14 Specific Improvised Weapons

14 Specific Improvised Weapons
I’ve been traveling a lot lately. And one segment of a recent trip was a ½ day ride on Amtrak where I couldn’t have “anything that could be used as a weapon”. I’m used to traveling to DC, where I can’t carry my firearm or a decent knife, but in order to avoid any problems if I got picked for random screening, I had to cache knives, multi-tools, scissors, pepper spray, and even my scalpel blade from my mini-med/survival kit before getting on the train.

There WAS a lady knitting for most of the 4 hour train ride with nice long pointy aluminum knitting needles. That was almost enough to make me want to start knitting.

So, today we’re going to cover 14 specific items that you can use to defend yourself, regardless of whether you’re at home when a home invasion happens, in a hotel, or just out-and-about.

I talked about this general concept a couple of months ago, and what you’re looking for is a way to focus your strikes, add mass and speed to your impact tool, and/or extend your reach if you find yourself in a situation where you need to defend yourself from a violent attack without a firearm or a fighting knife.

With that in mind, here are 14 specific items that are very common that make effective weapons. You’ll probably see, if not touch, all of them within the next 24 hours. I’ve also included the particular style of strike you’ll want to use with each item.

1. Shower curtain rod – puncture – Use it like a spear to focus your strike and extend your reach. If you’re lucky, it will break with the first strike and you’ll get a pointy end to focus your next strike even more. Don’t swing it…most shower curtain rods and clothes rods are fairly flimsy.

2. Clothes rod – puncture – Use it like a spear…hopefully it breaks on the first use and you get a point.

3. Sliding glass door rod –puncture – Use it like a spear.

4. Towel with soap or a soap holder – impact – Take the towel, put the heavy object in the middle, fold the towel in half one way, fold it in half the other way & get ready to swing. You can play with your folding methods to secure the heavy object better.

5. Sock with soap, soap holder, battery – impact

6. Pillowcase with soap, soap holder, battery – impact (or bed sheet, shirt, etc.)

7. Ceramic toilet tank lid. Break at an angle & use as a puncture weapon. Hold it with both hands, thrust the pointy end at your attacker, and put your entire body behind the strikes.

8. Fire extinguisher. Spray them with the white stuff & hit them with the red thing. I’m not sure who thought this up first, but the most colorful proponent of it is Clint Smith. In short, fire extinguishers are great weapons…especially if you have the element of surprise. I’m talking about the red metal ones…not the newer little plastic ones. The red metal ones are heavy and strong enough to swing at a head and the bottom edge helps to focus strikes nicely.

9. Floor lamp. Use it as a spear. Sooner or later the lamp part will break off, leaving you with a more focused impact point or it will stick in your attacker. Lamps are kind of awkward because of the cord. In training with them, I’ve had the lamp part break off, but still be connected by the cord. The biggest problem with this is surprise—if you’re surprised when it happens, your attacker will gain an advantage. If you just go with it and keep thrusting it at your attacker, you will gain an advantage.

10. Butcher block. Pointy knives for stabbing, serrated knives for slashing. Got a knife that’s pointy AND serrated? Stab with it. In a restaurant, or hotel even a butter knife will help focus your strikes more tightly, increasing your penetration and chances of causing internal damage.

11. Break off a wooden chair leg – puncture. Don’t be surprised if you get slivers…possibly nasty slivers.

12. Run at someone with all 4 legs of a chair aimed at them. (should look like a diamond rather than a square) Or, just thrust it at them with your arms and body weight. You want the top leg aimed at their head and you really don’t care if they block or avoid it or not, because the bottom leg will hit them in the gut and you have a shot at hitting their solar plexus or bladder. The important thing is to pile on additional aimed strikes after the first one until your attacker is non-functional.

13. Lamp cord disconnected from lamp, stripped so you have bare wires, and plugged into a power source – electrocution

14. Have a little bit of time…or coffee already made? Hot water in the face can distract your opponent enough to be able to completely take them out of the fight.

Have any other common, everyday items that can quickly be used as weapons? Share them by commenting below.

It’s important to remember that whether you have a firearm, another weapon, or just your body, you want to focus as much force as possible on the weakest parts of your attacker’s body.

Don’t punch someone in the gut when you can hit them in the solar plexus or the bladder.

Don’t punch an attacker on the hard bones of their face when you can simply crush their windpipe, strike their vagus nerve on the side of the neck, scratch their eyeball, or rupture their eardrum. Aiming can be the difference between just making someone mad and taking your attacker out of the fight.

With the impact weapons I mentioned, targeting is vital. Most people can take a few good strikes from a hard, fast moving object to the butt, legs, or arms, but not to the neck & head. If your life depends on the effectiveness of your strikes, aim for places on the body where you’re attacker is vulnerable.

Cutting weapons are the same…targeting is key.

As a note on stabbing versus cutting, Roman Legions conquered the world by being willing to take cuts and give stabs. Why? Because the body is able to survive multiple HORRIBLE, vicious slashes across the body, but there are more than a dozen easy targets where a 2” stab will quickly take an attacker out of the fight.

With this being Halloween weekend, I’ll take the liberty of getting a little gory for a second.

Some of the easiest stabbing locations to remember? Directly below the ribcage pointed upwards. You’ve got a ring of great targets all around the body at the bottom of the ribcage, like the spleen, pancreas, liver, & kidneys. If you’ve got something long and go through those first organs, you’ve got even better targets, like the lungs and heart.

