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It boggles my mind sometimes, how we can be as careful and clear as possible in making the case for surviving and winning in violence and still have it come out garbled on the other end.
But I suppose people hear what they want to hear, and if all your preconceptions about violence have you in the victim role, then all violence is about victimization. And fear.
I’ve always said I’d much rather teach the resolute than the fearful — people who are resolute take the tool in both fists and get busy swinging it; the fearful need to be coaxed to even get near the tool. (I’ve had plenty of fearful people become resolute after exposure to the tool, but having to overcome that victim-mentality just adds a needless speed bump to the process.)
Seeing yourself first and foremost as the victim in violence colors everything that comes after.
The simple idea of gouging an eye becomes you getting your own eye gouged out. You may not have considered it before, and now you’re aware that there are people out there — in this very room! — who not only think about it, but know how, and, most chillingly, are willing to do it. Again, fear finding fear, and growing.
Someone who approaches the tool of violence pragmatically realizes two things about a gouged eye:
If they do it first, the situation resolves in their favor and,
They themselves are not immune to such an injury.
Number one is simple enough. It’s what separates the winners from the victims in violent conflict. The real power, however, comes from number two. If it works the same on you, then it probably works the same on every human on the planet.
This base understanding — that violence is available to everyone and no one is immune — is simultaneously liberating and cautionary. It’s liberating in that you can stop worrying about what a badass monster that guy is, how mean he is, how dedicated, how big, fast and strong he is — his eyes are just as susceptible to injury as yours are. It’s cautionary in that no conditioning, training, or skill can make you immune.
It should follow then, if this training does nothing to protect you from injury — indeed, if there is no way to protect yourself from violence — that you should be very reluctant to use the tool. That’s just being smart about it.
If given the choice, the answer is ‘no.’ The luxury of choice gives you more options than just ‘injure’ — you can ignore, talk, or run. All three of these are brilliant social tactics, and I’m sure you’ve used them all to great success.
But they don’t work when you have no choice.
If you’ve already been stabbed because stabbing is what he’s up to, ignoring it, trying to talk to him or running only keep you in the victim-space he needs to get the job done.
We have never advocated using violence while social options are open. Violence is only appropriate when it’s either injure him or die.
This should be an incredibly rare event. About the same as you shooting someone to death.
If you’re smart, a full understanding of violence should make you literally go out of your way to avoid the avoidable. For the leftovers, that very small sliver of true life-or-death situations, you take responsibility for yourself through preparation. You consider the unpleasant, the awful, the unthinkable and learn what to do should you find yourself smack dab in the middle of it.
No one wants to swim to save their life. For all of us who know how to swim, only a small percentage have ever had to swim or die. If you’ve been there, you’re really, really glad you know how to swim. If you’re lucky (or smart) enough to never have had the need to save your own life by swimming, it’s a comfort to know you could. And only the stupid would willingly put themselves in that position for no good reason.
Victims are trapped seeing themselves on the wrong end of the tool, for violence is the tool of choice for victimizers.
The resolute understand that the severity and seriousness of the tool brooks no screwing around — pulling it out is only appropriate in the most dire of circumstances because there is only one way to swing it: in both fists, as hard as you can.
On today of all days, I can imagine at least one reason.
In the 14 years that I taught hand-to-hand combat through a university recreation department I got called on the carpet with this, and similar questions, about once every six months. My answer was always the same, and though uneasy, the powers that be were satisfied every time.
On the surface, there is no good reason. Or, more correctly, we don’t like to think we live in a world where there would ever be a good reason for the average citizen to know how to take a life with his or her bare hands. The natural reaction for anyone happening across this information, this training, out of context should be to recoil in horror. It stands in stark contrast to the world we believe we are building and would like to imagine we live in. A world where it would never be necessary for anyone — ourselves or our children — to know how to do this.
But you know better.
There’s the world we think we’re building, but that paradise of love, comfort and all the good things about being social animals really only exists where we can physically reach — the immediate space around us and the confines of our own homes. In those places we live in the world we make on a daily basis, a place where we actively work to do the opposite of acrimony, strife and violence.
