[geeks] its what you carry with you

[The Renaissance Man]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 01:34:32PM -0700, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:
> On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, The Renaissance Man wrote:
> 
> > "There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous people."  Sgt.
> > Zim, _Starship Troopers_, Robert Anson Heinlein.
> 
> There ARE dangerous weapons, there are really crappy stuff out there which
> is down right dangerous. There has been plenty of gear out there that has
> managed to inflict more damage to their own than the enemy could have.

That's different.  That's "crappy equipment".  :)  The SCA has a word
for such things, "pandybat" -- any weapon more dangerous to the wielder
than to the wielder's adversary.  (Though pandybat weapons are usually
intentionally so.)

Seriously, in this context I make a distinction between "dangerous
weapons" and "unsafe weapons".  (The distinction being that an unsafe
weapon is one which, through bad design or substandard construction,
poses an unwarranted hazard to its operator in the course of its normal
operation, ranging from a certain bolt-action shotgun on the British
market that had a nasty habit of blowing its bolt back into the firer's
face, to one of the tactical nuclear weapons the US Army developed which
had a maximum range less than its minimum safe distance.)


> When I was in spec-ops we had to be fluent in a lot of the gear out there,
> there was some shitty stuff that if you just look at it the
> wrong way it would misfire... or the chambers were so poorly constructed
> that it could blow on your own face... When the "warning" lecture takes
> longer than the "assembly, use" lecture you know that the stuff is shitty.
> I pitty the poor bastards that had to go to work with some of that gear,
> phew!

Amen, brother.


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