Mindset Archives - Injury Dynamics

Defense Makes the Perfect Victim

March 14, 2025/0 Comments/in Mindset/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

If you’re going to kill someone, there are a few things that make the job that much easier:

Time and space in which to work
A preoccupied victim
A non-threatening victim.

Defense gets you all three. Or, more properly, the best victim is a defensive victim. If they’re more worried about what you’re doing to them than what they could be doing to you, you’ll have a pretty easy time of it. Being afraid of you and what you’re doing will cause them to move away in an attempt to gain or maintain distance. All this does is give you the time and space you need to pick a target and smash through it, or to break something with a bludgeon, or put the knife in again, or fire the gun repeatedly. Not only that, but the human body is far better at moving forward than backward—chances are they’ll stumble, trip and fall, giving you an effortless shortcut to putting the boots to them. If you’re not so lucky, at least you’ll have an easier time effecting your overrun, since for every three feet you can move forward, they can only backpedal two.

If you’re using a tool, the best victim is the one who is focused on that tool—you want the person who will try to grab the gun, or bludgeon, or wrestle the knife arm. It’s as good as pointing and saying, “Look!” to get them to turn away from you as you strike. Much, much better to have them busy with your hand and arm than cracking open your skull. With the hand being truly faster than the eye this usually means you’ll get to employ the tool repeatedly while they try, with lessening enthusiasm, to get hold of it while you work. This goes for bare hands as well—you want a person who wants to block, grapple, or otherwise compete with your skill and strength instead of simply ending you. A busy victim is an easy victim.

Of course, if they’re trying to keep distance, and their attention is focused three feet out in front of your precious brain, it means you have very little to worry about getting done in kind. The absolute worst-case scenario would be a “victim” who wants to kill you as much as you want to kill them—that puts the win up for grabs. Much better by far to have a victim who prioritizes keeping distance over crippling, blocking over maiming, countering over killing. The ultimate conceit of defense is that if getting killed is the problem, then preventing that killing is the solution. You know better. In fact, you want them to be busy with the preventing, since that keeps them from hurting you. For every attempt at preventing, you get to put an injury into them; if that doesn’t work, you’re free to do it again. And again. If they’re looking to block/counterattack, then they’ll always be a half-step behind. All you have to do is pour it on until something breaks; the rest is academic. (Or at least as academic as stomping someone to death on the ground can be.)

With all the defensive training out there, chances are you’ll be lucky enough to get a person who goes defensive. If not, well, then just know it’s even chances—don’t waste any time. “Whoever screws around is lost.” If you see them screwing around—backing up, blocking, trying to get control of your arm—that’s just blood in the water. If they start behaving like prey, take them. It doesn’t get any easier than that… it’s like having two people tearing them apart instead of just the one.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

As Hard as You Can

August 6, 2024/0 Comments/in Mindset/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Intent is what makes people scary. It’s what you instinctively fear in the criminal. It’s what society breeds out of domesticated humans. But what is it, really? It’s far too slippery to hold in the mind’s eye, an amorphous, ever-shifting gem shrouded in a halo of mystical mist… And what good is that to anyone? If you’ll bear with me, I’ll try to get it to hold still for a moment, throw some sunshine on the cloudy facets and get them to sparkle for you. I’ll do what I can to stabilize the whole thing—gaze into it, into yourself, and get what you can out of it:

Intent is single-minded, goal-oriented focus.

Intent is being focused on injury to the exclusion of all else. From the moment you perceive a threat to the moment that threat is gone, all you care about is causing injury. From the moment someone pulls up their shirt to show you a gun or from the moment you hit the ground face-first, you are on target acquisition and destruction. You will find your targets and smash them, never stopping, never hesitating until you get what you want: an injury. And once you get that first one, you’ll pile them on until the other person physiologically buckles under the mass of trauma and you make them capitulate, pass out, or die as you see fit. Intent is about what you are going to force the other person to do. Intent is making violence once-sided as quickly as possible and keeping it that way.

