"How many guns do you need?"

Weapon of Mass (x Velocity) Destruction

Disclaimer: Not a PG-Rated Blog Entry This Time

I was watching gun control debates last night on YouTube, and the question was raised, "How many guns do you need?  Is five hundred too many?"  How much square footage does your house need per person?  Does a person need a Ferrari?  Does Oprah need thirty mansions for a two-person family?  Do rich, liberal celebrity douche bags need private jets?

I'm a single guy with an average house, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, about 2000 square feet.  That is WAY more space than I NEED, but I can afford it, and it's legal for me to buy it.  In a free society, governments don't get to restrict the purchase of perfectly legal items based on a lack of need.  Liberals like to (hypocritically) ask us peons "what do you NEED all those guns for?" as they drive away from the private jet terminals in their Lamborghini super cars.

"But, a super car is not a weapon that can be used to murder people," say the liberals.  That's bull crap; you get a Ferrari up to full speed on an interstate and then swerve into a school bus coming the opposite way, you've just created a highly effective terrorist weapon.  Private jets can be used as weapons also, come to think of it.  The September 11th hijackers used jets as missiles.  The guy in New York who used the delivery van to run-over all of those people on the bike path used a normal automobile as a weapon of terror.  The guy in China who took a butchers knife and stabbed over a hundred people used a kitchen tool as a weapon of terror.  Ted Kaczynski used homemade explosives mailed to his targets.  And, yes, the Las Vegas Shooter used guns.  

We do not blame the airplanes for the attacks on 9/11.  We do not blame the automobile for the attack on the bike path.  We do not blame the knife for the attack that resulted in over a hundred people stabbed.  We do not blame the Ryder Truck for the Oklahoma City bombing.  We do not blame the envelopes for the Anthrax Attacks of 2001.  We do not blame any of these incredibly deadly and dangerous devices of mass destruction.  But we blame firearms for the actions of the people holding them, which is absurd because the airplanes used as missiles on 9/11 were MASSIVELY more deadly than any firearm.

What all of these attacks have in common are not the tools used to cause violence and destruction.  What they have in common is the people who carried them out.  The attackers in all of these cases, and most random acts of violence, have one thing in common.  They were BAT-SHIT CRAZY!  I don't mean they were mentally ill; the vast majority of people with mental illness are not dangerous to other people, though admittedly a significant number are dangers to themselves.  When I use the word "Crazy," I mean it is more than just mental illness; it's violently, criminally insane.  Suicide bombers are insane fanatics brainwashed by hatred.  Mass shooters are lunatics.  Timothy McVeigh was a nutjob armed with diesel fuel and fertilizer.  Even less spectacular acts of violence are often the result of the criminally insane.  Rage is a type of insanity.  Maybe it's temporary, maybe it isn't; sometimes anger is the outward manifestation of depression.  The Columbine School Shooters were filled with so much rage by the constant bullying, that they turned their self-loathing into externally-focused hatred and violence.  Their guns and homemade bombs did not MAKE THEM attack their school and perceived nemeses; being Bat-Shit Crazy did.  Do you think the .22 caliber pistol with which John Hinckley tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan MADE HIM do it?  No, it was a Bat-Shit Crazy obsession with Jodie Foster and the psychotic idea that he would impress her enough to fall in love with him if he shot the President...but it's the target pistol's fault?

Blaming guns is easier than blaming people for two reasons.  The first is that it is more politically expedient to paint an inanimate object as somehow possessed by the devil than it is to address the staggeringly complex problem of our mental health crisis.  As messed up as that politically expedient answer seems, it is actually the one that I understand and can accept from the other side of the gun debate.  It's at least a political position.  But I don't think it is the reason MOST of the anti-gun movement blames guns instead of people for shootings.  Most liberals blame--and are afraid of--guns because they do not believe, maybe CANNOT believe, in the capacity for evil within human beings.  The modern progressive movement has grown out of the civil unrest of the 1960s, and the belief in the innate "goodness" of humankind has never changed.  It has changed in individuals, but not in the movement.  It is the same naivete the believes that under a Marxist system, a single genius with few material NEEDS, will be motivated to the peak of his ability without being compensated for it.  It is a desperate desire to make people live in peace, love and harmony; and a categorical denial of the opposite.  Such naive people do not want to accept the history of the human race, clawing its way to the top of the food chain by bloody violence, tribal conflict and millennia of war, genocide, slavery and murder.  It is easier for them to instill the evil into an idol of evil called the firearm.  That way they can continue to believe in the saintliness of humanity, and that it's just the devil inside the gun making people do evil things.

Some have a little less naivete, but they want to create a world without war, without violence, without murder.  But as I have written in the past, what causes all of this violence is the fact that we are mortal.  No revolution can change that.  Only evolution can.  As long as we are mortal, we will be subject to violent death, and as a result bad people will exploit that mortality for wealth, power or pleasure.  The hippies who have grown up to try "to make a world without sin," never understand this true root of violence.  They think the human race en masse can learn to "be good."  But, as Malcolm Reynolds says, "....they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people better.  I do not hold to that.  So no more running; I aim to misbehave!"

