Slinging.org Forum - Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence

Curious Aardvark Forum Moderation Offline Taller than the average Dwarf Posts: 13965 Midlands England Gender:	Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence Reply #30 - Mar 28^th, 2012 at 7:00am rusty balls = rustic balls And I've also got plenty rubber glue
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momanoheadhunter Descens Offline Slinging Rocks! Posts: 116 Southeast Texas, Gender:	Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence Reply #31 - Mar 28^th, 2012 at 7:13am Curious Aardvark wrote on Mar 27^th, 2012 at 4:18pm: got to pop into town tomorrow - couple of bags of balloons are on my shopping list Pretty sure I've still got a bucket of sand in my workshop. Ahh. sand in the balloon ? I dont think my kiddies will want to play if I lob those in to the air underhanded .
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perpetualstudent

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Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence
Reply #32 - Mar 28^th, 2012 at 7:51am

jlasud wrote on Mar 28^th, 2012 at 2:23am:

If you take a rusty ball in your hand and squeeze it,you'll be surprised how much force it takes to flatten it.You could put it on a table and suddenly push on it with your whole body weight and still it might not be totally flattened.

Right, but the question is how much of the force is eaten up? The only way I could think of to test that would be to push as hard as you can on a scale and see how much force you can exert. Then push down on a rusty ball on that same scale and see what the difference is. My guess, which admittedly is something of a SWAG, is that you won't see that much of a reduction.

Don't get me wrong I'd rather be hit with a rusty ball than a stone Roll Eyes

but my point overall is that it would still be dangerous and not that much of an improvement over an insulated battery (especially since the mass would actually be greater I'd think). For comparison's sake I would also much rather get hit with a rusty ball than a bean bag round from a shotgun. Honestly we've had real trouble in making LTL ammunition for guns. Especially early on beanbag rounds and rubber bullets punctured and killed. Humans are both incredibly resilient and incredibly fragile, temporary incapacitation with no lasting effects is a tall order. Any weapon used against a human brings a risk of lasting damage and death and so ought to be weighed carefully.

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Jaegoor Interfector Viris Spurii Offline Slinging Rocks! Posts: 2850 Gender:	Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence Reply #33 - Mar 28^th, 2012 at 8:23am http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nQQk8meHXE
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Rat Man

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Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence
Reply #34 - Mar 28^th, 2012 at 8:34am

A bad choice for non lethal ammo is a raw egg. When You see someone throw an egg in a cartoon it just explodes comically on someone's face with no actual damage. In real life an egg is just as bad as a smooth stone. It is heavy, dense, and hits hard. Once, when we were teens, I threw an egg by hand at a friend who had made some wise arsed comment about me. I expected the cartoon reaction but it looked like I'd punched him in the jaw. His face was very swollen and red where the egg hit. I felt terrible. Don't sling eggs at anything unless you intend to damage it.

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Dan

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Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence
Reply #35 - Mar 28^th, 2012 at 9:17am

That and carrying an egg could get messy. Tongue

Perpetual student was right on, finding something that is LTL that can still stop a person without killing them is quite difficult. In fact I believe almost every ltl weapon can and has been used leathaly if it has seen much use in the field, tasers are used thousands of times and occasionaly they stop someones heart, riot batons which are supposed to be used to hit the legs of rioters and hippies can easily be used to kill someone if you hit them in the head, and beanbag rounds aren't supposed to be at pointblank for a reason. So from these endevors we can find that an LTL ammo that doesn't have the capacity to kill and stop the attacker is going to be incredibly hard to find. At least with BFT, when you get into irritants like pepper spray or any kind of capsasum tech (http://www.pepperball.com/products.html Cool

), you have a much lower chance of lethatlity (probably 0%). So if you had some kind of kind of large harder pepper ball for sling ammo, That's about the best LTL ammo I can think of that doesn't have a chance of death.

As to where the guard was I do not know as I wasn't there. But it's not like prison that guards are constantly patroling the place I think they have one maybe 2 guards for the whole school so he easily could have been on the other side of the school and the situation could have ended not nearly as favorably. Or it could have been as you said, IDK. Either way it's in the past now and it ended the best possible way.

