Paranoia vs. Preparation

Great Little Self-Protection Tool

Recently had a conversation with a friend of mine concerned about the safety of his teenage daughter going to college.  She takes some unnecessary risks according to my friend, like walking alone across campus in periods of low-light.  I recommended my solution to such a problem: a two-dollar flat head screwdriver held upside down on the inside of the wrist inside a sleeve.  He did not like that idea, because it would cause her to constantly worry about it.

“I don’t want to make her paranoid,” he said.  “I don’t live my life constantly worrying about danger, and I don’t want her to have to live that way.”

My response was that if you are prepared, you don’t have to be paranoid.  I also told him that nobody is jumping out of the bushes to grab six-foot-four, two-hundred and fifty pound, middle-aged Marines like him.  Teenage girls on a college campus do need to be a little paranoid.  Not paranoid to the point that it debilitates a person or prevents them from living the life they want, but paranoid enough to be aware of surroundings using all five senses in concert.  Using all five senses at once does two things: 1) It causes your mind to become present-focused as it is impossible to remember or future-fantasize with all five senses; 2) it activates the so-called “sixth” sense, which is really just intuition about when a situation is potentially dangerous and should be left or avoided.

Situational Awareness is often talked about, but not fully understood.  It can be the deciding factor in a self-defense situation if it is utilized correctly.  Utilizing Situational Awareness correctly means you never get into a self-defense situation at all.  When you have a high level of Situational Awareness, and you trust your intuition—being informed by all five of your senses—then you can survive the ambush by never getting into it.  The best way to survive any self-defense situation is to listen when your sixth sense, your gut, your “spidey sense,” your women’s intuition, et cetera tells you to GTFO (Get The F--- Out).  That is the master level utilization of Situational Awareness.

By contrast, being aware of an ambush and still walking into it, while better than being caught unaware, is not the best use of Situational Awareness.  In the military, in war, sometimes you can’t avoid a combat engagement because you still have to accomplish a mission, or because you have orders, or whatever.  But, in the civilian self-defense world, if you knowingly walk into a combat situation, you are an idiot.  Or, if you are in a place and you start feeling a really bad vibe like something is about to go down, and you do not trust your gut, you have made yourself a victim.  Situational Awareness is not a tool to allow you to be irresponsible with your own life.  I have a pretty high level of Situational Awareness, especially in unfamiliar or riskier surroundings, but the intuition is only as good as the trust you have in it.

Situational Awareness should lead to one of two actions: 1) GTFO because you trust your instincts, or 2) you increase your readiness for combat.  Being aware you're about to get jumped does you no good if you don’t take the steps necessary to defeat the ambush in advance.  In other words, when my intuition starts telling me something is going bad, that is the time that I put my hand on the weapon, or if it’s the knife/screwdriver up my sleeve I get it into the grip I want and take it outside of the sleeve.  I might shift my walk/stance. 

“I have Situational Awareness, so I’m safe…even though I don’t have a gun, a knife, a screwdriver or running shoes and I can’t fight my way out of a wet paper bag…”

Situational Awareness is awesome, but it is not a panacea for self-defense because it is not how engagements are won.  Let me put it another way: spies don’t win wars; fighters do.  Now, some spies are also fighters, but my point is that information about the enemy, by itself, does not defeat the enemy.  You still have to have the capacity to inflict damage on the enemy.  Having every square inch of your yard covered by security cameras is useless if you don’t have the capacity to do anything to somebody trying to come in and hurt you.  The cameras are great Situational Awareness, which massively increase information and knowledge about the enemy, but if he’s “got the pistol, he’ll keep the pesos” unless you have a capacity to utilize the information.  Intelligence (Situational Awareness) by itself is only useful if you can use it to avoid an engagement; if you can’t avoid the engagement then Situational Awareness is far less important than the capabilities necessary to defeat the opponent.  It is not a panacea for self-defense; it is a tool for the preparation for self-defense situations.  Properly used, it gets you away from dangerous situations without ever being engaged.  If that’s not possible, then it eliminates the confusion of an ambush (which is the real danger), and it allows you to regain Initiative.  But, it does nothing for you if you do not trust the intuition it informs, or if you do not prepare yourself with the capabilities to do violence.

