My evolving thoughts on medieval hand to hand combat weapons vs. modern firearms, My thoughts as I pursue both German longsword and shooting sports Options

[Wounded Ronin]

Fairly recently, I started practicing German longsword with a local ARMA group. I never appreciated the longsword fully before. Like most people who don't have any basis to know any better I thought of the sword in terms of just cut and thrust. However, I am beginning to more fully appreciate the art of using the longsword...the bind, the anti-armor techniques, percussive techniques using the crossguard and pommel, clinches and throws while using the sword, and I also am beginning to understand how on the whole a longsword is pretty much objectively better for killing people than an axe or a hammer. I'm beginning to understand the ways in which a longsword would usually be able to outmanuver an axe or hammer especially when used against an unarmored opponent and given a basic level of skill on the part of the wielder, and accordingly why the sword was symbolic of the military elite in medieval times in Europe.

But damn, at the same time, I also participate every month in shooting sports like USPSA and steel shooting, and again given a skilled operator, I'm really struck by how much unimaginably better modern firearms are than even a longsword.

Before I'd taken up serious study of the longsword, I think I actually had unrealistic ideas about how potent a longsword or katana would be if someone decided to use one in the middle of a firefight. You read and hear all the stories about katanas cutting through several stacked up bodies, and you imagine how quick and powerful someone must be if they practice with the sword, so you imagine that someone with a sword can just hide around the corner, jump out, and lop your head off before you can react, even if you're wearing a kevlar helmet and vest and have got an AK47 in your hands.

But now that I actually practice with a longsword I think I appreciate how it'd actually be really hard to do something like that in reality. You'd need enough room to swing the sword, which would be harder to do if you were hiding around a corner in an enclosed indoor environment, and you'd need to hope that your attack isn't mitigated in its effectiveness if the guy you're ambushing jumps backwards or flinches away when he sees all that movement coming towards him. Even if you hit him, again it would require skill to hit his neck as opposed to, say, his upper arm, and it would be a combination of skill and luck to actually incapacitate the guy instead of only wounding him. It might be more practical with the longsword to try and thrust at the guy in his face or upper torso, but even if you succeeded in ramming the point of your sword into the chest before he can react, I don't see how you could be guaranteed that he'd be incapacitated right away and wouldn't be able to get a shot off half a second later even if he were mortally wounded through the lung or something. With all this body movement and timing you get one penetrating wound into the guy's torso, whereas with a few trigger squeezes the other guy can give you multiple penetrating wounds into your torso that probably penetrate deeper and are more likely to shatter bone. (Actually I kind of have the same question about bayonetting someone...how do you know the other guy won't just shoot you while you're driving your bayonet through his lung?)

And that's thinking about a committed do-or-die high-powered attack, as opposed to a lighter bop on the head that you might see from the bind against another swordsman.

The more I know and the more I practice both, the more I feel that given a basic level of skill in both disciplines, firearms are a lot deadlier than swords. Now a knife might even be different given that it could be used in conjunction with tackling someone and keeping his rifle pointed away from you, but as long as we're talking about swords per se which are going to be used at a slightly longer distance, I'm really beginning to understand how modern firearms made them obsolete.

But I think it's very good for me to understand this, as someone who is interested in role playing games. If I ever wanted to try and run a realistic RPG set in, say, the Pacific during World War II, I would be better mentally equipped to come up with good rules for what happens if a Japanese guy with a katana tries to jump out of the bushes and decapitate a US Marine who is scanning for threats with his 1911 out.


EDIT: All this also leads me to believe that it was easier to be brave on the battlefield in medieval times than today if you were an elite warrior. If you are wearing armor, have the skills, and have the swords, you can probably single-handedly kill a lot of peasants who come at you looking to bash you with an axe or hammer. The armor provides significant protection and your skills and weaponry will let you butcher the poor fools who think they can just swing their heavy tools around and bash your head in that way. I think that one skilled warrior with a sword can fight a lot more palookas with hammers and axes than he could if both he and the palookas were unarmed because in some ways the sword is such a good weapon. But, look at today. If you're an elite warrior with NIJ level 4 body armor and a two thousand dollar HK rifle, you can totally be taken out by a random bunch of palookas with AKs and RPGs. The power of firearms and modern small arms is such that they just need a little bit of luck to get you, even though you still have an excellent chance of killing a bunch of them. This impersonal yet significant element of luck leads me to believe that modern warfare is probably the most dangerous and savage the world has ever seen, eg. Battle of Stalingrad.