Inanimate objects do not have any intent, much less murderous intent, so stop ascribing such characteristics to them.  Guns are not possessed by demons, they do not have mentalities, emotions, psychological characteristics or willpower.  Humans have all of those.  And when those mentalities, emotions, psychological traits and intent turn to murder, the tools such Crazy people use to take life are abundant and plentiful.  The absence of any one of them is irrelevant for dedicated madmen.  We saw that on 9/11; in the absence of guns, the hijackers used utility knives and non-lethal pepper spray to turn airliners into missiles that killed three thousand people in under three hours.  What I am trying to teach good people, with the W.I.D.T.H.6. Principles, is this lesson that bad people know already: it is our intentions that make us dangerous, not the tools.  Once a person becomes the Weapon, and they understand that almost anything can be used as a tool of self-protection, then they become truly dangerous and able to protect themselves.  The same hammer they use to build a house, they can use as an amazingly effective tool of violence.  The glass they drink out of can become a deadly tool of violence very easily, once they understand being the Weapon.  Once they understand Initiative, how to gain and keep it, the way the Columbine Shooters did, then they understand how to win in any self-protection situation, by taking it away from the Bat-Shit Crazy person.  Once they understand how to cause Damage to the human body's critical systems, then they know how to use any tool to end a self-protection situation in two or three seconds.  Bad Guys understand all of this stuff either intuitively or through training in the correctional systems; delusional cowards worried about the "demonic possession" imbuing inanimate objects with murderous intent, or failed hippies desperately trying to change human nature, do not understand violence.  They don't understand the causes of violence.  They don't understand the utility of violence in self-protection.  They don't understand the irrelevance of banning certain things when trying to get bad people to stop behaving badly.  They absolutely do not understand the massive mental health crisis facing America.  They do not understand that people who are Bat-Shit Crazy, who want to hurt innocent people, always WILL unless they are stopped by equally violent people.  But we can't all be presidents with Secret Service Agents to step in front of the bullets when a John Hinckley nutjob shows up, so we have to get prepared to protect ourselves.

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Soule

Easy6

www.easy6training.com

W.I.D.T.H.6.

Weapon

Initiative

Damage

Torque

Head/Neck

Sixuational Awareness (Check your 6)

Also, please check out Colion Noir's debates with the anti-gun movement which inspired this blog.  Sorry about the language!

More on "Self-Defense Mindset"

So, after last week's blog and my facebook post about martial arts, I got some questions regarding what I meant by "self-defense mindset."  As always, I give credit to Tim Larkin and his amazing book When Violence is the Answer, in which he defines "self-defense" not as any actions we might do against another person, but as the legal determination from a criminal justice authority after the incident about whether it was justified or not.  By that definition, "self-defense" is the justified use of force against another person as determined by a cop, a prosecutor, a judge or a jury.  So, understanding what "self-defense" is and is not, then we have to understand that the things martial arts instructors and shooting instructors teach--the actions we train students to perform--are not self-defense, they are what many of us call "self-protection."

Now, last post when I was talking about the marketeers in the personal protection training business referring to the "self-defense mindset," I was really highlighting how many people misuse the term "self-defense."  The confusion I got was from people who still think this is about fighting.  I had a debate with my dad over the holiday about this very topic and if a bar fight can ever really be "self-defense."  My assertion is that nothing in a bar is worth fighting over, and if you can deescalate a situation by leaving, that is always the best option.  So, for me the "self-defense mindset" is not the same as it is for fighters, brawlers and martial artists.

Fighters, whether they be professionals, martial artists or just good brawlers, think of "self-defense" situations as any instance where somebody tries to put a hand on you.  That is their mindset.  I had a martial arts instructor tell me one time that he believes in teaching people lessons and if somebody touched him, they "earned a trip to a hospital."  He was an outstanding practitioner of his art and could easily snap people's limbs at will.  That's the problem.  A guy pushing you in a bar, or spilling a drink on you, or grabbing you because you spilled his drink (all three of which have happened to me at various times in my bar-going lifetime), does not constitute a "self-defense" situation to me, using Tim Larkin's definition of "self-defense," because drunk idiots are not Bad Guys.  Bad Guys is capitalized because it's a compound proper noun, not an adjective describing a noun.

And that is the fundamental difference between my concept of a "self-defense mindset" and the idea that some drunk idiot in a bar deserves a trip to a hospital because he took a handful of lapel and wrinkled your shirt.  My concept of "self-defense mindset" is killer instinct.  I don't mean that hyperbolically either, I mean literally killing people.  Now, when is that justified?  When would a criminal justice authority determine that gouging out somebody's eyes and snapping their neck would be an appropriate self-protection response?  The answer is when it really is a Bad Guy.  When the opponent is actually trying to do you grievous harm.  I can't justify blinding, paralyzing or killing a man who takes a wild-ass, drunken, hay-maker swing at me in a bar because I accidentally spilled his drink.  No criminal justice authority is going to say that was a justified use of force.

In my philosophy of violence, the "self-defense mindset" is the same whether you are armed with a Bradley Fighting Vehicle or your bare hands.  The tools are irrelevant because it is a life or death situation.  Which means, as I have written in the past, unarmed combat is still a struggle for life and death, it's just really uncomfortable combat.  The conclusion I draw from this philosophy, therefore, is as old as repeating firearms: Don't take a knife to a gunfight.  And, always take a gun to a knife fight!  Because there is no such thing as "cheating" in a real "self-defense" situation, where you are legally justified in killing a Bad Guy who is trying to rape, kill or maim you.  That is a combat situation, and in combat, whether it's between armies on a battlefield, fighter planes in the sky, or a rapist and a victim in an alley, cheating is winning!  In a real "self-defense" situation, where a Bad Guy is trying to do you serious harm, you would be perfectly justified in using a knife or a gun if you had it on you.  If you would not be justified in shooting or stabbing the other person, then that is not a real "self-defense" situation.  That is the difference between the "self-defense mindset" that a lot of martial arts schools teach and what I teach.