But it’s all imaginary.
That’s not to say it’s not real — my own personal and home lives are the exact opposites of the work I do — but it is entirely dependent on me actively keeping it so. And it’s as fragile as a little girl’s tea party with pets and dolls. All it takes is a single person who has chucked the rules and believes in complete opposition as I do and is willing to step across those imaginary boundaries and impose his own physical reality upon me.
None of the imaginary ideas protect you from the physical facts of violence — not fairness, not personal dignity, not how much someone loves you, not even the difference between right and wrong. This is where we become such brilliant victims, when we think these things will protect us from violence. Living well and treating people fairly — being demonstrably good — may work to keep you out of trouble, making violence less likely to start, but it does nothing for you once the trigger is pulled.
I wish we lived in a world where those things did matter in the face of violence. I wish my children had no need or cause to learn how to hurt people. But ignoring it won’t make it go away. Wishing it didn’t exist only makes you a victim when someone who knows the facts picks you as prey. So while I work to build that world we all wish we lived in, I’ll hedge my bet by knowing how to break someone’s neck in case the world of ideas ever fails me.
It is demonstrated, with sickening regularity, that a single person (or small group) who knows how to use violence can wreak great havoc on much larger groups of people who don’t. Having a single person on the other side who knows what to do, how to act, how to meet that threat with an equal threat can change everything. The balance ceases to be one predator among many prey and becomes at least an even chance. Which is far better than most sane, law-abiding citizens ever get in the face of violence.
When confronted with the question, my answer was always the same. It’s easy to dismiss it when it’s just an abstract concept. Breaking someone’s neck is antithetical to everything we hope for. So I made it personal:
“If someone came to kill your mother, wouldn’t you want her to know how?”
It’s not nice, it’s not comfortable, it is the unthinkable. But grudgingly, in the face of the world of ideas parting like fog before the murder’s blade, the answer is yes.
If your primary fear is getting hurt then you’re stuck reacting to his actions, pulling back, attempting to defend yourself. Distance-wise, this places you exactly where he needs you to be to get whatever it is he wants done. It also gets you behaving in a non-threatening way, leaving him free to finish it. This baseline ‘going defensive’ is what makes people spectacular victims.
If your primary fear is what he’s doing then you’re stuck going after his limbs to block or counter or otherwise thwart his actions. Distance-wise you’re still too far away, that half-step, arms’-length that means you can’t strike with your mass. This also leaves him in control of his mass and balance, with you as a target right in front of him should he decide to step in and use that mass to strike you.
This is fighting. A dangerous back-and-forth that builds into an epic struggle until someone gets it right and causes an injury. Dangerous for you because the longer it goes on the more opportunities he has to get it right at your expense.
If your primary concern is leaving a human brain in charge of a fully-functional body, then you’ll disrupt that relationship through injury. Or, to be more succinct, if you think your problem is the brain, you’ll go after the brain.
Distance-wise you can’t get any closer — to get at the brain, you have to go through the body. You’ll throw your mass through him, belt buckle to belt buckle, and end up standing where he was.
Going after the brain necessitates displacing him. If you put all that impetus through one square inch of him that can’t take it,the result is an injury. And that means the brain is either offline, busy, or in charge of a broken body.
The failure of most self-defense training is in giving you a goal that is at odds with the needs and realities of violence. What we see demonstrated time and again in successful uses of the tool are these simple facts:
The winners have no regard for what the victim is doing. They conspicuously ignore the actions of the person they want to hurt.
The winners don’t bother with blocking or counters. They put all their efforts into getting the job done.
The winners hurt people. Their only goal is injury, lots of it, following the victim to the ground and making him nonfunctional.
When we see this in action the natural response is: “How do I fight people who fight like that?“
The answer is that you don’t. Either you take them or they take you. Trying to defend yourself from them makes you a victim. Trying to fight them makes you a victim. Operating like they do gives you an even chance — and even that can be bent in your favor with every hour on the mats.
Learn the lesson: it’s always about the brain. And you getting over there and shutting it off.
