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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

The Illusion of Fighting

January 8, 2025/0 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

Violence starts at the top of the stairs—and only goes in one direction.

The back-and-forth that people seek in violence comes from two different ideas: 1) self-defense, and 2) a sport- and media-reinforced expectation of back-and-forth.

“Self-defense” says nothing about the other person. There’s just the self, and then working to keep yourself from harm. As an operational construct this kind of thinking makes it difficult to reach out into the fog beyond the borders of your own personal space and make the switch to you doing things to him. Think of the focus of effort as imaginary arrows—when you’re worried about what’s going to happen to you, some of the arrows point back at yourself, and retard the flow of focus outward (the arrows pointing at him, for things like actually hurting him). This gums up the whole process and has you working at cross-purposes. When both people are doing this, it looks like a classic “fight”.

The lucky thing for all of us—in terms of living a relatively peaceful life—is that very few people have experience with real, effective violence. This means that the vast majority take their cues for how violence works from sport and movies. In sport, the goal is to have a competition, to determine a winner through a process of rules—not to resort to the state of nature and put someone in the hospital or morgue. The perfect match would have both competitors able to compete again, and soon. In movies, real violence is too quick to build any kind of dramatic tension, and would be over before you looked back up from your popcorn. It is necessary, then, to have the engagement go on long enough to catch your attention, ratchet up the stakes, and build the drama toward a satisfying catharsis (the hero wins—or loses if we’re in the second act).

Effective violence is “nasty, brutish, and short”. It’s over before it really gets started, and ends up being shockingly anticlimactic. It only goes in one direction, driven by the person causing harm. (All arrows pointing in the same direction through him.) This is why the motto of violence is the opposite of the Hippocratic Oath: primum nocere (“first do harm”). Initial contact needs to be pathological, and then we stay close to do it again… and again… and again… We shove him down the stairs and then stay right on top of him to make sure he interacts with every step. We are the shove, we are the steps, we are gravity. We never part—we only meet, over and over again, until we are done.

We can see this in videos of effective violence—contact, overrun, stomping—which is exactly what we want our mat time to look and feel like.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Knowing the Stakes and Acting Accordingly…

July 2, 2024/0 Comments/in Social-Asocial/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

…is a ton of crap.

Let me rewind a little bit.

The concept of the universality of violence is a key idea that we come back to time and time again, that is, treating all violence as equivalent, with no such thing as “dash”-fighting, e.g., ground-fighting, knife-fighting, stick-fighting, etc. The reason we have to keep coming back to it is because a lot of the time you don’t treat it as equivalent; add a firearm, for example, and you think the stakes are different, and you suddenly want your performance to reflect “how serious” you believe the situation has become. Sometimes you think it’s just social status at stake, or mere wounding. But when the knife or the gun comes out, then it’s different, right? Now you’re playing for keeps, and so you have to get serious. Now you know the stakes and want to act accordingly.

I call bullshit.

Let me put it this way: you really don’t want to know the stakes. You never want to find out if it was life or death, because you know how you’ll know? When they’re killing you, that’s how. That’s a stupid, behind-the-curve way to find out. It’ll be the last thing you ever know. At that point the information will do you no good.

If your mat time is focusing on the idea that your workout partner is “empty-handed” and so the stakes are a mere beating, you’re probably being sloppy with distance and penetration—letting them have too much of the former and not doing enough of the latter. Then, when you add a firearm into the mix, now it’s on, right? Everything changes, you have to tighten up, “get serious”, etc. You know what you’re really doing? You’re training to get yourself killed.

Every time you go physical it’s for keeps. Every time you yank out the fail-safes and go off on someone it’s serious. Every. Single. Time. You need to take every turn you get in training as the “real deal.” Treat your partner as if they were armed with a firearm, or a knife—because they just might be armed with something worse. They might be carrying what I carry:

A bear trap and a pack of wolves.

I never leave home without them. In fact, they’re with me constantly. Now, you might think I’m being funny or losing my mind and to that I would ask that you review any video you have of instructors free practicing. Notice that once it starts, there is no escape. The reaction partner doesn’t get the opportunity to do much of anything other than react, fall, and get torn apart.

This is what I think of when someone asks me if I’m a sheep, a wolf, or a sheepdog. (Actually, the first thing I think of is that I’m Homo sapiens, a human being, something much, much worse than any of the above. But then, we’re all human and probably far too close to it to see just how incredibly powerful an animal we are. Hands-down the apex predator of the entire planet. But I digress.)

