self defense

React vs. Respond

/ hsoi

Seth Godin makes an excellent point:

We can react or respond, as my friend Zig used to say. When we react to a medicine, that’s a bad thing. When we respond, it’s working.

When the world dumps something at our door, we can take the shortcut and allow ourselves to react. We can point out that whatever we do is happening because the other side deserved it. Tantrums are okay, in this analysis, because the other guy made us.

Or we can respond. With something that works. With an approach we’re proud of, proud of even after the moment has passed. It’s not easy, it’s often not fun, but it’s the professional’s choice.

There are many ways this can apply to your life.

In some regard it’s semantics, but semantics can be important because they affect your mindset and how you will approach problems in life.

Sometimes we have to react, but it seems better to start thinking about how to respond.

The Odds of Good Health

/ hsoi / 5 Comments

Readers know I care about my health (diet, exercise, etc.) – and I’m sure you care about your health as well – so I want to discuss some numbers about health.

Odds of 1-in-150 vs. 1-in-6,000,000. Which has a higher likelihood of happening? The 1-in-150, of course.

What of those were odds of something bad – like contracting a terminal illness – happening to you? I reckon you’d prefer the 1-in-6,000,000 odds. Since we don’t have much choice if something bad happens to us or not, we have a pretty good chance of that 1-in-150 bad thing happening to us, yes?

What if I told you you could improve those odds with some simple changes in your life?

I’m sure you do things like this. Eating less fat, or minding your salt and sugar intake. Adding daily exercise. Maybe you look for GMO-free food, or make sure your plastics are BPA-free. And it’s not just food, but habits such as buckling your seat-belt when you get into a car, or looking both ways before crossing the street.

We seem to accept there are risks and dangers in the world, that we can’t fully escape them, but obviously we can make some changes in our lives that improve our odds of living a long and healthy life.

Look at what we teach kids. We teach them about “stranger danger”, and how to stay safe in a storm so they don’t get struck by lightning. Learning such safety precautions is an accepted part of our culture and society, because again we want ourselves and our loved-ones to live long and healthy lives.

Did you know that the average number of people killed in the US by lightning strkes each year is 51? With 310 million people in the US, that’s odds of 1-in-6,000,000 of dying from a lightning strike. A rare ocurrence indeed, and no one is considered paranoid for taking precautions against such a rare event.

According to FBI statistics, there are over 6 million violent crimes in the US each year. There are over 2 million where your life is literally at stake (armed robbery, aggravated assault, forcible rape, homicide). With 310 million people in the US…

That’s odds of 1-in-150 of you being a victim of a violent crime, that could leave you crippled for life or dead.

It’s not a “one in a million” chance of being a victim — it’s 1-in-150. It’s a 1-in-50 chance of being a victim of general violent crime. In fact, those odds are probably conservative because not all violent crimes are reported, so the real odds are likely greater.

Let that sink in.

You have a high likelihood of being the victim of a violent crime. I know you care about your health and well-being. Being alive, not being in pain and crippled for life because someone decided to shoot you for your iPhone – well, I think “being alive” is a fundamental component of being in good health.

Of all the unfair and undesirable things one can die from in this world, being a victim of a violent crime is pretty high up there. Please stop thinking it cannot happen to you, that crime only happens to other people (because to everyone else in the world, YOU are “other people”). The chances of you being the victim of a violent crime is pretty high, so once you start being honest with yourself about this fact and accept the reality of it, the next question is: what steps are you taking to do something about it?

(h/t to Tom Givens; listening to his interview on Ballistic Radio Season 2, Episode 87, 2014-11-23 provided the inspiration for this article. If you’ve never heard Tom speak, or even if you have, I highly recommend taking 30 minutes and listening to this interview. Tom has the wisdom and experience, and I can think of no one more authoritative and well-spoken on the subject matter.).

 

It’s Winter – Can you access your stuff?

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

And so with the changing of the seasons comes the changing of the clothing we wear. Yeah, there’s that one guy we all know from high school that wore shorts all year, but most of us start to wear more clothing – including coats and gloves – when the weather gets colder.

So can you still do all you can do with all this extra clothing?

How accessible are your pockets?

How accessible are the things on your belt?

If you’re wearing gloves, can your fingers still get to where they need to get to, without having to remove those gloves? And if you’re wearing mittens, what major changes will you need to make (including getting rid of the mittens).

What might you need to change to accomodate? New clothing? Modifications to the clothing? Different techniques?

What might you need to practice?

