Seize Initiative, Be the Weapon

Fourth Wall Moment: I started this blog because a crashing computer hard drive ate six chapters of a book I was writing about Making America Violent Again.  The first chapter of that book set the stage for the rest of the book.  It was about the ambush.

Violent crimes are all some type of ambush.  In Army doctrine, we divide ambushes into “near” and “far.”  Near ambushes are those that occur within hand grenade range, and far ambushes are those that occur outside of hand grenade range.  In a near ambush, a unit throws hand grenades and attacks.  This is a battle drill that does not have to be thought about or specified in orders.  In a far ambush, they break contact, get out of the kill zone and prepare a plan.

How does this relate to self-defense?  Well, almost all violent crime is a near ambush; home invasions perhaps are the exception.  But, a mugging, a sexual assault, a random assault and battery are all near ambushes and we have to prepare battle drills to defeat them.  A battle drill is a set response to a specific type of attack.  Throwing hand grenades and then charging is just that; a simple, set response to an ambush at close range.  To defeat the ambush, the unit becomes infinitely more aggressive than the ambushing force.  That is exactly how to defeat a criminal ambush as well: become the aggressor.  In my classes I talk about “the switch” that has to be thrown to turn a student from citizen to killer in an instant.  The secret to developing the switch is the same secret that the military uses to develop battle drills: repetitive training on the same simple tasks over and over again.

In armed self-defense shooting the most important skill is not hitting the target.  That is almost guaranteed at the one- to two-foot range of most self-defense shootings.  The most important skill is getting the gun out.  This is why most firing ranges, especially indoor firing ranges, are useless for self-defense training.  Presenting a firearm—that is drawing, pointing and (if necessary) aiming—is far more important to practice than the actual putting a hole in a piece of paper at an unrealistic distance.  The second most important thing to train is retaining the Weapon.  Remember, you may have to fight to the Weapon and fight over the Weapon before you ever fight with the Weapon.  That principle is the hardest for me to teach, that carrying a pistol does not by itself guarantee one their safety, because most violent crime does not occur at the standard twenty-five yard pistol range.  If a bad person is sticking a gun in your face at six inches, drawing your gun and shooting first is not going to happen even if you are Wild Bill Hickok.

In that situation, if you decide to defend yourself, you will need to have some empty hand skills as well as a very efficient method of presenting the Weapon and engaging at close range.  That is a battle drill.  The purpose of the book I was writing was to overcome the illusion that gun-armed, primitive-armed and unarmed self-defense are distinct disciplines.  I know many martial artists who do not believe in guns because they think their skills are good enough to defend themselves without a firearm.  I don’t care if you are the reincarnation of Bruce Lee and Bodhidharma into Brock Lesner, if somebody shoots you from ten feet away, you will lose.  I also know many concealed firearms carriers who believe that the tool will do all of the fighting for them.  I don’t care if you’re Doc Holliday either, if somebody is pummeling the hell out of you while you do nothing but fumble for your gun, you too are going to lose.  I refer to both types of people by the same title: VICTIM.

The solution to both of these flawed ways of thinking is to adopt the philosophy that the defender is the Weapon, not the tool.  Then, whether there is a tool or not, a person can defend themselves as the Weapon.  If there is a tool, it is simply an extension of one’s body, which is the Weapon.  This is a philosophy that both fighters and competitive shooters understand, but for some reason when it comes to unarmed and armed self-defense, the practitioners do not grasp it as easily.  Because half of them want it to be easy, and the other half think making it easy is somehow “cheating.”  All combat is cheating, first of all, and it’s never easy.  If you don’t need to “cheat” to win, it is not really a self-defense situation.

This is another good point to bring up here, the difference between sport and self-defense.  You can’t “cheat” if there are no rules.  Only sports have rules.  Even MMA has rules.  Real combat does not have rules.  Self-defense situation is individual combat, it is life or death, kill or be killed.  In those situations, you do whatever it takes to not be the loser.  Therefore in my opinion, the only unarmed moves you should make are the ones that are expressly banned by the UFC.  Eye gouges, throat punches, elbows to the soft spot on the top of the head, neck breaks, et cetera.  That is “cheating,” and self-defense IS cheating.