Soule
Easy 6
www.easy6training.com

Self-Defense vs. Traditional Martial Arts vs. Self-Protection Systems vs. The Only Art that Matters

Intro: Martial arts are not Self-Defense, and Self-Defense has almost nothing to do with martial arts.  The lie that the consumer has been told for the last fifty years is that the two words are synonymous.  In truth, “Self-Defense” is not a system of physical actions one takes to protect oneself. Actually, Self-Defense is a legal determination—from a criminal justice official—after a physical confrontation occurs (Tim Larkin, When Violence is the Answer).  If it was a real Self-Defense situation, where the person was protecting self from murder/rape/stabbing/home invasion/carjacking, then whatever actions were taken in self-protection would be construed as justified by the legal system.  That is Self-Defense, it is a plea in a court, a determination by a cop, or a finding by a prosecutor/judge/jury of a justified use of force in protecting self. 

1) Self-Defense is not a barfight. If you mortally wound or maim somebody in a barfight, you will go to prison.  Barfights are not Self-Defense, and yet traditional martial arts teach nothing but how to win in barfights, and then they call it “reality-based street self-defense training.”  It is NOT Self-Defense; barfights are “duels;” two drunk gorillas pounding their chests for social dominance.  When somebody is yelling “MotherF-er!” at you for five minutes before anybody takes a swing, that is not real, justified Self-Defense.  There is no legal justification for killing drunk idiots in bars with a gun, and we all understand that, but the martial arts community would tell you that permanently maiming somebody by stomping their head into a barroom floor is perfectly justified because “he threw the first punch.”  That idiotic idea will land you in jail.  There is NOTHING in a bar worth fighting over, because nobody ever wins.  Somebody gets hurt—usually both parties—and somebody goes to jail—often both parties—regardless of who “wins” or “loses” the altercation. 

2) Real Self-Defense means that if you had a gun or a knife, you would have been perfectly justified in using it because your life/body was truly in danger; it is combat at the interpersonal level.  Thus, when unarmed and confronted with such a threat, you must make your body a bullet—or a blade—and maim or kill the assailant by attacking vulnerable parts of their body.  Kickboxing the face and ribs or grappling on the ground may win in a cage fight, but in real unarmed combat it takes too long.  In real unarmed combat, you want your body to cause the same trauma to the enemy that a knife or bullet would if you had one; you attack the eyes, the throat, the spine and the brain to replicate such wounds.  You cause enough Damage to the assailant to allow escape, or to get to a better weapon and use it on him, because there is no “fair fight” in real Self-Defense.  If you would not be justified stabbing somebody to death, then it is not actually a Self-Defense situation; it’s just a barfight or a competition. 

3) Therefore, I never get into fist fights, because none of them are necessary to me.  I am always armed, so if it is real Self-Defense, why wouldn’t I just shoot/stab/run over the assailant?  There are only two kinds of physical confrontations: justified Self-Defense and unjustified “fights” or “duels” for illegitimate reasons (like impressing women, or because somebody spilled a drink on somebody else).  In the first kind, you are always justified in using a weapon to prevent your death or grievous bodily harm (unless you live in one of the insane places like Maryland, New York or the U.K.), so why get into a fist fight at all?  There is never a reason to get into a fist fight if you are armed, and if you are in a situation where you can’t take a gun or knife (like an airplane), then use an improvised weapon to get you to a better weapon that you can use to kill or neutralize the threat.  So, I just don’t see the need to get into fist fights; if I am justified in defending myself it means my life is actually at risk, in which case I am going to use the most lethal tool I have and use my bare hands only as a means to get me to a lethal tool.  If you adopt this outlook that you are going to kill any real threat to your person or loved ones, then actually your life becomes a lot more civil and peaceful, because you ignore the social slights and fake “self-defense” situations that most martial arts train you to defeat.   

4) Tom Clancy once wrote, “The first rule of unarmed combat is: Don’t Get Into It!”  Unarmed combat is never the goal, but it may be a transitional step to getting to a weapon.  But, traditional martial arts like to teach that “Self-Defense” is nothing more than winning fist fights by being a better puncher/kicker/grappler.  In truth, the whole goal of unarmed combat is not to win, it is to get out of the predicament of being unarmed.  To that end, there are some non-traditional self-protection systems that are useful for making your body into a weapon of last resort.  Their utility is two-fold: first, the biological utility in learning to strike from many different parts of the body other than just fists and learning mechanics of how the human body moves and doesn’t move (breaks).  Secondly, these non-traditional self-protection systems emphasize being armed.  Have a weapon; if you don’t have a weapon then find one; if you can’t find a weapon then make one.  Only as an absolute last resort should you use your body as the weapon, and then only in the pursuit of getting a better weapon.  Traditional martial arts do not teach this principle because they do not believe in this principle; they have been lied to for centuries about the effectiveness of their arts in killing people.  Do not buy the b.s. about some system being the “world’s deadliest martial art,” or “the most realistic self-defense system ever.”  Don’t believe hype or propaganda claiming the ability to disarm anybody, beat anybody or survive any threat because they evolved from some thousand-year-old style of taking spears away from guys in armor. 