Which means, in answer to my student a few weeks ago, that unless we are talking about law school, there is no such thing as a "self-defense class."  There is all kinds of training that can teach self-protection skills.  This includes unarmed combat skills (like martial arts or boxing) and armed self-protection skills (like knife fighting and shooting and flying a fighter plane), but these are not "self-defense classes," because it's not about the stuff we do to the other person, it's about what a criminal justice authority says regarding the things we did to the other person after the fact.  If you're not justified in shooting or stabbing the guy, it's probably not clear-cut "self-defense."  And if it's ambiguous, like the drunk asshole in the bar, you can lose a lot of money in legal fees trying to prove that he was a Bad Guy and not just a guy acting badly.  So, I will tell you the exact opposite of what my old martial arts instructor said: Walk Away!  Tim Larkin says that if you can walk away, then it's not a real self-defense situation.  Guys behaving badly are not the same as Bad Guys.  Just because a drunk asshole pushes you in a bar, doesn't mean he deserves a trip to a hospital.  But a Bad Guy, pushing a woman into a dark alley to do terrible things to her, deserves a trip to the morgue instead of the hospital.  See the difference?  Which begs the question, then, why not just shoot him?  Don't worry about whether Technique 1 or Technique 27 would be better in that situation, just pull the trigger until you hear click.  Which is not to say you should not take unarmed combat training; I think everybody needs to have enough unarmed combat skills to get to their tools: "Fight to the gun and fight for the gun in order to fight with the gun!" But it's the tools that finish the job, and if you're not justified in using the tools, then you're just in a bar fight and that isn't a real "Self-Defense Situation" where the first officer on the scene will shake your hand and tell you, "good job" instead of arresting you.  

"Kicking a guys ass," is a fighting mentality.  That's how you should judge so-called "self-defense" training; are they teaching you to "kick a guy's ass," or kill a violent predator using whatever tools you have?  Good schools teach the second one as the "Self-Defense Mindset;" harnessing the survival instinct required to kill a Bad Guy and get back to your loved ones, regardless of whether you are armed with a gun, your bare hands or a rock.  The problem is that many of those schools teach their students to use good, lethal methods of self-protection against guys behaving badly instead of actual Bad Guys, and that mistake can land you in prison very quickly.  Just remember, if you wouldn't be justified in shooting the guy or stabbing him if you had a knife, then it's probably not a real "self-defense" situation.  That's just a fight, and whether you can "kick his ass," or he "kicks your ass," none of it is worth it if you can WALK AWAY.

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Soule

Easy 6

www.easy6training.com

Thoughts on "Self-Defense Classes"

I had a student ask for a recommendation for “self-defense classes” recently during my pistol class.  I didn’t know how to answer the request.  For one thing, she was learning armed self-protection, which is far more useful than unarmed self-protection.  Secondly, as I have said repeatedly, the only purpose of any unarmed system of self-protection should be to get armed.  And lastly, she was looking for a recommendation for martial arts; martial arts are not very good at teaching self-protection.  Some are good at teaching some physical skills that are somewhat useful in self-protection, but almost none of them teach the mentality necessary for effective self-protection. 

Having said that, I felt bad that I did not have a good answer for her.  I have said repeatedly that I think traditional martial arts are good for teaching young people kinesthetic sense, specifically how to use their bodies more fully in a self-protection scenario.  That should be the goal of studying martial arts, to learn how to use your various hard body parts, like knees, elbows, fists, heels, et cetera, as weapons.  There’s also utility in learning about Torque through some of the grappling arts, how to do throws, breaks, et cetera.  Be cautious with learning the “self-defense techniques” many martial arts teach.  A few are good, most are bad, some are patently idiotic. 

So, if the primary goal is to learn to use the hard parts of your body as weapons, the most useful art I would recommend is kickboxing.  Real kickboxing does not incorporate any “self-defense” techniques into its curriculum.  All it teaches is punching, kicking, knees and elbows.  That is a great foundation for learning the kinesthetic sense needed to use those parts of the body as weapons.  The problem with kickboxing is that it teaches "fighting," not self-protection.  But, having the flexibility, balance and physical intelligence to fight can easily be adapted into self-protection. 

The secondary goal of learning unarmed systems of combat is to develop skills inflicting what I call “Torque.” Torque is applying circular motion and utilizing gravity for throwing and breaking bones, which is best learned through grappling arts.  Without getting into the debate about whether Brazilian or Japanese Jujitsu is better, I would recommend either for learning throws and grappling, or even Aikido to learn throws!  I know a great deal of MMA practitioners are totally anti-Aikido as lacking practicality.  They aren’t wrong, but the holy grail of MMA, Brazilian Jujitsu, also lacks practicality in an actual self-defense situation.  All martial arts do.  However, any of the Jujitsu disciplines, or Aikido’s throwing techniques, can teach some important lessons in body mechanics that can be applied to actual self-protection.  Avoid martial arts that incorporate “self-defense techniques” into their grappling training (like Hapkido and Kempo/Kenpo, or “Ninjutsu”) as they train “bar room self-defense,” at best the techniques are effective and they get people arrested for hurting, maiming or killing drunk guys who are not actual threats, or more frequently, they train completely useless crap that gets the practitioners hurt, maimed or killed. 

So, if you can only study one, study kickboxing to learn how to strike with a variety of anatomical tools.  Once you feel comfortable with the striking, then incorporate a grappling art that teaches throws and breaks—from the standing position—and maybe some ground-escape techniques.  Once you have one or both sets of skills that martial arts can teach you, then you must learn what marketing people in my line of work call “the self-defense mindset.”  Good martial arts teach that mindset, but then they teach you to use it at the absolute wrong time, such as a bar-fight.  Bad martial arts don’t teach the mindset at all, they teach sports, competition or even just a useless art.  None of those are inherently bad, they just have nothing to do with defending yourself from a violent predator trying to maim, rape or kill you. 

So, what is “the self-defense mindset?”  Basically, it means that if you had a gun, you would use it, or use a knife.  It means you must mentally be willing to use your unarmed body as a tool of lethal force, just as if you had a gun or a knife.  It is not a bar fight, therefore, nor is it a competition ring where there are rules and trophies.  Which means that everything I have written above in this blog is pointless if you are smart, because unarmed combat is dumbass combat!  The first rule of unarmed combat is, always has been and always will be: DON’T GET INTO IT!  Arm yourself with something, and almost anything can be used as a weapon.  To me, the only valid purpose of unarmed combat is to fight to a point where you can arm yourself and get into armed combat.  Any martial art that teaches that mentality, is probably a pretty good one.  Just like shooting, which is, to me, the most important martial art, because it means I finish self-defense situations with just my trigger finger instead of my fists and feet.

