"Dueling - Your Weapon of Choice?" Topic

So, you've decided to challenge your arch-nemesis to a duel, or, alternatively, you've been challenged to one, and given the choice of weapons.

Which do you choose?

1. Pistols, or course.
2. Rapiers, due to your skill with it, and sharp wit.
3. Sabres, since you prefer slashing attacks.
4. Blunderbusses, since you're a lousy shot.
5. Daggers, for up close and personal work.
6. Goose-down pillows, since you are a pacifist at heart.
7. Other

iocane powder?

Wits.

Poison

7. Thermonuclear weapons, because I like to be sure.

7. Other – aka M203

Banjos

7 : Cannon! Only Girls fight with swords!
Preferably the Armstrong Whitworth four-pounder cannonette, perfect for years of trouble free maiming.

8. Depends upon my opponent. If he is a weedy git, then sledgehammers. If he is a big bruiser, then pikes.

Gentlemen fight with pistols. I would prefer wits but so many of my potential opponents would show up unarmed.

LT

7. Other.

I recall a William Burroughs story about a town inhabited solely by duellists but where the the person calling the duel had to use whatever weapon his "victim" chose be that pistols, WW1 biplanes or what was known as the 50/50 – two pills, one a harmless aspirin, the other deadly poison – "take your pick, pard…"

2 or any type of sword all day any day, left or right handed. I spend more time with a sword in my hands then any 2 other things I do week to week. :)

I'm going to go with "7 Other" but I am not sure the right weapon to go with. The actual weapon I have the most experience with is the M16 family of assault rifles. But the one I am most likely to be better at than my opponent would be baseball bats since I played baseball for years including college. Surely I would have more experience at handling one than the average person?

Haddocks.

7. Claymore. The sword, not the mine.

Bale hook link

Probably awkward as a weapon, but for some reason they make people very uncomfortable. In fact, I've noticed that if you look angry or yell while holding one, people will run away. Fast.

Other: Howitzer.

Since The Duelists is one of my old-time favorite movies I'd have to say sabres. Maybe he will be satisfied with first blood.

20' pikes.

*Balloons* and Blunderbusses

YouTube link

Other: Back in college, a friend and I had a mutual friend, a music major, arrange "Dueling Banjos" for our instruments – tubas! We both live today because the music was hard enough for us to call off the duel…

7. Claymore.

Other (gonkulators)

4

7, Davy Crockettes, just to change the terrain.

8" Howitzers at 50 paces

*Balloons* and Blunderbusses

But there isn't always a sewage farm within easy traveling distance.

LT

According to The Rules, and assuming I *am* the party challenged and therefore have choice of weapons (very important to follow historical form in all of this), I choose custom-made pistols, of course.

Rapiers, because I've been playing with them for almost 15 years. Doesn't mean I'm any good, but they are elegant weapons, and it's not a bad way to go.

David S.

3. I fenced sabre in college.

Smelts!Or anchovies, I'll let the challenged person choose. I am deadly with both!

Planetary Disintegrators

Blunderbusses while mounted on penny farthings. a gentlemans drive-by….

Failing that, longsword or spear.

Pointed stick.

Chap Hop.
YouTube link
link

I agree with LT – the only suitable weapon for a gentleman is a pistol – charging around cutting each other to bits with swords and sabres just doesn't seem to have the sort of tone you want at a duel

Espada y daga (short sword with dagger) because if I am going down I may as well have fun.

Smallsword.

I've fenced for getting on ten years now, and while I wouldn't be out of my depth with sabre or epee, foil is really my thing. And the foil is/was the 'practice version' of the smallsword.

I would prefer rifles at 40 paces, like the famous 1854 duel between Charles Ames Washburn and Benjamin Franklin Washington that ended with Washburn's wounding on the THIRD shot!

I suppose Rapier would be an obvious choice:)

Otherwise a weapon with which I was more proficient and familiar than my opponent.

First to run 13 miles in mixed terrain with 2000 feet of ascending?

A Herring…

Eric

7. Other – Pikachu

It had to be said.

4

Grenade.

The ever-amusing Israel Putnam's choice:

During the French and Indian War Putnam was challenged to a duel by a British major whom he had insulted. Realizing that he would stand little chance in a duel with pistols, Putnam invited the major to his tent and suggested an alternative trial of honor. The two men were sitting on small powder kegs, into each of which Putnam had inserted a slow-burning fuse. The first to squirm or move from his seat would be the loser. As the fuses burned, the major showed increasing signs of anxiety, while Putnam continued to smoke his pipe with a casual air. Seeing the spectators gradually disappear from the tent to escape the impending explosion, the major finally leaped from his keg, acknowledging Putnam as the victor. Only then did Putnam reveal that the kegs contained onions, not gunpowder.

From link

LT

1)Gov 45, because I don't want them to get up

Mark Twain, with his American (not to say "Yankee") sense of pragmatism, saw a duel as a means for one--or both contestants to be killed, purely and simply.

From that perspective, he suggested Battleaxes in a closet, or Gatlings at 20 paces.

Absolutely guaranteed to produce one or more corpses, positively settling the matter between them.

TVAG

Silly: Flamethrower at 10 paces.

Non-silly: Pistol.

In a very strange novel entitled "Osborne's Army", one of the characters finds the several-centuries-old diary of the colonial governor of the island on which the book takes place. Apparently the Crown wanted dueling suppressed, while the young hotheads in the colony wouldn't stand for it. Finally, the governor declared that dueling would remain legal but that the governor would choose the weapons. When the principals in the first affair of honor were brought before him (I'm doing this by memory at a remove of almost 50 years, so I may not have it verbatim): "He led them forth to the pigge stye and, handing each a spade, bade them fling hogges es the one at the other until one should drop from fatigation, the other then being declared victorious." Oddly enough, there were no further duels in the colony.

LT