As the article notes, they're useful against angry dogs, who seem baffled by their deployment. My experience is that even large dogs won't advance against someone whose leg or arm or torso they cannot clearly view.
LOL, reminds me of the Unbreakable Umbrella Internet classic [1,2]. Not sure if I would walk around with such an umbrella, though. I used to do a lot of martial arts before I realized that the general problem with self-defense is that most thugs who want to rob you have more spare time to train and tend to be better at it than you.
The general problem with thugs isn't that they are well trained, but that they are typically carrying better weapons. Umbrella against a gun or even a knife is a really mismatched fight.
Against a gun, naturally. Against a knife, maybe not so mismatched. I'd not try to stab someone who is actively poking me in the face with an umbrella.
I think this kind of theorizing about how easy it is to defend against someone with a knife is very mischievous. People are way too confident about this ("oh, I'll just defend myself with an improvised weapon or wrap my jacket around my hand"). I would rather have an umbrella than nothing but I suspect step one would be "he grabs my umbrella with his other hand" and step two would be "I get stabbed or slashed".
Unless you get a brilliant shot in with the umbrella ("deadly eye poke!"), you're not going to have much effect, but any stab or slash would can start you bleeding out and/or degrade your ability to defend yourself.
This unbreakable umbrella looks like a formidable weapon. The story goes that the only time the famous swordsman Myamoto Musashi was fought to a draw was by Muso Gonnosuke yielding a short staff (Jo). An umbrella designed to be a weapon would presumably enough mass that trying to grab it while it's flying at you would be a pretty bad idea. While a Jo is longer you're not fighting a long sword here ;)
That doesn't mean the average joe should attempt to fight a knife wielding thug with their random umbrella but I think given training and the appropriate umbrella the knife is at a disadvantage. The big advantage of a knife is that it requires relatively little training to become very effective and certainly extremely difficult to face bare handed ... but a trained staff fighter is going to have a huge advantage against an equally trained opponent with a knife.
I was entertained by the 'unbreakable' umbrella vid, I'll admit that. Generally with a normal umbrella they seem to have a pretty high air resistance and are not remotely analogous to a staff. The thing that I carry in real life? No. A heavy enough umbrella with a metal spike in the end? Sure.
Even that being said, a trained staff fighter vs. a knife is at a bigger advantage fighting, forewarned, warmed up, in loose fitting clothes, starting at a dignified distance on a unobstructed gym floor against a rubber knife with both parties wearing protective gear (i.e. "a gym fight"). I would be very surprised if most of that advantage doesn't evaporate when the psychology of fighting an actual knife comes into play, or when the knife fighter and stick fighter start at close quarters or in a cluttered space, etc. "Messy reality". The logic most people apply to this seems pretty much exactly analogous to the confident proclamations that karate and TKD dudes used to issue about being able to defend themselves again, well, anyone from a Judo player to a rugby tackle.
I don't doubt that it's possible to choreograph a pretty nice fantasy sequence where the staff beats a knife, but having tried the "put on old clothes and 'fight' someone wielding a deadly magic marker" game, I'm pretty appalled at how easy it is to be messed up by a determined attacker with a magic marker. And that's without the added element of fear (and pain) that you would experience facing a real knife.
I don't really have a horse in the race here - I don't carry a stick, a deadly unbreakable umbrella or a knife, nor do I plan to attack anyone with one. I'm just always a bit skeptical about the idea of 'trained staff fighters' having developed skills in realistic circumstances as opposed to, say, martial arts LARP'ing. [ all that being said, I wouldn't to be the guy that tried to go after a Dog Brother with a knife of any kind... :-) ]
A big part of martial arts training is awareness and readiness. If you're already in close quarters with a knife wielding attacker you've already failed and it doesn't matter if you carry a knife, a gun, a stick, or a flamethrower. You have to always be ready and you have to sense the intentions of would be attackers. Easier said then done...
The psychological factors are what you train for.
