None of us can be trusted to act responsible with a personal fire thrower.

I somehow knew instantly

To add on about using a knife for defense that you lightly touched.

You never want to be in a knife fight. Nobody wins in a knife fight. Especially if it’s a pocket knife.

I have a bright neon orange & green bush/field/combat knife that I take with me when I go camping. It’s largely a tool for managing my camp, but I have practiced defensive fighting with it, but I am no knife fighting expert. I see it as a last-ditch effort of defense against a wild animal or human where my life is already on the line. And wearing it on my hip around camp advertises “this person is armed” to any human that has ill intent that comes across my camp during daylight hours. I’d still rather grab my walking stick for a good head bonking and sternum busting, and I would do my best to do that before pulling the knife for defensive combat use.

So, to be abundantly clear. There are no winners in a knife fight. The “winner” goes to the hospital.

How about an overpowered green laser to the face?

Point at face and pull the trigfer, shortly. Shouldn’t be enough to actually harm but burning hair, brows and eyelashes are great at resistributing attention ^^

One of my lady friends practiced butterfly knife tricks for years just to intimidate creeps. I’m a little scared myself when I watch her play with them.

What do you have against weevils? :(

You can get one that attaches to one of those small camping propane tanks for under $30.

Do you think it burns wasp and mosquito wings fast enough?

Get some silly string, too, you won’t regret it.

Look at Temu Casey Jones over here…

You say that as if casting fireball is ever a bad idea.

Oh no, wont anybody think of the sex criminals just minding their own business harrassing women.

There is no level of violence unacceptable for self defense against sexual assault. Keep your hands to yourself.

EVERY TIME ANYTHING WOMAN RELATED COMES UP IN THE FEED, HERE YOU ARE ACTING IT OUT, EVERY. FUCKING. TIME. HOLY HELL WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST WOMEN? I NEED TO KNOW. WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?

Alright. Let’s do this. I’ll bite.

So first thing’s first, this article is clearly click bait and no, the Chinese government isn’t going to start encouraging or even allowing women to simply carry flamethrowers and open fire on any threat like it’s nothing. So let’s start by establishing that we are arguing hypotheticals here over a clearly click bait article.

However, the point of self defence isn’t to provide an equivalent punishment to the crime committed, but to allow someone to use violence preemptively against an aggressor to stay safe. You don’t practice self defense after you get raped, but hopefully before you do.

This opens the door to many difficult and vague situations where it’s hard to tell whether an act was justified or not, but that doesn’t mean that burning someone is necessarily in any way less justifiable than shooting them or stabbing them etc.

So in this hypothetical scenario, the question isn’t whether burning someone is equivalent to being sexually harassed, because that’s not the type of situation that self defence is meant to be used in. It’s not equivalent but rather preemptive.

So we are now asking the question: are women entitled to self defence against sexual harassment? And I’d guess the answer probably lies in the middle of “yes every time” and “never” because no one should get raped for lack of self defence avenues, but also I don’t think someone should get burnt to death for cat calling someone else, no matter how inappropriate I may think it is.

However, if a woman (honestly, any SA victim, not just women) gets touched inappropriately and feels threatened, I think it’s fair to allow her to preemptively attack. So I’d say you can’t argue self defence without the presence of a physical threat. And even then, self defence obviously needs to be clearly outlined to minimise the likelihood of unjustified attacks.

That being said, this is both obviously clickbait and also a terrible idea simply because of how much uncontrolled collateral damage a flamethrower can do to others, structures and even first responders. So yeah, it’s a dumb idea. But I don’t think that’s because sexual assault is not a basis for self defence, rather because flamethrowers are extraordinarily unsafe weapons for everyone involved.

Are your concerns for others or yourself?

Over catcalling? That seems somewhat insane though no?

Unwanted touching or stalking or threatening and such i could see of course, but reciprocating men trying to get a womans attention (in a crappy and rude fashion) with literally death and/or permanent disfigurement and pain is a little drastic.

We rightly abhor the insane acid attacks committed on women over some minor transgression out of some fucked sense of honor, sometimes happening in certain countries; how is this a viable position to hold just because the genders are reversed?

I too hope that anyone using this shit gets prosecuted and punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Well, that’s the issue I find with this device, the same as guns or general physical force used against harasment and violence against women: it just leads to the woman getting arrested because the issue in the first place is that law enforcement and courts DO NOT take harasment and violence against women seriously