacker is armed. But then again, you also can't count on them not harming you if you comply. So having some kind of weapon available is still probably best.
Once you're inside a certain distance, there is less a "winner" of the fight than there is a "survivor." Quite often, this person is whoever either took the initiative and struck first decisively, or answered their attacker's threat with something the attacker wasn't prepared to face.
For example, being jumped while out and about. Unless you see someone mark you, follow you, or herd you in, you will probably be surprised even if you anticipate the possibility on any given day. On the other hand, the walking stick that might give the impression of easy prey can punch the wind right out of someone's chest with a bayonet thrust. Or the mark could literally just palm a can of mace whenever they're alone.
Damn Marcus, you and your controversial hot takes.
I can definitely see many situations where a gun may not be the best option but as I said before I personally would feel better able to protect my family with a firearm. I do like the melee weapon to hold you over until you get to your weapons because I have actually been stressing out about that because as a responsible gun owning family our weapons are of course locked up and unloaded.
I have a couple swords/guns and if you live in the country (like I do) it's gun 100% because areas are more out in the open, if you live in an apartment, still gun, swords are can be super unwieldy in say a hallway, and someone could just shoot you from the other end of the hallway before you get to them anyway
Everyone's talking as of the robber will fight to the death with you, which is just wrong, you point a gun at someone, they're gonna listen to what you say, in which case you tell them to get on the floor and call the police
Well you don’t understand how ballistics work and what happens when someone is shot if the right load with the right weight a 9mm will put a golf ball sized hole through someone
However I do understand where you are coming from in a room a sword would be great however a hallway or a door way gun is better specifically a rifle with rounds that fragment on impact
Swords are less risky for the user if they get disarmed. If the attacker somehow gets to you gun before you, you are dead, because guns are relatively easy to use. But it requires a significant amount of training to be really effective with a sword. So your opponent is less likely to use it against you effectively.
Yes, a sword is better in an urban/apartment setting. But a gun is easier to use, almost anyone with an iq above room temperature knows the basics, like don’t touch the boom switch until you want to fire. A sword would be much harder for an elderly person or a child to use, especially if the sword is large and heavy.
This is generally a bad idea, using aforementioned critical thinking. There are some situations where a gun is not viable, which is why i edc a knife and do martial arts. But there are infinitely more situations where a sword in not useful, for example how the hell do you conceal a sword, and you have to be in range without your attacker stepping backwards and shooting you, unless you can cut bullets in half. Or, if you are elderly or smaller, and a sword is not easy to wield. Guns are the great equalizer. You also mentioned that a sword can fend off an attacker to get to a gun, most people have a bedside gun for this reason and you are not likely to sleep with a katana for more safety reasons. Although it would be cool, it we dont live in the midde ages and you cant eli dicken someone with a sword.
Gun aficionado, tell me
How many stray bullets have ever occurred as a result of a sword clash ?
I rest my case
What if i just carry around a 50 cal flint lock. No regulation.
i do think that having a small caliber in a hand and a Glaive/Shortsword in the other (short enough so that you could maneuver it in thight areas) should be a given.
small caliber so that bullets don't go through intruders/multiple walls and nail somebody with it because well, the intruders might be armed with firearms and we never know what they have or how many they are before analysis of the situation, so yeah, one handed shortsword/glaive/machete and small caliber
Haven't you heard? A 9mm will blow someone's lungs out of the body.
how does something like a bokuto( wooden sword ) fair against a home intruder?
Best of both world, Bayonet. Seriously though in an event where your attacker is within grappling distance both melee and ranged weapons will be far harder to use but a draw cut with a sword would be an easier and faster way to incapacitate or at least inconvenience an attacker than trying to make the time and distance to use a long gun. A long gun is harder to maneuver in close quarters than a handgun but also has a much greater chance of stopping an intruder with one shot, can be used as a defensive implement against a melee attacker(if you know how and are willing to risk your weapon), and is generally easier to shoot for most people. For me personally where I live and my experience with firearms I keep a shotgun on hand but that is impractical for many people and each person should decide what works best for themselves.
