Slinging

[TheSilentOne]

It is always good to learn a new skill which one day may be essential to your survival for food or self defense.

http://www.slinging.org/

[Raul]

Likey, likey, likey..

[blindside]

Boy do I suck using a sling. Sure I can hurl a rock a long way, but accurately? Not so much. David must have practiced alot....

[TheSilentOne]

Boy do I suck using a sling. Sure I can hurl a rock a long way, but accurately? Not so much. David must have practiced alot....

Pitching the baseball at 90 miles per hour, you would need accuracy to cause the man to swing his baseball bat. He misses the ball with deceiving trajectory, speed and velocity.

Likewise, it is the same with throwing rocks to hit an animal in a straight line for food with serious power and devastating accuracy.

I am sure King David in Biblical times had cadres of young Israelite military men training first for distance, knowing how much power is needed to throw, good timing then work for deadly accuracy because their very survival depended on it.

[tellner]

A sling with a properly made rock or lead slingstone can easily produce ballistics equal to a .38.

Accuracy? I've met more than one former IDF soldier who served with Ethiopian or Yemeni immigrants. The immigrants who had been shepherds or farmers could pick off birds or moving animals.

[TheSilentOne]

I suspect that in biblical times, The sling was more for hunting to gather food for his family or to ward animals away from the sheep, protecting his farm investments as there were no coins back then. It was a bartering system.

It could be that in ancient warfare, the sling probably would have been more for ambushing the enemy with a first strike or to knock out the scout then running after them in attack formation with swords and shields to fight.

I would imagine to hit a bird flying in the air required a great degree of skill. It would be easier to hit big game like the antelope.

[arnisador]

Neat site!

[tellner]

Silentone, you don't have to speculate. There's a lot of information on ancient warfare including the use of the sling. It was widely used by skirmishers in the Old World. The sling and the altatl were the missle weapons of the Aztec and Inca empires.

[TheSilentOne]

Silentone, you don't have to speculate. There's a lot of information on ancient warfare including the use of the sling. It was widely used by skirmishers in the Old World. The sling and the altatl were the missle weapons of the Aztec and Inca empires.

I am beginning to see that slinging was not only exclusive to the Holy Land between the Israelites, the Roman Army and the Ishamelites.

Examples of ancient slinging have been discovered in places like North America in early times.

Slinging has also been found in odd places like China, given their heavy emphasis on ancient swords, battle weapons and savage kung fu fights to the death.

[TheSilentOne]

While this is not necessarily slinging ... It does give you a good idea of the high quality skills soldiers or monks must have been quite something to see.

You almost can go back in ancient times visualizing the applications with a pouch and a sling.

This is shaolin kung fu. Granted some of the movements are very fancy for demonstration purposes but imagine how effective they must have been in fierce battles.

The slinging aspect would have been grounded in more realistic movements mimicking natural combat movements in do or die battles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JgMmj4XnEI