Oleg has a great post about older-style martial arts and more modern weapons.
There are many anti-gun people who will claim that you don’t NEED a gun, just learn a martial art, and while the more classical martial arts are GREAT things to know, really you don’t need to go too deep down the martial arts rabbit hole before they start teaching you to fight with impact and edged weapons.
It’s easy to extrapolate this onto modern firearms, as they too are martial arts weapons, and knowing how (and how not to, and WHEN not to) deploy them is indeed a martial art in itself.
Now there are lots of reasons people get into martial arts, and some of these reasons have lead to variations of the art that get away from safety and self defense. Things like Tae Bo take the fighting aspects out of it and focus on fitness. You have your strip-mall Dojos that cater to kids that teach more discipline, goal orientation, and avoidance over actually winning in a fight. You have the various competition martial arts which are probably the closest to real fighting, but the quick and severe attacks that might save your life are NOT what you want to do against a friendly competitor.
Still when you get to people who’s goal is to go home safely at the end of the day no matter what dangers you might encounter, those people ALSO choose to carry defensive arms.
I have a brown belt in Bang-Fu – the ancient martial art of the speeding lead projectile.
And then there are those Martial Arts that explicitly teach modern firearms use in the offense and defense as an ordinary (or at least regularly scheduled) part of the instruction curricula.
http://www.teppojutsu.com/
Firearm use REALLY is a “martial art.”
Even the samurai studied it.
Excerpt:
Teppo Jutsu refers to the “art of the rifle”, a warrior art practiced in feudal Japan by the Samurai. Contrary to popular belief, the Samurai did use firearms and as with all their weapons arts, were quite the skilled “riflemen”. Similar to the other weapons employed, for the Samurai this art encompassed all aspects of the rifle as a weapon: achieving accuracy, proper cleaning and maintenance, rifle and ammunition design and development, as well as using the rifle in Close Quarters Combat. This latter included such skills as weapons retention, striking with the rifle as a blunt weapon, and even the use of the bayonet (Juken Jutsu)
It also seems to be called Hojutsu, the art of gunnery.
http://www.forceoptions.net/HJ_bios.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C5%8Djutsu
Neat, I always heard that the Samurai shunned the use of firearms (as well as other weapons and techniques) as dishonorable ways of fighting. Thanks for sharing!
Japan being a low-tech country, the use of firearms was limited more by the scarcity of good metal, or people who could design small arms, and by the lack of roads for moving artillery. By the end of Satsuma Rebellion, the rebels lost pretty much all of their modern arms, hence the forlorn charge into the teeth of the opposition.
But the Japanese did go from no guns in the 1540s to massive use of them by the 1570s, and the Shogunate got established in part through the bombardment of enemy castles with Portugese cannon. The Japanese government knew how well firearms worked and did their best to monopolize them.
Yup — it was only after the Shogunate had established total control that firearms became “icky” — lest they be used to topple the Shogunate.
Gun control is never about controlling guns — it’s about controlling the general population by keeping them helpless.