We had known since childhood that rock beats scissors and scissors beat paper, and had even come to accept the incongruous idea that paper beats rock. We had never known until Tuesday, however, that a flashlight trumps a hammer in a one-on-one confrontation.

We read about this on the front page of Tuesday’s paper in the “Blotter” feature, which chronicles the daily comings and goings of the area’s less socially adept residents. A Reader’s Digest condensed version of the report follows:

Two men were arguing over a complicated interpersonal relationship involving a third person, a woman. Diplomacy failed to resolve the dispute, and each man repaired to his own pickup truck in search of more formidable tools of persuasion. One man returned with a hammer, the other with a flashlight, one of those big five-cell suckers of the kind police officers used to use until those miniature, high-intensity models favored by the stars of CSI came along.

When the smoke cleared, the hammer guy was bloodied, and Mr. Eveready had vacated the jurisdiction. Officers later found both hammer and flashlight in the road.

Talk about light artillery!

This is not the first time that the use of unconventional weapons has cropped up in the Blotter. Just a few days ago, the Blotter reported an altercation in which pickles were the weapons of choice. We once read a Blotter item about a man who had been stabbed with a bowling trophy.

Tuesday’s item was notable not so much for the choice of weapons, but for which one proved the more formidable. It has always seemed to us that a hammer, be it claw, ball-peen, sledge or jack, would be a fearsome tool in a physical altercation, certainly more dangerous than a flashlight.

This could be a breakthrough in low-rent ordnance, though more research is needed before any hard conclusions are drawn. Most important, probably is the comparative size of the combatants, a fact not touched upon in this newspaper’s account.

Equally important might be the innate orneriness of the antagonists. A pacifist with a hammer is likely to be no match for a brute with a flashlight, or even a Bic lighter.

Those subjective factors are hard to quantify; they are questions that each man must answer for himself, preferably before he goes to his pickup truck to gird for battle.

We will be on the lookout for more research on the subject, and will report back with whatever we find.