…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.

   read this entry »

Or carry a knife, for that matter?

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…

Because it’s not your entire world.

Because it’s not your only hope.

Because the trained person is never harmless.

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.