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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.

The Final Word in Context: Murder

June 18, 2024/0 Comments/in Social-Asocial/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

There is a baseline level of confusion about what exactly it is we do; confusion that I am, quite frankly, tired of hashing and rehashing. There are deep-seated biological, psychological, and societal reasons for this confusion—and so it is perfectly natural for it to persist—but as an instructor it frustrates me because treading back and forth across this well-worn rut doesn’t make you any better at doing violence.

The only thing that makes you better is getting the mechanics down pat—where and how to cause injury, and how to best take advantage of the results. Everything else is just mental masturbation that feels important because it tastes like philosophy with a little bit of work mixed in. You think you’re working—while avoiding doing any of the real work that will make you better at violence, namely getting a reaction partner and hitting the mats regularly.

And so I am going to flog a dead horse again today, but my goal is to flay it to the bone (or finally sell it off if you take the original meaning); I want to take it to its absurd, logical conclusion beyond which there is no more jaw-flapping:

What we teach is violence, which is what you need to do when someone wants to murder you.

So where’s the confusion? That seems pretty clear-cut. And that’s what I think, too. But then the questions start:

Why would I ever need to know how to kill someone?

Won’t I get in trouble if I use this in a bar fight?

But what if he’s got X and/or Y and he’s coming at me like so?

How do I do it to someone who knows what you know?

What if he does it first?

Or one of the other infinite facets of the question that tells me you don’t really believe that bigger-faster-stronger doesn’t matter. You want to believe, but you don’t.

Where does all this confusion come from? It arises because you think you know what you’re seeing, but you’re looking at it through the wrong mental porthole. When fists and feet are flying, you see monkey politics. You see competition. It’s all great apes working out dominance and submission. Don’t feel bad—you’re hardwired to recognize and respond to this. It’s only natural. Which is why I want to start the violence conversation off with one person shooting another person to death.

Watching one person kill another with a firearm won’t ping your monkey brain. It’ll go far deeper, down into the lizard-level, the primeval predator level. You’ll see it for what it is: killing. If we look at the underlying mechanics, we have:

kinetic energy delivered through anatomy, wrecking it

And now we have the perfect model to work backwards from. Keep the killing context, keep the wrecked anatomy in mind, and now look at other ways of causing that outcome. A fist, a boot, a pipe, a shin, etc., etc.—it doesn’t matter what as long as it’s doing the work that a bullet does, if only in a generic sense. So now if we line up a series of killings and look at them side-by-side—a shooting, a stabbing, a bludgeoning, getting hit by a car—we should be able to see the clear, underlying principles that govern all of these equally and immutably. Learning how to wield these principles is “getting the mechanics down pat” I mentioned earlier.

All clear, right? No—back to the confusion: you get the gun and the car, but you feel iffy about the pipe and the knife, and downright scoff at the fist, boot, or shin.

Why?

Because you read it with your monkey politics filter and think there’s something you can do about it. “I can’t dodge bullets, but I can block a punch.” This is the ultimate in hubris and sends you down a negative feedback spiral: If you can “handle” a punch, then of course they can “handle” it when you’re trying to do it to them. You’re pissing in your confidence reservoir and your training will look hesitant and spotty. And that’s exactly where your skill will go. You’re thinking that you’re fighting when we really want you doing something completely else.

We are trying to teach you how to kill murderers. Everything that fits that narrow model benefits you. Anything that sounds out of place or silly in that context is useless.

That’s why “murder” is the final word in context. Almost no one knows what to do when that’s what’s up. “Fighting” and “defense” are worthless in that arena—remember that defense wounds are found on corpses and tell the coroner that the person “fought for their life.” You’re not going to fight anyone for your life. You’re going to kill a murderer.

Armed with this new context, let’s look at the common questions:

Why would I ever need to know how to kill someone?

If that someone is a murderer, then ipso facto. It’s like asking, “If drowning can kill me, why train to swim in water?”

Won’t I get in trouble if I use this in a bar fight?

Yes. Yes, you will.