This CCTV footage is graphic. I’ve posted the link to the story and video below. This is another visual example of how quickly anti-social behavior can go asocial. Here’s a Link to the Story: Aussie Footballer Choked Unconscious While Helping Friends
I don’t post videos to merely show gratuitous acts of violence. I strongly feel we need to study these clips in order to better understand what real violence looks like as opposed to the media images or the images we see in the combat sport world. Also much of the Martial Arts and various self defense training rarely accounts for how real violence goes down. I will let you readers make your comments first then I will post mine later this week.
This is an old video of a brutal attack in an Australian Train Station. I want you to view this from the aspect of using the tool of violence. Listen to the police description of the attack but focus on the use of the tool and give me your thoughts by using the comments link at the bottom of this blog.
Obviously, right? When stated in opposition like that, it’s self-evident. And yet, I get enough feedback to tell me it’s still fuzzy in most people’s heads. Nearly everyone we train shows up looking for the former — they want to prevent violence from happening to themselves — while only paying lip service to the latter.
If given the choice, sane people would rather prevent violence than do it to another. This is fine as long as everyone understands the difference between the two.
The Empathy Problem
No one wants violence done to them. Once a person has heard, seen, or unfortunately experienced enough of it, they start looking for answers. How do I keep that from happening to me? What can I do in that situation? These questions would be fine if they were looking at the right side of the equation. The problem is one of empathy — we naturally look at the guy on the ground, the one getting kicked, or stabbed, or shot. We empathize with the victim, feel his pain, and the questions become about preventing what’s happening, rather than owning the situation.
No one looks at that situation and asks the real question: How do I maim, cripple and/or kill the other man? Most sane people will not reflexively see themselves as the victimizer, look at the situation and say, “That guy’s obviously got it handled. I want to operate like he does.”
Confusion sets in when people believe that violence is a tool to prevent violence — in other words, that they can maintain their safety by using physical action to prevent the other man from hurting them. Blocking, countering, ‘using his energy against him,’ etc., are all dangerous conceits that do little more than make us feel good about violence.
They make us feel prepared while wearing the white hat (since we don’t stoop to the criminal’s level) — while doing almost nothing to solve the essential problem. They don’t do anything to shut off the other man, or otherwise degrade his ability to function. At best such tactics delay the inevitable; at worst they give the other man free time and opportunity to carry out his work. The work of hurting you and shutting you off.
Preventing Violence
I take a lot of heat for constantly wanting to couch the discussion of violence in social, antisocial and asocial contexts. The primary argument I hear is, “Who cares?” The second one is that I must be a simp, because that is not how badasses talk. The funny part is, if most people show up to learn how to prevent violence from happening to them, well, this is the key.
I always thought this stuff was common sense — don’t go looking for it, defuse and de-escalate when given the option, only hurt people when that’s the only way out — and then I meet people who think knocking someone out is the answer to the smart remark, social posturing and territorial disputes. Of course, it makes my hat hover. For those who don’t listen, or don’t care, I hope they are lucky. Luck is the only thing between them and something really horrible, or, at the very least, life-changing. And not in the good way.
The best way to prevent violence is to not be there. Second-best is to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, be calm, and go out of your way to make peace everywhere you go. While on the surface it may seem like a good idea to be intimidating, you never know when this will bite you in the ass.
The primary problem is that the people it works on — the ones who will see you coming and clear out — are not the ones you’re worried about. The ones you’re worried about, the criminal sociopath, will see your intimidation tactics as a challenge, or, indeed, a threat that must be neutralized. In other words, you’ll scare away harmless people while simultaneously attracting monsters.
It’s important to note that preventing violence has nothing to do with physical action — unless that action is running away. Otherwise, preventing violence is all about navigating everything that comes before violence. There’s nothing you can do once the violence has begun to prevent it. At that point your only option is to be the one doing it.
Doing Violence
This is really simple. It’s taking eyes, crushing throats, breaking legs. It’s being the successful person in the situation, kicking the man who’s down. Instead of worrying about how to prevent violence, you’re doing it. You can see how this is at odds with the idea of preventing violence — doing violence does not prevent violence. This is not the same as attempting to thwart a knife-thrust or keep from getting kicked while down. This is you doing the things you wanted to prevent to the other man. This is focusing on the right side of the equation, the winner’s side. And over here, it’s pure physical action.