It’s not an emotional state—you’re not enraged or Hulked-out or seeing red; it’s just that out of all the myriad possible things you could do you are going to pick one (injury) and you’re going to get it done to the exclusion of all else, over and over again. One target, one injury. Repeat until it doesn’t make sense to continue.

Intent is how hard you swing the bat.

Intent is a self-realizing prophecy that cuts both ways—if you think you can do it, you will; if you think you can’t, you won’t. If I ask you to kick a soccer ball, how hard you kick it will depend on what you expect to happen. If you believe that the ball is filled with lead shot, then you’ll expect it to hurt and won’t kick it as hard as you can. In fact, you’ll be very reluctant to kick it at all, and your performance will be a reflection of that reluctance. In a word, it’ll suck.

If I tell you that if you don’t kick it over the fence I’m going to shoot you in the head, your performance will suffer even more. Your preoccupation with a negative outcome will sabotage your efforts. Your mind will not be focused on the task at hand. You’ll be worried about living and dying while simultaneously trying to succeed.

Focus on reality as it stands, not on all possible outcomes. Focusing on things that may or may not be true, or are demonstrable falsehoods, is the “feeding the phantoms” that we discussed previously. Thinking that there’s nothing you can do, or that you cannot injure the other person, or that you’re going to die are all outright lies until proven true. Why put your efforts into your own defeat? It does nothing to aid you in shaping the reality you want. In violence, the reality you want is the one where the other person is injured. Everything you do must get you there by the shortest possible route. To consider failure is to aid in your own destruction.

Intent is how much of yourself you’ll put into getting it done.

Here’s a nifty fact: the one thing that all survivors have in common is that they believed they could survive. The circumstances are immaterial, whether it’s a crash, drowning, fire, wilderness, or violence. Survivors report time and time again that when they reached the lethal decision point—am I going to live or die?—they all unequivocally, steadfastly chose to live. They believed they could. I’ve never heard a survivor say, “and then I quit and waited to die.” (Okay, to be fair, I have heard that—but this was from the ones who were saved by others who refused to give it up.) Survivors believe they can alter the outcome.

So, back to the soccer ball. If I hand it to you so you can feel how light and eminently kickable it is, and then tell you that our goal for this training session is to see how far you can kick it, then you are free to work on the mechanics of running up and kicking it with your whole being.

This is what we are attempting to do with our training, only instead of kicking soccer balls we’re kicking people in the groin. If you show up with false assumptions, believing that even though you felt the ball, and it was indeed light and bouncy, it will still hurt when you kick it, or that you are incapable of kicking a ball very far, then anything I do to train you is for naught. You sabotaged yourself before you even set foot on the pitch. Negative expectations lead to diminished results.

Believing you can do it, expecting to get it done, gets you what you want. Intent comes down to wanting to cause an injury more than anything in the world. Focus your mind in that direction, onto that single vulnerable target, and your body will follow suit. You will plow your entire mass through that throat and crush it. All because of the simple belief that you can do it.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

PS. Intent makes people scary because it trumps technique. Intent, coupled with a very basic understanding of targeting, will always beat superior technique alone. This is why we always say that techniques are worthless, and that the criminal sociopath, for all their lack of formal training, is a formidable human wrecking machine. These two facts reside on either side of the same coin. If we fuse the two, if we take superior technique and drive it mercilessly with laser-like intent, we end up with the scariest human being possible.

And that would be you.

Time to Stop Lying to Yourself

July 16, 2024/0 Comments/in Mindset/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Experienced instructors are some of the most relaxed people I know.

The question, of course, is why?

When you have the mechanical ability to cause injury and couple it with the driving motivator of intent, everything throttles back and gets calm and easy—you’re not out spoiling for a fight or giving yourself an anxiety disorder by obsessing violently over every human being who brushes up against you.

This is what I was getting at in “Scenario-Based Training vs. The Hard Knot”. You simply cultivate the skill, and the will to use it, and then sit back and relax into the rest of your life. Should the need arise, you pull out the knot and brain people with it. Then you tuck it back where it belongs and get on with living. (I should note that I’m not talking about a ball of twine here—in my mind it’s an infinitely folded tessellation of agony, a world-heavy, fist-sized sphere from which no light can escape.) You don’t walk around brandishing it high over your head, mad-dogging all comers with a halo of purple lightning dancing about your enraged features. You tuck it behind a smile.