5) The goal of all the other unarmed self-protection activity I might engage in during a violent encounter is ultimately designed for one purpose: to get my hands on a gun to eliminate the threat. Therefore, the only martial art that matters to me any longer is shooting.  Yes, shooting is a martial art (a “war skill”).  Just like fencing was a martial art for swords, and warriors of the Renaissance understood that to get good at using their tool they needed to train and practice with it.  Firearms are simply the modern version of swords.  Therefore, I train with the pistol like Musketeers trained with their rapiers.  The skill and the tool combined is what made the Musketeers effective in combat, and so must the modern concealed carrier be efficient and effective in using his version of the rapier.  So, we have to train, and not just for marksmanship but for gunfighting.  I think the most dangerous person on the planet is somebody with a concealed carry pistol who has not gone to a range and practiced with it in years.  That is somebody who will end up arming a bad guy, because he will be useless with the tool when the time comes to use it, and he will have it taken away from him.  To prevent that, some empty hand skills are needed to “fight to the gun, fight for the gun in order to fight with the gun.”  That should be the focus of a good unarmed fighting system (getting armed), and the system should apply the same principles to shooting as it does to unarmed combat: 

1. Get the Initiative away from the attacker: become the aggressor, make the bad guy retreat. 

2. Cause traumatic Damage, not just intimidation or peripheral pain: shoot/fight to end threats. 

3. Maintain Situational Awareness: don’t get ambushed. 

4. If you do get ambushed, be mentally prepared to kill to protect yourself: don’t freeze! 

5. The first rule of unarmed combat: don’t get into it!  If you are in it, get to a weapon fast!

Lessons from the Annapolis Shooting

Another mass shooting, another blog.  The cops got there in 60 seconds.  By then, five people were mortally wounded, two others shot.  This by a guy who was deliberately targeting people rather than just randomly killing anybody.  This bears out other research that says mass shooters hit somebody about every 8 seconds.  Meaning, unless you are a plain-clothed cop standing next to the first victim, relying on the police to stop a mass shooter does not work for the second--et sequentia--victims.

Predator vs. Armed Prey

Honestly, carrying a gun does not guarantee your safety in a mass shooting.  Nor does not carrying a gun guarantee you will be a victim.  But let's say carrying a gun increases your survival chances by one percent.  Is your life worth that one percent better chance?

Unfortunately, what the politicians on both the left and right in modern America argue about are false guarantees of safety.  There are no guarantees in combat, and as I have said many times, real self-defense engagements are combat on an interpersonal level.  It's the scene in Saving Private Ryan where Private Mellish is killed with a knife by the German.  There are no guarantees, because the enemy gets a vote in the outcome of the struggle.  Guarantees and promises are what Americans want from their politicians, and giving such guarantees is how politicians get elected.  But, that's a lie.  There are no guarantees when it comes to violence.  There are only probabilities, and you can increase your odds of winning by doing certain things, but there is still no 100% solution in combat.

The most important thing you can do to increase your chances of survival is equipping yourself to be able to confront violence.  In other words, you have to have the physical capabilities to be violent if you are confronted with violence.  That means arming yourself.  I advocate carrying a firearm, but if that's not possible, then remember the first WIDTH-6 principle: anything can be used as a weapon, because you are the weapon.  There are fire extinguishers in most indoor work settings; ambush the bastard upside the head with one.  Get a kitchen knife from the break room, and turn his neck into a red sprinkler.  Or, be like me, and shoot back.

The other thing you need to do to prepare yourself is train.  Train as much as you can.  For me that means shooting as often as I can.  If you're in a place where you can't carry a gun, then train for unarmed combat; that is not the same as training for a fight.  Unarmed combat is not a boxing match or MMA competition; it is trying to neutralize the other person's ability to kill you before they have a chance to do so.  That means taking the Initiative away from them and causing Damage (not pain) to a structure of their body in order to kill or completely incapacitate them.  In other words, cheat your ass off and be brutal; if you're not cheating, you're not in a real self-defense situation.

