Friday, January 26, 2007

Gun vs. Japanese Sword

We saw the oddest thing today. Somehow someone somewhere got the bright idea of pitting an American military-issued .45 caliber handgun against an exquisitely made Japanese sword. Granted, the lead bullet didn’t have the metal casing the military requires nowadays, but that doesn’t make it any less of a bullet, which was being aimed at the edge of the aforementioned samurai weapon.

Many slow-motion playbacks later revealed an astonishing thing. The blade was so insanely sharp that, upon impact, it sliced the bullet completely in half.

The question of whether or not a sword would be able to survive being shot at from any angle other than dead-on the business end will be saved for another day. What matters now is we have undeniable proof that the samurai who is able to wield his blade fast enough to slice bullets in mid-air while simultaneously dodging the fragments would be a) invincible and b) able to obtain a real-life bullet-slicing weapon for all his bullet-slicing needs.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I remember seeing another TV show clip on YouTube in which they use M-60 to test an authentic Japanese sword. I think the sword managed to cut a few bullets in half before it finally broke.

This story reminds me of an anime drama named Rupan Sansei. There is this character in the drama who can defend himself from gun attacks by cutting off incoming bullets.

Admontius said...

I don't know about bullets, but on Myth Busters they did prove that you can't slice through the barrel of a world war II era machein gun with a samurai sword. Occasionally you could bend the barrel if it was hot enough but otherwise the sword didn't do much to the barrel. It would be cool if you could go all matrix on the bullets though.

Star said...

An M-60? Yikes. This was a single shot, and it left a ding in the blade, so I can imagine that swords can only take so many hits of that force before they break. Thanks for the comment! :)

Admontius- Why am I not surprised to hear that Myth Busters had an episode pitting a sword against a machine gun? ;P When it's Old Weaponry vs. New, we all know who will win. Nonetheless, it's a nice anime pretext.