Also, if you don't practice weapons how do you practice practical defense against them? Please don't be offended by this question as it is not meant to be a jab I am just curious to the philosophy of your school on this subject.
This is a continuation off of the weapons thread. I really think that it deserves its own discussion here.
The question was raised as to whether a person can effectively be taught to defense against weapons if they are not trained in how to use those weapons offensively.
To me, there are two parts to this question.
Part 1) Can the attacker provide a realistic attack without previous weapons training?
Part 2) Can the defender be aware of how the attacker may move or react and how the weapon is wielded without having a background in the offensive use of the weapon?
****Now...for the sake of this discussion, we will assume that the questions of realistic self defense, standardized curriculum, etc don't enter into the discussion. i.e. we know that you can only simulate what a real attack would be like, that subject has been beaten to death; and we know that any standardized curriculum has a certain level of effectiveness due to the way that standardization is done. We can assume that standardization is to build muscle memory and to provide a construct for testing, etc. It is obvious that in a real confrontation, stances and exact movements wouldn't be done exactly as they are in standardizations.