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

Self-Defense Mentality vs. Martial Arts Philosophy

My friends and I were talking about traditional martial arts yesterday and their relative effectiveness in a self-defense situation.  Their son just started his study of a traditional martial art and one of their friends, a single middle aged woman, occasionally studies it also.  These are two very different demographics that need very different things from training.  Traditional martial arts are excellent for kids for the very reason they are horrible for adults; we called it the body-mind-spirit triangle.  Traditional martial arts have a spiritual/philosophical component related to eastern schools of thought, they have a mental component that teaches how self-control and self-discipline as well as will power, and they have a physical component centered around healthy physical activity.  Notice, that is not the physical realm of violence, though.  This is great for kids because we don't want to teach kids how to snap necks and gouge out eyes on the playground.  But a middle aged woman living alone needs to learn ONLY how to gouge out eyes and snap necks, or put bullets into high center chests.

More importantly, the mental training required for self-defense is not, as the traditional martial arts industry says, eastern philosophy.  Now, I am a Taoist and I got into eastern philosophy through the study of traditional martial arts as a teenager, but I am also a combat veteran and none of that thinking is what kept me alive in a war.  The philosophy of violence is one of aggression.  When confronted with a predator or evil bastard, aggression is the only mentality that will allow you to survive.

"Everybody will fight for their lives in that situation, though," is a common argument against training aggression.  "Survival instinct will kick in."  But what we are learning is that adrenaline does not just produce one of the two classical options of fight or flight; many people freeze.  Arguably most people will freeze when confronted with violence directed at them personally, as opposed to random flight-inducing violence.  This is the same as the confusion in an ambush, not being able to process the threat leads to defeat.  So, you have to train to overcome that.  In the military we use battle drills to respond to ambushes, because then you don't have to think and make decisions, you can just react.  There's utility to that in martial arts also, but only to a certain extent.  Good self-defense systems will be simple self-defense systems that have a small number of responses to any kind of attack.  Go for the eyes, throat, groin, knees and then stomp their head into the ground.  Or, jab a thumb into their eyes with your weak hand while you draw your pistol and empty it into their torso (which is what I prefer).  Simplicity is success in combat operations, and self-defense is a very personal combat operation.

Now look at traditional martial arts with ten or fifteen different belt levels that all include a dozen or so different "techniques" to respond to various attacks.  That is how unscrupulous martial arts "McDojos" make money, after all, by keeping people paying monthly dues for years.  This is absurd when you look at how our special operations forces train for hand-to-hand combat in their qualification courses.  Granted, they continue doing hand-to-hand training once a week for the rest of their time in their units, but I'm saying the guy that just graduated the Special Forces Qualification Course is infinitely better prepared to defend himself in actual hand-to-hand combat than any "Take My Doe" black belt who has been studying two days a week for ten years.  How is that possible?  Because the Special Operations Combatives Program trains the mentality of aggression, cheating, no rules hand-to-hand combat, not the philosophy of "arts."  As I always say: cheating is winning.  If you are not cheating, you are not in actual combat; you may be in a duel where there are rules for lethal sport, but that's not self-defense or combat.

This is where martial arts fails adults so miserably.  It is not just that fifteen techniques for fifteen belts is idiotic when it comes to defending yourself, but they don't train the mentality of kill or be killed.  Now, there are some non-traditional martial arts with all the belts and so forth that are not bad because they teach the mentality.  And, if you have the mentality of cheating to win, technique is a nice to have.  But, if you have all the techniques in the world and can do a flying spin kick, if you are fighting against somebody with the combat mentality, you will always lose.  The self-defense practitioner will grab a brick and beat you to death after you do your beautiful flying spin kick.  Or, he'll run you over with a van, spin kick be damned.  This is what is lacking in sports martial arts or traditional martial arts mentality training: screw fairness.  If your life is on the line, there is no such thing as fairness.  Nor is there any such thing as lady-like or gentlemanly behavior.  Cheating is winning in combat.

