They tazed him three times… and it did NOTHING.
When they finally took him down, he was still fighting.
The judge who sentenced Brian Sanchez-Padilla to 39 total years in prison ruled he used a deadly weapon.
His victims?
Two cops who tried to roust him for sleeping in a public park.
When Sanchez-Padilla got belligerent with the male and female officers, they tried to arrest him…
…and that’s when he went NUTS.
What happened next was a good example of what you DON’T do with a weapon like that.
That’s why you need hear…
How To Avoid 3 Common Tactical Pen Mistakes!
Brian Sanchez-Padilla was a strung-out drug addict who left a treatment center early against doctors’ orders.
He was also high on K2, a synthetic marijuana known for its nasty side effects.
That’s why he was sleeping in a park when the two police officers found him.
His lawyer tried to argue in court that the judge shouldn’t have categorized his pen as a deadly weapon.
But the convicted criminal used that pen to repeatedly stab one of the officers near the eye.
In other words, he was trying to BLIND the cop.
In the end, the police took him down, and he was convicted of aggravated assault (with an enhancement for using a deadly weapon).
But when I read that story, I kept thinking about how it illustrates a very dangerous reality of the pen as a weapon.
Given how many of us carry tactical pens these days, we should learn from this nasty example… and keep a few other facts in mind when carrying a tactical pen.
1. The Tactical Pen Is Not A Knife
Look, I know using a criminal as an example is a little weird, but hear me out.
Lots of people carry tactical pens as emergency weapons, and I’m one of them.
The problem is, a lot of us “good guys,” just like “bad guys” like Brian Sanchez-Padilla, think of the tactical pen as a tiny knife.
It isn’t one.
Now yes, people can be and have been stabbed with pens.
A few years back at “Comic-Con,” two fan-boys famously got into an argument about who was sitting too close to whom, and one stabbed the other with a pen “near the eye.”
The result was pretty ineffective, and the victim went to the hospital with a “minor cut.”
The cop Sanchez-Padilla jabbed, by comparison, was injured more, but not enough to stop the two police officers from taking the scumbag down.
In other words, a tactical pen is more like a “tactical poking device” than it is a knife.
But that brings me to…
2. The Tactical Pen Is Not A Precision Weapon!
Last summer, in Harlem, a guy walked up to another dude on a train platform and tried to stab him in the eye with a pen.
He instead hit the victim in the mouth (and then ran off).
Just like the Comic-con pen-stabber, and just like Brian Sanchez-Padilla, that guy found out fast how hard it is to hit a small target with a pen.
Because the pen (tactical or not) is not as sharp as a knife, the only target you can really dig into are the eyes.
The eyes are small compared to the head.
And the head is usually moving, especially in a fight.
Sanchez-Padilla tried and failed to stab out a cop’s eye.
If he had instead used his tactical pen like a kubotan, to concentrate the pressure of his strikes, he might have been able to stop the cops from taking him down.
(Not that we would have wanted him to.)
The point, though, is that if YOU use a tactical pen, you’re not going to make precision strikes to the eyes.
You’ll have to use it more like a kubotan or yawara (the Japanese term for a wooden dowel).
When you do, you’ll use it to concentrate the force of your hand strikes to those targets you CAN hit.
3. The Tactical Pen Is The WORST Option For Security Checkpoints
By now, if you’re like me, you’re probably seeing how you would use a tactical pen as a tool for defense…
…and if you don’t already have one, you’re thinking about getting one, right?
There’s one big problem, though.
Security people are already “hip” to the idea of the tactical pen.
They’ll spot the knurled grip and the all-metal construction, and if you try to take a tactical pen past a security checkpoint…
…they just might take it from you.
For that reason, if you want a pen weapon for flying, or when going past any other security checkpoint, switch out your tactical model for a non-tactical all-metal writing pen.
The Zebra F701, or one of the all-metal Parker pens, are good choices for temporary “security carry.”
For anywhere that isn’t a security area, however, I love a good tactical pen.
They’re sturdy, they have the design features you want in a self-defense tool like this (including good traction for gripping and jabbing), and… well, they’re just freaking cool.
As long as you know what the tactical pen can and can’t do, you can avoid critical mistakes when using it as a weapon.
