I'm always out there keeping an eye out for horrible self-defense takes, and in a world that thinks magic boomsticks are scary, hot dog are there a lot of them!
Listen to this girl explain how she would stop a home invader:
I'm just gonna throw this out there:
We have this technology, a thousand years in the making, that started in the 10th century in China. The Chinese perfected a solution of explosive powder that could propel projectiles into their enemies. They called it the fire lance.
The tech quickly made its way westward to the Middle East and Europe, where cannons became all the rage.
Cannons were bulky, so people quickly figured out how to make them lighter and put wheels on them. They changed the barrels to make them effective artillery pieces with longer range. They even put this magic tech on boats!
But that's not all!
The Chinese also developed a weapon called the "hand cannon," which could be carried by an individual soldier.
Pretty soon, these wondrous devices were being used all over the place, as it turns out they were much more effective at stopping bad guys than older weapons.
Shortly after 1400, people had a new breakthrough. See, hand cannons were great, but you had to ignite a fuse before pointing the weapon at your enemy, which was slow and greatly reduced accuracy.
Hand cannons also had short barrels and people realized a longer barrel would make the projectiles travel more accurately.
To fix this issue, people developed a matchlock - a piece of metal that held a smoldering fuse that was cocked back away from the barrel while reloading. Then, a soldier could point his weapon and take aim before pulling a small metal lever that would release the fuse. The embers would touch the powder through a small hole in the back of the barrel and boom!
Using levers was also cumbersome, however, so people invented a curved piece of metal that fits a finger for even better efficiency. This was called a trigger.
Pretty soon, people started wondering if there was a way to shoot more projectiles without having to reload. Take this revolving concept from Germany from 1580:
Such things were too costly for the average soldier, however. Instead, inventors worked on cutting grooves in barrels, known as rifling, to put spins on the metal projectiles so they would travel farther and straighter. They also put swords on the end of the barrels so soldiers could fight hand-to-hand if they didn't have time to reload.
By 1718, reloading became a whole lot easier when this novel invention, also called a gun, was "machined," or automated in an early sense of the word.
But again, this was expensive and the tech wasn't quite there yet, so it wasn't until the late 1800s that these began mass development for the average soldier, starting with the Gatling gun in 1862 (although the Chinese had a weapon called the "string-of-100-bullets cannon" with similar repeating tech by the 17th century).
See, people realized that you could use the explosive force of that magic powder to load another projectile in a repeating motion that would continue for as long as you had projectiles and powder to fire. Putting the projectiles and powder into one handy package made this even easier!
(The government thought some of these ideas were too dangerous for us little people so they banned some of them.)
So yes, you could be live like a caveman and use a stick to stop the bad guys trying to kill you and your family.
Or, and I know this is a really hard concept for those Gen Z Californians, you could embrace 1,000 years of human ingenuity and invention and buy yourself a blaster instead.
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