Baton vs. knife--from the movie Kill Zone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OOsorMPTw0

It says they are non-lethal weapons that cops can use to subdue an offender without inflicting gross bodily harm. Unlike a knife.

That video is obviously not a fight to the death. Plus the guy starts on the ground. The baton vs. knife fight is also nothing like bat vs. knife, and isn't realistic at all.

I don't understand how all the knife-lovers think they're just gonna take a full force swing from a bat and keep moving in for their blow. You can't just come in with a knife being like "whatever I take one blow to the arm/head/chest but I ignore it and stab him." No. You get hit by a full force swing from a bat and you're done.

Also, it's not like if both people are equally skilled that the dude with the knife can just dodge a swing and stab the guy with the bat before he can swing again.

Yeah, that isnt a realistic video for how the fight would happen. I mean the dude was on his back for one, lol. The demonstration is the radius means you can hold people at bay and the use of feet to kick is also a useful demonstration of how it would actually go down.

IE, you wouldnt stand there waiting for a pitch, you would be moving, kicking, kneeing and using the bat etc.

Batons are extremely short, very light and they are trained to use them in none lethal manner - using blows to the limbs mainly, plus they use them for blocking (on a t handle stick) and use them for manipulation in joint locks etc.

Btw the cop stance is how i would start out. Weak hand outstretched, bat in your strong had over your shoulder. It means you can reasonably grapple with your weak (if you catch the wrist of his knife holding arm he is dead), swing the bat over the top if the other guys gets in range and if he does shoot you you can bring the butt of the bat into his spine/back of his head.

Hopefully this thread will go on forever and eventually there will no longer be an argument since over the course of evolution the bat people will die out

Ok, so you try to grab his knife hand with your weak hand. We'll assume you are spock and your weak leftie hand grip is enough to catch him and hold on to him. You swing with all your strength at close range using your right arm. Of course this swing is highly telegraphed and villain instinctively guards himself any way he can. You miss and the bat goes over the top of his head. The bat now has inertia continuing to carry it around your left shoulder like a golf swing. Now what?

Oh thats right, you take the butt of the bat in the palm of your hand and insta-kill him with a hammer fisted strike to the top of the head..

Sigh..

Knife. If the footwork is good a person with a knife should be able to close the distance while/after the person with the bat swings.

Maybe I'm missing something but arguments like this seem very illogical to me.

The two combatants are physically identical. Neither person is more agile than the other.

So unless you regard wielding a bat as some kind of liability, why would you ever expect to be able to close the gap without first sustaining at least one hit from the bat?


Let's put it this way. Pretend instead of a knife you had no weapon. Do you believe you would be able to land a solid smack with the palm of your hand to reasonably vital part of bat boy's body without him first getting a solid hit against you?

Obviously the knife guy has slightly better range than with no weapon at all, but it seems like a reasonable comparison to me.

Yes, I do believe I could get to the bat guy before getting hit significantly. Avoiding a bat is not terribly hard if you are patient. I know this because I have done it in training many times.

But what if the bat guy has equal patience and cunning to you?

Again these assertions seem illogical to me. Are you sure you're appreciating that the bat guy is equal to you in every respect but his weapon?

The key difference is that your training partner was trying to train you, not kill you.

Yes, if he is a smart fighter, it will be very long and drawn out. No one ever may initiate a strike for a long time in this case. But it's a draw in that case. Bat guy has a weapon that is by nature very slow and useless at anything other than a very small range. Anything too far, it's useless, anything too close, and he's screwed. The bat guy will pretty much be on the defensive making sure knife guy does not lunge at him. I would not rule out a draw in this case. Occasionally bat guy will get lucky and catch him off guard and get him. But more often, he will get caught in a bad position and be stabbed with a bear hug where he will need to drop his bat, and fight hand vs. knife. This is not impossible to win, but it's much harder, especially with a wound.

I definitely am accounting for equal fighters. The bat is a great defensive weapon, but a terrible offensive one.

No, they definitely had pride on the line. It was quite competitive. And these were guys with black belts and a good amount of training. It was a foam bat, so it's not like it would have hurt me, but they definitely tried to bash my head in. I trained against the same guys with fake knives who were able to slash the crap out of me (we used markers) before I was able to disarm them (I had no bat, though). I was able to "win" hand vs. knife maybe 1/10 times against these skilled fighters at most. No one likes to lose in these games.

Now, there is an argument that there is less fear from each participant since no damage can occur, but it should affect each person equally.

What kind of knife are we talking about. A big ass buck knife or a switch blade. I still think bat wins but if it's a switch blade I don't worry too much about leaving myself open to get a good swing.

Patience is the exact opposite thing the bat guy should have, if he waits for the knife guy to make the first move before starting his swing, the distance has already been closed. Best case scenario for the bat guy is to instantly go on the attack and hope that the knife guy tries to avoid the bay by increasing the distance instead of decreasing the distance. That at least gives him the chance to get a debilitating strike those times when the knife guy fails at getting out of range of the sweet spot of the bat.

