Post
by David » Sun Mar 22, 2009 4:55 pm
Stab wounds don't work like they do in movies. Your body works like a machine, and no amount of willpower or adrenaline can overcome the physical facts of damage.
Let's assume you are magically immune to pain. If you get cut deeply on your arm, odds are that you will lose essential functionality, like being able to close your hand or extend your arm. If you get stabbed anywhere in the chest, your lung will quickly collapse, and you won't be able to breathe. If you're cut in the face, you will bleed profusely, and the blood will get in your eyes, nose and mouth and make it extremely difficult to see or breathe. If you're stabbed in abdomen, suddenly you have fecal matter and hydrochloric acid mixing with your blood stream causing you to go into shock and pass out. Even if you just get a shallow cut, it will bleed profusely, and you will quickly feel faint, dizzy and weak, and probably pass out.
With modern medicine, luck, and a lot of money, none of these wounds are necessarily lethal, but any one of them will make you unable to fight anymore and mess you up for life. Unfortunately, now the mugger is freaking out because it's felony assault, and you've seen his face, so he may stab you a few more times while you're down.
Even if you survive, your hospital bills will cost orders of magnitude more than whatever he wanted to take from you, and he'll take it anyway while you're unconscious on the ground. It doesn't matter if you're an expert martial artist in Olympic shape, you will almost certainly get stabbed if you fight someone who has a knife, and that first stab will end the fight.
Action movies and games have instilled this idea that if you get in a fight everything will suddenly go in slow motion, you can flawlessly execute devastating unarmed attacks and disarms, and then walk away unscathed with epic music and explosions going off behind you. You have to think of it from an outside perspective. In real life, the universe doesn't care if you get your face sliced open, and isn't going to intervene on your behalf.
On the one hand, you have some kid walking home from school whose muscles probably haven't yet caught up with his growing skeleton. His fighting experience is at best limited to punching the air a few times in some corporate bastardization of a martial arts class. On the other hand, you have a thug whose life consists of robbing people, fighting, and taking steroids to develop huge muscles which elevate his status in his lowlife social circle. On top of that, he is displaying a sharp knife, and for all you know is carrying other concealed weapons as well, or has friends nearby.
You are in his element, and he is in control, for the moment. Your only options are to run away or to capitulate, and then call the police ASAP with a decent description (sex, age, race, clothing, direction he left), and then do some paperwork to get new credit cards, check if your stuff is insured for theft, etc. Then you get on with your life, and think about how lucky you were for making it through the situation alive and unhurt.
To summarize: If you fight someone with a knife, you won't win. Even if you do, you will still be cut, and it will cost more to treat your injuries than it would to replace all the valuables you are carrying.
. So has this happened to anyone else?