Now you can see where our problem, as instructors, lies — and maybe even some problems of your own. When people see the man getting stabbed, they want to know how to stop that from happening to themselves, and they assume — wrongly — that there is some kind of physical action that can keep them safe from such things. So they are looking for physical training to prevent violence. And there is no such thing.
Because we are looking at different sides of the equation — they see the man getting stabbed, I see the man doing the stabbing — the answers don’t always fit the question. When someone asks, “What do I do if the man wants to stab me?” and I show them how to take his eye, crush his throat, and break his leg, they are usually aghast at the ‘severity’ of the action, as well as being uncomfortable since I really didn’t do anything about the knife.
When they ask, “How can I prevent him from stabbing me?” and I launch into a discussion of social/anti-social/asocial and mention running away, using your words, letting him have the parking space, etc., they are even more puzzled. What they really want is a way to not get stabbed once the stabbing starts, and there is no such thing.
You can’t prevent violence once it’s on, and if all you want is to change someone’s behavior, violence can’t do that. All it does is break down the human body, and shut off the brain. While some of you may want to argue that technically you prevent violence with violence by shutting the other guy off, please remember that that occurs only as a side effect — the goal must be to break things inside of him and take him to nonfunctional. If the goal is to prevent him from stabbing you, you’re at odds with the goal that will actually get that done.
Understanding that what people really want is an easy, painless way of preventing violence from happening, rather than to learn how to be the one doing it, cleared up a lot of misunderstanding for me as an instructor. It’s much easier for me to communicate when I know this is the baseline assumption.
From the other side, it’s important to make it clear that there is no physical action that makes you safe — physical action is not the path to safety, it’s the path to ruin him. If you want to prevent violence, be smart and use your social skills. But once the violence starts, the only thing that’s going to change the situation in your favor is hurting him. Confuse the two at your own peril.
The words we choose to describe things shade and flavor our perception of those things; this can be to our benefit or detriment. Any given word gives rise to a whole cloud of associations, some better than others. For example, take the words attacker and defender. It’s easy to associate speed, aggressiveness, initiative, strength, power and evil with the role of the attacker and tasked, hounded, reactive, protective and good with the role of the defender.
So which one is better to be, if you had the choice?
Again, this is one of those trick questions where everyone shouts, “Attacker!” and then turns around and uses the language and posture of the defender when it comes down to action. Why? Especially when you know it’s better to be the attacker — it works great for the criminal, the killer, the survivor… it means you have the initiative, you are, by definition, in the cause-state, doing instead of getting done.
And all it gets is lip service.
You do it because socially, it’s wrong. It’s evil, it’s immoral, it’s not what your mom, your clergy, or the cops would like you to do. Such behavior is corrosive to the social fabric; behaving like a killer is to take on the mantle of the killer. It’s unsporting. It’s unfair. It’s the very definition of cruel.
And you can’t think of yourself in those terms.
Now, I’ve tried to talk about this before, but maybe I’ve been too vague or too nice, I don’t know. But I’m here now to tell you:
You either see yourself as the person stomping on the downed man or you are the downed man.
No ifs, ands or buts.
And again, before you protest, check yourself. A lot of the language I see floating around when people talk “reality self-defense” is the language not of killers, but of people trying to justify that role, to feel better about it. Trying on the mantle of the killer, finding it distasteful, and then looking for logical constructs to make it fit better, to give yourself sufficient reason to try it on in the first place.
Justification can only effect mechanical performance in one direction — to make it poorer.
The attacker has no justification. This is why, socially, we find it distasteful, wrong, and evil. But all the attacker has to do is attack. One simple thing.
