Dont you think it is rather disturbing that there are 12 comments regarding which method is better: Cutting or Stabbing?

And nary a word about slicing…

Seriously, I’d say they serve different functions. Slashing is likely to end an endable fight sooner, and with less legal complications. I taught my son, who shaves with and carries a straight razor, something I learned in seventh grade. Open up an eyebrow.

Among the shallow areas that can be attacked with a knife are the jugular, thyroid, femoral artery, iliac artery, brachial plexus, and intestines. Get any of those and your attacker doesn’t have long. Even a well-muscled fat guy has all those relatively close to the surface.

If your knife is sharp and you use it well, you can slash through just about anything. A friend of mine is an instructor in a martial art that is primarily knife-based. He recently did a series of tests using dummies swaddled in thick clothes and demonstrated that knives go right through with a slashing motion. He attacked large cuts of meat as well to show how deep he cut. Even went through bone pretty well. He did it with large and small knives.

Bottom line is that gashes are much bigger wounds than stabs. Poke a guy and he’ll keep coming. Leave bits of him hanging and he’ll be too busy trying to scoop his innards back in to kill you.

Oh, no! I’ve got hands that can easily flip out and be used to attack an unsuspecting individual! Knife hand, ridge hand, spear hand, punch, backfist, hammerfist, and oh wow that’s just a few! God help us all, we’ve all got Assault Hands! We must make them illegal!

A brief interlude on knife fighting: you don’t stab, you cut. It’s easier for the recipient of said wound to fight back if they’re just plugging a hole than it is for them to fight back if they’re trying to hold their insides in.

As always, location, location, location.

A slice wound tends to be faster and more likely to disable, particularly since even short knifes can get a decent tendon cut on the arms (which are also more exposed). Slices are also generally much more painful, at least until you start poking into internal organs.

But stab wounds have their place. A stab to the sternum is much more damaging than any slice to the chest would be with the same weapon. Stabs commit much more momentum, and are best aimed at normally well-guarded points of the torso and limbs. But they’re more likely to end a fight as opposed to just slowing down your enemy (admittedly, slowing down an enemy has its place : lets you run away). A stab will easily hit kidneys or arteries when a slice would only cut skin or muscle. There’s a reason the Fairbairn-Sykes knife, used by the OSS and Marine Raiders through WWII, was a great stabbing instrument.

Part depends on your grip : the “cancer” grip (modified forward grip with thumb pointing forward at targets) is useless for anything but stabbing, while most reverse grips will overcommit you if you attempt to stab with them.

Of course, if your opponent has a weapon himself, all of the above goes out the window. In a weapon to weapon fight, you should first attempt to cause a minor wound then run, but if that’s not possible, you should leave every possibility and technique open. The only bad cut when someone’s trying to kill you is one on your own body.

lmao

My post here links to the WSJ article posted at the high road.

Worked in Sctoland, didn’t it?

As for knife fights, bring a gun to one and you’ll be OK. =)

It’s intended to be the ‘knife’ equivalent of the NRA.

All the blood vessels on the surface of the body are capillaries and all the nerves are serving only that section of the body. Inflicting an incapacitating wound by damaging the outer surface of the body is notoriously ineffective at stopping a fight.

This was an important reason why the Roman legions were so effective in combat. They discovered how quickly fatal even a relatively shallow puncture wound could be and used it to great effect against armies who did not know this and kept using slashing and hacking strokes.

Then again, it is also easier to make a weapon of low grade steel that can kill by puncture than one that can kill by slashing.