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This makes me wonder: might telescoping retractable spears be a solution to this problem? My immediate concern would be that such designs would fare far worse at imparting lots of force to an enemy without breaking, and this seems to have been echoed by one or two of the few things that came up when I searched for such spears just now. But there’s gotta be some clever design that could get around this, right?
Tacticool catalogues have spears that can screw together (example: https://www.budk.com/Amazon-Jungle-Survivor-Break-Down-Spear-Cast-2Cr13-51329)
I don't have this one, but I do have one similar to this, and it's remarkably solid-feeling, I'm pretty happy with it aside from the whole "why would you ever need a spear" question. And it seems easy enough to put together with 5-10 minutes warning on a fight, which might match reasonably well to gang violence: you know when the other gang shows up and as long as you know you're going to fight rather than run, you just screw it together and put it down somewhere that's easy to reach for when things kick off. If they don't, take it back apart, stick it in your backpack, and head out.
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A telescoping spear seems quite feasible to make, but in a country that bans guns I'd expect the law to take an extremely dim view of such a thing.
Heck, I remember learning as a kid that nunchucks and butterfly knives were illegal in England not just to own but even to show in movies, which explained some bizarre censorship in some movies (IIRC the Mel Gibson movie Payback had a non-violent, non-combat scene cut where someone was showing off a butterfly knife). So it wouldn't be surprising if telescoping polearms were banned as soon as they became commonly used.
C. Thomas Howell in the original Red Dawn film did the butterfly knife open and close in a random scene I guess to show his transformation into a "real fighter" compared to the high schooler he had been at the film's beginning. I remember owning at least two after watching that and becoming adept, if not in the actual use of the knife, in its rapid, smooth opening and closing.
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