Soule (Easy 6)

www.Easy6training.com

Unarmed Combat IS Combat. It's just really Uncomfortable Combat.

Good Unarmed Combat: be the guy standing up!

I taught a great bunch of people in Canon City last weekend, and as always at the end of my classes, I opened it up for questions.  One of the students asked, “What do you do if somebody grabs you from behind?”  We had just covered a basic gun-grappling technique and covered shooting from retention, so it was a fair question.  But it was really a question about unarmed combat rather than Armed Self-Protection, which was my initial answer.  This led to several students looking for recommendations for “self-defense” classes.  I don’t think I did a very good job answering their questions, even though I did recommend a couple of good unarmed combat schools in Colorado Springs.  So, today I am going to write about why I couldn’t give a very good answer and what a better answer is.

First of all, the students were looking for me to recommend a martial arts dojo.  But, as I have written about many, many times, I do not believe that most traditional martial arts like Tae Kwon Do, Karate, Kung-Fu, Aikido or Jujitsu (even Brazilian Jujitsu) are useful in teaching the unarmed combat skills necessary to defend yourself in a deadly force, lethal encounter.  I believe they are good at teaching fighting, whether in a ring or on a playground or in a bar, but such fights are not situations that will be deemed “self-defense” by a criminal justice authority after the incident, which is how self-defense has to be legally understood.  There are a few good hand-to-hand combat systems that have very little to do with traditional martial arts or competition that are good for self-protection in a lethal force encounter.  Some of these that I am familiar with are Vee Arnis Jujitsu, Combat Krav Maga, Target Focus Training, some modern styles of Ninjutsu and some schools of Jeet Kune Do.  I believe these systems can be very useful in self-protection training with the right instructor.  The problem I found with studying a few of these more practical, useful “self-defense systems,” is that they teach good skills, but they are still teaching people to use them in “fights.”  I call those kinds of situations “bar-fights,” whether they happen in a bar, a playground or a Wal-Mart on Black Friday.  Those bar-fights are situations that will not be adjudicated as “self-defense” by criminal justice authorities, especially if you apply lethal—effective—techniques in such situations.  Now, if you can find good instructors who truly understand when it is justified to apply lethal unarmed self-protection techniques, the skills you can learn in these modern systems are very useful.  If you have children under the age of 18, I think traditional martial arts are a great thing for them to learn about kinesthetic awareness, flexibility, body mechanics and gracefulness.  I don’t think anybody under the age of 18 should be involved in modern, lethal systems of self-protection because kids on playgrounds shouldn’t be breaking each other’s neck.  Conversely, anybody over the age of 18 should not be studying traditional martial arts, because they will not save your life in an actual unarmed combat situation; kickboxing and wrestling are not effective at killing people trying to kill you.

The answer I gave the student was that after twenty years of studying various martial arts in various parts of the country and world, I had lost faith in the ability of 2000 year old monastic workout programs to protect me.  So I got a concealed carry permit and a handgun, and now shooting is the only martial art I study.  When I can’t carry a gun, I carry a knife, and I know how to use it as effectively as a gun at close range.  When I can’t carry a knife, I carry a solid metal pen that I know how to use as effectively as a knife if I had to defend myself in a weapon-free environment.  But, that is not a good answer.  The truth is, you have to have some unarmed skills in situations where you don’t have a self-protection tool.  The answer I would like to have said is this: most traditional martial arts are great for kids to learn how not to hurt each other, but useless for adults.  However, there are some excellent self-protection systems like Tim Larkin’s Target Focus Training and SOME Krav Maga schools, if they are not corrupted into being McDojo workout studios.  The key is to find a system that does not believe, as many traditional martial arts believe, that they are better than knives, swords, guns, spears or aircraft carriers.  A good unarmed combat system should be dedicated to getting you armed.  The only fights that a good unarmed combat system should encourage are the fight TO the gun/knife/shovel and the fight FOR the gun/knife/screwdriver, so that you can utilize the gun/knife/automobile as a tool for your self-protection. 

The martial arts industry complicates the concept of self-defense so much that we lose sight of this simple truth: an actual self-defense situation is one where you would be justified in using a gun or knife if you had one.  Almost nothing the martial arts community teaches provides for that level of lethality.  The martial arts industry calls everything they teach “self-defense,” even though almost none of it rises to the level of justified homicide.  If a situation does not rise to the level where you could justifiably shoot or stab a violent criminal, then it probably is not legally self-defense; it is probably a “bar-fight.”  You would not shoot a person for spilling their drink on you in a bar, nor should you break his or her neck with your bare hands for doing the same.  Kickboxing or wrestling around on the ground with somebody for some minor violation of polite etiquette IS NOT JUSTIFIED SELF-DEFENSE!  Nor is it even self-protection when you could have just walked away from the bar or the conflict.  Conversely, kickboxing or wrestling around on the ground with somebody who is TRYING TO KILL YOU, will not work!  What works is getting out of the condition of being unarmed as quickly as possible when confronted with a violent criminal predator.  That is what effective unarmed combat systems teach you; you may need to hold a guy off with empty hand for a second or two by jabbing a thumb in his eye, or kicking him in the groin, but that is just to get to your self-protection tools.  Ultimately the goal of GOOD unarmed combat systems, is to get you armed as quickly as possible to end the threat, and if you can’t get to a tool, then you have to use your body like a bullet and apply only lethal techniques that kill, blind, maim or paralyze the threat just as effectively as a bullet or stab wound.  Any sort of classical martial art that teaches “weapons are for the impure of heart” or “guns are for cowards,” is nothing but a religious school teaching eastern philosophy.  There is nothing wrong with that; I loved studying eastern philosophy and religions in conjunction with my martial arts for twenty years, but it has NOTHING to do with real self-defense in real combat situations where it is kill or be killed.

