Anyone want to volunteer to attack Sean with a knife and then a hammer?

Actually, the craziest part of your argument is that there is somehow less inherent wildness in the swing of a knife than there is in the swing of a hammer.

I mean, if you know what you're doing with both hammer and knife, it becomes a matter of personal preference. If you only know how to use one but not the other, you'd presumably be best off using your weapon of choice.

If you don't know what you're doing with either, than you don't know what you're doing. Your swing is likely to be just as ineffective, and throw you just as off balance if you swing poorly with a knife as it would with a hammer.

You're swinging the knife, Sean, not me. Which becomes your problem. I'm perfectly willing to believe you're as vulnerable using one as the other. However, that's all about you, and not about the ways in which you can use each to create damage.

It is also possible that you can hurt people with a hammer without swinging it. I will cop to the limitation of not being able to use a hammer practically without momentum. That's my problem.

Actually, the craziest part of your argument is that there is somehow less inherent wildness in the swing of a knife than there is in the swing of a hammer.

But you can jab with a knife and hurt someone with a minimum of movement on your part. You HAVE to swing a hammer.

You're swinging the knife, Sean, not me.

My competence with a knife or a hammer is not in question here, any more than yours is.

You HAVE to swing a hammer.

Pfft. Just because you and ita aren't creative enough to try a straight jab to the bridge of the nose with the top of the "T" of the hammer doesn't mean nobody else is, either.

Sean, you keep insisting that a wild swing with a knife is as bad as a wild swing with the hammer.

I respond:

1. Straw man. Why are you swinging the knife? I could contend that the hammer is obviously a worse weapon because when you poke someone with it, it doesn't hurt as much as when I poke someone with a knife. But it wouldn't be useful data.

2. And you're wrong. The wild swing with the hammer is harder to control with the same amount of musculature because of the extra weight of the hammer, a tool designed for momentum.

I got nothing else.

Sean, are you one of those people who chokes up on the hammer and then wonders why the nail won't go in? Momentum is the main thing about hammers. Otherwise you could just use a rock to get nails in wood.

are you one of those people who chokes up on the hammer

Ah -- thank you for using that word, Jesse. It triggered another explanation -- you're automatically choked up on your average kitchen knife, because of where their centre of gravity is located. And if you use a hammer conventionally, you're unchoked.

Is there a physicist in the house? With diagrams? There need to be pictures now, I can feel it.

Sean, are you one of those people who chokes up on the hammer and then wonders why the nail won't go in?

I can hammer a nail just fine. An intruder is not a nail, and calls for unconventional application of the hammer.

Think outside the box, people!

But if you're hanging on to the head of the hammer, you might as well be using something that doesn't leave you with a foot of unused handle. Frozen spinach, or something.