Those fighting arts come to us from the messy realities of the past. If you were a Samurai in Japan you were always ready to fight for your life against much scarier weapons than a knife. But getting that sort of mentality takes a lot of work, it's more than a hobby...
Indeed. I have trouble imagining how - or why - cultivating this mentality would be possible or useful. Given one doesn't have access to a pool of "would be" attackers, nor anyone who has had said access, it seems far more likely that one will develop a acute sense of the intentions of "martial arts dudes pretending to be would-be attackers".
At the very least, it was always possible (though shockingly rare in practice) to pad up and see you how things would go against a fully committed rugby tackle - or at least get an approximation. I don't see how the equivalent reality check can be done for weapons; at least not without the luxury of having a pre-gunpowder battlefield to experiment on.
Exactly. The danger of getting hit with an umbrella is mostly that it hurts. The danger of getting cut with a knife is that you bleed to death. The two are wildly mismatched.
The likelihood that even a trained combatant would successfully poke out someone's eye before they got stabbed is pretty low. An untrained one will undoubtedly use the umbrella as a shitty club and get stabbed immediately.
I took a self-defense class where we practiced using improvised weapons against a few simulated actual weapons. Against a short knife, a sweater wrapped around the arm was not very useful (but better than nothing). I much preferred a long stick, with which we would maintain distance and strike at the hand, and a chair, which makes a handy, pointy, shield. Against a knife, I'd rather have an umbrella than a sweater, jacket, or nothing.
Important to note, though: The class stressed that your best option was to have enough money on you to satisfy your attacker. A mugger who just made $100 is much less likely to beat you to death for spare change.
Well, your response to a situation needs to evaluate the threat of the situation.
No matter what your situation is, you don't want to try to go hero on it. If someone has a weapon and wants your money, you give it to them. Your goal is to try to give yourself an opportunity to run. Throw your wallet behind the attacker a little ways. They will need to turn their backs to go get it, which they will if that's what they are after.
If you're in a different situation where someone is trying to herd you into a more isolated area or especially into a car, you use what you have at hand to try and fend them off enough to get a chance to run.
Only bad things happen when people move you to more isolated places, and if someone is trying to force you into a car, it's worth doing whatever you can because you are probably not getting out of that car alive, in good shape, or into a better situation than the one you are currently in.
In any situation other than a routine mugging, I'd use an umbrella or anything I had at hand to at least try to equalize the situation. To give me enough space to get some escape velocity. An umbrella isn't the worst idea if it's a knife. You want distance from a knife. An umbrella is quite a bit longer than a knife. If you can discourage the person long enough to get you a head start for running, then it was a good gamble.
Again, by the time you've decided to engage with someone in this way, you are already pretty certain that they aren't just after some cash. They're after your life, or your ass. And that's the only time you should ever consider engaging a stranger in combat.
That was the training I got from the police trainers that taught the CHL classes I took in Texas. We practiced a lot of stuff about how to disarm someone at close range, but the lesson was always this: run if you can. It's hard to shoot someone who's moving even at close range. If you get desperate, these are some last-ditch things you can try to keep yourself from being moved to an isolated place where you can (will) be raped, tortured, or murdered.
But the best defense against any of that is to have some situational awareness, and to look like you have situational awareness. Make it clear to anyone who might be after you that you are watching and alert and won't be taken by surprise.
Unless someone really is after you personally, most people will look for a different target.
Oh, P.S. The other training we got was that if you're in trouble within earshot of people, don't yell that you're being mugged or raped. Yell that there's a fire or that someone's been hit by a car or something like that. Anything that makes sense in the context that doesn't sound like a crime in progress. People will shy away from that, whereas people will very often come to help out with something that doesn't sound dangerous to them personally.
Ironically, a group of pedestrians showing up to see what's going on will often have more impact on a crime in progress than a fire or a car wreck. Though I understand this is ethically dubious, at best.
A MechEng student I knew at university tried to design a new umbrella mechanism that used strips of spring steel that would form helices around the shaft when furled.