The question is not: “what do I do when somebody grabs me from behind?”  Nor is the answer complicated by the technical aspects of defending against a rear choke, a rear bear hug (arms pinned) or a rear bear hug (arms free); the answer is complicated by the intent of the attacker.  The real question is: “what is this person trying to do to me?”  If the person is trying to kill/rape/maim/abduct you, then get to your gun and shoot her; to get to your gun remember this: GROIN, EYES, GUN or EYES, GROIN, GUN!  If the person is trying to tackle you because you gave him the middle finger, then buy him a drink.  Ask questions, like, “What do you want?”  Or, “What are you doing?”

Carry a knife up your sleeve and if the answer to those two questions is wrong or silence, then jab the blade into his abdomen/thigh/femoral artery/genitals/diaphragm as many times as it takes to persuade him to let you go.  Recognize, however, that just because he drops you after you stabbed him four times, that does not necessarily mean he is done with you.  Now would be the time to draw your gun and if he continues to attack, put about five to fifteen pistol slugs into his ribcage/skull.  The question is not: “What do I do if this particular situation develops this particular way using this particular hold or this particular attack?”  Those are martial arts questions, not self-protection questions.  The self-protection question is this: “can I LIVE WITH inflicting mortal damage to this asshole?”  If the answer to that question is “Yes,” then it is probably an actual “self-defense” situation, and you should inflict mortal damage to the asshole.  The obverse question is this: “can I LIVE, withOUT inflicting mortal damage to that asshole?”  If the answer to that question is “No,” then it is definitely an actual “self-defense” situation, and you should absolutely inflict mortal damage to that asshole.  How you do it simply depends on what you have available.  I like knives; they don’t run out of bullets, and at arm’s length they are every bit as dangerous as a firearm.  If nothing else, I use my bare hands to get to the bad-guy’s knife, and his knife to get to his buddy’s gun, and his buddy’s gun to get to the Republican Guard’s tank.  Self-defense is killing; killing is self-defense.  Kickboxing, jujitsu, aikido, karate, tae kwon do, et cetera, are NOT about killing.  They are NOT self-defense.  Unarmed self-defense just means that you didn’t have a gun to do your killing with AT FIRST.

Myths of Self-Protection

Myth Number 1: You have to be THIS GUY to defend yourself.  I have tremendous respect and admiration for the elite members of our military, and if you want to spend thousands of dollars learning how to snipe people at a thousand meters, or enter-and-clear a room with an MP-5, more power to you.  But, that's not self-defense shooting.  Most justified self-defense shootings happen under twenty feet with compact handguns.  You do NOT need to train for eighteen months to get good enough to protect yourself with a handgun.  You can LEARN everything you NEED to know in about four to six hours on a pistol range.  It won't make you the guy above, but it will put you on the path to becoming THIS GUY:

Myth Number 2: A basic firearms safety class teaches you everything you need to know to protect yourself with a firearm.  But, wait, Soule, didn't you just contradict yourself?  A basic firearms safety class is not four to six hours on the range learning out to fight with a pistol.  It is teaching you how to be safe with a firearm, which is an important first step, but IT IS NOT GUNFIGHTING!

Myth Number 3: So all I need to do is take your four to six hour Armed Self-Protection Class one time and then I can put a gun on my hip and be Doc Holliday.  This is the most dangerous myth I try to debunk, and I write about it all the time.  People who take a CCW class (usually just a firearms safety class), and then strap on a holster and carry a gun for the next five years without shooting it ever again, are suicidal.  PRACTICE is what makes you good with any tool.  If you want to be a musician, you can't just take one class on guitar and expect to be a rock star.  The same is true with a handgun.  Now, do you need to practice as much as a Navy SEAL?  Well, are you going to be inserting behind the lines of an enemy country to kill terrorist leaders?  Probably not.  But, you have to shoot on a regular basis.  So, you can LEARN all you need to know to effectively use a pistol to protect yourself in one day; but then it has to become a life-long commitment to maintain those skills.  Shooting is a sport, and you have to practice it to be good at it.  The guy that takes one class and never practices with his concealed carry pistol ever again is, in my opinion, the most dangerous person on the planet.  A bad-guy will take that gun away from him and use it on the people he loves.

Myth Number 4: I have to spend thousands of dollars to get a tricked-out race gun so I can shoot all fifteen guys attacking me.  Violent criminals tend to work in small groups to maximize profits.  The most common type of concealed carry handguns in America are the various .38 snub-nosed revolvers.  The "pros" mostly recommend Glocks.  Old school guys love their Model 1911 .45 ACP's with seven round magazines and one in the chamber.  A lot of cops like the Springfield XD series.  None of them need to be "tricked-out" to be effective self-protection pistols, and versions of all of them can be bought for around $500.  Competition is not self-protection.  You don't drive the Ferrari everyday, and you shouldn't carry a race gun for self-protection.

Myth Number 5:  You are safe.  Even if you are a Navy SEAL or a Ninja, there are no GUARANTEES of safety in a violent world.  Carrying a pistol ALL THE TIME that you have LEARNED to shoot fast and well, and PRACTICED with every month, is still no GUARANTEE that you will win in a violent encounter.  This is the hardest thing for civilians to accept; they believe that if they prepare enough, they will always come out on top.  That's the most frustrating myth I try to debunk; that you are GUARANTEED to win.  The enemy always gets a vote on the outcome.  The only guarantee in any sort of combat is this: if you do NOTHING, you are guaranteed to LOSE!  Anybody in the self-protection industry that guarantees you that their magic tricks will allow you to "win every fight," is a liar.  What we do is try to increase your odds by giving you skills and equipment to make you a harder target, because I believe a 1% chance of victory if you take action and fight back, is still better than the 100% guarantee of losing if you do nothing.