This is where I differ from other firearms instructors.  I don't just teach firearms safety.  I teach aggressive reflexive fire.  The person who has the Initiative at the end of a fight is the winner.  So, if somebody is mugging you, robbing the store you are in or has invaded your home, the key to victory is to seize the Initiative away from the predator, and become the attacker.  Don't defend against the attack, attack the attacker.  Close with and destroy the enemy.  That simple sentence is the mission of the American infantry and it sums up everything you need to know about winning in any kind of combat: move forward, get closer, get inside their ability to react, and DESTROY the enemy.  It does not say, beat up, or defeat, it says DESTROY.  That is the mentality we have to train into students if we want them to not be victims.

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Soule
Easy 6
www.easy6training.com

School Shooting Sociology

My friend asked a good question after the Santa Fe High School Shooting: what are the sociological phenomena that are causing these school shootings?  She was not looking for a political/legal solution nor a technical explanation like bump stocks or magazine capacity of firearms, but rather asking for the sociological factors involved in this insane trend.

In this blog I have never really tried to understand the question of why mass violence occurs, because I have always started from the belief that it is irrelevant why it happens, it simply does happen.  My initial answer to my friend's debate was not really an answer to the question, but an admonishment that such questions were foolish because, as I put it: "Violence Is."  Professionally, that is all that matters to me.  I survived violence, I teach others how to survive violence when it--God Forbid--finds them, to be prepared to confront the violence.  That's not a good answer to the question, but from the perspective of my profession and background in the protection industry, I concluded that these mass shootings continue to happen because the innocent people in our society are unwilling to accept personal responsibility for their personal protection.  We want to live in a bubble of delusion that we are protected by the military and our first responders and that violence can't find us, but it continues to find us over and over again.  Violence always finds the soft targets and debating why that is does not help.  That was my basic response.

But then I actually got curious.  Why do these things keep happening, and at an increasing rate?  What are the sociological factors driving this heinous trend of mass murder among school kids?  What has changed in our society that is causing such mass violence?

The day after the Santa Fe High School Shooting, I was at a bar and met another Army Veteran who was an Infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was now a high school teacher.  He had a unique perspective in that he had been in the violence business and was now in the education business.  His perspective is that the problem does not stem from the students, but rather the adults.  The parents of these kids are to blame as are the adults in the educational system.  All sociological problems are basically parenting problems.  The Columbine High School Shooters were not raised by evil neo-Nazi parents; they were raised by uninvolved parents who were too busy focusing on their own lives to know what was going on in the demented minds of their emotionally broken children.  While focusing on their careers, they failed in their most important job: raising productive, law-abiding members of society.  Much has been made of the failure of law enforcement at the Columbine High School Shooting, so I will not rehash that aspect of failure too much here, except to say as a result of that incident, most law enforcement agencies have changed how they respond to mass shootings.  But it is not just the responsibility of the cops and parents to protect kids.  In this conversation with this other veteran, I said that these kinds of things did not happen in the 1950s, even though access to firearms for teenagers was much easier in most of America back then, because every adult in the schools felt responsible for the safety of their students.  The adults of the Greatest Generation had just fought and won a World War and they were brave enough to confront evil when it found them, at the cost of their own lives if necessary.  This is no longer the case in our society.

That is the other thing that has changed sociologically in modern America: bravery.  Violence was ended more quickly in the past because bystanders were more willing to fight back in the face of evil.  When was America Great?  When our grand parents defeated Fascism, liberated a continent and went on to rebuild a destroyed world.  America was great when we were brave.  Now, unfortunately, most American adults believe it is the job of somebody else to keep them safe.  Certainly most educators believe it is the job of somebody else to keep their students safe.  Parents believe it is the job of cops to keep their children safe.

When did it change?  In the conversation I had with the teacher and former soldier, I said I think what caused the change is 9/11.  Recognizing that there were school shootings before 9/11, I nonetheless believe that 9/11 caused dramatic changes in our society, some good, most bad.  One of the more frightening effects of 9/11 was that it demonstrated to evil people just how easy it is to commit mass murder and terrorism.  Nineteen lunatics killed three thousand people in three hours with only box cutters and pepper spray.  This is a chilling example to the violent religious fanatics, psychopathic killers and these emotionally broken kid shooters unable to rationally process their feelings of loss, jealousy, anger or fear.  Such people were instructed as a result of 9/11 that it does not take a great deal of training or resources to cause mass casualties.  So, evil people were inspired by 9/11.

