Boots with steel inserts over the toes. They're standard safety clothing in factories and other environments where heavy items may fall on the foot. For added protection, metatarsal protectors may be added to shield the front of the foot.

In addition to normal mayhem as described by Andromache, steel toed boots have a distressing tendancy to be employed in meelee situations against both people and animals. Skinheads are notorious for doing this.

When I took weight training classes, I was instructed not to wear steel toed boots, because dropping weights on the boots could deform the steel into the flesh of the foot. I guess there's just two different schools of thought on the subject.

Steel-toed boots are also useful for random acts of mayhem be they they minor or major. For instance, falling into the minor catagory would be challenging someone to a quick game of Roshambo and forgetting to mention the exact nature of your footwear. Falling into the major catagory is a practice known as balrog hunting (an AD&D reference, for all you noders out there less pathetic than Yrs Trly).
Balrog hunting takes place in the suburbs, where there are no streetlamps to shine a telltale light on the body of the minivan in which you and five of your closest juvenile delinquent friends are riding. If the van is a newer model, then you are fortunate, as you now have two sliding doors to work from. As you cruise down the darkened streets with your headlights down and your dimmer off, the delinquent riding shotgun scans the cars parked along the road for good prospective targets. When the proper cars have been spotted, the sliding doors come open. You and another friend lie down across the seats, your legs sticking out into the night. As the driver goes by your chosen targets at thirty miles an hour, you kick.
CRUNCH.
That, my fellow noders, is the sound of a side view mirror being torn off the side of a car.
You pull your legs back inside the minivan, shutting the door as the driver makes like a bat out of hell for the next suburban hellhole on the list, and thank God for steel-toed boots.

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