Truth: The world is a violent place not because of race, religion, nationality, socioeconomic statuses or ideologies.  The world is a dangerous place because human beings are mortal creatures, and as long as that is true, bad people will exploit that mortality by force, or the threat of force, for their own benefit.  All violence is based on that simple truth; we are mortal.  No revolution in art, religion or politics has ever been successful at changing our violent human nature because only EVOLUTION beyond our mortality can change it.  The second most frustrating myth I try to debunk is that somehow human beings are capable of overcoming this violent nature without overcoming our mortality; pacifism always fails in the face of evil men willing to do evil things to innocent people for their own benefit.  If you don't accept this truth first, no amount of training, education, practice or advice from those of us who have faced violence, will ever make you more ready to protect yourself.

That's The Real Philosophy of Violence,

Soule

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Knife Attacks

So, here is a startling statistic that nobody will believe because it detracts from the gun control agenda: according to the Centers for Disease Control, which tracks emergency room visits, over 134,000 patients were admitted to US emergency departments for edged weapon wounds received in violent crimes in the year 2016.  Most of these are domestic violence or known party altercations rather than random stabbings, but it is still a huge number.  The FBI does not track these statistics, because over 90% of knife wounds are non-fatal, and the FBI only publishes knife attacks that contribute to the homicide rates.  The 134,000 number does not include fatal edged weapon attacks, as the CDC statistic is for emergency room admissions, not morgues.  The 134,000 plus number sorts out all self-inflicted and accidental wounds; it only includes non-fatal violent crimes committed with edged weapons.

Why is a firearms instructor telling you this?  Because I don’t want to get stabbed, even if I have a ninety percent chance of survival, which is the liberal argument in the UK against guns that somehow being stabbed is so much better than being shot.  No thanks!  The mass stabbings in the UK and Paris make the news, as do the spectacular fatalities like the poor lady in DC last week, but the vast majority of non-fatal stabbings never make the headlines.  If it is happening over 134,000 times in America in a single year, it probably is not very news worthy, to be fair to the news industry.  But it is epidemic from the perspective of the self-protection industry.  To answer my question more thoroughly, a firearms instructor is telling you about knife attacks because I don’t want you getting stabbed either, and the best way to not get stabbed is to shoot the guy with the knife.

Many honest martial artists will tell you that in a knife attack there is no way to prevent getting cut or stabbed.  What they are training you to do is minimize the damage caused by those knife wounds.  Deflecting a blade away from the torso and getting a cut across the outside forearm muscle is success according to honest martial artists.  I won’t even belittle the (honest) martial arts community in this edition, because I agree a cut forearm is better than a punctured lung, liver or diaphragm muscle.  But isn’t it better to have neither?  Which is not a guarantee that I can make with a gun, but then there are no guarantees at all in an interpersonal combat situation (self-protection incident).  But there are ways of improving your odds; to prove this point I will relate a true story.  One dark and stormy night in the Diyala Province of Iraq in 2006, a guy jumped out and emptied his AK-47 magazine right in front of my buddy Chris.  The only problem the guy had was that Chris was in an M1 Abrams Tank, and he simply swiveled the coaxial machine gun at the guy and let off a half-second burst before running him over.  One can’t discredit the bravery of the insurgent, just his judgment and gambling ability.

Here’s my point: Always take a gun to a knife fight.  Do not trust any martial arts instructor that says they can prevent you from getting cut or stabbed in a knife encounter.  Don’t trust a firearms instructor that says that either.  I can’t guarantee you win with a gun against a knife; but I can increase your chances.  It’s better to have the tank than the AK-47 in Chris’ story.  It’s better to have the gun in a knife fight.

An annoying irony is that cops are allowed to shoot guys with knives, but citizens are only allowed to in certain jurisdictions.  Some crazy jurisdictions like my former state would prosecute a person who shot somebody trying to stab them.  They have a proportionality self-defense law that says you can’t use a more powerful weapon on an assailant for self-defense.  If you live in those kinds of jurisdictions, you really, really need to move.  The state is jeopardizing your safety and life because of an absurd concept of fairness towards psychopathic predators.  The reason cops are justified in shooting guys with knives is because it is a lethal force situation.  The infamous “21 foot rule” comes from a case where an officer shot a guy with a knife twenty-one feet away, because he proved in court that the guy could close that distance at a sprint in less time than it takes to draw a handgun and engage.  That is therefore a lethal threat.  No knife attacks start as far back as twenty-one feet against civilians, by the way.  Which means, up close and personal, you have to train to draw and fire at hand-to-hand combat range.  You have to train it over and over and over again, because it is very possible you’ll have a knife wound before you fire, and if you train your reptilian brain to just draw and squeeze that trigger, even wounded, you will complete that ingrained task.  But you still got stabbed, which is why you continue to squeeze the trigger until the knife wielder is no longer a threat.  Don’t try to disarm him, don’t try to wrestle for the knife, just pull out your gun and squeeze the trigger until he is no longer a threat.

If, for some reason that escapes my understanding, you still live in a jurisdiction that punishes you for defending yourself with a firearm, then you should get real good with whatever tools you are allowed to carry.  The principle is the same.  Do not attack the knife.  Do not go for the weapon.  Use your tool, improvised or otherwise, to eliminate the threat behind the knife.  Shut down the predator’s central nervous system and you won’t have to worry about the knife.  There are experts out there that teach this, I always recommend Tim Larkin’s Target Focus Training system, but even they would say the best solution to a guy with a knife is to shoot him.  The worst case scenario in a knife attack is to be just a helpless victim who gets stabbed, but only slightly better than that is to be a not-so-helpless victim who gets stabbed but manages to crush the guy’s trachea or snap his neck.  The best case scenario is to not get stabbed, either because you escaped, or because you shot the prick before he had a chance to stab you.

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Patenque Ball Defensive Technique

The Paris stabbings the other day highlight several lessons.  Number 1, as always, is “Sixuational Awareness.”  Check your six, be aware of your surroundings, be protective of your personal bubble.  Nobody should be getting closer than arms-length, to you.  Professor David James of Vee Arnis Jitsu calls this “The Three Foot Rule,” and there’s no reason any stranger should be closer to you than that in an unsafe place like Paris.