This topic IS gruesome, and many people don’t like to think or talk about it. Even if you’re a vegan pacifist who won’t swat a mosquito, I believe it’s important to know how to respond to a violent attacker coming after you or a loved one. If you are unarmed and NEED to make an attacker non-functional as quickly, safely, and efficiently as possible, it’s important to know a handful of specific targets to strike.

Along with specific targets, it’s important to know the best ways to transfer as much force as possible through as small of a contact point as possible so that you can end the confrontation quickly…before it turns into an endurance event where you’re trading blows and taking damage.

If you want to dig into this, one of the best resources I’ve found is Tim Larkin’s Target Focus Training. I’ve been using Target Focus Training since the mid 90s, have every DVD, book (and VHS) he’s made, and have been through the live training multiple times. Tim trains all sorts of elite teams around the globe and he not only knows his stuff, he’s an INCREDIBLE teacher.

To find out more about Tim’s training, please go to http://SurviveInPlace.com/targetfocustraining . He’s put together a special package at a significant discount for my readers, called the “Human Weapons Package.” Of course, I’ve got it, I love it, and I fully recommend it.

My 110 pound wife and I regularly watch and go over Tim’s DVDs and the training gives her the peace of KNOWING that she can protect our 3 year old and 11 month old when I’m not around. And I can’t even begin to tell you how much peace of mind that gives me.

As a bonus, Tim pays me part of each sale that I send over, so if you buy through the link above, you’re not only saving a TON of money, you’re helping support the free Urban Survival Newsletter as well. Thanks in advance.

The Election and Conflict Resolution
Last week’s newsletter set off a little firestorm. From the comments, it was easy to see that while preppers tend to favor limited government, we’re spread out across the political spectrum. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

And, thanks to those of you who kept the disagreements civil. It’s important to remember that in a grid down survival situation, you’re going to have to deal with all sorts of people…possibly even outsiders enforcing martial law. In most cases, you don’t want to escalate conflict unless it is simply a tactical tool to achieve victory in the conflict. Escalating conflict simply to beat your chest and try to bully your opinion on someone else seldom, if ever, works.

We’re just days away from the election and I’m apprehensively optimistic. Elections always seem like vulnerable times to me, and I’m always happy when we get through them without incidents. I’m personally praying that the elections are uninterrupted, go fairly, and that people get into office at all levels of government who respect liberty, individual responsibility, and limited government.

EMPs In The News
Last week, I mentioned that there was considerable solar activity predicted for this week and another probable coronal mass ejection. So far, we’re looking good Interestingly enough, on Wednesday I was in a hotel and had a copy of the USA Today at my door when I got up. On the front of the Life section, there was an article on nuclear and solar EMPs.

It was written for the USA Today audience, which is incredibly broad, so it didn’t go into very much detail. Even so, I was excited to see EMPs discussed so prominently in a mass market publication.

To begin with, I’m sure thousands of conversations about prepping happened as a result…in offices, in car pools, at home, and at sporting events. Many people have become aware of the need to get prepared for disasters because of the threat of EMPs and it’s safe to assume that many more became “aware” and their realization that they need to prepare began this week.

I can personally tell you that several dozen people (close to 100) have written me to tell me that they became “switched on” after watching “Jericho,” reading “One Second After,” or watching/reading other fictional stories based on EMP events.

Any time stories like this are in the news, no matter how watered down they are, people wake up, decide to get prepared, and we become that much more stable as a country.

So, if you have any friends, neighbors, or relatives who read the USA Today, you might want to ask them if they read the article. This could be a GREAT opportunity to bring up prepping without divulging how much action you’ve taken or how much you’ve thought about it.

Think about it…it was in the USA Today. They distribute almost 2 million copies a day and 18 million more online. How extreme could it be?

Here’s some softball questions that you could ask:

-Have you ever thought about what you guys would do if the power went out and just didn’t come back on—like what they were talking about in the article?

-Which do you think is more likely—the solar one or the terrorist one?

-I decided to get a few days of food and water…just in case. What do you think? Is that silly?

-The government doesn’t have money to spend like they did back when Katrina happened. Do you think they’d help or would we just be on our own?

Keep the conversation light, resist the urge to talk too much, and ask lots of softball questions with easy outs. And most of all, remember that your goal is to find people who WANT to prep, not beat people over the head about the need to prep.

Here’s the link to the story so you will be able to talk about it intelligently and so that you won’t have to overplay your knowledge about EMPs: www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2010-10-26-emp_N.htm

If they want to learn more, please refer them here to the SecretsOfUrbanSurvival.com blog and simply tell them to enter “EMP” in the search bar that’s in the upper right hand corner of the screen. They’ll get exposed not only to several articles on EMPs, but other threats and practical strategies for getting prepared to survive short, medium, and long term disruptions in the power grid and breakdowns in civil order.

Who knows…you might be fortunate enough to have them buy the SurviveInPlace.com Urban Survival Course and have them ask you to be on their Mutual Aid Team (People who have gone through the course will know what I’m talking about.)

And if you haven’t gone through the course yet, maybe now’s the time that you should. You can learn more about it and get started now by going to www.SurviveInPlace.com


Until next week, God bless and stay safe.

David Morris
www.SurviveInPlace.com
www.UrbanSurvivalPlayingCards.com
www.SecretsOfUrbanSurvival.com

P.S. Don’t forget to vote