What I am asking is that should a person trained only in hand-to-hand combat carry a knife for self-defence? I have never had any knife training. My guess is that there are elements of punch mechanics. If so, can a person let's say trained in Karate able to handle a knife well?

If you were to use a knife, obviously most attackers would be intimidated to go away. I believe some will stay. Multiple attackers who got their ego boosted or a robber who himself have got a knife. Nett effect is that when a serious confrontation do come up, it is indeed extremely serious. Meaning that when you really do need a weapon for fighting and not as an intimidation factor, it is usually a life-and-death situation. What would you do? Eg. 3 street punks with bats that have cornered you waiting to beat you up. Grab the weakest one and hold the knife on him to get yourself out? What about slashing your way out?

if you have trained and are comfortable in hand to hand, and know nothing about a knife, it would probrably not help you - it could also defocus you and create chaos in your mind deciding to go with what you know and are good at, or with the knife.

on the other hand - lets say you have a CS gas canister and you have planned out what you want to do - you see 3 guys attacking you - you put up a cloud of gas in each ones face, and then you launch into an assult with your skills, while they have lowered capacity. or, you do techniques that you know, but with a kobotan in your hand. these compliment your knowledge and skills.

That's the one thing I don't get. Every culture has some form of knife. Why aren't these trained more in MA. My AKK instructor made sure to teach us how to use the three weapons in AKK (I already knew staff, but he does teach how to use one to his brown belts), not just how to defend against them. The reason is that knowing how to use the weapons gives us better understanding of how to defend them, as well as the ability, especially with stick or staff, to obtain an "equalizer" and fight back. Like I said earlier, I almost always have a lock-blade pocket knife big enough to fight with on my person. If someone pulls a weapon on me, there's my equalizer.

I usually carry wtih me a big ass heckler koch .45. I think that will pretty much freeze any 2 legged attacker in his tracks . If not I'm sure the FMJ or hydrashock will

Knives and kubatons are poor man's self defense lol.

Frame of mind/quick wittedness in general are good defenses. There's a lot of dumb people out there who are bad at thinking on their feet....and evven then....

One state-Arizona, I believe-use to have a law that if you carried a gun you had to show 2" of holster.

I don't think they had a lot of those people being attacked.

You spray three guys and let them fall forward or kick the closest away from you and fall back. You don't want to enter that cloud of pepper spray, I'd wait for them to start choking & coughing as their falling out of the cloud then attack them again, other wise RUN!! The sprays done
its job.

Some people it doesn't affect fully you could deal with him as he step thru the cloud, most likely his eyes and nose are running. Advanatge to You.

Good counter to a multiple just an tacticle error IMO, entering the pepper spray cloud, that stuff can put a hurt on you, no neeed for all four of you to be coughing, whezzing on bending knee.

Other then that I commend your non lethal, personnel protection package, the Kubaton is almost like brass knuckles.

CobraLionz -I usually carry wtih me a big ass heckler koch .45. I think that will pretty much freeze any 2 legged attacker in his tracks . If not I'm sure the FMJ or hydrashock will

Knives and kubatons are poor man's self defense lol.

Defintely a show stopper and bank account wrecker, but excellent choice of auto pistol, you got taste and rich parents, I assume? Somebodies got money.

So, what I get from this thread, is no one can apply weapons training from traditional MA to modern, legal weapons (which appear to be the gun and knife). It appears that Nekogami pointed to the real applicability: the mindset.