Without intent, without the implacable will to wield the knot, it’s not much better than yoga. Physically challenging, yes. A survival skill, no. (As an aside, it’s critically important to note that the criminal sociopath has very little training—a deficit they more than make up for with vast, raging reservoirs of intent.) So why do people have such a hard time with intent? And most importantly, what can you do about it?

People have a hard time with intent for a number of reasons: They suffer from a natural disinclination toward violence, they worry about what the other person will do, and they think violence is mechanically difficult.

The natural disinclination toward violence

Not wanting to physically hurt people is healthy and sane—but ultimately an impediment to survival when someone poses the question to which violence is the answer.

You need to get over the idea that anything we’re up to here is social in nature. This is why it’s so critically important that your mat time is as asocial as possible—no talking, no nervous laughter, no checking your partner’s face for feedback. The only time you should be looking at a face is if you’re taking an eye out of it.

I’m not talking about getting fired up and hating your partner. I’m talking about dispassion. Lose the emotional triggers—you’re not here to communicate, and raging at your partner (or their targets) is still communication. If you’re working with your “war face” you’ve kicked the social but are busy reinforcing the antisocial. What you really need is to get off the any-social, and get to its absence. That voidspace is the psychic storage shed for the knot.

Worried about what the other person will do

Let’s be blunt: Injured people are helpless. Ask anyone who’s done it. The first injury converts a functional person into a gagging meat-sack. Every injury after that is like busting apart a side of beef with your boot heels. This is why experienced instructors are so damned relaxed (and courteous, for that matter). This is also why they won’t hesitate to be the first one doing it. (It’s the ugly truth that no one wants to talk about—how people really respond to serious injury, about how when you cause one, you’ll know it because what you see next will stick to the inside of your eyelids for the rest of your life.)

What is the other person going to do? They’re going to break and behave like an injured person. They’re going to go to the worst place they’ve ever been. And you’re going to put them there.

The question you have to ask yourself is, will you worry about what they’re going to do, or will you make them worry about what you’re going to do? (Hint: pick the one where you’re in charge.)

On this same topic, you need to get off the whole “attacker/defender” merry-go-round. In any violent conflict there’s going to be, by definition, at least one person doing it to another. Be that one person. Decide it’s you, now, and every time after now. Out there it’s always your turn. If you must think in terms of there being an attacker, then it’s you.

Choosing to put yourself in second place is not the best strategy for a win, no matter how much we may venerate the underdog. In a “fair fight” or a contest, the underdog is the hero. In violence, they’re dead.

Quit empathizing with the dead person. You’re doing it because you’re nice, you’re doing it because you’re sane. In a social context, it makes perfect sense. In violent conflict your social skills and mores do nothing but prevent you from surviving. Empathizing with the dead person at the funeral is sane and normal. Empathizing with them while we’re all trying to decide who the dead person is going to be means you’re it.

Bottom line: decide who has the problem—is it you, or is it them?

Believing violence is mechanically difficult

Outside of the psychosocial issues, violence is really, really easy. We’re all predators, we’re all physically built for killing. Violence is as easy as going from where you are to where the other person is and breaking something important inside of them. The rest is academic.

How easy is it? General consensus says easier than free practice. You get to strike as hard as you can, follow all the way through on everything, you don’t have to take care of them, and it’s over so fast you won’t even have time to break a sweat or even breathe hard. The only hard part is giving yourself the permission to be inhumanly brutal, giving yourself the permission to survive. (I recommend you vote for you every time.)