That is the point of the near ambush battle drill, to use the hand grenades as a method of cheating, to take away the enemy’s Initiative.  Initiative is the most important aspect of combat.  Whoever has the Initiative at the end of an engagement, is the winner.  Law abiding citizens do not have the luxury of the Initiative at the beginning of a self-defense engagement as we do not chose the times and places where we get mugged.  So, what we have to do is take away the Initiative from the enemy, then with the Initiative, eliminate the threat.  All unarmed self-defense techniques teach this.  The mugging scene in the movie Collateral is a great example of this principle when you have a tool to extend your body (which you should watch on youtube).  But, notice in the movie, Tom Cruises’ first move is unarmed, he takes away the Initiative, removing himself from muzzle direction, then draws and fires, finishing the engagement with the Initiative firmly in his grasp.  That is a very good fictional depiction of armed self-defense (and just an awesome movie), but you have to ignore the fact that he’s the bad guy.

Conclusion, if you noticed in this blog I capitalized the words Weapon and Initiative.  These are the first two principles I used to teach my soldiers.  W is for Weapon.  The person is the Weapon, not the knife or gun.  If you adopt that mentality, then any tool you use is an extension of the Weapon.  Which means anything can be used to augment your body from a B2 bomber to a beer bottle; make them extensions of your body and Be The Weapon.  But remember, the First Rule of Unarmed Combat: Don’t Get Into It!  Arm yourself with something, which can be anything.  Next, I is for Initiative.  Whoever has the Initiative at the end of an engagement is the winner.  All combat is fundamentally a struggle over the Initiative.  You have to develop battle drills to seize the Initiative from an attacker, and then finish that attacker using the tools you have access to.  Last thing I will say is this: if you are not prepared to be as violent as necessary, to kill an attacker to save your life or the lives of others, do not carry a lethal weapon.  In which case, you will be a VICTIM.  Despite what your granola-loving hippy kindergarten teacher told you, violence itself is not the enemy; in a near ambush, violence is the only way to defeat the enemy.  Make America Violent Again.

Fragility

The events of the past week in America have confused me.  I have been struggling for a way to write about the Charlottesville Riots.  I wrote a little on social media about the absurdity of debating who were bigger scumbags, Nazis or Communists.  Two hate groups had a riot.  I wrote a little on social media about the Orwellian nature of destroying history.  I wrote a little on social media about the danger of people who hate the freedom to express ignorant, bigoted and dumb ass ideas as being as dangerous as the hatred such toothless hillbilly bigots feel towards another race, religion or other superficial characteristic they blame for all of their woes in life.  But I have not been able to incorporate these things into a coherent understanding within my own American philosophy.  Then I started thinking about the similarities between the rioters, instead of their differences.  What they all have in common is fragility.

The hillbilly racists are fundamentally weak and fragile because they blame some "other" for their failures.  They are not responsible for their lots in life.  They blame Jewish people, black people, gay people, liberal people and anybody else who does not look or act like them.  They do not take personal responsibility for their lives.  Their egos are fundamentally unformed or malformed in ways that preclude mature understanding of how their lives are their own responsibility.  Bigotry is fundamentally blaming some "other" for all of one's own failures.  It is a childish need for the world to be fair to them.

As is the quest for equality at the expense of freedom.  The opposition in these riots were equally hate-filled nutjobs who feel the world has been unfair to them because of the Marxist dogma of class disparity, coupled with a historical perspective that deems all socioeconomic disparity as deliberate oppression of their class.  In other words, they fight to make the world more fair.  Their main enemy in this struggle seems to be the expression of Americanism.  They do not believe that people have the fundamental right to be offensive, to disagree with their dogma or to express anything that runs contrary to that dogmatic belief that the world is fundamentally unfair.  This too is an unformed or malformed ego that is so fragile it cannot stand the thought that there are people in the world who do not like them.

Fragility is the trait both of these wingnut movements have in common, and it is the most unAmerican trait I can imagine.  It is contradictory to everything America is supposed to stand for: rugged individualism allows for class movement despite all the inequities stacked against any given person.  Both philosophies are dictated by group-think, both in the sense that they see themselves as oppressed members of a group, and also in that they surrender their own mental and moral faculties to unintelligent mob-minded hate in defense of their group from imagined injustice.

Grow the Fuck Up!  Nobody is oppressing you.  Nobody is stealing your life.  Nobody is hurting you because they say words that are offensive.  You do not have a right to not be offended.  You do not have a right to inflict physical violence on those who disagree with you.  You do not have a right to destroy property because it makes you feel bad.  Being offended is basically just feeling bad, and anybody over the age of five has surrendered that as an excuse to get violent.

