<head><style>body{font-size:10pt;font-family:arial,sans-serif;background-color:#ffffff;color:black;}p{margin:0px;}</style></head><body><font color="#000000"><font size="2"><font face="arial,sans-serif">> If not now when? We have already had the patient on life support for 6
years. Pull the<br>> damn plug. Let the foils and epees go with grace to meet
their French/Russian maker. </font></font></font><br><font color="#000000"><font size="2"><font face="arial,sans-serif"><br>It's not on life support, which is extraordinary measures without which it dies. Without any extraordinary measures, there are still the occasional rare epee bouts, just as without any extraordinary measures, there are the occasional rare offensive beer mug bouts.<br><br>"Pulling the plug" means letting the natural thing happen. But what is being called "pulling the plug" is not letting the natural thing happen, but preventing the natural thing from happening. <br><br>In fact, we pulled the plug years ago, when we dropped the rule making epees the default weapon. And they have become very obscure since then. But they haven't naturally died out.<br><br>They have become so obscure that somebody today has claimed that a problem exists that there are events with no epee marshals. (The claim was of course theoretical, and no such event was cited. But it was claimed.)</font></font></font> <font size="2">In fact, occasionally people want to use them, and we have always been able to marshal them. If they want the rare epee bout, why not?</font><font size="2"><font size="2"><br></font><br>Robin of Gilwell / Jay Rudin</font></body>