The role of the defender is a justifiable one. We can explain away our need to behave in a socially unacceptable way by virtue of being attacked. Because we have accepted the number two slot, and dumped ourselves into the effect-state, it’s okay with mom, et. al. The only problem is that being a defender is a very busy job, with lots to try to do. We have to register the attack, attempt to counter it, and only then may we attempt a counter-attack. If you’ve seen our live “knife-defense” demo, then you know how well that works out… And for those who haven’t seen it, here’s the breakdown: it works like gangbusters for the stabber, not so great for the stabee.
Even if you are resolved to be a bloodthirsty and vicious defender, you’re still applying the loser moniker. Best of luck with that.
Ultimately, you have to ditch even the idea of being an attacker — lose the attacker/defender dichotomy entirely. Because really, what makes a difference in violence is not self-defense, or even fighting — it’s all about hurting people. It’s what you’ll do when there are people around you who need to get hurt. Who need to get maimed, dropped on the ground, crippled so they stay there, and maybe even killed.
That’s all I train. When people ask me what I do, the simplest answer is, “I teach people how to kill sociopaths.” Not only is it the simplest, it’s also the most accurate. And after that, I don’t waste my time or breath trying to justify it — and most people demand justification after a statement like that — because trying to make them feel better about it is really just me trying to make me feel better about it. And there is no feeling better about it. In a social context, it’s wrong.
But we’re never talking about a social context, are we? Not unless the Virginia Tech shooting was a garden party. So there’s no feeling good or bad about it — there’s only what’s mechanically correct. And trying to make it sound or feel better just convinces us it’s okay to be in second place. We all know that’s a lie.
Or do we?
Depends on how much mat time you get. The more you actually model the behaviors we present, the more comfortable you’ll be with the mechanical facts of violence, and seeing yourself as the person doing them. At that point it stops being words and becomes the only way to be in violent conflict.
How simple is it? We can answer that with two more questions:
1) How can untrained people prevail? and
2) How is it that untrained people can prevail over trained people?
Because for all their blissful naivete the victorious untrained have a firm grip on the tool of violence. This fact stands because violence is much simpler than people would have you believe; it’s much simpler than you want to believe.
The idea that violence is difficult and requires years of training — and that years of training will protect you from the untrained — are comfortable, comforting thoughts.
I read somewhere once that the little lies we tell ourselves on a daily basis, the small untruths that shape our subjective realities are what keep us happy. That the people who see the world and themselves as it all ‘really is’ are the clinically depressed.
Accepting the simplicity of violence is an unpalatable dose of hard reality. To learn that you are never immune and that someone who is completely and conspicuously untrained can murder you is acutely unsettling. Even depressing.
If, that is, you’re a blood-bucket-is-half-empty kind of person.
I like to look at it from the other side — the blood bucket is half full, and I’m going to use him to fill it the rest of the way up. If violence is so simple that even the untrained can use it and survive, then even a little bit of training is going to make you really, really good at it. And if you’re reading this, you’ve probably already had a little bit of training. You’re way better than you think, if only you’d let yourself be.
(The only thing that could possibly hold you back is a lack of intent; what the serial killer lacks in technique he more than makes up for with a monomaniacal will to get the job done. But you already knew that.)
Violence is much simpler, even, than we present it to be.
We spent a lot of time teasing out the common elements and finding ways to communicate them to you. It comes across as a ton of material that people mistakenly believe they must master before they can be effective.
For all that, we’re only ever really talking about the rock to the head… and what is the rock to the head but a big hunk of kinetic energy driven through a vulnerable target?
Everything else is just detail work, an exploration of all possible combinations and configurations for using your body as a human tissue wrecking machine, with and without snap-on tools. Violence seems complicated if you think this detail work is required to be effective. If you think you need a black belt before you can seriously injure someone.
Forget everything you think you know about how it should go down: violence is you injuring people. It’s throwing yourself at him to break things inside of him. You are the bull in his anatomical china shop, the Enola Gay to his Hiroshima. It’s you violating every tenet of polite society and destroying the only thing that any of us ever really own.
It’s simpler than you think because it has nothing to do with thinking.
There is a level of confusion about what it is exactly that we do, confusion that I am, quite frankly, tired of hashing and rehashing. There are deep-seated biological, psychological and societal reasons for this confusion — and so it is perfectly natural for this confusion to persist — but as an instructor it frustrates me because treading back and forth across this well-worn rut doesn’t make you any better at doing violence.