Thinking that violence is mechanically difficult (and thereby trying to give yourself an out so you don’t have to face your own intent problems) is akin to thinking that swimming in the deep end is any different from swimming in the shallow end. Mechanically, it’s the same—swimming is swimming—the difference is all in your perception. In the shallow end, you can touch bottom and can save yourself from drowning by standing up. In the deep end you’re on your own—it’s sink or swim. So everyone thinks free practice is the shallow end; there’s no risk, you can always “stand up” when you get into trouble. That would make the street the deep end—no backup, no safety net, just swim or die. I’ll grant all of that as true. Just remember, always, that no matter where you’re swimming, mechanically it’s all the same. The idea that there’s a difference is an illusion that takes effort on your part to make a reality. Stop feeding the phantoms and just swim.

Intent—your will to cause injury, your drive to get it done—is completely up to you. You need to start thinking about it now, personally letting go of the things you’ve kept between the “you” you love because they’re a lovable, good person, and the “you” that can stomp the throats of screaming men.

We can only show you how to mechanically take someone apart—pulling the trigger on it is up to you, and you alone.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

Dead Men Tell No Tales

June 11, 2024/0 Comments/in Mindset/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

You can’t learn anything of value from the dead guy.

When we see an act of violence, we feel it in our guts. Our eyes turn to the hapless victim, desperately trying to defend themselves, and a part of us is there, suffering with them. This is what sane, socialized people experience when they see violence—empathy. We can imagine the pain and we empathize with the plight of the victim. This is normal and natural and good. It’s what makes society tick along and keeps us from tearing out each other’s throats at the drop of a hat.

If you spend any time at all worrying about things like violence, that knee-jerk empathy morphs into questions: What could the victim have done differently? How can I keep that from happening to me? The fantasy is that if only you could learn from their mistakes, then what happened to them can’t happen to you.

A neat idea, but much like the dead guy, full of holes.

The only piece of (almost) useful information we can learn from the dead guy is to not be there. I say “almost useful” because it’s stupid-obvious. It works okay when you’re presented with a clear-cut choice—do I escalate or disengage? But it’s stupid when you think about scenarios like workplace shootings. “I’m not coming in today—I feel a shooting coming on.”

Anything you think you could learn from the dead guy’s performance—if he’d just gone for the eye or not stepped back—is pointless because it’s all pretend. It’s make-believe.

It didn’t happen that way.

Someone else in the picture was doing something. Something that worked. Something that got the job done. Something that made the dead guy dead. The winner is the one you’re going to want to look at if you want to learn what works in violence.

Is this a nice, comfortable idea? Hell no. The vast majority of violent video footage also happens to be criminal. And you, not being a criminal, will find it naturally difficult to empathize with the person doing the violence. But that’s the only place where there is anything useful to be learned.

Why? Because it is a record of what works in violence. It’s not pretend, it’s not coulda-woulda-shoulda—it is. When we shift focus from the dead guy to the winner, we leave the world of conjecture and land squarely in the realm of fact. If you’re going to bet your life on something, I don’t recommend you bet on a bunch of opinions or armchair quarterbacking—bet on the facts.

The person doing the violence is using the facts to their advantage. Pay attention to what they’re up to.

The only thing the dead guy can show you is the end result of those facts. And that’s information you already had going in.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

Stripping the Fat to Find the Bone: Reason in Violence

March 13, 2024/1 Comment/in Mindset/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Sane, socialized people see resorting to violence as the unique purview of the frustrated simpleton, the enraged id unleashed, and the insane. By saying you are willing to use violence as a survival tool you are also saying (in the layperson’s mind) that you are a card-carrying member of one of those groups.

Sane, socialized people want desperately to ascribe “reason” to violence. It’s a scary, random thing that they (typically) only ever think of as happening to them. If they can hitch it to a reason, then they think they can use their social skills to avoid it by:

– Staying away from performatively antisocial people.

– Being nice.

– Avoiding the insane.

Not bad ideas in general, but hardly enough insurance for you, personally, to bet the rest of your life on. “Speak softly but carry a big stick,” and all that.

The essential problem is that when the layperson looks at the idea of violence without reason they see (rightfully so) the very definition of a monster. And you just said you were one.