Now I want to see an old bastard with a zweihander fall like Hans Moleman.
I know jack shit about swords but I know at home I'd much rather have a shotgun or pistol at the bedside, get that ready and keep distance.
If the invader is also armed, then the risk is equalised to a degree, let's say if I had a knife or sword and they are armed with a pistol I feel that would on their favor.
I'm not very strong, at all, quite weak and feel having an instrument of melee combat would just get me all kinds of messed up. Especially that almost all men are y'know, stronger than me.
Former Washington Redskins player, Sean Taylor, responded to a home invasion with a machete. He was promptly shot and killed. If any of you fedora wearing neck beards think you, and your zatoichi would fare better than a professional athlete with a machete, a go fund me for your funeral is in your immediate future. I carry a firearm daily, as well as a fixed fighting blade. They each have their place, but outside of extremely close quarters (21 ft rule), a firearm wins almost every time.
I rather have a gun than sword. Melee combat always sucks and messed up, and there's a saying that in melee combat, you will ended up either in hospital or pool of blood bleeding out on the floor. But if gun is unavailable (law, etc.), I'd rather have knife than sword for concealability.
I personally prefer a mace. Useful for home defense and when I'm out on the town going clubbing.
Excluding the laws… Because of political destruction.
Guns are easy to aim but hard to control.
Swords are easy to slash but too short in reach.
Collateral and Lethality is the most important for Self Defence. You want a weapon that doesn't go out of control in any way and that can eliminate the threat with ease.
A grim truth: If you leave criminal alive after they committed murder, then YOU can be liable in some States… … … That's why some laws are political tools.
They want to die
Debunking some of his reasons. 1. Age if you aren’t old enough to have a gun your also probably not old or strong enough to fight with a sword. 2. Penetration, hollow point bullets that penetrate less 3. Reaching your gun, just carry it
I’m gonna have to say bat w/nails is better still. Bring a little Stranger Things into your home.
I think guns over meelee all day.. But unlike Biden I would not suggest a shotgun, unless you really want to cut the intruder in half lol.. .22 or 9mm preferably hollow point so there's less chance of any round going through the intruder, through the wall and into a loved one or pet..
big issue is not everyone is strong enough or compitant enough to weild a sword (hence Japans history around gun warfare). Also it endangers you to get so close to the opponent. Lastly we all saw indian jones, don't bring a knife to a gun fight XD. I think a sword is only going to be right for the right person at the right time / place. I think a small gun would be more likely to work overall for most people and most situations.
Nah, I'll stick with my boom sticks. Of course a sword is better than nothing, but a gun is better than a sword almost always.
More managable thath a gun, at worst anything of a sword can be used to injure an opponent, a gun is almost useless if the opponent is alredy beyond the exit hole. Sorry for the phrasing
Guns are bad for home defense. Too loud my neighbors works graveyards and I don’t want to wake them up. I seen a samurai split a Airsoft BB mid flight on that Stan Lee show.
Baised however if I had my rights restricted then yes
I would use a sword just so I can get that sweet critical damage multiplier
Swords actually a pretty good middle ground when it comes to lethality, like baseball bats you gotta get a really hard head hit or just be strong enough to break bones for it to be effective at stopping someone larger then you, which most of us are not, and what a gun can do is pretty scary, and not everyone is down to blast some unfortunate kid whose down on their luck to the point they have to steal, knifes are too short and probably go unnoticed with enough adrenaline
So boom perfect weapon, a sword, can come in any length, shape, or size, you can control how hard you hit, its scary as hell, and yea it can kill but at least you can hold back unlike with a gun where once the bullet hits that person now has a gaping hole in them, yea swords can dismember people but also you dont HAVE to swing that hard but you CAN and it's less likely to be brushed off if youre a smaller person cuz well its a sword
Fire Extinguisher home defense ftw
Bayonet or Gun. Sword is exaggerated. Also only if you live in the U.S where 9 mm can pass through walls do melee weapons make sense. In Europe getting ahold of a gun is already pretty difficult. If the Intruder has a gun and you have a sword, you are at a disadvantage.
