The US Army still teaches bacic combat skills with rifles.
I can remember Learning to attack with both sides, Bayonet and Bytt Stock, and to block income attacks.
food for thought
I'm x Airborne Infantry.
I maintain what I said.
First of all, most weapons are not built as robustly as a battle rifle. Second, the parries you do with a battle rifle are learned to be used against someone else with a bayonet on the end of a rifle, because if they have bullets and you don't, you're pretty much screwed.
The thrusting action of a rifle/bayonet-spear is NOT the same as a full armed swing of a sword or a baseball bat.
Thrusting with a bayonet won't hurt a weapon - all the force is heading straight back into the weapon where it's strongest- the line of the barrel. Think wood grain that goes one way. Once you start hammering the SIDE of the weapon, shenanigans happen.
I happen to know this because I've seen a number of weapons get burned in during my day. Being burned in means the weapon wasn't rigged to the jump harness correctly, and when parachuting, a soldier would pull his release tab to drop his ruck 50-200 feet up in the air... and the weapon just fell. In a bag.
Sometimes, it wasn't pretty.
There is a reason why folks use rubberduckies for bayonet training too. If they used real rifles instead of the dummy rifles, each basic training class would need a new set of beater rifles.
Last but not least, I don't think that bayonet training is still taught because it is practical in any way. It's still taught for the same reason that cherries have to sound off with "Blood Blood make the grass grow green!" - it gets young kids used to the idea of killing.
I would model firearms blocking similarly to hexing. The older a weapon is, the less likely it is to fail after blocking.
Muskets you can block pretty well with. A Steyr Aug... not so much.
