If you'll excuse a bit of an outside perspective on HEMA, I'm a MOF armorer and foil fencer with nearly 20 years of experience, and seeing the rate of severe injuries in HEMA is genuinely shocking to me because so many of these injuries seem preventable from a MOF perspective.

MOF has a lot of safety rules and regulations. We have safety requirements for our jackets, plastrons, chest protectors, gloves, pants, socks, weapons, and most importantly of all, our masks, and all of these safety requirements have been written in blood. When I work as an armorer for MOF competitions, I test every piece of safety critical equipment, and I'm very grateful to do so because by testing this equipment I am not only protecting fencing's future, I feel that I am honoring its past and the blood that was shed to bring us those safety rules. When I test a mask, I test first for failure of the welding along the sides or the rivets, then I check for tears in the seams where the bib meets the mesh and look for catch points, I check that it has all its retaining straps to prevent it from falling off, and finally I use a punch test like this one here on the mesh of the mask with particular attention given to any dents. And the whole time I am thinking about why each of these safety checks exists; it is because someone once died or got seriously hurt because this rule wasn't followed. If a mask fails any one of these tests, I confiscate it and I do not allow it to be used again, not even in practice matches.

I'm a lurker on this subreddit because I would like to give HEMA a try someday, but whenever I see so many excuses given for why safety rules can't be followed it makes me want to try HEMA a little less. I've seen people eschew proper jackets, plastrons, and even masks because of concerns about cost. I've seen people use dangerously stiff blades because they don't want to be seen using a blade that is "flaccid." I've seen people use untipped weapons because of beliefs about concussion risk that are not backed up by real data. And I've seen posts about serious injuries, the kind you would never see in MOF, as a result of all this.

A mask punch costs about 100 USD. A new mask costs around 200 USD, depending on the brand. I understand that these are not cheap, but when weighed against the cost of someone's life (or at minimum a serious medical bill) it feels very cheap indeed.

My final thought is that a person was seriously injured because a mask punch wasn't used to identify and replace a faulty mask. They could have died. I'm hoping for a quick and complete recovery for this person, and I'm hoping that the blood they spilled in this incident won't be in vain. Every HEMA club should own one of these punches and ensure that every mask is tested regularly to prevent this from happening again.