But what if he’s got X and/or Y and he’s coming at me like so?

Would you ask the same question with a gun or a steering wheel in your hand? Of course you laugh, but a crushed throat and a gouged eye don’t care if it was bullets, hood ornaments, or boots that did it. So why should you?

How do I do it to someone who knows what you know?

Injured is injured, dead is dead, regardless of talent or training.

What if he does it first?

Then you have nothing to worry about.

Bigger-faster-stronger?

The murderer doesn’t care—in fact, that’s one reason why he’s successful. And that should inform your thinking on the subject.

Here’s the bottom line: check yourself and stick with what matters. Is your question, your doubt, your worry rooted in the mechanics of injury or is it stuck in monkey politics, in “fighting”? Be honest with yourself. If it’s the mechanics, we can work on that, show you what to do and how to do it. After that it’s on you to hit the mats with a partner and take ownership of it. If it’s competition, monkey politics, or has anything to do with communication or changing behavior, then it’s immaterial and meaningless in the context of killing a murderer.

Because you don’t talk to, try to best, or even fight with murderers. You kill them.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

What Is Injury, Really?

April 24, 2024/0 Comments/in Injury/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

It’s the only thing that means anything in violence, or at least that’s what we’re always saying… But what is injury after all? And is there a simpler way to think of it, relate to it and thereby better relate it to others?

We’ll start with the dictionary definition of the word—The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th Ed. says:

Hurt or loss caused to or sustained by a person or thing; harm, detriment; damage, esp. to the body; an instance of this.

This is a good start, but it’s not quite as serious or stunning as I would like. While “harm, detriment, damage” are all good synonyms for what we’re up to, it’s still a little bit vague on the overall effect we’re gunning for. There are plenty of people out there, for example, who believe that they can sustain “damage” and keep going. And, of course, they’re right. We all can. But no one—NO ONE—can sustain injury the way we mean it and keep going. Period. So even the dictionary leaves something to be desired, a tightening-up of ambiguities.

These ambiguities flourish and grow into their own chaos-gardens in the minds of the average person—I daresay no two people’s definition of “injury” is going to be exactly the same. For some it is tearing a fingernail or stubbing a toe; others won’t declare it until blood is spilled. The difference between a lucky person unused to pain and a trauma surgeon is going to be vast. It’s a lot like saying the word “dog” out loud to a roomful of people—everyone will see a dog in their mind’s eye, but I daresay no two will be alike.

And still, for me, even with torn skin and spilled blood, we are not at a workable definition.

Our own textbook definition reads thusly:

The disruption of human tissue in a specific anatomical feature such that normal function is obviously decremented (and can only be regained through medical intervention), eliciting an involuntary spinal reflex reaction.

This is great for two reasons: it reinforces the universality of violence (as this effect can be achieved with any judicious application of kinetic energy, from fist to stick to bullet) as well as being specific enough to rule out hangnails and messy, but ultimately ineffective, minor lacerations.

The only problem is that for all its precise lawyer-ese it’s quite a mouth- and mindful. It’s not easy to remember, it doesn’t roll off the tongue, and you’re just plain not going to win over any converts with it. It’s thorough, but clunky. By seeking to be clear it loses its clarity and becomes next to worthless to you. Anything that gets in the way of your understanding needs to be retooled—like carving steps into an insurmountable cliff face.

This gets us to my current favorite way to think of injury:

Break things inside people so they don’t work anymore.

This is the way the sociopath approaches the problem, the way the Saturday night slugger thinks when he wades in to deliver a beatdown. It is the simplest way to think of injury. It paints a picture that’s easy to parse; even the ambiguities work in your favor. Does “they” refer to the people or the things inside them? Hey, either one—or both—I’m good with all of it.

This is a definition of injury you can take as your personal violence mission statement. It’s all you want to do; it’s the only measuring stick that divides success from failure. Easy to think, easy to say, easy to do.

It just goes to show that sometimes simple is better than precise.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

The Absence of Choice

April 16, 2024/0 Comments/in Violence in the Wild/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Violence starts where choice ends.