Jeez this is a dumb argument. There is a reason that once we invented blades we stopped fighting with clubs.

FYP.

So, the Romans must have been at a huge disadvantage due to their use of small blades when everyone else was using maces, and that's why they never got anywhere.

Oh, please!

Very few of the major military opponents of Rome used maces as a primary weapon. However, this is not because they were ineffective against short swords.

A single Roman soldier with a short sword was at a disadvantage vs. most single contemporary opponents. The Romans were more successful because they, unlike many of their opponents, didn't fight single-handed, but in a tight formation. Often, a Roman with a gladius didn't attack the enemy directly in front of himself. He defended to the front and attacked the man in front of the Roman to his right. Roman Legionaries were most often better trained than their opponents, and had better communications, logistics and engineering.

That defending to the front, BTW, was done with a rather large semi-cylindrical shield, which our hypothetical knife fighter does not have.

One final point, a mace is about the same length as a gladius. A baseball bat is several times the length of the knife in our hypothetical fight.

How were they using (holding/swinging/thrusting) the bats? Were they using them like a typical bat-wielding maniac, or were they using them optimally? Did they have black-belts in bat-wielding?

If the bats were only foam, how did the training account for the unwieldy, unbalanced weight of a real bat?

Would you rather have a bat or nothing, when going up against a knife? Were you trained how to use a club against a knife?

Myamoto Musashi solved this debate a long time ago if one is willing to consider a sword as not too poor a substitute for the knife, and a bokken (wooden sword) hastily carved on the spot from a boat oar to be an adequate substitute for a baseball bat.
From wiki
Duel with Sasaki Kojirō
Main article: Sasaki Kojirō

In April 13, 1612, Musashi (about age 30) fought his most famous duel, with Sasaki Kojirō, who was known as "The Demon of the Western Provinces" and who wielded a nodachi*. Musashi came late and unkempt to the appointed place — the remote island of Funajima, north of Kokura. The duel was short. Musashi killed his opponent with a bokken that he had carved from an oar while traveling to the island. Musashi fashioned it to be longer than the nodachi, making it closer to a modern suburito**.


*a nodachi was an oversized sword for use on horseback
**a suburito would probably be about 45 in (probably a couple inches longer than the nodachi) though a baseball bat can't be more that 42 and would be about the same weight

So burrito > knife? What about a quesadilla? A fistful of flautas?

Kind of just proves my point even more, huh, "howevers" aside.

And big knives.

And yet the mace was so much more popular than bat-like weapons, and yet a large mace should have been more popular due to more force being possible, but it wasn't. Why is that? Maybe because such a longer mace would have been unwieldy against a highly mobile opponent?

So, lets see: back when armor was still light and troops fairly mobile, blunt force weapons weren't nearly as popular as edged weapons, the army known for its use of knife-like weapons dominated the world, and even when blunt force weapons became en vogue due to heavier armor, their most popular version was much smaller than a bat. I know what conclusion I would draw from this...

Im left handed. If i actually managed to grab your arm or wrist or whatever i have a free opening to strike. Tbh id prob go low for the knees first since they are exposed regardless of what you would do.

Also if you were in a situation there isnt much he can do to guard and to say it would be "telegraphed" is truly hilarious as if you have any chance to react.

The point of the stance is to allow flexibility before working out how knife guy will attack. If they try to shoot in you need a free arm to grapple in some sense, if they leave an opening you want the bat in striking position and you are set up in such a way you can use the bat for its full reach or a short hammer blow if they actually do get a shoot in on you. You can also move in any direction without leaving an opening. There is a good reason why this is the primary trained position for cops.

As i have said before bat wins because it scales better with skill and in a blow vs blow comparison the bat will do WAY more damage than the knife.

Also a Gladius is a sword, not a knife. As i said earlier i dont know of a single point in human history anyone took to a battlefield with a knife. Bats of some kind were common from cavemen times up through to the invention of the gun. In fact early muskets were designed to be wielded as bats after you fired your volley.

Really? Are you really going to pass this off as an argument?

They used swords, not knives. They also had large shields and helmets that would have made it much easier to get in close while sustaining blows.

Furthermore, presumably their opponents were armored, which would greatly increase the value of a thin piercing instrument.

A+ for audacity though.

You not knowing what a knife is?

This is not a knife:
http://balboahsroom208.edublogs.org/.../Gladius_2.jpg
(linked cos its a huge picture)

This is generally about as big as a knife gets:
http://www.chefknifereviews.com/chef_knife.jpg
(again, big pic i dont want to inline)

Fwiw the Gladius was a good weapon one on one and it dominated the gladiatorial arena for a reason with the Gladius versus a trident a popular fight. However the training involved between a soldier and a Gladiator was like night and day and a bunch of Romans fighting like Gladiators in broken formation would have been destroyed by the barbarians since they were outnumbered in 99.99% of fights.