Stiletto the sharp point to inflict severe internal damage not readily apparent when examining the entrance wound. The stiletto followed the first wave of Italian diaspora to the city of New Orleans, Louisiana during the mid-19th century, where the knife became a popular weapon of gamblers, gang members, and assorted assassins. The stiletto was involved in so many stabbings and murders in New Orleans that the city passed an ordinance in 1879 outlawing the sale or exhibition for sale of any stiletto within the city limits. Italian immigrants to America frequently purchased or made such knives for self-defense, and the stiletto
Stiletto heel popularity in the 1950s, they reached their most refined shape in the early 1960s, when the toes of the shoes which bore them became as slender and elongated as the stiletto heels themselves. As a result of the overall sharpness of outline, it was customary for women to refer to the whole shoe as a "stiletto", not just the heel, via synecdoche ("pars pro toto"). Although they officially faded from the scene after the Beatle era began, their popularity continued at street level, and women stubbornly refused to give them up even after they could no longer readily find them