The world is full of assholes.  You are one of them.  I am one of them.  Everybody else on the planet is also one of them.  Most of them are not like you.  Most of them do not agree with you.  Almost none of them are trying to physically hurt you, kill you or steal your shit.  Until they do, you have two non-violent choices: write a blog to point out how big of pansies they are, or realize, as more enlightened, smarter and less malformed egos have for millennia, that they do not matter.  Grow a thicker skin.  Stop being so damn fragile and believe that every irrelevant verbal slight or bad word is a physical attack on your person.  They are not.  Bullets, bayonets and bludgeons are attacks on your person; some asshole spouting off about how unjust the world is because it favors black women or white men is not an attack on your person.  It is an attack on your feelings.  Your feelings don't mean shit.  The fragile belief that there is a grand conspiracy of Jews who are ruining your life because you grew up a hillbilly and could not read at the age of twenty is weakness bordering on delusional mental illness.  The fragile belief that there is a grand conspiracy of rich people who are ruining your life because you are a hundred thousand dollars in debt to student loans you took out to get your degree in Marxist transgender studies is equally weak and delusional.

The assholes who dislike you, your kind or your words are not the majority (we don't give a shit about you), they are a small minority, and they are just as pathetic as you.  They have absolutely no power to ruin your life, even if they say they can with mean and dirty words that make your inner child feel like its imaginary ears are going to bleed imaginary blood...because it's all in your head!  YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR YOUR FAILURES, YOU RAVING, DELUSIONAL NUTJOBS!  Robert E. Lee is not your fucking problem.  Nor is Robert E. Lee your fucking solution.  Stop being so damn fragile and take responsibility for your own successes and failures.  Also, stop trying to be admired as the biggest, mindless wannabe bad ass in a mob of other mindless morons who themselves have completely unformed or malformed egos even more fragile than yours.  You are not impressing the rest of us by being so emotionally weak that half-literate words written by some equally moronic pansy, in crayon, on a cardboard box, at a protest, is enough to send you over the edge into insanity.  That is the very definition of fragility.  Both sides of the riot in Virginia, and the ensuing purge of the history of the Civil War, are fundamentally WIMPs: Weak, Incompetent, Malingering Pussies!  You have no control of your lives or self-worth if you are that fragile; and that is the weakness that is killing our country.

If my language in this blog offended you...READ IT AGAIN!

Thanks,
Soule (Easy 6)

PS: If you are part of the majority not involved with these losers: 1) Avoid them, or if that's not possible, 2) be prepared to defend yourself from them.

Mentality Determines Lethality

     This will be a bit rambling because I want to write about a few things, so I apologize up front.  The first thing I want to talk about is the title of the piece: Mentality Determines Lethality (which is a word, despite what the spellchecker is telling me).  Had a great day on the range on Sunday with a group of shooters with varying degrees of experience.  One was a relative beginner, but a bit of a natural.  After just one tip from the most experienced shooter out there, she was bulls-eyeing every target.  Before that, she was getting excellent groups, but she was a bit nervous because of the natural tendency to be unsure of oneself when put on a range.  People think it is a competition, and if you're not hitting bulls-eyes you are failing.  This reminded me of a very important distinction between competitive shooters and self-defense shooters.  I don't aim for bulls-eyes and I don't train students to aim for bulls-eyes.  So I explained to them that your measurement for performance varies based on your goal.  My goal in training to shoot a pistol is to put a large number of bullets into the torso of another human being as fast as I can.  That is a different goal than a marksman who trains to put one bullet into a bulls-eye.  Neither one is better, they are just different goals.  After that, she became less nervous and started being less self-critical of her shooting, which was truly way better than most experienced shooters.  She picked up a gun she had never seen before and hit a bulls-eye the first shot.