What do you think would be the best sword for home defense would be though? Lol
It will give a psychological fear to your opponent once they see some random guy holding like a Scimitar or something, and just starts swinging it left and right like crazy man while you ,are trying to find a good shot to fend em off.
Lethality is another reason why I think a sword might be better than a gun.
When a person fires a gun AT another person (a warning shot is not shot AT another person unless someone wants to spend some time in Cell Block Tango), it's with intent to kill. They may not want to kill the person, but the only control over the force a gun releases is the construction of the gun, which usually isn't adjustable in an actual self defense situation. If a person is actually under threat, they often don't have time to line up a precise shot with intent to maim. So guns are inherently lethal weapons, and should be treated as such. And sometimes a self defense situation is not actually a self defense situation, it's one or both parties making an innocent mistake or misreading a situation, so lethal force is unwarranted. Arguments can be made about whether or not lethal force is warranted even in actual self defense situations, but that's a deeper debate than I want to touch on here.
A sword, on the other hand, offers a great deal of control over how deadly it is. If lethal force is warranted, a home defender can kill someone with a sword. People have been doing that for thousands of years, swords are known to be lethal. If lethal force isn't warranted, though, a home defender can swing with less force and inflict less grievous wounds. Because the force applied is an extension of the force applied by the wielder's body, it can be as lethal or as harmless as the wielder desires.
I have a doggy and I wouldnt want to hurt her ears with big loud gunshots — baseball bats all the way
I have a wooden training sword (the hard wood ones not that bamboo) for self defense at home because in my country even defending yourself with a blade can land you with a criminal charge. Blunt weapons are a better go-to than swords where I live. (guns are very hard to come by legally)
Here's a bunch:
Cutting off the hand someone is holding a weapon with or putting a chunk of steel in their brain tends to end their ability to hurt you faster than punching a tiny hole through their torso and hoping they fall into shock or bleed out before they can injure or kill you.
Swords take less training and practice to get and maintain basic reflexive proficiency with than guns.
If you're defending your home, you get to choose the engagement range and lie in wait. Choosing a weapon with the main advantage of range in that context when all likely engagement distances to pick from are less than the distance where a knife has an advantage over a gun makes no sense.
Swords don't tend to misfire and kill people.
You're unlikely to mistake a family member for and intruder at sword using distance rather than trying to shoot them from the top of the stairs to maintain as much distance as possible.
People usually don't kill themselves with swords if they have a sudden mental break.
Sword skills are less common and if you have them, you're far, FAR more likely to survive someone getting their hands on your sword and trying to kill you with it than happens with guns (as people are more likely to die to a firearm they own than to be saved by a firearm they own).
It's far easier to trust children and pets around swords than it is around guns.
They don't jam.
They don't run out of ammo.
And people holding a sword are (for complicated and simple reasons) far more likely to be actively evaluating the situation when the adrenaline dumps into their system than people holding guns who have a tendency to slip into tunnel vision of "get gun, chamber round, turn of safety, drop into (typically square and static) shooting stance, align sights, control breathing, notice what is between you and your target, notice what is behind your target, put finger on trigger, squeeze trigger instead of pulling it" and use up roughly all of their available attention to just run through all the steps of operating that machine they practiced on the range. This leaves them often forgetting to maintain situational awareness, stay mobile, assess if they should even be attacking instead of retreating, etc.
That's why (outside of the extreme amount of training that almost no-one outside of professional soldiers has) when they do high tension tests of simulations of an active shooter barging into a room with someone with concealed carry, what tends to happen is that most of the people without guns immediately dive for cover. Meanwhile the guy playing the concealed carry roll gets overwhelmed by the addrenaline and just stands up, still, and starts fumbling with trying to deploy his gun. This results in him being one of the very first people shot because he's just simultaneously made himself an imminent (but not instant) threat and a perfect target.
Guns have their uses, but in MOST situations they are absolute garbage for self defense and we haven't even gotten into how a LOT of people freeze/hesitate when they put their finger on the trigger with a real person in their sights with often fatal results and would have been far better served with a taser or can of mace.