For social and antisocial interactions, this means you get to choose whether or not to be involved, and how deep your involvement will go. On the asocial side, you won’t have that choice. This gives us a nice, clean delineator between violence and Everything Else. As you’ve heard us say time and time again: if you have to ask, the answer is “no.” The reason we say this is because once you commit, your choices dwindle dramatically. Once you cross that line, you’re in it till you finish it. There are, to be sure, small choices to make—which target to wreck, when to stop—but none of them involve “unviolencing” him. Once you break that arm, you can never go back to just holding hands.

Make the choice you can live with. Be confident enough to be called a coward. I’ve walked away from situations where I was legally and morally in the right and no one present would have objected if I’d laid the jerk out. I’ve walked away while dodging ego-withering epithets and slurs to the accompaniment of the loud and obvious sound of my social standing being taken down a peg. (A whole peg!) I did this gladly because I was handed the luxury of choice and, to be quite frank, I just didn’t feel like it. “It” being the stomping, the screaming, and then having to do it to all his friends while getting punched in the head until I can’t remember second grade, maybe getting stabbed or shot or killed, or arrested and spending the night in jail, making bail, paying a lawyer and then getting sued. Not to mention having to look over my shoulder every time I stop to take a piss. All that crap is worth my life, but it’s not worth my time. Social standing is a manufactured illusion; losing it is nothing compared to the loss of an eye, or freedom, or your life. If your friends are truly your friends they will remain so; everyone else can go hang.

Asocial means you have no choice, or, rather, the choice is something decidedly unchoosy like “kill or be killed”. (Which one would you pick? Yeah, everybody picks that one, too.) Because it’s hallmarked by a lack of communication, asocial comes on without warning, without preamble, like lightning out of a clear blue sky. One minute you’re worried about which curry joint to patronize and the next you’re getting stabbed. You’re down to those small choices, like which target to wreck, and when to stop.

From a purely mechanical point of view, in social and antisocial situations he gets to choose whether or not a technique works. All of your sundry come-alongs, pain compliance, joint locks and submission holds fall into this category. If he decides you “got him” and gives up, all well and good. If he decides the pain in his elbow doesn’t matter, well, now you’re stuck holding a tiger by the tail. And your Plan B better be really, really sharp. Especially if the choice he makes is to take it into the asocial and get to the work of injuring you.

The mechanics of the asocial violent interaction can be summed up in a single word: injury. Injury removes choice from the equation. He has no say in whether or not his eye comes out of his skull or if his throat crushes. He has no say in how his body will move next. The physical laws of the universe, and how well you’ve employed them, are the only arbiters here. If you did it right, everything breaks. He may wish double-plus hard on a falling star it wasn’t so, but it’s not going to matter one whit. Violence is the absence of choice, and he’s just along for the ride.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2006)

Splitting Hairs or Splitting Heads: The Semantics of Violence

March 19, 2024/1 Comment/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

There is nothing sexy about beating a man to death with a claw hammer.

Okay, let’s rewind a little bit. Once upon a time I had two very different (and yet not so) conversations about what it is that we do. The first one involved a grandmother and her very young grandson who just happened to be walking by class while we had the big door rolled up. She looked extremely uneasy, the child even more so.

“What is this?” she asked, eyes wide.

“It’s the intelligent use of violence as a survival tool,” I replied.

“Like self-defense? Like when you’re in trouble?”

I hesitated. I wanted to say “No, more like breaking people,” but she had asked with such hope in her voice, as in, I sure do hope this isn’t what my gut is telling me it is—please reassure me. So I blinked and let it go.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s exactly like that.”

Her face flushed with relief. It wasn’t what the awful knot in her gut said it was. These were sane people after all.

The second conversation occurred at my (then young) son’s weekly piano lesson. It turned out that I went to high school with one of the teachers, and when he realized this he googled me to see what I’d been up to for the previous 20 years.

