Was the knuckle duster blessed?

It's a mistake to expect monks and clergy to be anything other than human, but this seems a little over-the-top:

Five Thai Buddhist monks have been defrocked and fined after a brawl with monks from a nearby temple, police and newspapers said today.

The street fight was the culmination of years of antagonism between monks from the two temples who had often exchanged curses, insults and rude gestures as they collected alms on different sides of a road, the Manager newspaper said.
[snip]
[One of the defrocked monks] said he usually carried a knuckle-duster in his shoulder bag during the morning collection of alms on which Buddhist monks depend...