Take a few minutes and give things a try. Make sure things you need to get to you can get to, quickly. If you cannot, figure out the adjustments you need to make.

Better to find this out and work out a solution now, before the flag flies.

Risky Locations

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

“We live in a nice neighborhood.”

“I never thought something like that could happen here.”

“This is the good part of town.”

You’ve probably heard – or even uttered – these phrases. Crime happens in a place you wouldn’t expect it to, and phrases like these come out.  The reality is, crime happens everywhere – no where is immune. But certainly, there are areas that can have a higher tendency for crime than others.

Force Science Institute News #268 contains an article on “What locations are riskiest for you?” In this context, “you” means law-enforcement officers. And while I tend to look at things from a private citizen standpoint, this is still information worthy of note.

The study looked at data from the nation’s second largest municipal police department (Chicago), and constructed “a “risk terrain model” that links an officer’s relative danger of felonious injury to the presence of certain environmental factors.” They looked at 991 batteries (“serious bodily harm or death, including firearm threats and assaults) against CPD officers over a 12-month period. They examined where those tended to occur across the city, at a granularity of about 1-city block. They also considered other “potential risk factors”, locations likely to be trouble spots like apartment complexes, night clubs, homeless shelters, laundromats, convenience stores, etc..

From their analysis, they determined an “exceptionally strong” statistical correlation between batteries against officers and proximity to 11 environmental features.

In a descending order of risk, “police who handle calls for service at locations with foreclosures, problem buildings [sources of complaints about criminal activity], bars, schools, gang territories, banks, apartment complexes, liquor stores, clusters of service requests for malfunctioning streetlights, grocery stores and/or retail shops are at a greater risk of felonious battery,” Caplin writes.

At the upper end of this list, calls “within three blocks of foreclosures and/or within a dense area of problem buildings pose as much as two to three times greater risk of battery to police officers” than calls to locations at the lower end of the spectrum, he says. But even the lesser locations on the list present a significantly higher danger than the average among all the cells analyzed.

Of course, the risk is even greater at locations where more than one of these “model features” is present.

The specifics are unclear, but Caplan theorizes that the behavior of people can be influenced by the geographical features around them. “The nature of certain places may be perceived by offenders to be opportune locations to behave aggressively toward police,” he writes.

For example, “foreclosures may be high-risk due to the absence of invested caretakers who would otherwise serve as ‘eyes and ears’ within the area. This void of guardians may serve as cues to certain suspects that the prospect for instant freedom from criminal justice authorities is better had with aggression toward police rather than cooperation.”

Rather an interesting take-home. Of course, like any study it really is a call for further study: to have the study replicated in other cities, other jurisdictions, other departments, both within the US but also abroad. So, take the study results for what they are.

Out of curiousity, I asked Tom Givens how this data compared to his (ever growing) data set of student/civilian incidents. His response:

John,

That all makes sense from a law-enforcement perspective. Bear in mind that these are police officers responding to calls for service. That takes them to foreclosed homes, ghetto apartment complexes, and such locations that the typical middle-class CCW holder is far less likely to frequent.

In our civilians experience the most dangerous places are gas station/convenience store, shopping malls and parking lots in general. These are the places where your typical CCW holder has the highest chance of interacting with strangers, and thus with criminals.

Hope this helps.

Tom

Either way, this information does give you an idea of where there is greater risk, and lends into John Farnam’s quip about personal safety: “Don’t go to stupid places, associate with stupid people, and do stupid things.”

Safety: Perception vs. Reality

/ hsoi

Is your safety based in the reality of the world around you? or in your limited purview?

Granted, we can only be based in what we know, so the question is really a matter of how much do you know? How much awareness do you have of what’s going on around you?

As an example, a few weeks ago when I was at the gym and the police came knocking because a shop a few doors down was burglarized. I had no idea the shop had been broken into – they went through a back door, which of course I never saw. Had the police not come knocking, I would have never known.

How much do you speak with your neighbors? Did you know that one of your neighbors had their house broken into? It wasn’t on the news, it wasn’t in the papers. Usually it takes having regular communication with your neighbors to know what’s going on around you. Of course today, many neighborhoods have groups on Facebook or use sites like Nextdoor, but however you communicate, so long as it’s there to keep you informed.

I thought about this due to a conversation I had with a loved one. That loved one doesn’t quite get one of my jobs, and does think I’m a bit paranoid. That I take steps to keep my house safe from burglary be it outside lighting, alarm system, guard dog… it’s all rather overkill  to this loved one because they’ve never experienced anything that would give them a need for such things. Well, after you’ve had your house cased, after you know some neighbors have had their house and cars broken into… yeah, you really would prefer to not be a victim.