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I was pretty good at slinging like 10 years ago.

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Morphy

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Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence
Reply #36 - Mar 28^th, 2012 at 12:57pm

Rat Man wrote on Mar 28^th, 2012 at 8:34am:

A bad choice for non lethal ammo is a raw egg. When You see someone throw an egg in a cartoon it just explodes comically on someone's face with no actual damage. In real life an egg is just as bad as a smooth stone. It is heavy, dense, and hits hard. Once, when we were teens, I threw an egg by hand at a friend who had made some wise arsed comment about me. I expected the cartoon reaction but it looked like I'd punched him in the jaw. His face was very swollen and red where the egg hit. I felt terrible. Don't sling eggs at anything unless you intend to damage it.

No doubt. When I first started slinging I slung a few eggs at a wooden fence. The noise was no different than a stone hitting it.

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bigkahuna

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Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence
Reply #37 - Mar 28^th, 2012 at 8:44pm

I may be missing something here, but why the concern for non-lethal ammo? Did that guy pull a non-lethal knife??I would have hit him with anything I had and had I been there I am pretty sure when I saw the knife I would have draw my gun and ordered him to drop the knife! When somebody pulls a knife in a fight it changes everything. It has gone from just an altercation to a possible life and death struggle. Undecided

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Bill Skinner past-moderator Offline Slinging Rocks! Posts: 3292	Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence Reply #38 - Mar 28^th, 2012 at 9:33pm What bigkahuna said about the situation. I think a rusty ball to the temple will be fatal, it has mass. There is going to be a fine line between light enough to be non lethal and heavy enough to break bones or rupture something. Maybe a hacky sack in duct tape?
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xxkid123

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Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence
Reply #39 - Mar 28^th, 2012 at 11:22pm

Well if you're going for non lethal self defense then just don't use a sling at all. While Dan's friend was ready in this scenario, in a surprise situation you would probably be better off with using your ammo as a fist weight.

If you had to, then I recall that instead of a rusty ball, Jaegor first proposed a water balloon filled with gel (water and agarose) and covered in duct tape. Question is, will it land with a light splat or will it easy knock someone out could? What if you hit them in the torso. Will it be enough to stop them?

BTW: kudos to your friend Dan.

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jlasud

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Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence
Reply #40 - Mar 29^th, 2012 at 6:49am

As we know it,the LTL to lethal line is very thin and moves from person to person and situation to situation.
For raw eggs..we've tried to slung a few with my buddy and discovered that with a long sling and a fast acceleration they tend to break due to the G forces. With a gentle lob they're fine though.
For a viable LTL ammo what Dan suggested,a pepper ball is something i could see as a good option. Maybe powdered pepper loaded in a single small baloon. I highly doubt that could be fatal in any case if it's packed in a single ballon and not bigger than a chicken egg.

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Curious Aardvark

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Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence
Reply #41 - Mar 29^th, 2012 at 7:15am

you're all missing the point of deformable ammo.

It's not the total amount of energy in the missile that matters, it's how it's imparted to the target.

Classic example take a bb gun that also fires lead pellets.
Fire both a bb and a lead pellet at a pane of fairly tough glass.

The lead pellet will hit a pane of glass and deform, not breaking the glass. The energy is applied relatively slowly over a spreading area. This not only lowers energy at point of impact, but allows the energy to be transfererred over a period of time and a variable surface area.

The steel bb - same weight as the pellet and fired with the same velocity - will hit the glass. Because it cannot deform to spread the energy - all the energy is concentrated in a very narrow area and the energy is transmitted very very quickly to the narrow point - so it will almost always break the glass.

So of course if you push on a rusty ball on a scale you won't see any difference - because all you are measuring is downward force. You are not measuring area over which the force is imparted or the time it takes to transmit the energy from your hand to the scale.

Of course you could still kill someone if you hit them hard enough in the right place.
But this is considerably less likely than with non-deformable ammunition.

BK I am concerned with non-lethal ammo for 2 very good reasons.

