You take your family on a drive along a beautiful mountain road.
The kids are looking off to the left at the amazing view as your car hugs the mountain on the right.
Suddenly, small rocks begin dropping, hitting the road, and pelting off your car.
In a moment of terror you recognize it’s the start of an avalanche. You’ve thought about this possibility in the past and now its ‘go’ time.
What are you gonna do as the rocks continue to fall — faster and bigger?
You want to take action, in fact, your foot is straining to hit the accelerator. Yet you hesitate!
Why?
Flashing through your mind you see yourself getting a felony speeding ticket for reckless driving if you take action. And this dilemma causes you to freeze, frantically trying to think of another answer. But the rocks just keep falling — bigger, faster and now there’s a lot more of them…
A ridiculous situation? Of course. And obviously, unless you are a fool, you’ll hit the accelerator and do everything you can to get your car to safety to protect you and everyone else in it.
Yet as obvious as this situation is to you, I get the same question posed to me about various self defense laws and the liabilities you may face if you take action to “defend” yourself in a life-or-death situation. Usually people are very thorough in their analysis of the the situation and ask me for exact levels of response that they may “safely” use to protect themselves yet be “proportional in response to the threat.”
After dealing with sane, socialized clients for the past 20 years I understand what you’re grasping for with such questions. Unfortunately I’m constantly forced to be the one dumping a bucket of ice water on these reveries of “self defense realities.”
I do this first by quickly asking people the “scenario” you are imagining. If it does not constitute a life-or-death situation then I summarily dismiss the situation.
If the imagined scene is a life-or-death situation I then walk folks through the above “mountain road” analogy. And you quickly see that once the rocks start falling you must hit the gas and go for it all out. Any other course of action will leave you crushed under tons of rock.
At the point of violence when someone attacks you with the intent to do “grievous bodily harm” (yep, I threw in a popular legal self defense term) there are no options and no such thing as a proportional response.
Furthermore in that very scenario the only person concerned with the law is YOU. The other guy is too busy stabbing, stomping or shooting to be concerned about laws nor does it matter to the asocial criminal. It’s the dirty little secret most self defense and reality fighting programs leave out of their training. In fact they often go overboard with the legal aspects of such incidents while ignoring the physical realities of violence.
In the above mountain road scenario once the rocks are falling you need to hit the gas — not worry about getting a speeding ticket.
Now an intelligent question to ask is what decisions did the driver make before traveling that road. Did he ignore warning signs? That is when you can really make a difference in avoiding even the possibility of facing an avoidable ‘avalanche’ in your life.
I wrote a whole book on that subject and it’s the best Self Defense insurance you can buy. My job is to make sure my clients avoid every possible personal self defense avalanche in their lives so they never freeze when they should, instead, be hitting the gas!