The most important aspect of training and equipping yourself to confront violence is not physical, it is mental preparation to do violence onto another person.  This should inform your decisions for equipping yourself in that you want a weapon that you can handle to actually inflict lethal damage upon another person, not just threaten it (never rely on intimidation against crazy people).  It should also inform your training methodology.  Training to win a grappling contest in a ring will not solve an active shooter problem.  Neither will training to put holes in bullseyes in a sterile indoor shooting range.  Mental training has to be training the mind to kill.  The mind is I, and I am the Weapon.

Train to flee also.  Understand where the exits are.  Understand how to get out of an active shooter situation.  Rehearse escape routes.  Rehearse getting to safety, not just outside the building.  Rick Rescorla, who was the hero security manager for Morgan Stanley in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, forced his entire company to do evacuation drills.  On September 11, 2001, he saved all of his employees but one idiot Vice President, who refused to leave, and Mr. Rescorla died going back in for the idiot when the tower collapsed.  It was his preparation, learned in Vietnam, that saved hundreds of lives.  He taught them how to get out, and to not stop once they got out.  These simple rehearsals that he ran made the difference between his company's survival and the fates of so many others in the World Trade Center.  Know how to get out of your work space, always know where you are in any space, and know the most expedient means of escape.  When you are traveling and check into a hotel, find the nearest emergency exits and just take a walk down to them.  These little rehearsals save lives, and they are all part of training to survive an active shooter.

There are no guarantees in combat because the enemy gets a vote.  Don't trust any politician, on the left or right, that promises to "make you safer."  They can't.  You have to make yourself safer.  Be the Weapon.  Retake the Initiative to save your own life.  If confronted with evil, cause mortal Damage.  Trust your Sixth Sense and maintain situational awareness.  Be mentally prepared to save your own life, because even when the cops are only 60 seconds away, that's too long.

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Soule
Easy6
www.easy6training.com

Checking your Easy 6th Sense

Easy 6 was my radio call sign in Iraq.  Lots of my students ask what it stands for and why I call the company Easy 6 Training.  They ask if there are six easy things to remember to be a better armed self-defense shooter.  I have always had the five W.I.D.T.H. principles, of which I have written extensively.  But, briefly, W is for Weapon: 1) I am the weapon, not the gun/knife/sledge hammer, thus 2) anything can be used as a weapon from a rock to B2 bomber.  I is for Initiative: Combat is a battle for initiative, whoever has it at the end of an engagement is the winner, thus retaking the initiative from an attacker is the most important aspect of winning.  D is for Damage: do not try to cause pain, try to cause damage; shoot for the high center chest, punch for the trachea, stab for the jugular.  T is for Torque: use mass and circular motion to defeat smaller mass and fragile structures.  H is for Head (and Neck): use Torque on the Head to break lethal structures (Damage), target the Head to shut down the central processor of an enemy (Damage). 

Then I got to thinking about situational awareness.  Fighter pilots call it "checking your six o'clock" to make sure nothing is behind you.  I used to include checking your six in Torque, or circular motion to ensure nobody was sneaking up on you.  In fire team tactics, we use 360 degree security to ensure the six is always covered.  But there is more to situational awareness than just checking your six.  It is using all five of your senses in order to increase your sixth sense.  There was research in Vietnam about guys that survived ambushes because their "sixth sense" told them about the danger before the ambush was launched.  That is true situational awareness.  Being attuned to your environment, so you can feel when something is not right or a threat.  Listen to your instincts, to your sixth sense.

I tell a story in my classes about when I did not listen to my sixth sense.  It was my first week of my first tour in Iraq, and I was a new guy.  We were driving by another Forward Operating Base (FOB) and there was a white van parked across the road from the gate.  Something didn't feel right to me, but I didn't want to look like the paranoid F---ing New Guy, so I didn't say anything.  A couple hours later, the gate guards came out and found the van was loaded with high explosives, and they planned to ram it into the gate later that night and get inside the FOB perimeter.  Fortunately, no Americans were hurt, but it taught me a vital lesson about trusting my sixth sense.  Embarrassment is a small price to pay for staying alive.  Learn to trust that "Spidey Sense" when something does not seem normal.  Maybe it means you put the knife up your sleeve, maybe it means you put the gun in your hand, maybe it means you just get out of that situation, but trust it.

So, there it is, six easy things to make you a better self-defender: Weapon, Initiative, Damage, Torque, Head and Sixth Sense: WIDTH-6.  This one was short, because I have another I am working on about lessons from the Annapolis Shooting.

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Soule
Easy 6
www.easy6training.com

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Soule
Easy 6
www.easy6training.com