Tag: self defense

Real Self Defense for Women

Posted by Mostly Genius – April 2, 2009

I have been reading quite a bit lately about women’s self defense. For some reason this quickly turns into a gender politics debate and some kind of vehicle for feminist ideology. I thought that any discussion of self defense would revolve around protecting oneself and the people that one cared about. I keep seeing a number of the same themes popping up.

Empowerment: True empowerment is the power to change the outcome. Empowerment isn’t an emotion, it is the power to do something. Owning a firearm isn’t empowerment, it is a ‘capability’ only if you are up to the task of it’s operation under the circumstances. This is the will to do what is necessary and the ability to get it done. Without will and ability you simply have a “possibility.” Maybe brandishing the gun (like a cross to ward off vampires) will frighten away the assailants or maybe jerking the trigger in a cardinal compass direction will provide you with a lucky, fight-stopping, shot.

Confidence. Any training can give you confidence, even the worthless kind. If you sit in a room of true-believers you will begin agreeing on cue. A charismatic instructor can sell a lot of techniques that just plain don’t work. If you are miming a groin-kick against a compliant training partner then what happens to that confidence when the full-force/full-power version doesn’t produce the desired result? I am not disputing that confidence is a good thing, and having a suboptimal plan is better than having none at all. I argue for spending some time training under stress and using realistic levels of force if you really want to build confidence.

Girl Power Boosterism. There is a whole lot of “go girl” cheerleading in many women’s self defense classes. It’s important to remember that when everyone is sitting in a circle and chanting, there is a criminal lifting weights and waiting for his next release from prison. Violent assaults are frequently bloody, terrible, and most of all: lonely. Real empowerment and confidence is grounded in truly recognizing what one might actually face and having a realistic plan for dealing with that. If the starting place has to be a women’s only group that cheers each other on then so be it. Don’t let that be the stopping place.

Pseudo-pacifism and nonsense ideologies. I meet a lot of women in classes that cringe when I start talking about how bad things can get and what might be necessary in order to prevail. Everyone wants a simple tool or technique that is guaranteed to work and isn’t really going to injure anyone, but that doesn’t exist. I am a huge proponent of less lethal tools, deescalation, and avoidance but there always has to be a backup in case those things fail. At the worst extreme it is “combat” with all of the snot, blood, spit, sweat, and grime associated with it.

I read far too much “we must change society so there are no assailants/abusers/rapists/criminal” type ideas. This has never occurred in human history, despite a lot of people wishing for it. If this is an education issue, it is a matter of training people to resist with effective violence rather than handing out pamphlets about how being a violent criminal is bad. I don’t control public policy, law, or even public opinion. I do have a large measure of control over what happens to me.

You can’t blame the victim. Nobody is going to argue that the victim is responsible for the criminals actions. Peoples actions and decisions can make them vulnerable to predators. Blaming the assailant is both easy and just, but it is also useless. Yes, the assailant is completely morally culpable, but that doesn’t make anyone safer – the predators know they are predators and they are OK with it. “Blame” isn’t really the issue, dangerous actions and decisions are. Remove the front door from your house before you leave for a long weekend: it’s not your “fault” that all your stuff is gone, but it can’t be too much of a surprise.

Emotion. There is a lot of ‘feeling’ about self defense. Feeling intimidated, threatened, afraid, powerful, confident, etc. are generally present when women write about the topic. I do not see nearly as much emotion expressed by men writing on similar topics. I don’t know that this is positive or negative, but I do know that most of it is probably irrelevant on a practical level. I think that “feeling” rather than knowing, sensing, thinking, or proving should be guarded against. There is a big difference between being intimidated and recognizing that someone is trying to intimidate you.

Equality. In the physical sense there is no such thing. As a rule there is no physical parity between men and women, just like there isn’t physical parity between two women or two men. I don’t expect to be as large or a strong as my assailant. Generally, women tend to be smaller than men (this is called “sexual dimorphism”), so when I get asked “What is a good gun for a woman?” I say one that fits her hand, has sights she can see through, a trigger she can reach, and she is strong enough to operate. This is the same advice I give to men, but the gun usually needs to a little bit smaller for women. Saying “she can’t handle that gun” isn’t a sexist statement any more than “he can’t handle that gun.” If making your gear work takes effort, then you are diverting your energy from fighting the bad guy.

I care about people making their own decisions and fighting back. This requires that people take personal responsibility for their choices and their actions. Those choices should have a basis in reality, not in fiction or an idealized philosophy. Self defense is not gender specific, but the the tactics and techniques might be – because the genders face a different set of threats.

Three Battles

Posted by Mostly Genius – March 2, 2009

It is important for students of self defense to recognize that there are three battles that need to be won in order to be successful, and in fact loosing any one the battles is loosing the “war.”

The Physical Battle. This is the one that gets the most attention. All of the shooting, striking, grappling, knives and pepper spray happens in this battle. Losing the physical fight in a self defense situation could mean being killed, and the other two battles become moot. We need to win the physical battle in such a way that it sets us up for success in the other two. If you decided to end all social disagreements with gunfire you would win the physical battle and quickly lose the other two.