But that’s often how it goes for many people: they come around because something happened to them. You find many women that never considered owning a gun, until that crazy, abusive ex came calling. I myself grew into this world because shortly after getting married and having my first child, Wife was assaulted while out on a walk in a “good part of town”. Yeah, often our perceptions are founded in our own ignorance of the world around us — because we just don’t know what we don’t know.

So I pay attention to police reports. I pay attention to the FBI Crime Statistics. I try to seek out information about the dangers around me. Yes, you have to keep it in perspective, and yes I can see how some people would think this is paranoia. But why should seeking knowledge and doing responsible things with that knowledge be considered paranoia? Or really, should we let being called “paranoid” bother us so much, since the label is being applied by those so obviously ignorant?

How to Intimidate People

/ hsoi

VICE has an interesting article titled “How to Intimidate People: Pro Tips from Drug Dealers, Hostage Negotiators, Bouncers, and Drag Queens“.

It’s a useful read for anyone, but readers of my blog tend to be those interested in topics like self-protection. While intimidation isn’t always considered a positive action to undertake, sometimes it can be a useful skill for self-preservation. I mean, the article frames itself as a bully response:

It started in the playground, where that sweaty bully dished out bad insults and made you feel like a putz. Years later, you’re still being intimidated: on the street at night, in job interviews, at pickup basketball games, when someone says something nasty to you in the bar—in all these situations you’re stuck being the victim rather than the aggressor, the one who has to back down while your tormentor makes that shit-eating grin at you. Don’t you wish there was a way to shut him or her up, to force that clown into a humiliating retreat? Not by throwing a punch, of course, since that could end with you in a jail cell or badly beaten or both. You’re going to win this fight without it ever becoming a fight.

The problem is, not everybody has a natural knack for intimidation. Practice makes perfect, but since firsthand research in this field can be slightly hazardous, I thought I’d get some pointers from a group of individuals who are skilled in getting the bullies of life to back the fuck off.

Indeed. If you can avoid a fight with a little “verbal judo”, that’s certainly a preferrable way to go. Yes, the article framing does seem to have a bit of assholeness to it, a bit perhaps of “revenge”, but ignore the author’s hyperbole and give the article a read.

The information here? It may be useful for your own use. It may be also useful so you can recognize it so perhaps you won’t become a victim of such intimidation. In the end, it’s knowledge.

In self defense, bad language can be pretty fucking relevant

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Seems Greg Ellifritz got some people wound up over some salty language:

Last week I posted a book review on the site. In the review, I quoted the author. The author said the words “shit” and “fuck.” That apparently spun quite a few of you up. I received several email complaints, a few negative comments, and had the largest mass exodus from my email subscription list that I’ve seen in the entire existence of the website.

I get it. A lot of you don’t like foul language.

But have you ever truly thought how your conscious avoidance of swear words might create some unintended negative consequences when it comes to a self defense situation?

Indeed. Because criminals still speak The King’s English, right?

I would postulate that if reading such language in a book (or hearing it on TV or in movies) makes you uncomfortable, you will have serious difficulties when the criminal you face uses the same language against you in a threatening manner. Harsh language is a teaching tool. It adds emphasis in a manner that more moderate words cannot convey. Besides that, it desensitizes the people exposed to it. Such desensitization is an absolute necessity in order to successfully avoid being intimidated by the criminals who WILL use harsh language when they attack you.

You don’t have to use or like foul language in your personal life, but language you find objectionable and that you would never utter is still language that is out there and in use by people – especially people willing to do harm unto you. You need to accept it and not flinch in the face of it.

“Street talk” is the language of criminals. They will use it, even if they aren’t wielding it, and if hearing “fuck” or “shit” causes you to flinch in some way, that allows them to get into your head. This becomes detrimental to you regarding your ability to defend yourself.

Really, hearing “fuck” or “shit” or “goddamncocksuckingmotherfuckercunt” should just go in one ear and out the other.

Realize as well that such language can be used by you as well. You don’t need to use it, but again, if this is their language, speaking to them “on their terms” may allow your attacker to understand you a bit better.

Suppose you start with a polite “Hey man, can you back up?”. They don’t back up so you escalate to a loud and firm “Back up!”. They still don’t back up so you really crank it up with a “BACK THE FUCK UP!”. Now tell me that doesn’t add emphasis. Sure you could just say “BACK UP!”, but the reality is the “FUCK” adds an emphasis that people understand. Even those offended by the word understand the added weight in that message.

