This story, reported by the San Jose Mercury News, is making the rounds through all the nooks and crannies of the Internet today. The short version is:

Teenager with a knife threatens 84-year-old retired Marine.

Marine warns him off; teenager pushes it.

Marine kicks him in the groin, incapacitating him.

Right now the story is being enjoyed on a comedic surface level--an old man kicking a kid in the groin, what a hoot, right? It's the money-shot from America's Funniest Home Videos brought to life. There's also the feel-good old Marine angle--you can't count them out of the fight, EVER. But beyond the comedy, or the social life lesson, this is a textbook example of the use of violence as a survival tool. We literally could not ask for a better primer in the principles of violence. To wit:

Violence is not about competition--it's about injury.
Physically, an 84-year-old cannot compete with a teenager. He can't outrun, out-wrestle, or out-endure a reasonably healthy kid. He can't 'take a punch' in the competition sense. But that's okay--he didn't bother screwing around with any of that--he went straight for the injury. And put his man down.

The knife doesn't matter.
If it did matter, you'd expect this veteran of three wars to have factored it into the equation--with a 'classic' knife defense, or attempting to control the weapon, or, realizing he wouldn't be able to wrestle the knife away from someone almost 70 years younger, capitulating to the kid's demands. But again, he went straight for the injury. And in so doing short-circuited all that knife-defense/wrestle over the weapon crap. With injury he did 'control the weapon' if you understand that the only real weapon present was another human brain. A brain that could not stop the injured body from the betrayal of laying down on the sidewalk and doing nothing while the Marine picked up his groceries and continued on his way.

True injury is unambiguous.
The Marine was able to recognize success in violence, as well as the fact that the kid was nonfunctional--that is, that he no longer presented a threat.

Injured people are helpless.
He had a knife. He had the strength and resilience of youth. And he was unable to bring either to bear in the face of real injury. All he could do was lay down and stay there long enough for an old man to gather his belongings and take his leave.

I could go on--this small, perfect story of a threat of violence shut down by the application of real violence (a single injury)--is the quintessential expression of everything we do in Target-Focus Training. Usually, this story is told the other way around--we're usually left to talk about why a murderer was successful. Thankfully, this time the person who did everything right in violence was one of the Good Guys.

Labels: criminal violence, injury, knife, self defense