“So, you’re still doing that martial arts thing?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I nodded, “but it’s not martial arts anymore.”

He frowned. “So it’s like self-defense?”

“No—more like beating a man to death with your bare hands.”

His eyes widened and heads began to turn. The metaphorical needle came off the record and the chatter in the room dipped a bit as people began to tune in to our conversation.

“But you don’t use any weapons.”

Once again, the hopeful inflection in the voice. He wanted me to veer back into something sane, and away from the idea of killing.

I didn’t blink. I gave it to him straight. “Sure we do—you can beat a man to death with a claw hammer or stab him to death with a kitchen knife. It’s all the same.”

That did it. Everyone in the room was listening now. Everyone had questions, and every single one of them was to try to get me to recant, to box me into a corner where I’d have to admit that what I meant was a sane, righteous, defensive use of force to disarm or disable an “attacker”—not the wonton misuse of power to maim, cripple and kill at will.

I was my usual courteous, approachable, informational self—but something told me that future conversations at music class would be strained. Maybe I should have told them it was just kung fu.

Often, when I’m attempting to explain what it is we do, I’m accused of splitting hairs, told that it’s “all just semantics.” That one person’s self-defense is another person’s claw hammer murder. But the ridiculousness of that sentence shows it ain’t so.

I’ve written previously about how socialized people like to fall back on euphemisms to distance themselves from the ugly, brutal reality of what has to happen in violence—namely you seriously injuring another person. Not stopping when they beg you to stop. Not interacting with them as a person, or even an enemy, but as meat to be torn to uselessness.

Describing it in these terms causes (dare I say) violent reactions in lay people as they instantaneously judge you to be adrift without a moral compass, operating at the debased level of the criminal sociopath—in a word, insane.

People parse killing in socially acceptable terms (martial arts, self-defense, etc.), to show other socialized people that they are not “bad”. When someone defies convention and steps out of bounds (“beat a man to death with a claw hammer”), the strong reaction comes from an unconscious, intrinsic understanding that if everyone’s playing by the same rules, we’re all okay. And as soon as someone decides not to, we, the people who play by the rules, are royally fucked.

This social parsing of violence then takes the next step up to seize the moral high ground where we all have permission to behave badly. Witness the “attacker/defender” dichotomy. If you are the defender, you are cleared hot, in pretty much everyone’s mind, to brain the attacker.

The moral high ground is also a cool place to be seen. There you are, on the wind-swept mountain top, beams of blinding righteousness radiating from your head. It’s super-sexy with a double side order of pizzazz. Having a black belt in martial arts impresses friends, and whatnot. Knowing how to kill a man is less cool in most circles. Being ready and willing to do so is another thing entirely.

Maintaining righteousness in the face of simple killing takes a lot of mental gymnastics. Many people advance schema using Animal Farm-esque stand-ins to try to illuminate the roles to be played. White hats and black hats. The protectors and the helpless. Guess what? Those are nice lies we tell ourselves to feel better about what it is we’re training to do.

There is no animal schema, no predator and prey, regardless of which one you think you are.

There are only naked humans, milling about on an infinite gray plane. You’re one of them, and everyone else is stuck in there with you. We all have the same set of advantages and disadvantages. Identical physical constraints and powers. We each possess the most dangerous weapon in the known universe, a human brain.

Everyone, exactly the same on a level playing field. Not comforting in the least, but then, when was the last time reality was comforting?

So how do we talk about it? Let’s look at some of the most common terms, and then I’ll toss mine in. And I promise it’ll be a live psychic grenade.

Martial Arts

This really only works in the ancient Greek sense, as in “the skills required by warriors to make war.” This sense has been completely lost in the modern day (think of the Olympic Decathlon), and I doubt anyone out there thought of “maintaining and operating a cruise missile launcher” when they read the words “martial arts”. More likely than not you thought of your local karate school. And until that kind of training is necessary for serial killers to ply their hobby, it will remain a misnomer for what it is we do.

