As I get more advanced in BJJ, people sometimes ask me if I’ll have to register my body as a weapon. My answer is always “no”, but I’ve never been able to explain why. Well, it came to me this morning. It happened like this:
See, my workplace forbids weapons of any kind. I’ve always had a Swiss army knife in my drawer, and it often comes in quite handy. And every time I use it, I think about what I would say if confronted by some officious official espousing the no-weapons rule: I would say it’s not a weapon; it’s a tool.
So this morning, as I was using the pliers to pull a twisted staple out of my carpet (loathe building 45), this apothegm came back to me as a perfect response to the BJJ-practitioner-as-weapon question:
I’m not a weapon. I’m a tool.