The second is the use of improvised weapons against the first attacker.  Before yesterday, I’d never heard of a Patenque Ball, but I commend the game’s practitioners on pelting the knife-wielding lunatic with them.  Weapon: the tool is not the weapon, you are!  When you are the Weapon, then anything can be used as a tool of self-protection.

Having said that, three, we should probably not be relying on lawn sports equipment for our personal protection in a dangerous world.  Weapon: arm yourself.  If where you live does not allow you to carry a firearm, you are living with a dramatically increased level of danger.  But if you live in such a place, you need to carry something.  Carry whatever is legal.  Carry a pocketknife with a blade the legal length allowed by your state or jurisdiction.  Carry a flat-head screw driver.  Carry a cane.  Then, most importantly, learn to use what you are allowed to carry.  If you live in a sane place like Colorado, get a concealed carry permit and a handgun.  Part of “Sixuational Awareness” and being the Weapon is always having those tools at your disposal.  I tell people to treat them like a watch: you put them on in the morning, take them off only when you get into the shower, and put them on your nightstand when you go to bed.  The tool should never be farther than arms-length, away from you.

The last lesson is related to the “Patenque Ball Defensive Technique” also.  They did not try to wrestle the knife out of the guy’s hand.  They beamed him with heavy metal balls.  They attacked the attacker, not the bad guy’s tools.  This is about Damage: you have to hurt, incapacitate or kill the brain box of the bad guy to stop him, not the inanimate objects his brain is animating.  Focusing on deflecting or blocking or retreating from the knife once you are engaged are all losing bets.  Now, if you aren’t yet engaged and you have an escape route, run for it, but if you are engaged, you have to ATTACK!  Take the Initiative, gouge out his eyes, stomp on his throat, snap his neck, rip his ears off, or do whatever it takes to eliminate the enemy weapon system.  The enemy Weapon IS NOT THE KNIFE, it’s his brain.  The best way to shut his brain down, by the way, is to empty a firearm into his chest or head.

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Soule (Easy 6)

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Mary Interviewing Little Lambs

This would be hilarious if it was not so scary.  It highlights the dangerous misconceptions held by most people who have never been in a life or death situation.  They believe that in an actual combat situation, they will be able to cleanly and distinctly make well thought out decisions about their self protection.  This is patently insane.  If you can make those well thought out decisions, it is not really a self defense situation, because your life was not on the line.  If it is a real self defense situation--defined by a criminal justice authority AFTER THE INCIDENT--then you do not have the time, luxury or even the capacity to make those decisions.  What Tim Larkin teaches is to use your body as a bullet, because in a real, justified, legal self defense situation, you would be perfectly justified in shooting the predator.  He simply teaches people how to use their body to apply that lethal force that a bullet applies for when you do not (for some reason) have a gun.

I once took a person shooting who said, "If I was attacked I would shoot the gun out of their hand."  I succeeded in not laughing in her face.  Do not carry a gun if you believe that is a possibility; if you ever find yourself in a self protection incident, it will be taken away from you by somebody with no conscience, and it will be used on you.  These idiots in the video do not understand what an actual self defense situation is.  They think it is a bar fight.  I have written previously about how most traditional martial arts are training people to bar fight, but calling it "self defense training."  Kickboxing competitions in a bar are really pointless, foolish and illegal.  That is not self defense.  As an aside, in an actual interpersonal combat situation, where somebody is trying to kill, rape or maim you, using those really cool Mixed Martial Arts skills that work so well against a single, unarmed opponent in a ring with a ref and rules, will guarantee your death.

What these people do not understand is that the only systems of unarmed self protection that are actually worth a darn, are things like Tim Larkin's Target Focus Training, because all they teach is how to kill and maim a violent predator.  You cannot negotiate with a lion trying to kill you.  You cannot Aikido its ass onto the ground and then think you can walk away.  If somebody is actually trying to kill, rape or maim you, you attack them with lethal force and the intent to kill them.  Maybe they get lucky and survive you emptying the cylinder of your revolver into their upper chest, but not because you were trying to "wound them."

Professional predators operate by ambush.  An ambush is confused chaos.  The confusion is terrifying, so much so that your cognitive brain shuts down.  When that happens, only your reptilian brain is functioning, and it will allow you to do only that which you have trained over and over again.  That means, if you train to shoot the high center chest of a silhouette, then that is what your body is going to do.  If you train to jab out someone's eyes with your thumbs if they grab you, then that is what your body is going to do.  If you train to try and put them in an arm bar--as cops and bouncers are trained and required to do--then that is what your body will do.  If you are not a cop or a bouncer, with backup, that last one will get you killed against a professional predator.  Why would you try to restrain somebody trying to stab, shoot, rape or mug you?  You do not have time to play around in an actual self defense situation--as determined by a criminal justice official AFTER THE INCIDENT--you only have time to react and do what you've been trained to do.  If you train to grab lions by the tail, you're going to lose, and you're going to lose huge.

There are some good systems of unarmed self protection out there, that teach using your body as a bullet.  There are some systems of martial arts that teach the right skills, but they teach you to do it in a bar fight and then go to jail.  Then there are some traditional systems of martial arts that teach grappling and kickboxing in life and death situations, and that is dangerous crap that will get you stabbed, shot or raped in a real self defense situation.  Do not make the mistake the Army did back in the 1990s and start training non-lethal MMA techniques for a lethal environment.  If you want to survive a life and death situation, you have to live and the bad guy has to meet death; that is combat.  If you are training to "wing 'em" then you are training to be a victim.  If you are training with the mindset that you will be able to think your way through an attempted murder or gunfight, you are--as the people in the video are--dangerously delusional.  It's over in under two seconds, the blood drains out of the frontal cortex of your brain as adrenaline floods your system and completely shuts down cognition.  If you haven't trained for it, you will freeze instead of fighting or fleeing.  It is absurd to think you will be able to make generous and pacifistic choices about just "disarming or disabling" your attacker in those circumstances.