They don’t understand that a tool is just a tool—picking up and using a hammer to drive nails doesn’t mean you’re any more likely to run around the neighborhood smashing car windows than you were before you picked it up. Of course, the layperson sees an increased likelihood of vandalism simply because you picked up the tool. They suffer from an underlying assumption that there is reason and purpose to it—you only ever pick up a hammer to nail things, right?

For a sane, socialized person who happens to be trained in the use of violence as a survival tool, you are no more likely to use it inappropriately, in monstrous fashion, than you were before you were trained. In fact, you’re probably less likely to seek out “opportunities” to use it now that you know, without ambiguity, what’s at stake. (Nobody’s willing to die for a parking space. Unless you live in Southern California.)

But it is this dispassionate, morally neutral view of violence that is troubling to the average person. There has to be a reason behind it, passionate and evil, or there is no social blanket of rules woven thick enough to keep them warm against the shuddering cold void of the universe laid bare.

What they need to understand is:

It’s not from a lack of options.

It’s because your long utility belt of shopworn social tools failed to get the job done. The tool of violence is only good for one thing—shutting off a human brain. It’s the end of the line, the final option in a long list of tools and techniques. If you’re injuring people, you’ve run through and exhausted all the other social tools and arrived at the last one, glinting cold and hard in its “in case of emergency break things” box.

It’s not out of anger.

Heightened emotions are not a requirement for injury. In fact, killing with dispassion is the hallmark of the sociopath. This is the stickiest point for most people—they assume that if you don’t have to be “worked up” in order to injure people then you’re empty inside, too.

It’s not insanity.

If you were sane before, you’ll still be you on the other side. Crazy is not a requirement for injury.

The simple fact is that there is no reason to it. You’re not injuring someone because of any extraneous reason—you’re injuring them to shut them down. If you’re in there to “fight for your life” and he’s just in it to kill you, you’re probably going to get killed. The person with the clearest, cleanest, and smallest achievable goal will tend to prevail. This is what we mean when we say “intent”, which is another way of expressing monomaniacal focus. The focusing of your entire will and effort onto one small thing at a time—destroying a single square inch of him.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2005)

Tactical Cruelty

November 30, 2018/2 Comments/in Mindset/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

“Violence is the race for the eye.”

— Master Derrick Farwell

When he was a young Marine, Derrick sought effective hand-to-hand combat training, going where stories of ass-kicking and dread reputation led. One night he ended up in a dingy karate studio; the instructor was a Vietnam-era Marine from Okinawa, a compact, no-nonsense man versed in the stunning language of fists and feet. That same night a much larger, and thoroughly drunk man, came in and challenged the instructor to a fight in front of his students. The instructor demurred, and tried to get the man to leave. But he would have none of it, and so the instructor took him up on his offer with a blow to the solar plexus. They folded to the ground and began rolling, rolling, until suddenly the larger man screamed, leaped to his feet and fled the school with his hands pressed to his face. Meanwhile, below the look of grim satisfaction, the instructor’s gi was spattered with the big man’s blood.

Derrick credits this moment as a turning point in his training — not because he learned some cool new “go-to” move or an inspirational Bruce Lee quote — but because of a simple truth: the one who gets it right first wins. It’s not what you think you know or how you look doing it — what happened inside that ball of chaos didn’t remotely resemble a magazine photoshoot karate technique — it was a mess, figuratively and literally. But it was a mess that made a difference.

From that moment on Derrick would only listen to instructors whose training was a physical reflection of that awful truth.

This is why we will always speak plainly about our work — training people to use violence as a survival tool — and not waste anyone’s time with the expected and socially acceptable euphemisms of self-defense, self-protection, etc., etc. (Euphemisms that impose a potentially lethal drag on the needs of action. All language surrounding a thing tells the story of where you see yourself in that thing. Ask yourself: During your attempted murder, do you want to “defend yourself” or “attack and injure”?) We seek to communicate with those who know or sense this truth, and who feel something vital is missing in their current physical application.

It’s one thing to say, “When things get serious, go for the eye,” and another to spend every mat session doing what those words actually mean. We set foot on the mats assuming we’re already at maximum “serious” — we get straight to it… and make sure the blind man gets a broken leg and a head injury for good measure. Violence isn’t a contest or a game, and we assume the loser gets set on fire.