For the good people in our society, it had two different effects.  For some people, 9/11 burst our bubble of illusionary safety brought on by the belief that terrorism would not find a free and liberal accepting society a target worth attacking.  The World Trade Center bombing of 1993 could no longer be looked on as a freak occurrence that could never happen again.  In that regard, it taught many of us resilience like that of the Israelis.  But, while some people took off their blinders to the violent nature of the world, many other people reacted to 9/11 by abandoning the blinders in favor of a full blindfold.  Most people unaccustomed to that level of violence react in denial that such evil can exist and do such horrific things.  It is a psychological defense mechanism designed to protect our sense of reality, which was shattered on 9/11.  It is also designed to allow us to live the lie that we are safe, and thus able to go about our day in blissful ignorance of the Saber-tooth Tigers outside our caves.  These people cannot deal with the thought that such violence exists and can find them.  They want to believe that our protectors are out there on the walls guarding them and that nothing will get through.  The problem is the violence keeps getting to us regardless of our protectors.

Violence is a fact of life, and now mass violence is a part of our existence.  So, what is the solution?  Politicians have gone after the tools (guns), or attacked the entertainment industry, or talked about fixing mental illness.  As I wrote last time about Great Britain, the argument that eliminating one kind of tool will prevent violent crime, has been completely debunked.  Terrorists are wandering around London stabbing people to death with kitchen knives or driving over them with delivery trucks.  The tools are not the problem.  A frying pan is made for cooking, but it works as a pretty good weapon.  You can't ban all the tools of violence, because they are the tools of everyday life.  Baseball bats are made to hit baseballs, but they can hit other things.  Cars are made to transport people, but they are steel, glass and petroleum bombs.  The Columbine Shooters rigged homemade detonators to propane tanks to level the school.  Focusing on the tools does not solve the problem.

Focusing on the mental health issues of these people, while valid, does not PREVENT these attacks beforehand.  A crazy person can go shoot up a place and kill dozens of people before they ever interact with a mental health provider.  The shooter at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs was very mentally disturbed, but no mental health providers could prevent a deranged man who never had contact with the mental health system from committing an atrocity.  So that does not solve the problem either.

I think the answer to the question is that there is not an answer, which is what's so scary and frustrating.  There is no solution to the sociological problem that can be enforced on the potential perpetrators of these attacks before hand.  All sociological problems are fundamentally parenting problems, and you can't effectively legislate parenting.  There have always been good and bad parents.  Maybe there are more bad parents now because they want to be the friends of their kids rather than their disciplinarians and standard-enforcers and that is why there's this increase?  But what is the solution to that problem?  Write more parenting books?  Bad parents are not reading parenting books anyway, nor are they willing to admit that their lack of discipline is what is causing their kids to snap and shoot-up schools.  You can't politically change how uninterested parents raise their future psychopaths.

So is there a way to prevent these attacks?  Is there a way to alter the sociological conditions that are causing these things to happen?  Is there a law that can be passed to make parents be parents?  I doubt it, unless we want to start holding parents criminally accountable for the actions of their children?   I hope smarter people than me in the fields of human behavior are working on this problem, but other than saying sociological problems are all generally parenting problems, I don't see a preventative solution.  Which, tragically, means we come back to the reactive or "responsive" solution to violence.

The Responsive Solution to Violence is that we are prepared, through repetitive training to overcome the confusion of an ambush, to deal with violence when it finds us.  I think it's tragic that there is not a better answer than that.  But, ultimately, after much discussion and rational debate, I come full circle: Violence Is.  Therefore, we must take personal responsibility for our personal protection and the protection of the children entrusted to our care.  To be successful, we must not only be trained and skilled, but also brave enough to confront evil when it does find us.  We had more courage in the 1940s and 1950s than we do now; back then if somebody came into a school with a gun to do violence, every adult would have bashed their chairs into his skull.  We cannot rely on the professional protectors, the legionnaires, who go forth and do our violence for us anymore.  In the age of mass violence and terrorism, the barbarians are not at the gates, they are inside the gates.  If we want to avoid what happened to the Roman Empire, we have to accept personal responsibility for defending the public space.  Predators will always find the soft targets, so it us up to each of us to not be soft targets.  Rome fell because it was decadent, spoiled and soft; they lost their courage and the fell to those who had more courage.

