you armed them with knives in a gun fight?!

(However I did give them hard plastic clubs shaped in the form of shovels)

Oh, you are being sarcastic? Wouldn't have guessed

In some ancient text I read it talks about how the ancient Greeks had stopped wearing swords all the time for protection, but there were still some primitive areas where they did. Civilization reduces the necessity and the rate of return on individual violence it would seem.