     Which leads me to the bigger point.  Technique is not as important as mindset.  I wrote about this last time regarding the mental strength necessary to kill another human being.  I train people in techniques to do that, but I also tell all of my students at the end of every class that shooting is a self-defense method, but it is also a sport that requires practice.  Or, in my case, it's a recreational activity.  It is how I relieve stress, not get more stressed out about hitting bulls-eyes.  But, sport or recreational activity, both involve practice.  That is the technique.  And technique is not as important as mindset.  That is something that can be taught, but typically it involves months of indoctrination into a uniform of some type.  That can be a military uniform, a police uniform, or a martial arts gi, but whatever the case, it usually won't come from an eight hour class on a range.  I do demonstrate what aggression is, and sometimes that scares the hell out of students in my advanced classes, because I want them to see the mentality.  You shoot until your out of bullets, then you start pistol-whipping the guy if he's still a threat, and stomping on him until he's no longer a threat.  That is the philosophy of violence, not sport and not technically putting bullets in bulls-eyes.

     Which is what I think is missing in 21st Century America.  I wrote "Go Kill Something" because it has to do with that mentality of getting acquainted with mortality.  We are very removed from it; which means we are very prone to it surprising us when people who use violence for evil show up in our lives.  I phrased that deliberately, because I had a conversation last week with a well-meaning young person who said we had "evolved passed the need for violence."  I asked him if his grandfather was still alive.  He said he was.  So, I asked if his grandfather knew how low of an opinion he had of the Greatest Generation.  He was offended.  But, basically, his assertion was that humanity today is more civilized than it was in the 1940s, when violence was used to SAVE CIVILIZATION.  I doubt I successfully changed his mind from being a pacifist to being a warrior, but it highlighted a very offensive ideology in the civilization that the Greatest Generation saved.  Most Baby Boomers, Gen X-ers and Millennials have lost the mentality necessary to be lethal.  Obviously, there are exceptions, but we are outliers, and we are terrifying to the majority who have lost the understanding that violence can be used for saving civilizations as well as oppressing them.

     Which brings me back to my title; Mentality Determines Lethality.  I studied martial arts for almost ten years before I ever had to use it in a fight.  I had absolutely no confidence in the skills until I had to use them.  But, it turns out, I had the skills inside me to end the fight in a matter of seconds.  This was not a self-defense situation; this was two dumb ass college students with big mouths, by the way.  But what I discovered was that the technique was okay, but the mentality is what carried the day.  The technique didn't go off exactly as I had trained on the mat over and over again, but I put enough aggression and violence of action into it, that it didn't matter.  The same is true of shooting.  The goal is not to be Chris Kyle (God rest his heroic soul); the goal is just to get home.  If sloppy violence gets you home, you achieved the goal.  Putting a perfectly aimed shot into someone's heart or snot box is indeed more technically impressive; but putting five rounds into their torso achieves the same goal.  It is that Mentality that Determines Lethality, not accuracy.  What practice does is give you muscle memory enough to execute the movements good enough to get home.  "There's GOOD, and there's GOOD ENOUGH."

     Which brings me to my last meandering point: self-defense does not require you to be a Navy SEAL.  Navy SEALs do not go to kill Bin Laden with a concealed carry pistol or a pocket knife as their primary weapon.  War and self-defense are not the same thing.  There are a lot of guys out there who are very, very good warriors who are truly American heroes, that are trying to train civilians to be "operators."  That's cool, if you have the money to spend on the ammo.  But, I contend that you don't have to be an operator to kill a mugger, though certainly operators can kill them more efficiently, but the mugger can't tell the difference afterwards.  That is not to contradict myself and say practice isn't important, it is, and you should practice the skills of violence as often as you can.  But, don't make the mistake I made before that first fight and assume that your skills aren't good enough because you're not Chris Kyle.  First of all, it's not likely you will be carrying a sniper rifle when you are mugged or carjacked, as most muggers and carjackers are not quite that stupid.  It is more likely you will have a concealed carry pistol, or a folding knife, and with those tools precision is a lot less important than aggression.  Not everybody needs to be an operator, but we all need to remember the faces of our grandfathers who did not believe violence was inherently evil, and were willing to be violent when it was necessary.

Perfection is irrelevant in defeating very fragile and highly mortal human beings.

Thanks,
Soule (Easy 6) 

Melting Snowflakes

We give a lot of crap to Millennials for being precious little snowflakes, but the truth is they did not start the trend.  Most of the Baby Boomers were equally fragile, as are most of Generation X.  There were just a larger percentage of exceptions with the Baby Boomers, smaller with Gen X and now tiny with Millennials.  Americans born after World War Two have had a pretty easy life and have been treated as such precious little snowflakes; then a relatively small number went to fight in Vietnam, a smaller number in Iraq the first time, and an even smaller number in the Global War on Terrorism.

