A Gary, Ind., high school freshman was arrested after she injured a student with a mace -- a spiked ball attached to a long wooden stick by a metal chain.
The 15-year-old girl, who was not identified, swung the weapon at a teacher but instead struck a fellow student who attempted to intervene, the Gary Post-Tribune reported Friday. The second student, a 19-year-old senior, suffered cuts on her hand.
"It's heavy, and it's metal, and it's sharp," Detective Sgt. Darlene Breitenstein said of the weapon. The girl, who is being held at the Lake County (Ind.) Juvenile Justice Center on battery charges, told police she brought the weapon to school because she was "tired of getting picked on."
Via Ace
Does anyone know if a weapon like this, with a chain attaching the haft to the head, is properly called a mace? I think what she brought was a morningstar.
I thought a mace has a fixed weighted head while a flail has a detached head on a chain.. at least that's what Diablo II says..
Posted by: Jake | April 20, 2007 at 11:06 AM
I thought a flail didn't have a head and a ball and chain on a stick was a morningstar.
Posted by: gail | April 20, 2007 at 11:07 AM
Althought there are probably lots of different names for these things. But I don't think mace is right. A mace is just a big nasty club
Posted by: gail | April 20, 2007 at 11:08 AM
Where in the hell did she get it?
Posted by: Pixie | April 20, 2007 at 11:17 AM
It's a morning star.
Of course the girl is a idiot because all teachers wear a "Broach of blunt weapons protection +3." So the saving throw was only like a 4 of a 1d20.
Rookies.
Posted by: Rob B. | April 20, 2007 at 11:20 AM
Sean writes:
I'm pretty sure Jake's right and it's a mace if it's just the stick and a flail if it has a chain. Also, I think morningstar just refers to the spiky head so both a spiky mace and a spiky flail can be called a morningstar.
Posted by: gail | April 20, 2007 at 11:56 AM
It makes me think of Mark Silverman's song /I Am A Medieval Man/. The kid probably didn't mean anything by it; he just got carried away. Once you start swinging a mace around it can get away from you. They're unwieldy.
Yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle there was an article about a 33-year-old man in Rohnert Park having stabbed his mother to death with a sword --a rapier, to be precise. It wasn't an accident; too many holes for that.
And /that/ makes me think of the Garrison Keillor story about his aunt gleefully reading a newspaper article about a man who brained his own mother with an iron skillet in a dispute over five dollars. "What kind of person would kill his own mother?" she said. "...With a /skillet/... For /five dollars/?"
Pretty soon it'll be illegal to have sharp things. Or blunt things. You can't get real pseudoephedrine in the toothpaste aisle anymore because they're afraid you'll make amphetamine out of it. Already in Wisconsin they're trying to restrict sales of baking soda because someone might use it to prepare crack cocaine.
I'm hoarding pencils in case they decide to protect children from poking themselves in the eye with one.
Meanwhile the U.S. is still overwhelmingly the world's biggest supplier of weapons of mass destruction, including land mines and rocket bombs. It's time for everyone to see /Bowling For Columbine/ again.
Posted by: Marco McClean | April 20, 2007 at 04:42 PM
Sexist! The kid was a girl. Do you just automatically assume that anyone with a large, spiked medieval weapon is a boy???? :b
Posted by: gail | April 20, 2007 at 06:03 PM