1) killing people with slings will bring the sling to the notice of knee-jerk authorities, which is always a bad thing.
2) hurting or injuring with greatly reduced chance of killing someone is preferable in the vast majority of situations.

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perpetualstudent

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Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence
Reply #42 - Mar 29^th, 2012 at 11:05am

Curious Aardvark wrote on Mar 29^th, 2012 at 7:15am:

you're all missing the point of deformable ammo.

It's not the total amount of energy in the missile that matters, it's how it's imparted to the target.

Classic example take a bb gun that also fires lead pellets.
Fire both a bb and a lead pellet at a pane of fairly tough glass.

The lead pellet will hit a pane of glass and deform, not breaking the glass. The energy is applied relatively slowly over a spreading area. This not only lowers energy at point of impact, but allows the energy to be transfererred over a period of time and a variable surface area.

The steel bb - same weight as the pellet and fired with the same velocity - will hit the glass. Because it cannot deform to spread the energy - all the energy is concentrated in a very narrow area and the energy is transmitted very very quickly to the narrow point - so it will almost always break the glass.

So of course if you push on a rusty ball on a scale you won't see any difference - because all you are measuring is downward force. You are not measuring area over which the force is imparted or the time it takes to transmit the energy from your hand to the scale.

Of course you could still kill someone if you hit them hard enough in the right place.
But this is considerably less likely than with non-deformable ammunition.

Yes. And no. Measuring how much force it takes to deform is a useful measure because it does decrease the amount of energy transferred to the target. You're absolutely right about how that energy gets transferred, but you are missing the fact that the total amount of energy transferred matters too. To take your argument to the extreme, getting shot with a full metal jacket round should be less preferable than getting shot with soft pointed rounds when in reality the opposite is true. The dynamics are complex. Yes, if we wanted to measure perfectly you'd need pressure pads hooked up to a computer to measure changes in area and time preferably down to the nanosecond. In this type of situation though, I'm more concerned about the total energy being transferred than having a dynamic area of impact. Your example of glass is fine, except we are concerned with more than penetration if we are talking about a head injury.

I'd be willing to bet that an duct tape insulated battery has less mass than a rusty ball. And that is the most important measure in this situation. Using a rusty ball would likely have been worse.

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Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence
Reply #43 - Mar 29^th, 2012 at 11:23am

xxkid123 wrote on Mar 28^th, 2012 at 11:22pm:

Well if you're going for non lethal self defense then just don't use a sling at all. While Dan's friend was ready in this scenario, in a surprise situation you would probably be better off with using your ammo as a fist weight.

If you had to, then I recall that instead of a rusty ball, Jaegor first proposed a water balloon filled with gel (water and agarose) and covered in duct tape. Question is, will it land with a light splat or will it easy knock someone out could? What if you hit them in the torso. Will it be enough to stop them?

Non-lethal for self defense is assessing the situation long before hand, avoiding danger and using your head and your cell phone to summon help when help is needed. If you're jumped or in some other way bodily attacked then the game is changed, lethal force should be a first option and a sling is one of the last things I would use for defense. My luck some guy would choke me to death with it. If you're far enough away to sling, you're far enough away to run. If you're in a confrontation you almost always have the choice to stand down and walk away. If defending someone else you should try and call first because if the situation gets out of your control and someone is injured or killed you're going to have to answer the question of why you didn't first call police. If you're far enough away to pull out your sling, load ammo, wind up, gauge your target one may argue that calling police should have been one of your first moves. Outside of that, self defense if attacked unexpectedly should result in a lethal response.

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jlasud

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Re: Sling Use (And Used) for Self Defence
Reply #44 - Mar 29^th, 2012 at 2:29pm

The police may arrive in 10 minutes as to load a sling and the ammo to reach it's target may take 5-10 sec. The difference can mean life and death.
But i highly agree that detecting,avoiding trouble is the #1
Also your personality will get you in certain places..for some in those places violence is common..for some it's unknown,so this is how it all starts,what you draw around you. Seeing the physical manifestation of violence is not where it starts.

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