But you must be mindful in the use of such language, because saying something like “BACK UP, MOTHERFUCKER!” is quite different. Now you’ve insulted him, and it’s taken things to quite a different level — it may even incite him and the situation gets worse. Worse is not what we want.

Foul language is a fact of life. To use it yourself is a personal choice; if you do choose to use it, use it wisely. Realize you will hear it, and the best thing you can do with it is let it go in one ear and out the other.

I’ll leave you with Greg’s closing comments:

Criminals use language as a tool to manipulate their victims.  They KNOW their language will make “good” people uncomfortable.  They count on the shock factor to give them an advantage.  It’s your job to ensure that the criminals don’t win.  You cannot allow language of ANY type to phase you in the least bit if you want to win a street confrontation.

You can start your practice by refusing to be “offended” when adults use adult language in books and on the internet.

Why can’t we just ban “crazy”?

/ hsoi

A couple horrible stories in the news recently. But I think ones that are worth your consideration due to their greater implications.

One was about 4 NYPD officers attacked by a crazy man with a hatchet. Another was about a beheading of an Oklahoma teenager.

From what’s been reported so far, it seems what we’ve got are some random people with a heavy dose of “crazy”, attacking other people with an intent to inflict harm and death in a horrible manner due to their crazy.

Where are the calls for hatchet bans? or machete control? Because you know if these attackers used guns, it would become fuel for those bent on banning guns. Why aren’t we seeing calls to try to control this sort of violence? Is this sort of attack somehow less worthy of your political attention?

Or maybe perhaps it’s not about the tool/weapon. I mean, I think it’s pretty clear what’s in play here isn’t guns or hatchets or machetes, but plain old crazy.

So why aren’t we working to ban crazy? I mean, if bans are so effective at stopping things, don’t you think a law against crazy would be the most effective solution?

Of course we know there’s no reality in making that solution happen. Thus we look for other solutions, often things like “gun control”.

But let me ask you something.

Look at the NYPD hatchet case. What got things to stop? Was it legislation? Was it a ban on hatchets or the fact that murder is already illegal? Did they pee or vomit on their attacker? Was it talking to the attacker, be it begging and pleading, words of love and kindness, or stern words?

No. It was a swift and violent response on the part of the NYPD officers, using guns to stop the attacker. There was no ability to call for help; only the people immediately on site right there right then were able to respond.

Are guns, and swift, violent responses always the right answer? Certainly not! In fact, the overwhelming majority of problems in our world are not going to be rightly solved by the muzzle of a gun. However, there are some problems in this world that cannot be solved any other way.

For every solution you offer as an alternative, I ask you to consider the viability of that solution — with intellectual honesty. Would you equip those NYPD officers with your solution? Will your solution enable them to go home to their loved ones at the end of their shift? Will your solution be effective at keeping other innocent people on the NYC street from being brutally murdered? Will your solution effectively stop the danger, the madness, the crazy?

What if you were faced with the same imminent danger? If someone were charging at you wielding a hatchet with every intent on embedding it in your skull, can you honestly believe your solution will keep you alive? Are you willing to put it to the test?

A ban on crazy – just like most bans – doesn’t stop bad things from happening. Effective solutions may not always be palatable, but we must always be honest in finding and applying those solutions.

Mindset wins

/ hsoi

[Lemmy] said that Sid Vicious would throw himself at guys much bigger than he was and they backed off because they could tell that Sid had no fear

That’s a story that Lemmy told Henry Rollins. It was just a passing comment in this article (which is about music elitism, an interesting article in its own right), but it stood out to me.

Sid Vicious was a tall but skinny dude. From a purely physical standpoint, there wasn’t much intimidating about him. But that he threw himself at bigger guys and they backed off because they could tell Sid had no fear? What might that tell you about the importance of mindset in being successful?

About the OODA Loop

/ hsoi

In matters of personal defense, we often speak of the OODA Loop. Of course, the OODA Loop has applicability to life in general, but for many people the first time they hear about it is in some class teaching personal defense.

BTW, while it’s common to refer to it as the “oo-dah loop”, Massad Ayoob made it clear back in my MAG-20 class that the creator of the OODA Loop – John Boyd – referred to it as the “Oh-Oh-Dee-Ay Loop”.

Pronunciation aside, The Art of Manliness wrote a rather in-depth piece on the OODA Loop. If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, or know about it but appreciate some deeper knowledge of a topic, give it a read.