So, until the smarter social scientists find a way to prevent these heinous acts of evil against our children, we have to confront evil when we encounter it.  Psychiatrist Paul Dobransky says, "Courage is nothing more than doing the right thing regardless of the circumstances."  Bravery may only be necessary two or three times in your life, but when violence finds you or the children around you, at that moment no other solution will work.

Violence Is.  Train for it, be ready for it if it finds you, have the courage to defeat it!

Thanks,
Soule
www.Easy6Training.com

Britain's "Knife Control" Movement

I have been trying to write this blog for almost a month.  I find it very difficult because of my cognitive bias.  I cannot really wrap my head around the logic of banning knives.  This is what I believe, you guys tell me if I am off-base.  Banning guns in Britain has stopped a great deal of gun murders.  Knife murders have thus replaced gun murders in England.  How is this success?  The murder rate in London is skyrocketing.  I cannot effectively express how irrelevant it is to murder victims whether they were murdered by a knife, a gun, a car bomb or an airplane flying into buildings.

Here is my basic problem with all of this: I was a horrible combat engineer officer in Iraq.  Why?  Because the mission of the combat engineers was to go out and find IEDs (bombs) on the side of roads.  Our job was to go find the bomb.  We created Task Force IED after the first year of the war to defeat the bomb.  We spent tens of billions of dollars to defeat a hot-wired mortar round on the side of the road; that was really, really, really stupid.  But it got a lot of defense contractors a lot of money.  Hunting for bombs is a stupid way to fight a war.  The Israelis have a saying, "Find the bomber, not the bomb."  So, I fought very hard, and was mostly successful, at getting my company of combat engineers out of the bomb-hunting business and into the bomber-hunting business.  We found, captured and/or killed the IED makers.  That reduced the IEDs way more effectively then spending billions of dollars on redesigned combat vehicles that were specifically designed to get hit by street punks with homemade explosives.

Focusing on the defeat of the weapons of war instead of the defeat of the enemy is a sure way to be defeated by the enemy, regardless of his weapons of war.  Bad people commit murders, not inanimate objects.  Britain has been brainwashed into insanity in the last three generations.  They believe that if you take the rocks away from the monkeys, they will stop fighting.  The rocks do not cause the monkeys to fight.  The knives do not cause the Brits to stab.  The guns do not cause the Americans to shoot.  It is the inevitable outcome of a morally relative society that accepts every evil aspect of every culture no matter how barbaric: marrying nine year old girls off to Sheiks, accepting honor killings, killing abortion doctors, ritualistic mutilation of children, et cetera.  Accepting all of it in the name of multiculturalism means your society has adopted absolute moral relativism, and thus cannot--will not, are incapable of--believing that there are just some evil assholes in the world.  People keep getting killed, regardless of the tools used to do it, and the mentally ill politicians in Great Britain are so blinded by their biases that they can't accept the existence of evil.  When you stop believing in the evil that men do, you start ascribing motives to inanimate objects, because your world view will not allow you to accept that some people are gonna be murderers regardless of the inanimate objects.

There are evil people in the world.  They kill innocent people.  They have created incredibly intricate machines, methods and technologies to do it.  But, if you take away all of those things, the monkey can still bash a brain out with a rock.  The only thing that stops an evil person from stabbing you, is you.  There is no law that deters an evil person from being evil.  There is no law that deters a criminal from breaking laws.  The insanity of the left is not its politics, it is the undermining of language; when you create "unwords" through political correctness, idiots lose sight of definitions.  Criminal: one who breaks laws.  It doesn't matter how many laws you pass, LAWS DON'T DETER THOSE WHO BREAK LAWS!!!

Misdemeanors that ban knives, guns, cricket bats, et cetera, do not deter evil assholes willing to commit capital murder.  The lunatics running London and the rest of Great Britain have lost their minds if they believe that is not the case.  Snidely Whiplash was not evil because he had a sinister mustache, and banning his mustache wax would have no effect on his intentions.  Evil is defeated by good men fighting back, not banning evil's choices in how to be evil!

Thanks,
Soule
Easy 6
www.easy6training.com