IIRC It had two significant drawbacks, a) it had a very high energy barrier for state change, requiring extraordinary user strength, and b) (related) when opening the ends of the strips moved at incredible speed presenting significant threat of decapitation to the user.
I have formal training for the use of pistol, pepper spray and baton for self defense. As a result I think umbrella is the best possible self defense weapon for civilians in most western nations:
1. Can be carried openly. (Unlike any other weapon.)
2. Can be used for threatening. (Unlike pepper spray, taser or knife.)
3. Legal to own without permit. (Unlike possibly any other.)
4. Guaranteed to be more effective than bare fists. Especially pepper spray is sometimes very unreliable on having any effect at all. Especially if the opponent is under the influence of opiates.
5. Allows to keep some distance to opponents fists while still being effective.
6. Can be used safely against all demographics and in all locations. (Only batons are equal in this. You can hit the head, but you can also avoid it. You can't know if someone you spray has asthma.)
7. Can be used legally. (You can't use knife for self defense "reasonably" and assume that you don't get charged for manslaughter.)
8. Everybody has clear understanding on the magnitude of damage an umbrella (or baton or baseball bat or any other "stick") will make. This means that the defender with umbrella is less likely to use it completely in excess. Also it means that the assailant may calculate correctly that the assault is ill advised.
9. Is not perceived threatening by itself by innocent by-passers. People carrying umbrellas don't cause everybody to get tense.
10. Can be used to various threat levels. You can gently tap a bratty teenager to the bottom with umbrella. And from there you can incapacitate violent drug addict with several blows to the head or anything in between. With pistol you can only use it when lethal force is acceptable.
Openly carried umbrella is one of the very few weapons that can possibly deter violent crime without anybody knowing. Only pistol and batons are clearly better from individual viewpoint, but they require permits. Tasers and pepper sprays are only good as "more tools to the box" for guards and police.
Well. Markov was a journalist, playwright and maybe a dissident, never a spy.
It is important as spies are supposed to be able to defend themselves and playwrights are not.
Early in The Charterhouse of Parma, a sometime minister is set upon and killed by reactionary thugs armed with umbrellas:
Après la chute de Napoléon, certains personnages puissants à Milan firent assommer dans les rues le comte Prina, ancien ministre du roi d’Italie, et homme du premier mérite. Le comte Pietranera exposa sa vie pour sauver celle du ministre, qui fut tué à coups de parapluie, et dont le supplice dura cinq heures.
Ok downvotes. Defend that movie. Especially the scene with the princess at the end. I can sort of understand how most people liked it because for most people the bar is low on movies. But this is HN. How can smart people like a movie that treats the audience like idiots?
That movie is intended more as a parody or farce. If you expected a serious movie, it would be disappointed. Although its been a long time since "action" movies were serious.
Lowest hanging fruit would suggest James Bond? The insane gadgetry, the dedication to Britishness, the utterly bonkers plot of the villain and "getting the girl" at the end were all mainstays of that type of film. Albeit turned up to 11 and taken in, as mentioned above, farcical directions.
It's far closer to Austin Powers. You can't parody suave James Bond with a no class street thug who spends most of the film in training, which Bond has never done on film. Or moping about his mom, Bond doesn't even have have a mom. Bond works for the British government, and he works alone.
First the spy/action movies are epitomized by the Bond series, and Kingsman has little to do with Bond. Sure it has gadgets, a megalomaniacal villain with a world destroying plan, and British agents. But Bond isn't a street urchin, never has a family, let alone family problems, never goes thru a recruitment or training process, rarely ever works on a team, and is entirely a governmental employee.
And it's even farther away from Mission Impossible, and the Bourne Identity series. So it can only be a parody of Bond, and not only is it far from Bond, it's not even funny. How can you parody something without being funny? It really smells like they had an idea that was more serious, then realized they couldn't make it work midway through, and pivoted to a not very funny parody.