Self-Defense

This is the next logical step. And yet, “beating a man to death with a claw hammer” tends to strain the definition of self-defense beyond the breaking point. Self-defense requires an attacker; it requires you to be second banana in physical terms (as the lowly, yet much loved defender), but don’t sweat it. ‘Cuz you’ve got the moral high ground, and that awful attacker had no right to be doing these things to you. Good luck, and remember this comforting fact: you are in the right no matter how it all works out.

Beating a man to death with a claw hammer probably isn’t allowed in self-defense, but—funny how the universe works—it may be just the thing that has to happen in order for you to survive. When given the choice between self-defense and survival, let’s all pick survival, shall we?

Fighting

This doesn’t work because it’s too wide open. You can fight with your sibling, your spouse, your boss. On the high end you can fight for your rights; on the low end you can fight for the TV remote. Do any of these uses make you think of stabbing someone in the neck? (I mean other than the TV remote one.)

Fights can have rules and referees. Murders don’t.

Combatives

No. Just no.

Hand-to-Hand Combat

Here we are—down to the hard-nuts, in your face, XXX-TREEEM!!! term. While on the surface it would seem to be the one we want, it’s still somewhat lacking. Hand-to-hand carries with it the connotation of back-and-forth, tit-for-tat. Most people would not readily apply the label to a man being beaten to death with a claw hammer. The question you have to ask yourself is: “Do the people who are best at violence in our society (the criminal sociopaths) truly engage in hand-to-hand combat?” I’ll let you answer that for yourself.

So, what is it we do? What words can ever truly communicate the essence of it?

At a seminar someone asked a foe-specific question about an extremely accomplished combat sports champion. This champion is big and tough and skilled. The question was, “How would you defeat so-and-so?”

To which I replied, without hesitation, “I’d start by hiring someone to shoot his dad.”

And that’s it exactly, rendered as precisely as words will allow.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2005)

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)

A Difference You Can Taste

August 10, 2018/3 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

In the 28 years I’ve been teaching, the most common question I’ve heard is:

“How is what you do different from self-defense, self-protection, or fighting?”

(The question is usually about specific schools or popular styles, examples of which I refuse to list for reasons you’ll find at the end.)

The simplest answer is:

“Injury. We’re far more concerned with what’s happening inside of him, rather than what’s happening inside of you.”

In other words, something crushed, ruptured or torn — not the “cool move” that supposedly does that thing.

For a more involved explanation, here are the fundamental differentiators, including the visceral one:

– We strive to model the successful use of violence in our practice, based on observable reality — instead of trying to defend or protect ourselves or get into a fight. We don’t want to “win a fight”, we just want to deliver a beating. What the other person wants to do is immaterial. Violence is unidirectional and heavily favors the one doing it. The defender, not so much.

– Successful violence causes and exploits debilitating injury as a first principle and sole goal — the only thing that means anything in violence is ruptured anatomy. We seek to cause results similar to firearms (stripping the man of function until we achieve a nonfunctional state), using the relatively slow, heavy bullet of our mass leveraged by our skeleton. To this end we use similar training methodologies — working more like a tactical shooting course than a sparring match. (Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.)

– The human machine only breaks when subjected to catastrophic volume change, when tissues are compressed or stretched farther and faster than their elasticity will allow before failure. The action of the limbs alone (punching and kicking with no overrun) can produce useful injuries, but usually doesn’t. (This is why fights go on and on — people can easily withstand nonspecific trauma.) Body-weighted collisions with overrun get us the traumatic volume change we need to break things inside of people.

– In figuring out how to get results we start with the injury first, then work backwards from there, reverse-engineering the process to make a given sports accident happen on purpose. We are only interested in what’s happening inside of him, not what’s happening inside of you — result vs. technique, a broken knee instead of a knee-break move:

It’s his knee, but you can feel the difference in your gut.

