IS kung fu and swordsparring redundant in the age of guns?

[TL Rese]

i luv sword-fight scenes - i think hand-to-hand combat is always more interesting to watch than guns and blowing-up stuff. in reality, yea, it's prob pointless to have a sword when the other guy's got a good working gun (and knows how to use it), but w/ fiction, it'd be good to try to write a scenario where the characters have to use their swords, if you want to create sword-fight scenes. or do it in a more subtle way, so the reader doesn't wonder, "why doesn't he just use a gun?" - like in kill bill, which was mentioned earlier.

[Quokka]

I agree with that, in some ways it's harder to justify why a charcter would be using a sword than it is to realistically have them survive, barring a head on charge into gunfire, I mentioned earlier in the thread about the ~7m rule if someone needs to unholster a weapon, so for storyline purposes it's as much about having a convincing set up for why they dont use guns as it is finding ways to keep them alive, preferrably ones that don't rely on secret societies or immortal pyramid schemes.

[soulsinging]

I think one key distinction is that a gun is in a lot of ways, a last resort. Its only value is in the user being willing to pull the trigger, which in a lot of situations won't work. I think I've heard it described as something like you don't pull the gun unless you're willing to finish it. So the value in hand-to-hand combat or lesser weapons is their ability to promise pain or coercion or submission, which is often the goal in a fight. You can "escalate" in response to the resistance of your opponent without it being a choice between bandying hot air or dead bodies.

Think of the many painful holds involved in something like kung-fu. It offers a much better way to subdue someone without necessarily killing them, whereas with a gun (unless you're knee capping someone) it's pretty much all or nothing. You can point it and argue, but if they don't think you're willing or wanting to pull the trigger, it's useless.

In a practical sense, if you're trying to get information or reason with someone, you might be willing to bust a few teeth, but if you're firing a gun you're in a whole lot worse trouble if you can't prove to law that you were in mortal danger. You can throw a few punches though and often get what you want without risking life in prison.

[Metryq]

Originally Posted by soulsinging

You can "escalate" in response to the resistance of your opponent without it being a choice between bandying hot air or dead bodies.

I understand the point you're making, but I've been told repeatedly by those trained in a formal art that the whole point of the training is to end the fight as quickly and efficiently as possible. Longer fights mean more damage. Real fights don't last 6 minutes, like the high point of the movie They Live.

Properly trained, one can certainly disable an opponent without killing him. However, pretty much all of these trained fighters have told me that they're very good at avoiding the fight in the first place.

(Just to be pedantic for a moment, "martial arts" has been used many times in this thread to mean "hand-to-hand" combat. Technically, using guns, swords, etc. are all martial arts.)

[soulsinging]

Originally Posted by Metryq

I understand the point you're making, but I've been told repeatedly by those trained in a formal art that the whole point of the training is to end the fight as quickly and efficiently as possible. Longer fights mean more damage. Real fights don't last 6 minutes, like the high point of the movie They Live.

Properly trained, one can certainly disable an opponent without killing him. However, pretty much all of these trained fighters have told me that they're very good at avoiding the fight in the first place.

That 2nd to last sentence is what I meant. You've got a lot better chance of winning a fight and not having someone be dead if it's hand-to-hand as opposed to using guns. And in most cases, that makes for a lot more tension. That's why in movies and tv, guns make all kinds of bizarre and unrealistic noises to draw attention to there even being a gun... it builds the tension that the cold fact of a gun to the head just can't convey in an artistic sense and lets you banter during the fight (#4 on page 2, gratuitous cocking of guns for dramatic effect):

http://www.cracked.com/article_18576...to-movies.html

[hopewrites]

True you want the fight to be over quickly, but that doesnt mean it wont start up again if you have an immovable opinion against an unstoppable change. They will fight it out again and again each learning something about the other from each encounter.
Eventually the fight is over, ether when the immovable move, the unstoppable stops (or changes course) or when one or the other is dead.
If you go the gun rout, even starting with shots to the foot, knee, arm, hip ect. you end up at Dead a lot sooner and with fewer chances at another path.
You also end up with people who's aggression has not been utterly spent by their struggle, people likely to take their violence to some other place and time to vent it on people less or not involved.
Granted the most hand to hand fighting I ever engaged in lasted maybe 2seconds before i was tossed across the room by the bouncer, but it was enough to spend us both aggressively, and get to the root of the problem.

[Lilmizflashythang]

21 feet. The average distance that an attacker can clear before a gunman can draw, aim, and fire his weapon. Sucks to be the gunman within the 21 feet, sucks to be the attacker without the 21 feet.

[Metryq]

Originally Posted by Lilmizflashythang

21 feet. The average distance that an attacker can clear before a gunman can draw, aim, and fire his weapon. Sucks to be the gunman within the 21 feet, sucks to be the attacker without the 21 feet.

This assumes the gunman is completely useless in all other manner of fighting, and/or that the attacker can do more than a lumbering tackle. I know an ex-Marine who taught other snipers, has been studying aikido and other hand-to-hand arts since he was 10, is a frighteningly efficient knife fighter, and who competes in quick-draw contests for sport. Inside 21 feet or well beyond, one would be hard-pressed to get an advantage on him.

While working as a repair tech at a university, I sometimes enjoyed visits from "T" between classes. She was from Burma and had studied various hand-to-hand arts since childhood. For her, it was common exercise. I was in my shop, hanging a cable on the board behind my door, when T stepped in to say hello. I got the silly idea to startle her. I reached out and snapped my fingers right next to her head.

If I had blinked at the wrong time, I would have missed the blur of one her hands making a vice-like grip on my wrist and the other just behind my elbow. I was drawn forward like a piston and almost learned about human flight when T managed to squelch her trained reflexes and let go of my arm. "DON'T DO THAT!" she barked.

[JoanDrake]

One thing that's not been discussed here much is that sometimes it's just not considered fair to use a certain type of weapon...I know that seems funny in an era when we depend on WMD but remember that gas was never used in WWII, even though both sides had large reserves and the Germans had even developed new forms. It was forbidden by International Law and even the Germans wouldn't use it because they were afraid it would be used on them.

If you remember in Star Wars when Obi-Wan is about to be killed by Darth Sidious (or whoever the 4 armed robot was, I forget,) he just sees a blaster laying there, picks it up and blows him away....then he throws it away in disgust..."filthy weapon", he says, totally forgetting that it just saved his life. Killing, even in wartime, may not be just a simple calculus of lethality

[Mirannan]

Originally Posted by Scifi fan

I was a part-time martial arts instructor, so I'm biased, but unarmed combat definitely has a role in modern warfare. When an army advances into enemy lines, there will be close quarter fighting, and the combatants must be given the full range of skills. This includes bayonet fighting, pistol shooting in cramped urban environments, and, yes, unarmed combat.

By way of history, when the atom bomb was developed, many thought the rifle was obsolete, but that didn't happen.

Heinlein expanded on that theme at length, in Starship Troopers. The basic point is that any military needs a range of options, causing variable amounts of death and destruction, to cover various threats. To take a semi-random example, 2000-lb bombs are of rather limited use in a hostage rescue scenario.