The only thing that makes you any better is getting the mechanics down pat — how & where to cause injury, and how to best take advantage of that fact. Everything else is just mental masturbation that feels important because it tastes like philosophy with a little bit of work mixed in. You think you’re working while avoiding doing any of the real work that will make you better at doing violence, namely getting a reaction partner and hitting the mats regularly.
I am going to flog a dead horse again today, but my goal is to flay it to the bone (or finally sell it off if you take the original meaning); I want to take it to its absurd, logical conclusion beyond which there is no more jaw-flapping:
What we teach is violence, which is what you need to do when someone wants to murder you.
So where’s the confusion, you ask, that seems pretty clear-cut. And that’s what I think, too. But then the questions start:
Why would I ever need to know how to kill someone?
Won’t I get in trouble if I use this in a bar fight?
But what if he’s got X and/or Y and he’s coming at me like so?
How do I do it to someone who knows what you guys know?
What if he does it first?
Or one of the infinite facets of the question that tells me you don’t really believe that bigger-faster-stronger doesn’t matter. You WANT to believe, but you don’t.
Where does all the confusion come from? It arises because you think you know what you’re seeing, and you’re looking at it through the wrong mental porthole. When fists and feet are flying, you see monkey politics. You see competition. It’s all Great Apes working out dominance and submission. Don’t feel bad — you’re hardwired to recognize and respond to this. It’s only natural. Which is why I want to start the violence conversation off with one guy shooting another guy to death.
Watching one person kill another with a firearm won’t ping your monkey brain. It’ll go far deeper, down into the lizard-level, the primeval predator level. You’ll see it for what it is — killing. If we look at the underlying mechanics we have:
kinetic energy delivered through anatomy, wrecking it
And now we have the perfect model to work backwards from. Keep the killing context, keep the wrecked anatomy in mind and now look at other ways of effecting that outcome:
kinetic energy delivered through anatomy, wrecking it
So, a fist, a boot, a pipe, a shin, etc., etc., it doesn’t matter what as long as it’s doing the work that a bullet does, if only in a generic sense. So now if we line up a series of killings and look at them side-by-side, a shooting, a bludgeoning, a knifing, getting hit by a car — we should be able to see the clear, underlying principles that govern all of these equally and immutably. Learning how to wield these principles is the ‘getting the mechanics down pat’ I mentioned earlier.
All clear, right? No, back to the confusion: everyone gets the gun and the car, but they feel iffy about the pipe and the knife, and downright scoff at the fist, boot, or shin.
Why?
Because you read it with your monkey politics filter and think there’s something you can do about it. “I can’t dodge bullets but I can block a punch.” This is the ultimate in hubris and sends you down a negative feedback spiral: if you can ‘handle’ a punch, then of course he can ‘handle’ it when you’re trying to do it to him. You’re pissing in your confidence reservoir and your training will look hesitant and spotty. And that’s exactly where your skill will go. You’re thinking that you’re fighting when we really want you doing something completely else.
We are trying to teach you how to kill murderers. Everything that fits that narrow model benefits you. Anything that sounds out of place or silly in that context is nothing but crap.
That’s why ‘murder’ is the final word in context. Almost no one knows what to do when that’s what’s up. ‘Fighting’ and ‘defense’ are worthless in that arena — remember that defense wounds are found on corpses and tell the coroner that that person ‘fought for their life.’ You’re not going to fight anyone for your life. You’re going to kill a murderer.
Armed with this ‘new’ context, let’s look at the common questions:
Why would I ever need to know how to kill someone? If that someone is a murderer, then ipso facto. It’s like asking, “If drowning can kill me, why learn how to swim?”
Won’t I get in trouble if I use this in a bar fight? Yes. Yes, you will.
