Tag: combatives

Knives and handguns are not either/or

Posted by Mostly Genius – December 22, 2008

The gun vs. knife thing

To my mind there is no more a “gun vs. knife” debate anymore than there is a “hammer vs. screwdriver debate.” A knife fills a different role than firearm does. As I have previous explained here, there are a lot of things that knives do much better than firearms. This does not make knives a firearm replacement.

Fighting at contact distance you can certainly use your firearm, but once it becomes a wrestling match getting the firearm into play becomes a lot more difficult:

  • The typical handgun requires a lot more motion to draw from the holster than a normal folding knife or short fixed blade.
  • It is very hard to draw a firearm with the opposite hand in the event that your primary shooting hand is pinned, locked up or disabled.
  • Most semi-autos end up being single shot weapons because a change in grip angle causes “limp wristing” or slide bumps into something and interrupts it’s cycling.
  • It is pretty easy to become your own backstop when entangled on the ground.

Because knives are so easy to conceal a lot of the Tueller drill/21 foot rule thinking doesn’t always apply: an unarmed subject approaching from 21′ doesn’t normally justify drawing a firearm. Tueller demonstrated that you need 21′ to draw a firearm if you want to remain flat-footed and shoot the person who stabs you.

Pain and Injury

Posted by Mostly Genius – December 18, 2008

I hope it hurtsIt is important to discriminate between pain and injury. From the standpoint of self defense this is pretty simple: injury reduces the physical ability to fight or pursue. Inflicting injury can cause pain as well (though not always immediately), but pain by itself does not take away an assailants actual ability to fight.

A perfect example of this is professional soccer. Players who have been fouled roll around on the ground writhing in pain until the referee assigns the penalty and then they jump back to their feet and continue to play the game as if nothing happened. I am sure that the foul was “painful” but if they were “injured” they would be getting carried off the field. Part of being a professional athlete is being goal-oriented and shrugging off pain to get things accomplished.

Martial Arts and self defense systems that rely on using pain to influence behavior with pressure points, arrest-control holds, and the like are using pain to get voluntary compliance. These methods can fail against people who have either a higher tolerance for pain or are impaired by drugs or alcohol. The pain only lasts as long as the hold is being applied, so compliance after being released from the hold is voluntary behavior.

Injuring the assailant makes him unable to continue the attack. Knocking them unconscious, breaking bones, and causing significant amounts of blood loss all degrade his physical ability to fight regardless of his mental state or willpower. “Superficial” injuries might have some deterrence value, but assailant gets to choose if he is going to be deterred or not. If you can treat it with a band-aid it probably isn’t an “injury.”

The Totality of the Situation

Posted by Mostly Genius – December 11, 2008

Chinatown AlleywayI use this phrase so frequently that I am sure my students are sick of hearing it. I repeat it so often because it is so important. Most self-defense training consists of drills or techniques and it easy to forget because of the constant repetition that there is not necessarily a stimulus-response relationship between a technique and a situation.

A simple wrist grab has all manner of escapes, counters and other responses. Some martial arts seem to have a fetish for this attack, and all sorts of joint manipulations are built around it. Many students are surprised when I teach responses to wrist grabs that include strikes, knives, and gunfire.

Knives and shooting are not my default response to a wrist grab, but they are certainly within my range of responses.

Correctly they will point out that a wrist grab is not in and of itself a lethal threat. This is absolutely true, but in the totality of the situation it might be an element of a lethal threat. If the attempt to pull you into the van full of ski-masked assailants begins with a wrist grab there is certainly justification. The wrist-grab is not the lethal threat: getting pulled into the van is.

We need to remember that without a context we are just practicing a drill, trying to learn the technical aspects of a technique and not demonstrating a use-case. We are answering the “how” question and not the “when” or “why” questions. Knives and shooting are not my default response to a wrist grab, but they are certainly within my range of responses.

This can go the other way too. Some people think that the Teuller drill means that we need to shoot people with knives (or other contact distance weapons) that are within some fixed distance. A threat with a knife that responds to a verbal command of “Stop” might not need to be shot. I would certainly be creating distance and getting a weapon in hand, but if the verbal commands are working I don’t have a reason to shoot (yet), I just have an excuse.

The complete scenario (or as much as we can understand of it) dictates what the appropriate response should be. There are a number of models for making these sorts of decisions, and none of the good ones look like a list of “Attacker does x, I respond with y.”

Your martial art probably isn’t.

Posted by Mostly Genius – December 10, 2008

SenseiThe “martial” portion of the term should indicate that the “art” is directly related to military warfare. While many traditional arts can credit their development to how warfare was conducted prior to the widespread use of gun powder, a lot has changed a lot since then.

It is important to remember that warfare was (and still is) the politics of force. Warfare is not conducted as a spiritual journey for the troops (though it might be one for individuals). Warfare exists to achieve the political aims of the leadership. Morality is defined by that leadership. More modern systems (specifically Judo, Aikido, Karate-do) have a moral philosophy that was part of the design goals. In many ways this completely severs any philosophical linkage to warfare.

There is certainly some overlap between the principles or techniques between warfare (both ancient and modern), “martial arts”, and self defense, but there might well be incompatibilities between the moral and or philosophical underpinnings of different disciplines.
If we consider a hypothetical scenario where we are confronted with an individual threat the response can differ wildly:

  • The practitioners of “ethical” disciplines (Aikido, Judo, etc.) might attempt to redirect and control the aggressor.
  • The practitioners of “fighting” disciplines (Boxing, Karate, etc.) might subdue the assailant by pummeling him into submission.
  • The traditional military response is generally to bring overwhelming firepower to bear against the threat.

The “appropriate” response depends upon both the nature of the threat and the moral perspective of the defender. This is where we being to see the “toolboxes full of hammers” problem and indeed, most disciplines tend to view all problems in terms of their particular solutions. The top MMA heavyweight doesn’t have much more chance of winning a gunfight than the top IPSC/IDPA shooter has winning in the octagon.

Another way to think about this is that a particular discipline is a framework for viewing the world. Within this framework are a subset of physical and philosophical principles and from these a set of techniques are derived. Those techniques do not necessarily represent a direct stimulus-response type of relationship, but rather serve as examples for how the framework can be applied in different situations. Mastery is the understanding of the principles to point of not just simply applying the optimum technique at the right time, but inventing new ones to fit the situation.

Obviously a multidisciplinary approach is required but in practice most of these tend to be little more than cobbled together strings of techniques. Without a unifying framework the “system” becomes an endless series of “options” and stops being systematic at all. This problem is further compounded by the introduction of modern weapon systems.

Bat Mantell & C.Y. Smith (LOC)Consider a hypothetical system that includes western boxing as a foundation – as soon as you are holding a handgun you can forget about combination punching. Obviously this hypothetical system believes that firearms and boxing exist as separate states: you are either boxing or you are shooting. There is no rule that states deadly threats and non deadly threats cannot be intermingled, or that a static situation can’t change over time: After shooting the lethal threat you are immediately confronted with a non-lethal threat. The “system” of boxing and shooting didn’t have a framework (or didn’t include such situations in its framework) and simply stitched together marksmanship skills with boxing techniques.

This is not to say that studying a martial art (or several) is not a good idea or a beneficial practice. What is important is to look for the underlying framework in any discipline and make some smart decisions about how each integrates into your overall self-defense plan.