Just read your post...interesting...I tend to agree but I have no knowlege in weapons.
If you were a woman, seeking to protect herself, would your advice be the same? And what type of knife as most require you open them...by then someone could be all over you!
In past I have proposed what might sound like an odd idea, and one that needs a little explanation, but could pretty much change the world in favor of women.
People, no matter the time or place, have a set of unwritten rules that are enforced by almost everyone. In the US, for example, just about everyone frowns on other people eating house pets. While it might be technically legal, most people will be very harsh to those who break this “social sanction”.
Most social sanctions are rather minor, but are widely enforced, such as how women raise girls, that “because they are girls” they must do some things, and not do other things.
Well, imagine one such rule added to the mix. That girls and women, in all times and places when in public, must carry a knife or bladed weapon, and if attacked by a boy or man, to cut them with it.
Why? “Because that is just what girls do.”
Once a certain number of women and girls begin to practice and teach this social sanction, it will cross over national borders like they were not there. And eventually, be she an impoverished rural girl in Africa, who carries a sharp piece of metal or broken glass; or a rich, self made executive woman in NYC, who keeps a razor sharp 440 stainless blade hidden on her person, among *enough* women, if not all, it will change the world.
Men lord it over women far too often with violence, and the threat of violence. But if women resist this violence, even a little bit, it crumbles. Men lose their “sense of control” over women, and women become just as important, and often more important. As a saying goes, “When women stand up, men sit down and shut up.”
At first, many girls would be injured and even killed by cutting a man who had attacked them. But they are injured and killed right now, without offering any resistance. Yet in short order, once the idea got around that women had knives or other bladed weapons, it would force a moment’s pause to the situation. And this matters.
If a man just has to pause for a moment, before attacking a woman because she *might* be armed and cut him, that pause alone will cause many men to not act in the first place. To decide that it is better to not attack, than to get cut, even a little.
When women carry knives or other bladed weapons, they will think both about them, and the circumstances in which they would cut a man. And such a chain of thought leads only in one direction: better capability when actually put in such a situation.
Some women, of course, would overdo it, either carrying a lot of knives, or grievously injuring or killing an aggressive male, but that is part of the deal, and the message, of the social sanction as well.
And it begins with just a single woman, who both accepts the idea that women should be armed and to defend themselves, and who teaches other girls and women she meets the same.