But what if he’s got X and/or Y and he’s coming at me like so? [cue sarcasm] Then you should act enraged and execute a bluff charge and pray he’s playing by the same rules — that he’s spoiling for a fight and not a murder. Would you ask the same question with a firearm or a steering wheel in your hand? Of course you laugh, but a crushed throat and a gouged eye don’t care if it was bullets, hood ornaments or boots that did it. So why should you?
How do I do it to someone who knows what you guys know? Injured is injured, dead is dead, regardless of talent or training.
What if he does it first? Then you have nothing to worry about.
Bigger-faster-stronger? The murderer doesn’t care — in fact, that’s one reason why he’s successful. And that should inform your thinking on the subject.
Here’s the bottom line: check yourself and stick with what matters. Is your question, your doubt, your worry rooted in the mechanics of injury or is it stuck in monkey politics, in ‘fighting?’ Be honest with yourself. If it’s the mechanics, we can work on that, show you what to do, how to do it. After that it’s on you to hit the mats with a partner and take ownership of it. If it’s competition, monkey politics, or has anything to do with communication or changing behavior, then it’s immaterial and meaningless in the context of killing a murderer.
Because you don’t talk to, try to best or even fight with murderers. You kill them.
There are a lot of good arguments to be made for doing both instead of spending the money, time and effort to train to use your body as a weapon. It takes far less effort to purchase and carry an extraneous tool — and far less effort to use it to good effect. In fact, that’s the whole reason behind weapons — they are labor-saving implements that magnify our efforts and make short work of any assailants. It doesn’t take any training at all to kill someone with a gun or knife, though both can benefit from specific instruction.
So, again, why bother?
Because guns can run out of ammo and/or jam, knives can be dropped, and both have to be on you, near you, gotten at and deployed to be of any use.
In other words, if you can only kill a man with a knife or gun, you’re harmless without one.
If you can’t do the same work as a knife or gun with your bare hands, then you’re hopelessly overmatched when the other guy has one and you don’t.
When you learn how to use your body as a tool for violence — driven by the weapon that is your brain — you are armed in a way that is invisible, ever-present, and permanent.
Since no one can tell you know how to kill by just looking at you, people will tend to assume you’re harmless — just the assumption you need to fly under the radar, take advantage of their hesitation and hubris to end the situation in your favor. This aspect has been noted time and again by our female clients who have had to use the information — the assumption that because they are female and unarmed they are helpless and therefore not a threat means the assailant will let his guard down and give the woman opportunities for injury. Opportunities that only the trained would be able to recognize and take full advantage of.
The trained person never has to take time to access the weapon, won’t ever run out of ammo, or be disarmed. Your training is with you, and ready to go, at all times, as is the primary tool to get the job done — your body. Instead of wishing you had a gun, or wishing for the time and opportunity to deploy it, you can hurt the man right now, where ever you are, anytime. In fact, using your training to hurt the man now can buy you the time and opportunity to deploy that tool to finish the job. This has been the biggest positive for law enforcement personnel who’ve gone through our training — the peace of mind that they now have another tool for lethal force, and one that can get them smoothly to the firearm, or work in conjunction with it, in 360˚ instead of just in front of the muzzle.
Once you’re trained you never forget how to hurt people. It becomes a part of you, like swimming. When you know how to swim for your life it’s something that comes back as soon as you hit the water — maybe not as smooth or powerful as you did it back in the day, but more than sufficient to keep your head above water. Likewise, once trained, if someone tries to kill you you’re in your element, you know how to hurt them and take them to nonfunctional. It won’t be pretty, but then, violence never is. I’ve had many clients get in touch with me years after training — so many years I don’t even remember them — with harrowing stories of survival… often without so much as a scratch. They, themselves, were amazed at how obvious and natural the solution to their predicament was — they found they didn’t even have to think about it — they injured the man and it was over.
Lastly, if you like the idea of using a tool — knife, stick or gun — Target Focus Training will greatly enhance your understanding and use of that tool. In the end it’s a total win: you’re never truly ‘unarmed,’ you’re dangerous even when naked, and you’re just that much more effective when you do have that tool in your hand…
It boggles my mind sometimes, how we can be as careful and clear as possible in making the case for surviving and winning in violence and still have it come out garbled on the other end.
