Why use a handgun, or a baseball bat as a tool? Your chances of being accidentally effective increase with the use of a self defense tool. The tool doesn’t increase your skill or your accuracy; it only magnifies the trauma when you do manage to line things up just right.

With this perspective, the knife, stick and especially the gun become not just desired, but necessary, to commit effective acts of violence.

There are two problems with this approach:

1) Lose the self defense tool and you got nothing.

The weapon’s fighter is useless without the weapon. Lose it, break it or take it away, and the person becomes helplessly unarmed.

Need a gun and have it taken away, you got nothing. Take his gun when he doesn’t need it, you got nothing.

However, if you can use injury to shut off the brain, you win regardless of whether he needed that gun or not.

2) Not being able to use the self defense tool in conjunction with your own body is a disadvantage.

You can do more work with a shovel than you can with your bare hands—but if you don’t know how to make the most of the shovel, it’s going to be terribly inefficient. It will take more effort to do the same amount of work.

If you understand how to do work with your bare hands as the primary engine to get stuff done, then things like shovels, sledgehammers and pickaxes become snap-on tools that you can use interchangeably, depending on the nature of the work required.

The person who knows how to use their body as an engine and the tool to amplify that effort will be able to do more work more efficiently than the person who does not.

The person who invests all the power in the tool is going to get half as much done, half as well.

So it is with weapons, the tools of violence.

Learn to use your machine first—how to get the work done with your bare hands—and then you’ll know how to get the most out of snap-on self defense tools. And you’ll be able to do it with the confidence that comes from knowing you don’t need the tool to get the work done.

If you can think and move, you’re never unarmed—and having a tool just means you’ll be done sooner.