Handheld weapons

Handheld weapons preceded weapons designed to kill or incapacitate from a distance. Such weapons included wooden clubs and pointed sticks eventually leading to pointed, stone-tipped spears, and knives, daggers, and swords made from wood or stone. 

A major development in human armament was the discovery of metal and the ability to work metal, and this rapidly led to metal knives, daggers, and swords and metal-tipped spears and arrows. These were much superior to the wooden and stone weapons, and were used for many years until the development of a handheld weapon that surpassed all others and that had a profound effect on human history—the firearm. 

With rapid advances in technology there is no doubt that firearms and ammunition will continue to develop and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that firearms could be replaced by some other form of handheld weapon. 

The National Institute of Justice has put together multivolume compendiums of instrumentation relevant to chemical and biological weapons detection. However, none of these books contains a critical review of the effectiveness of the technologies. One instrument included in the publication is a portable, handheld, ion mobility spectrometry chemical agent monitor with moderate to high selectivity, but only when used in open spaces, far from vapor sources such as smoke, cleaning compounds, and fumes. This would seem to make it useless in the battlefield. Another listed chemical agent monitor has a below 5% false positive rate. With one in 20 false positives, no one could reasonably act upon an alarm. 

Metal detectors should be installed to screen visitors, customers, service personnel, and visitors in high-security areas. In other situations implement handheld metal detectors to use in identifying weapons. 

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