Not only that, but in a lot of situations, you are statistically better off unarmed than you are with a gun, as you're more likely to avoid direct violent confrontation and if violence is used on you, it is less likely to be of the lethal variety.
Like bows and spears were in the middle ages, they're good for hunting and good for war, but for individual self-defense they are entirely sub-optimal in all but the most niche situations when you're actually in the real world rather than imagining how it would go down in your head.
Bro, we all know spears are way better than swords and guns
Yeahi can think of alot of situations, but heres one. Someone is pointing a gun at you. You have a sword. That sword takes time to swing. His gun does not.
Swords are generally a better self defense weapon than guns for responsible firearm owners.
No you are wrong
One thing to consider is the indimitation factor, as optimally you would not actually fight with either weapon, but threaten the attacker. With firearm, the attacker might (or not) try to close the distance, because you are a threath at range. A bladed weapon, they might stay away from you, because that is the surest way of not getting hurt.
But if they have a gun or armament themselves, having any weapon might escalate the situation, which is something you'd want to avoid. Imho, getting killed, shot or having to kill someone are all worse outcomes than getting robbed, so not having a weapon at all can also be advantageous of the attacker is armed. But then again, you also can't count on them not harming you if you comply. So having some kind of weapon available is still probably best.
Once you're inside a certain distance, there is less a "winner" of the fight than there is a "survivor." Quite often, this person is whoever either took the initiative and struck first decisively, or answered their attacker's threat with something the attacker wasn't prepared to face.
For example, being jumped while out and about. Unless you see someone mark you, follow you, or herd you in, you will probably be surprised even if you anticipate the possibility on any given day. On the other hand, the walking stick that might give the impression of easy prey can punch the wind right out of someone's chest with a bayonet thrust. Or the mark could literally just palm a can of mace whenever they're alone.
Damn Marcus, you and your controversial hot takes.
I can definitely see many situations where a gun may not be the best option but as I said before I personally would feel better able to protect my family with a firearm. I do like the melee weapon to hold you over until you get to your weapons because I have actually been stressing out about that because as a responsible gun owning family our weapons are of course locked up and unloaded.
I remember that 1 guy that stabbed a robber with a spear
Imagine breaking into your house only for the house owner to pull out a samurai sword and attempt the judgement cut…
Do for honor
I have a couple swords/guns and if you live in the country (like I do) it's gun 100% because areas are more out in the open, if you live in an apartment, still gun, swords are can be super unwieldy in say a hallway, and someone could just shoot you from the other end of the hallway before you get to them anyway
Everyone's talking as of the robber will fight to the death with you, which is just wrong, you point a gun at someone, they're gonna listen to what you say, in which case you tell them to get on the floor and call the police
Well you don’t understand how ballistics work and what happens when someone is shot if the right load with the right weight a 9mm will put a golf ball sized hole through someone
However I do understand where you are coming from in a room a sword would be great however a hallway or a door way gun is better specifically a rifle with rounds that fragment on impact
Swords are less risky for the user if they get disarmed. If the attacker somehow gets to you gun before you, you are dead, because guns are relatively easy to use. But it requires a significant amount of training to be really effective with a sword. So your opponent is less likely to use it against you effectively.
Yes, a sword is better in an urban/apartment setting. But a gun is easier to use, almost anyone with an iq above room temperature knows the basics, like don’t touch the boom switch until you want to fire. A sword would be much harder for an elderly person or a child to use, especially if the sword is large and heavy.
This is generally a bad idea, using aforementioned critical thinking. There are some situations where a gun is not viable, which is why i edc a knife and do martial arts. But there are infinitely more situations where a sword in not useful, for example how the hell do you conceal a sword, and you have to be in range without your attacker stepping backwards and shooting you, unless you can cut bullets in half. Or, if you are elderly or smaller, and a sword is not easy to wield. Guns are the great equalizer. You also mentioned that a sword can fend off an attacker to get to a gun, most people have a bedside gun for this reason and you are not likely to sleep with a katana for more safety reasons. Although it would be cool, it we dont live in the midde ages and you cant eli dicken someone with a sword.