I read up on a weapon of old yesterday usually used by sailors and hoods called a "slungshot" consisting of a rope tied to the wrist with a couple feet of rope attached to a monkey fist with a lead weight inside or just a weight or rock and has since become highly illegal in the modern world for obvious reasons, mostly due to the ease of concealment within long sleeves.

This lead to a crazy story during the anti-western movement in China wherein a small group of Catholic Nuns was cornered by an angry Chinese mob. As the nuns raised their hands to the sky to pray in their last moments, someone caught sight of a book of passages they keep in their sleeves of their robes, mistook them for slungshots, and cried out in fear, "Loaded sleeves!" The ensuing panic of the crowd created a large enough gap for them to make their escape.

Truly an example of the soft overcoming the hard. Never underestimate the power of soft weapons. ;-)