Training like this has two effects on behavior:

1. We will do everything in our power to avoid violence if we have a choice, and

2. We will do everything in our power to finish it first if we don’t.

If violence is the race for the eye, we’re going to cheat by starting at the finish line. Anything less is betting your life that the other person is nicer than you are.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

When Is a Gun Like a TV Remote?

September 21, 2018/2 Comments/in Mindset, Training/by Taylor Good

During a training in Dallas, I visited my parents who live there, but whom I rarely get to see on account of living, working, and training in San Diego most of the year. While relaxing at their house between extended training sessions an incident occurred that got me thinking.

We had all decided to sit down and watch a movie, but my nephew, a toddler at the time, had recently been over to play and had moved the television remote control to an unknown location, as he is wont to do. My parents and I summoned what was left of our energy reserves to mount a thorough search of the house to no avail. I reluctantly suggested that we just go over and turn on the TV by hand and then manually select a movie.

It was at this point that my parents informed me that they did not believe manufacturers even put manual controls on new TVs — “Everyone just uses the remote these days,” they said. In utter disbelief I walked over to the set and scanned the edges around the front, along the side and just behind the display until I finally found what I was looking for. In the back there was a vestigial control panel with limited options that would not provide us access to some of the higher-end functions that were exclusively remote-driven, but would allow us to accomplish our basic goal: to turn it on, select a movie (any movie at this point) and relax my aching body on their very, very comfortable couch. With that done, I dissolved into that couch and tried to remember what it was like before the remote control.

Back in the day, if you wanted to turn your TV on or off, or even watch a different channel, you had to get up off your asset and physically go over to manipulate the controls by hand. As a result of this fact people tended to be more patient with whatever was on. Then along came the remote control to remove all that work. Soon, we became much more casual about changing the channel, and before long we became completely reliant on remotes to the point that TV manufacturers stopped putting manual controls on the front of TV sets. In fact, most people today, including my family, would probably tell you that you can’t actually operate their TV without the remote — however, if you know where to access the manual controls, you can still execute the basic functions of any TV set in the catastrophic absence of that remote.

In a way, firearms are analogous to the venerable TV remote control. Like the remote, firearms distill, into a handheld device, all of the hard work and intent normally required to motivate a person to the point that they are willing to take action — and all that control is at their very fingertips. Furthermore, as firearms have gone into mass production in recent history, people have become so reliant on these highly efficient labor-saving devices that they have forgotten how to roll up their sleeves and do that work by hand when necessary. It might even be said that modern people are incapable of implementing the tool of violence without a firearm. Sound familiar?

The truth is that firearms don’t accomplish anything that you can’t already do by hand with a little knowledge and elbow grease, and there is nothing inherently special about them — unless it has become your only solution to asocial violence. In the rare event that you are put in a position that requires direct action to take out a threat you can’t afford to waste time and opportunity desperately searching for your labor-saving device.

Keep in mind that you come from a legacy of violence: By necessity, your ancestors knew the principles of violence and implemented them serviceably when necessary — or you wouldn’t be here. Luckily for us not much has changed since the dawn of time. Gravity is still cruelly tugging our bones toward the unforgiving surface of the planet, the human machine remains just as vulnerable in spite of all our efforts, and the old “rock to the back of the head” is just as relevant today as it was for our ancestors’ ancestors. Handguns are just a little smaller, a little more convenient, and require nearly zero training and intent to cause objective injuries.

Weaponizing your skeleton is simply a matter of training in the core principles of violence. One of the great benefits of training is that it allows you to take control of the learning environment before it’s an emergency. And, with a little training, anyone can learn to hurl their mass through vulnerable anatomy. Nothing has changed in that regard. When you have a principle-based approach to navigating true asocial violence — with and without tools — you’ll never be unarmed again.

— Taylor Good

Defense Makes the Perfect Victim

As Hard as You Can

Dead Men Tell No Tales

Tactical Cruelty

When Is a Gun Like a TV Remote?

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