What is the legality of martial arts within the Criminal code of Canada?

In the Criminal Code of Canada martial arts is a bit of a grey area. I am interested in knowing whether or not it is considered a weapon. The definition of a "weapon" in the criminal code is as follows:





...any thing that is designed to be used to cause injury or death to, or to temporarily incapacitate, a person.





Ergo, if a martial artist were to engage an average person in hand to hand combat the lethality of the martial artist is going to be significantly higher; thus, resulting in injury, death or incapacitation.

What is the legality of martial arts within the Criminal code of Canada?
Martial artists and professional fighters such as boxers, kickboxers, etc. are not treated differently under the law than anybody else. The idea that a trained fighter's body is somehow legally registered as some kind of a deadly weapon is an old myth. However, if you're involved in a violent confrontation with somebody where you used excessive force and injured or killed him, the prosecutor is likely to be more strict with you because he will assume that as a trained fighter, your actions were more deliberate and you should have known better. In other words, a skilled martial artist should be better able to control himself in a fight than an average person, so he would have less of an excuse in stepping over the line and using excessive force.





In reality, though, most black belts have only a marginally higher chance of winning a real-life confrontation than an average person. That chop-suey fighting might look intimidating in the dojo and the movies, but out in the street it's really the bigger guy, the guy who attacks first, the guy with his friends at his side, or the guy with the knife/bat/gun who usually wins.
Reply:Being trained to fight would play into any kind of conviction you may have for a violent confrontation. But it is not true that martial arts combatants are defined 'lethal weapons'.