– Beyond the “one-and-done” crash course (for raw effectiveness) we have a 10-year curriculum in writing that incorporates striking, joint breaking, throwing, knife, baton, and firearms into a seamless whole — meaning we’re never suddenly having to switch gears into “knife defense” or “gun disarms”. It’s all the same because it all hinges on causing injury and then exploiting that state change. The 10-year curriculum is about efficiency (getting an effective result more quickly, with less effort) but does not improve upon baseline effectiveness — if we both knock someone out they’re still KO’d, regardless of our relative efficiency. This is the curriculum we use to produce instructors.

In summary:

– Pure offense — not defense, protection or fighting

– Entirely directed toward causing debilitating injury

– Looking at the physics and physiology of collisions rather than techniques

– A 10-year curriculum, in writing

It’s important to note that I’m not saying what we do is “better” than anything else — effective violence is as old as hominids and no one has a patent on concussions. All training has the potential to work. The best training is the one you know in your bones you can make work for you. If someone looks at what we do and doesn’t think they could make it work, then they’re right. If a specific school, style or system makes more sense to them, then that would be the better choice. In the end all we have is some technical information that you may or may not find useful. That determination is up to the individual.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Injury Dynamics — What We Do

March 16, 2018/3 Comments/in Training/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

We teach the use of violence as a survival tool: how the human machine breaks, how to do that work with your bare hands, how to take advantage of the results. We cover striking, joint breaking, throwing, knife, baton, firearms, multi-man work, as well as grabs, holds and chokes.

But what does that word salad really mean?

Violence

Violence is physical force intended to cause harm. We call it what it is because padding language for comfort leads to indistinct outcomes. “Self-defense” is a moral imperative and a legal finding — it’s not a description of direct action with a concrete result. “Hurting people” is.

Discomfort with this idea is normal, natural and desired for 99.999% of your interactions with other people across your entire lifetime — but not during the black swan event of your attempted murder. There you will need to set aside all of the imaginary constructs that make up society and civilization and behave like a primate using physics and physiology.

Reality is disappointing and inconvenient, but we have to train for it as it stands, not how we wish it were. The bottom line is that in violence you have to hurt people.

Injury

Violence begins and ends with debilitating injury. It is the sole arbiter of success — the one who gets it right first, wins. This is a single piece of critical anatomy subjected to catastrophic volume change. You have to break it so it doesn’t work anymore. A ruptured eyeball, a crushed throat, a knee broken backwards — these things give us immediate advantages:

• Loss of function

• Involuntary movement in response to the injury

• Momentary helplessness

The goal is to break something, then use these advantages to break the next thing, and the next, and so on until we achieve a nonfunctional state, meaning you’d feel comfortable turning your back on the person and walking away. This can be everything from unambiguous incapacitation to unconsciousness or death, depending on the needs of the situation.

Striking

The most obvious way to cause injury is through blunt force trauma — body-weighted collisions of skeletons with a single piece of vulnerable anatomy caught in the middle. Instead of punching and kicking (the action of the limbs) we need to think from the ground up and crush things with our mass in motion. It’s not about how far you can reach, but how far you can step, how far you can move your belt buckle (center of gravity) through their anatomy. Think about how much you weigh, and then imagine hurling that three feet through a single square inch of them — their eye, their throat, their knee. This is how you break things — by minimizing the anatomy while maximizing the physics. Mass in motion leveraged by your skeleton gets it done.

This is the base engine of violence we will use to cause all injury.

Joint Breaking

Joint breaking is a special case of striking where we cause injury by using mass in motion and leverage to force joints beyond their pathological limit. This isn’t “joint locking,” submission or pain compliance — we will grind the joint to the end of its range of motion and then ensure that we have:

• Mechanical advantage (leverage)

• Body weight positioned to drive the work

• Space for follow-through sufficient to tear out or dislocate the joint

In other words, we will make sure that the only possible outcome if we throw our weight into it is a broken joint.

We train to break every joint in the human body — from the wrist (to cripple the hand) to the neck (for paralysis or death).