Read Tim Larkin's book "When Violence is the Answer," and you will understand that the professional predators are not training in prison gangs for an MMA fight.  They are training to take what they want, and if you are a minor obstacle to them, they will simply kill you and then take what they want.  You have to be as lethal, as ruthless and as capable as they are if you want to survive a real self defense situation and not just beat up drunk idiots in bars.  Predators are not afraid of a sheep who knows Aikido.

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Soule
Easy 6

The Problem of Denial

Modern American institutions of education and socialization produce one thing in greater numbers than any other profession: victims-in-waiting.  Our culture has become so Anti-Violent that when violence finds average citizens, they are completely unprepared for it.  I always look back at the time after World War Two when America was accustomed to violence and people knew how to protect themselves.  The uncomfortable truth that nobody likes discussing is that to survive a violent encounter with a professional predator, you cannot be civilized.  A true Self-Defense Situation, where somebody is trying to kill you, rob you, rape you or maim you, is not civilized.  In fact, I would define such acts of anti-social behavior as “the abandonment of the social contract that allows civilizations to function peacefully.”  When that contract is abandoned, behaving with civility is dangerously absurd.  The Greatest Generation understood this.  Their children, grandchildren and now great grandchildren, do not understand that the breach of a social contract means the rules are literally discarded.  This is contrary to any training, education or expectations most civilian members of the Baby Boomer, Generation X or Millennial generations have ever received.  They have not been well prepared to deal with behavior that is anti-social; anti-social (or sociopathic/psychopathic) behavior literally means behavior against the nature of society.  Professional predators exist purely outside of the nature of civilized society.  The effect of this is that the majorities of three generations of Americans have no concept how to react to, or survive, situations that suddenly abandon the rules of civilized society and turn violent. 

               The so-called “self-defense” industry does not have a very good answer for this problem, either.  This is why they teach bar fighting (as discussed here), because that is physical violence within the arena of a social construct, and they don’t have to address this problem within the mentality of three generations of customers.  A situation which is actually adjudicated by a criminal justice official as Self-Defense does not exist in an arena of a social construct.  A true Self-Defense Situation exists in the arena of anarchy—or combat—which are really the same thing because anarchy will inevitably lead to combat.  Anarchy is the absence of the social contract, any social construct or any civilizing norms to control violent behavior.  Preparing people to survive an encounter in that environment requires overcoming generations of pacifistic socialization in America.  Socialization defined in the true sense—adapting a person to life in a society—which indoctrinates them to expect rules, constraints and protection from anarchy.  How do we overcome that socialization?

               This is the biggest challenge facing those who teach self-protection, in which definition I am including every combat veteran and every cop who has ever been in a gunfight, because I believe to overcome the socialization of victimhood in America, every cop and veteran has to be an instructor in this mentality.  The American Army has traditionally had a very good system for overcoming that socialization; they use the veterans of the previous war to train the recruits for the new war.  And they train them as brutally as possible to prepare them for the absence of civilization one finds on a battlefield.  But, how do you replicate that for the civilian world?  People who have been victims of anti-social behavior do not need convincing of the threat, and they are frequent enrollees in self-protection training; but how do we convince the potential victims of the need to train to survive in moments of anarchy?

               This is not something that can be trained easily outside of the military system, where there is no quitting, and the instructor literally owns your body.  It is not a skill that can be taught, in other words.  We can teach people how to fight, how to shoot, how to be aggressive and how to win, but only if they accept the necessity of learning those skills.  To accept the necessity of learning how to kill a person with a screwdriver in an alley, one has to first believe and accept that the alley is potentially in a state of anarchy.  That flies in the face of all the socialization, all of the systems of government and all of the psychological defense mechanisms built up inside every modern American to protect their “inner child” from the truth.  The truth is that somebody who is a productive, functioning member of a society is also a victim-in-waiting for when that society—rules, codes, laws, morals, norms, commandments, canons and standards of behavior—disappears in a dark alley behind the barrel of a Saturday Night Special.  Acceptance of that truth is very difficult absent experience in anarchy.  But acceptance of that truth is a prerequisite to any effective training in self-protection.

               We can teach people to punch, kick, shoot and even win in a controlled competition with the rules, codes, morals, norms, commandments, canons and standards of behavior associated with a society that loves bloody sports.  But nobody can convince somebody else that her life may be in danger if she walks down that alley; for her to accept the truth, she has to accept the possibility that the rules of the social contract can be discarded, and that is a scary reality to live in for most people.  But, once a person accepts that truth, then he becomes very committed to learning the skills necessary to survive such anarchy long enough to get out and back to the social contract.  Acceptance of the dangerous nature of the world, and recognition of the tissue-paper-thin and flimsy nature of the social contract, cannot be learned from a lecturer.  It has to either come from one’s socialization early in life—being raised by a combat veteran for example—or come from a moment of clarity about that flimsy nature of the social contract.  Tragically, most times that moment of clarity comes after the façade of civilization is shattered and the person becomes a victim.  What I want is for every American to accept the truth about such dangers before a professional predator drags you into anarchy as a victim.  If you do that, then you will never be a victim; you may lose in combat, but it’s not because you will be helpless, like a victim.

               Each student has to believe that the façade of civility, civilized behavior and civilization itself can be snuffed out—as happened in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina—with very little effort from the anarchy-loving and entropy-driving universe.  The fact is every successful violent crime is against a person who believed it could never happen to them; every foiled violent crime is attempted against somebody who understands that it could and they prepared for it.  The only way to be the latter instead of the former is to accept into your belief system the fragility of civility, and then train to survive the moments of anarchy that follow its collapse.  If you change your mentality, any combat vet or gunfighter cop can teach you the skills you need to survive those moments.  But if you don’t change your world view to acceptance—instead of denial—of the dangerous world we live in, then studying the skills for decades will not prepare you for anti-social predators and you will still be a just another victim-in-waiting.

Step 1: Stop being Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.  Accept that the world is a dangerous place.

Step 2: Get more dangerous than the world.