The Legal Battle. In our modern society if you use force above a certain threshold you will be exposed to the legal system. This exposure could be with both the criminal and civil courts. The old saying “better tried by 12 than carried by six” is true, but getting “tried” isn’t some kind of picnic. We tend to imagine some very obvious good/bad scenario where it is immediately clear to the jury that we were acting in self defense and anyone would have acted in a similar manner. By the time you are in front of a jury you have already paid huge sums of money (especially if someone was killed.) If you bankrupt your family and end up in jail cell for the long-term then you have “survived” but you really haven’t “won.”

The Moral and Ethical Battle. This battle is the most easily dismissed by people who haven’t thought this through. The gun community is full of references to “Scumbags” or “Goblins” and people who think they can kill them without remorse. Maybe that is so, but how will your friends and coworkers view the events? How will the other parents at your children’s school? None of them were there and they are getting the story from the media after the fact.

I recall one story of a private citizen that really did everything right in reporting a crime and only got involved when he felt he had to. He ended up shooting an adolescent male that had already beaten and shot a police officer. If the private citizen didn’t act that cop would have been killed. The local paper in this man’s community then released a fluffy piece about the troubled youth (with prior assault and drug convictions) who was so full of promise and love for his friends and family. This private citizen didn’t want to be a hero, he didn’t want to be a ‘gun fighter’, he didn’t want to shoot a teenage kid, but he wasn’t going to watch a cop get killed and do nothing to prevent it. His reward was having his hometown paper speculating that he was some kind of racist vigilante.

Self defense requires you to have an ethical framework that will let you look in the mirror everyday and know deep down that you did what was required. The actions you took were both appropriate and necessary. I imagine that most people with some kind of conscience will constantly reexamine such an event wondering if there was anything else that could have been done.

Get a gun and… hope.

Posted by Mostly Genius – February 28, 2009

No sooner do I write this post and then I read this: My New Gun. This is precisely what I was talking about. Being afraid and having a gun is better than being afraid and not having one, but it’s not that much better.

The noise in the indoor range was frightening, even though I was wearing the same ear protectors as construction workers using jackhammers. But more unnerving were the other shooters. The man in the adjacent booth had set his target at 15 feet and was firing with a coolness and precision that chilled me.

This is not the mindset that is going to keep you alive when you need your gun for self-defense. This article represents the gun-as-talisman thinking, the author believes that clutching a gun when alone in the dark will banish the bogey-man.

Then finally I picked out a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, “the gun I started with,” the clerk said. I handed him my driver’s license and filled out the paperwork. He left us to run my license number through a criminal-records system called QuickCheck. Two minutes later I was qualified and, between gun and ammo, $762 poorer. The revolver I bought has a black handle and a four-inch stainless-steel barrel. There’s nothing pink about it.

So for a first gun the author has a pistol that will kick like a mule with an 18 pound trigger. This probably won’t matter because I doubt the author is going to be going to the range or getting any training with it. It’s just good luck charm for the nightstand – in a masculine color.

(h/t:Joe)

Get a gun… and

Posted by Mostly Genius – February 27, 2009

The common response to some crime incident or self-defense item of news is that somebody should get a gun. I am all in favor of guns, the 2nd Amendment, concealed carry, and the like but it is not “THE” solution.

A handgun solves a subset of self-defense problems: given an identified deadly force threat a handgun will solve that situation at a distance relative to the skill of the operator.

Pure marksmanship increases the maximum distance that the gun can be effective – but not the minimum. Regardless of how good of a shot you are unless you can get your gun into play it will not be a factor in the fight.

If you have a really fast draw stroke then you can reduce the minimum distance, but not down to zero. A half-second draw will optimistically let you engage targets as near as 7 feet, a little outside of conversational distance.

Having all of these gun skills will not make a non-deadly threat solvable with a firearm, and situations can have a way of escalating. The non-deadly problem can turn deadly – but you have manage it well enough to get your firearm into action. Shoot/No-Shoot isn’t real life. “No Shoot” targets can turn into “Shoot” targets in a few quick seconds.

It is easy to pat ourselves on the back after shooting a decent group under controlled conditions and pretend that is “fighting.” We read the little lists of bullet point tactics that are so popular on the internet (heck I have written a few of them) and believe we understand what we need to do to prevent victimizations. I applaud the decision to get a firearm and carry it for protection, but that is not the destination. It is true that in many cases simply producing a firearm will scare off the assailants, but what about the cases where this is not true?

What I am getting at is that all of your mindset, tactics, skills and equipment are the solution to a range of problems. It is easy to envision getting woken up by the intruder who is breaking into the house, it is much harder to contemplate getting woken up by the intruder who is standing at the foot of your bed. Having solutions to the simple scenarios is a step in the right direction, but having a plan for the harder scenarios takes a lot of work.