Throwing

Throwing is another special case of striking where we cause injury by using mass in motion to disrupt structure and balance and drive the person into a targeted collision with the ground — usually head first for debilitating head and neck trauma. This can be as simple as kicking someone’s leg out from under them or as complicated as a shoulder throw. Either way the goal is to bounce the brain off the planet.

Strike – Break – Throw

While anyone can be trained to be immediately effective (striking to cause injury), the highest expression of the work above is to strike, use that injury to effect a joint break, and then use that loss of balance to effect a throw. This is the path of efficiency, the goal of ongoing training.

Tools — Knife, Baton, Firearms

Once you have the base engine of violence thudding along — mass in motion leveraged by the skeleton — we can clip things onto the end of the skeleton to magnify our efforts and do things we can’t do with our bare hands. Knives allow us to penetrate deeply into the body and open up the circulatory system to cause him to bleed out; batons, being harder than the stuff we’re made of, allow us to access the entire skeleton as a target, breaking bones and directly accessing the brain. Both of these are nothing without that base engine: You must generate the physics for the tool to amplify. (Firearms are an exception as the physics are prepackaged in the powder charge.)

On the flip side — when the other person has a tool — the answer is the same: You have to injure them. We don’t practice knife-, stick-, or gun-defense/fighting; we practice hurting people who are attempting to use the tool.

Multi-Man Work

You never know how many people are involved until they’re all there — so we’re always going to assume it’s more than one. You can’t realistically injure more than one person at a time (this is why humans invented explosives and machine guns) so we need to use the initially injured person and movement (covering ground) to give ourselves the space and time required to injure the rest of them one-by-one. No one’s going to wait their turn like a kung fu movie, so you have to go on the attack and make them have to deal with you.

Grabs, Holds and Chokes

This is injuring people while they hang on to you, doing all the things that aren’t allowed in competition — gouging eyes, crushing throats, getting fistfuls of groin. All you need is that initial injury to get to the rest. The key is to be the problem, rather than looking at it as a problem for you to solve. Make them want to get away from you.

Everything above is what mat time is all about — serial target practice on the human machine to shut it off. We roll with training knives, batons and firearms on the mats; with our partners trying to punch, kick, stab, beat, shoot, out-number and grapple us while we strike, break and throw while using knives, batons and firearms. It’s a low-velocity scrum where anything goes and the answer is always the same: ATTACK & INJURE.

Training

All of this work is pulled from our 10-year curriculum — in writing — three massive tomes that describe the 1,560 stepping stones from absolute beginner to Master Instructor. We can literally show you something new at every class, three times a week, for a decade — with no repetition.

All well and good if you live near an instructor and want to take on the training as a lifestyle — but what about everyone else? The beauty of the curriculum is that it’s modular, and we can pull it apart and put it together in any number of ways to meet your needs:

“Dangerous in a Day” — This is a one-day course designed to make you baseline effective at violence. You’ll learn how to cause debilitating injury to 10 different targets, from the eyes to the ankles. At the end of the day we’ll use that new skill in a single module tailored to the interests of the group (grabs, holds and chokes; knife; firearms; multi-man, etc.).

2-Day Crash Course — This is our Gold Standard for training: two full days of hands-on mat work including knife, baton, firearms, multi-man, grabs-holds-chokes, as well as in-depth lectures on decision-making in violence (when to pull the trigger and when not to) and how the law views violence.

Multi-day courses / tailored events — We can do as many days with as much material as your group desires. Want five days with joint breaking and throwing in the mix? Three days with a special emphasis on firearms? We can do that. We can arrange something special here in sunny San Diego (have you seen our zoo?), or travel to you. Just get in touch and let us know how we can help!

When it comes to violence, we have it covered from the stupid-simple (finger in the eye) to the crazy-complex (a joint-break throw using a knife or baton). We can train short-term, long-term, or lifelong. It all comes down to what you need, and what you want — regardless, we can make it happen.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Tag Archive for: definitions

As Hard as You Can

What Is Injury, Really?

Splitting Hairs or Splitting Heads: The Semantics of Violence

A Difference You Can Taste

Injury Dynamics — What We Do

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