It’s a terribly illuminating thing to listen to killers speak of killing with your social filters turned off.

With them on we naturally recoil, feel like prey and try to figure out how to counter all the atrocity he’s talking so blithely about.

The killer’s perspective flies in the face of principled self-defense, moral rectitude, and general fairness, these things we cling to deep down inside even when we profess not to.

With our social filters up we are shipwreck victims scrabbling at the remains of the SS Social Contract as the maelstrom that smashed it rages around us.

But if we can let all that go and simply look at the mechanics of the thing it’s all really very straightforward and simple. Not the complicated flow-chart of tit-for-tat self-defense or fighting, but the straight arrow to the heart of it and done.

In a documentary on a notorious prison gang, I was particularly struck by how an enforcer for the gang — with 11 inside kills to his name — spoke about how it all worked.

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Last week I presented an image of violence in action and asked for your thoughts. The results showed a wide range of thought, a distribution of points all along the continuum of violence.

The image I chose on the left functions more as a cypher to show your expectations and where you see yourself in violence than having a right or wrong answer.

It’s an inkblot test, or one of those optical illusions where you can see either a vase or two faces — people immediately see one or the other, some see both and can flip it back and forth in their heads, others can never see the inverse of their initial impression.

What’s interesting to note are the very different responses you get from two distinct populations: the sane/socialized and the sociopathic/or otherwise experienced in the use of violence.

Sane & Social

• See themselves as the man on the ground, reacting to thwart the standing man (parsing attacker-defender, classic self-defense)
• Are intensely interested in the story leading up to the image (who’s the good guy/bad buy, who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong)

Sociopathic or Otherwise Experienced in Violence

• See themselves as the standing man (parsing winner-loser)
• Are uninterested in the story or social roles (pure mechanics of winning)

As a teaching tool the goal here is not to shame those who reflexively see the image through the social lens, nor to reward those who know the “right” answer and parrot it because they think that’s what we’re looking for — the goal is to show you what’s inside of you, your most basic assumptions about violence and the role you expect to play in it.

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When you look at this picture, which guy needs self-defense?

If you found yourself in the above situation, what would you do?

I look forward to your thoughts and further discussion.

–Chris Ranck-Buhr
   TFT Master Instructor

The following police blotter bit was posted by Stephanie Farr on the Philly Confidential blog of the Philadelphia Daily News:

Cops: Victim sends attempted rapist to hospital

MONDAY, JUNE 6, 2011

“A man who tried to rape a woman on the streets of Hunting Park this morning ended up in the hospital himself when his intended victim fought back with a vengeance.

“Around 2:25 a.m., the 43-year-old man tried to rape a 19-year-old woman on 9th Street near Lycoming, according to police.

“But it was the man who got the surprise when the woman pulled out an unknown instrument and stabbed him twice in the stomach and once above the left eye, police said.

“The man was taken to Temple University Hospital, where he was listed in stable condition, according to police. His name and the charges he is expected to face have not yet been released.”

This incident, and the way it’s reported, highlight the importance of perspective in training.

If you think like a victim and train like a victim…
you’re preparing to be one.

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This recommendation comes to us from Gregory, a TFT Cadre Instructor living in Colombia:

“Here’s a great article on how David beats Goliath.

There’s a phrase that crops up about two thirds of the way through, that he must do what is ‘socially horrifying.’ It also talks about effort over skill, about doing what you’re not supposed to do. The relevance for our common interest is, I think, “substantial.”

The article is on the long side, but well worth the read. It gets right to the heart of why we train the way we train: I don’t want you to defend yourself, or play by the rules (even the assumed, unwritten ones), or go skill-to-skill or strength-to-strength.

Because that’s how you lose.

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

–Chris Ranck-Buhr
   TFT Master Instructor

…Because even if you don’t know what you’re doing, if you poke enough holes in someone you’ll kill them eventually.

The same goes for handguns and baseball bats.

Your chances of being accidentally effective increase with the use of a tool.

The tool doesn’t increase your skill or your accuracy — it only magnifies the trauma when you do manage to line things up just right.

With this perspective the knife, stick and especially the gun become not just desired, but necessary, to commit effective acts of violence.

There are two problems with this approach:

1. Lose the tool and you got nothing.

   The _____-fighter is useless without the (fill-in-the-blank) knife, stick or gun. Lose it, break it or take it away and the person becomes helplessly unarmed.

   When it’s you, you’re screwed. When it’s him and he doesn’t really care whether he shoots you or stomps you to death, you’re screwed.

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What is the greatest fear?

It’s that the other guy will hurt you.

Whether he does it with a gun, a knife, a club or fists & boots, you are preoccupied with stopping him from hurting you. And so you seek out things to mollify those fears — gun disarms, knife defense, stick fighting and self-defense techniques to block punches and kicks. All the while missing what makes him so powerful: not caring about any of those things.

If you have a gun, what’s the priority, shooting him or worrying about countering gun disarms?

Does the one doing the stabbing care at all about knife defense?

The last thing on your mind if you’re busting limbs and heads with a baseball bat is whether or not he’ll take it away from you.

Thinking it’s any different with fists & boots is what separates the person delivering the beating… from the person taking one.

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In the training environment, anything works as long as we all agree it does.

On the street, the only thing that works are the laws of physics.

If you don’t get an injury, nothing changes in your favor. Nobody’s going to “respect your technique” just because they’re supposed to. People will keep going as long as they can think and move. Remove one or both of those, and you stop the man. Affect neither and it’s the same as if you did nothing at all.

You can do the move, execute the technique, and touch the target — but if you don’t break something important, it doesn’t matter. And suddenly what worked so well on the mats is completely ignored by the guy you just did it to. If he doesn’t make the same mistake, he just might finish it in his favor by injuring you.

“Lucky” is what you call it when two people come together with the intent to cause harm but end up getting into a sparring match because nobody really knows how to cause injury — there’s a lot of commotion, a little blood, torn clothes, but everybody goes home just fine, if tired. If someone happens to line it up just right — one square inch on one square inch with enough mass-in-motion and follow-through to bust something important, we get an injury and have a winner.

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I get inundated with emails pointing to different training videos, all asking for my opinion on whether it’s the “real deal” or not. There are a lot of different flavors of Kool-Aid out there (ours included), a veritable rainbow of “ultimate” and “unbeatable” systems.

But who has the real Kool-Aid?

Well… serial killers do.

They tend not to be the best physical specimens (so there goes bigger-faster-stronger), they tend not to be trained (so there goes belt-levels), and they tend not to practice (so there goes ring experience).

And yet… they get results.

They get results because results are all they care about.

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Our two-day base seminars are the distillation of more than 20 years of experience, research and the training of thousands of people to use violence as a survival tool.

In approaching a format for a weekend seminar we had to answer two questions:

1. “Knowing what we know, how would we use violence today, right now?”

…and

2. “How would we train a loved one or family member if we knew they had to use it — for their life — in just two days time?”

Both questions cut right to the heart of it — there are a lot of training methodologies that are little better than hoop-jumping, hazing or time-marking that are perpetuated for no other reason than tradition or simply because we had to do it that way to learn it. Just because we had to carry water through the 39 chambers in order to learn how to gouge an eye doesn’t mean you have to.

The answer to the first one is that I’d ignore the hand-holding through all the stuff people worry about — backing up, blocking, getting hurt — and get straight to it and do it like the guy everyone’s afraid of. Make him want to back up, make him try to block, make him worry about getting hurt. Focus solely on injury and taking full advantage of the injured man. Only stop when I’m done.

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