If you are not trained carry pepper spray. If you are carry a pistol. Get licensed if at all possible. Glocks are still the best thing on the market. Extreme reliability, excellent accuracy, relatively low cost, and excellent for neophytes in a high stress situation. That is why they are the choice of so many police forces.
Bottom line - too many people watch too much television. Violence is too often unexpected, happens faster than you can think, is vicious, intense, and makes your body turn into an adrenaline filled noodle. So, take your good intentions one step further and carry a real weapon and get some real training - firearms training along with mixed martial arts training.
"However, in most states the penalty for unlawful carry of concealed knives with sufficient blade length to be reasonably effective is the same as for firearm carry"
My dad made that very same legal point to me.
My reply was "Well then, which would you rather attend? My funeral or my trial?"
Hasn't uttered a peep about the knives since.
In MD, it is virtually impossible to get a CCW permit.
That puts a big target on the back of every woman traveling alone.
There's utterly no reason any LEO searching me otherwise, so *if* the knife becomes an issue, it's because I cut up some rapist or other perv.
By then, it will have become a legal moot point and I will, hopefully, be alive to face the "consequences".
For some of us, it is a matter of preferring the possibility of death or jail to the "other choice".
I have my reasons for feeling that way.
"Car keys border on useless."
Not if carried on one of those long neck-strap thingies popular these days.
Carry enough keys [and an army issue can opener] and a good swing of that's gonna leave a very memorable mark.
Mixed Martial Arts? Explain.
Arioch7