BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — Local nunchuck owner Rob Langford was reportedly just itching for a reason to nunchuck something while testing the weight of each of his weapon’s chained-together ends, confirmed sources.
“Look, when you’re a nunchuck owner, everything looks pretty damn nunchuckable. Hammer, meet nail, you know what I mean?” said Langford, who bought the nunchucks at a swap meet from a man who refused to take credit cards. “Unfortunately, due to ‘the law,’ you actually have to be fairly judicious when it comes to what you can and can’t nunchuck. But I’ll promise you this: I will nunchuck the first thing I can nunchuck, assuming I have the legal cover to do so. So, please, step on my property without an invite. I dare you, ’cause I got some nunchucks just a’waitin to meet some trespasser’s flesh.”
Historically, the most popular self-defense weaponry has been limited to pepper spray, tasers, and handguns, marking Langford’s preference for nunchucks as a decidedly off-the-beaten-path choice.
“Rob’s got a temper—hell, having one’s practically a prerequisite for nunchuck ownership,” explained Crystal Samson, Langford’s partner. “But that’s what I love him for—he may be a rageful, odd little man, but that he’ll nunchuck whatever needs nunchucking on my behalf is the kind of sweetness you just don’t find every day. Just the other day, he tried to nunchuck the remote control to change the channel for me. It almost worked. We just had to order a new remote afterwards. That’s just life in a nunchuck household.”
Military historians and other combat-oriented academics have long critiqued nunchucks as something of a hobbyist’s weapon, given its serious limitations as a means of defense against, say, any attacker more than an arm’s length away.
“Throughout history, you see this pattern—sort of a ‘have nunchucks, will use them’ philosophy, in essence,” noted Miranda Cañeda, PhD, a weapons expert at The Smithsonian. “Now, due to nunchucks’ deficiencies as weapons—they only really work at close range, there’s a learning curve that leads to a lot of injuries for the user, and so on—the kind of person who opts into nunchuck ownership is a special, specific type. And that type is one to watch out for—it’s got nunchucks.”
At press time, Langford was doing his best to quietly stalk around his home, nunchucks at the ready, itching to absolutely blast a fly buzzing through the place to pieces should he get the chance.