We have to melt these snowflakes.  When you add friction to a snowflake it turns to water, the most versatile and powerful substance on earth.  Water can take any form, bends to the touch but can carve out the Grand Canyon or power entire cities.  Snowflakes are delicate little one off crystals of pointlessness; but you apply some friction and they can literally move mountains.

Which brings me to this blog's unusual topic: internal strength.  I teach an external skill.  I teach people how to interact with a threat in a physical manner.  That's an outward manifestation of power, work, effort and physics.  But somebody said something to me this week that made me want to write about the internal mechanisms required to execute the skills I teach.  Not the philosophical internal skills, which I spend a decent amount of time teaching in my classes, like the legal and moral idea that your life and body are sovereign and you have the moral right to defend them.  Rather, I am talking about the conviction necessary to manifest physical violence upon a person trying to do violence to you or a loved one, which takes strength.

I was told, "Not everybody has your background in the military, so you can't talk to them in certain ways.  It is counterproductive to influencing them."  This bothers me, not because I don't like dancing around on eggshells to protect the emotional sensitivity of weakling snowflakes (which I don't), but more importantly it bothers me because it indicates a level of fragility that detracts from my mission of making Americans invulnerable.  We cannot be invulnerable physically if we are cripplingly fragile and vulnerable internally.  I know the 1960s and 1970s brainwashed an entire generation into believing the sensitive man is the truest nature of human existence, but that is complete crap.  We did not claw our way to the top of the food chain by being sensitive.  The children of these brainwashed kinder and gentler souls are even more fragile and vulnerable to psychological damage than they were.  So much so that when somebody is blunt or direct with them in disagreement, they consider it the equivalent of a physical attack.  As I have written before, I don't know at what point they stopped teaching "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but your words are just patterns of auditory vibrations in compression waves of air, surrounding us at all times and thus completely incapable of causing me physical damage," or something like that.  Apparently things changed after I left kindergarten.

Somebody recently argued with me that, "words have power."  This is also untrue.  Words do not have power, they have influence at best.  Bullets have power.  Allow me to prove this to you: The Revolutionary War without Thomas Jefferson would still have been won by George Washington, though not in as poetic and charming of a manner, to be sure.  By contrast, without George Washington's Army, Jefferson would have died very badly in an English dungeon for an act of treason; a very poetic and charming act of treason, to be sure, but dead nonetheless.  Anybody who has ever been in a life or death situation understands the difference between influence and power; nobody talks their way out of a firefight.  But, this does not mean that you can only come to know the difference through combat.  It is far better to know the difference before you ever go to combat.  Last week I wrote about growing horns and being a harder sheep to kill.  The same is true of your internal reserves; you have to harden them against negative influence, recognizing it is not the same as threatening power, which can actually hurt you.  Actions matter; words and the exchange of ideas are luxuries.  They are wonderful luxuries that enrich our lives, but they are not what makes life bearable or death available.  Anybody who thinks that words are the root of either of those states of being has truly lived a charmed and privileged life shielded from actual consequence, violence or snowflake-melting FRICTION.

Jokes, folks, are just folking jokes.  If your feelings get easily hurt, train to make your internal self as resilient as your physical skills make your external self.  Go hurt some peoples' feelings and get your feelings hurt; the latter being more important.  Go sit in the front row of a comedy club wearing something ridiculous and see what happens.  Whatever happens, I positively guarantee, you will walk out with all of your limbs, all of your senses and no extra holes in you (as long as the club isn't in Chicago).  It will also give you a thicker skin and a stronger internal reservoir for dealing with actual challenges and hardships.

This is why we politically incorrect veterans often come across as not just mean and uncaring to the precious little snowflakes, but also arrogant.  Combat makes that distinction between what is influence and what is power.  It makes the distinction between what makes life bearable, and what makes life luxurious.  Once you learn that you can live without the luxury of "high fallutin' talkin'" and everybody kissing up to each other in the giant drum circle of modern America, you become stronger.  You also become wiser, which makes nineteen and twenty year old combat vets a lot smarter than many forty and fifty year old snowflakes.  The greying snowflakes don't like that because it hurts their feelings.  Maybe, snowflakes, if you want to be as powerful as water, you should listen to those who have survived the Friction!

Thanks,
Soule (Easy 6)