So, if I have to pick a different animal, I’ll pick the way it feels when I free practice—like a bear trap and a pack of wolves. The trap set, powerful springs straining beneath a hasty cover of leaves and forest detritus, and a pack of lean, tawny wolves circling in the shadows. Once the trap is sprung, there is no escape—after the steel jaws of the initial strike splinter bone and sunder flesh, the wolves are free to tear the crippled person to pieces.

Why does instructor free practice look like this? Because the instructor knows the stakes ahead of time. It’s all or nothing, every time. And once that trap is sprung, there is no escape. Starting right now, here are three things you can do to get there:

– Throw out the idea that the stakes are variable.

Treat every turn on the mats as if your partner has a knife, or a firearm, or, worst-case-scenario, a bear trap and a pack of wolves.

– Be the bear trap and the pack of wolves.

Once you start, it’s all about you. They get to do nothing but react, fall, and get torn to pieces. They don’t get to stagger back. They don’t get to roll away. Get inside and stay there, right on top of them—the maximum distance between the two of you should never be greater than one step/strike. Ideally, you’ll be pretty much torso-to-torso the entire time. Make “there is no escape” your personal violence motto—and then make it a reality.

– Work on making universality a reality for you.

Violence is not a bunch of disparate things all duct-taped together into an unwieldy Frankenmass. It’s a singularity. It’s just one thing. It has a single use. You can’t dial it up and down, “go easy” or be nice. You do not inflict it upon the “unarmed” man any differently than you would an armed one. (Think about how dangerous you are, naked, with nothing but your bare hands and intent. As dangerous as a steel bear trap and a pack of hungry wolves, perhaps?)

You need to walk into every mat session with these three things in mind because you need to act identically in every violent situation—spring the trap and maul at will. Every free practice should feel the same—guns, knives, batons or not. If it feels different with the gun, if it feels stressful or “more real”, you’re missing the point when it’s not there—it means you’re not taking any of the rest of it as seriously as you should. The obvious, projected intent of the firearm is taking you where you should be all the time in your free practice. Buckle down, focus, and free practice to make the tool in the hand truly immaterial—get the job done so that it really doesn’t matter what they have, even if it’s a bear trap and a pack of wolves.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr (from 2007)

It’s Not About Naughty or Nice

June 25, 2024/0 Comments/in Social-Asocial/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

It’s about what works & survival. Period.

I was recently reading an article on “self-defense” in which the author was speaking of violence as if you could pick and choose the level of seriousness of the interaction, e.g., if they just want to “kick your ass” you kick their ass back, not really hurting them, but teaching them a lesson. If they’re a little more serious, then so are you—and if they want to kill you, well, that’s the only time you’re going to use certain serious techniques and targets like eyes, throat, and so on.

This idea illustrates a fantasy disconnect between fighting and violence, one that deserves a fantasy name: I like to refer to it as “dialing in your Spidey-power.” (With apologies to Stan Lee & Steve Ditko.) It’s the idea that you can choose to hit someone with, say, 60% of what you’ve got—and that you’ll only ever hit someone with 100% when your life depends on it. It’s being able to look at an impending “fight” and say, “Well, they’re not really serious, so I’ll dial my Spidey-power down to 50%,” and then sock them hard, but not too hard, because, after all, you don’t want to kill them, right?

Here’s the problem: holding back can get you killed. There are many ways to hold back:

1) You can wait and see to try and suss out what their intentions are,

2) You can make certain targets off limits because wrecking them is awful (you’ll never hear me say otherwise)—like the eyes or breaking a knee, both permanent, crippling disabilities, and/or

3) You can “go easy” on them by not striking as hard as you can.

Any one of these leads directly to reduced effectiveness, poor results, and in the worst case, can get you killed.

The idea that you can suss out their intentions is a fantastical delusion. If you don’t have psychic powers (and my guess is… wait for it… you don’t) or know the evil that lurks in the hearts of men like the Shadow does, then you’re screwed. You’ll know they want to kill you because, well, they’re busy doing it. That is not the time to find out. In fact, it’s never a good time to find out, right?

Making targets off limits ahead of time (“I’ll never go after the eyes,”) will give you a hesitating hiccup if your next—and only—opportunity is that target. You will stop. And try to get restarted. If you’re lucky, it means nothing. If you’re unlucky, the opportunity is gone and you just got stabbed/shot/whatever (perhaps again) and you just better hope they got it wrong, too.

You always want to strike as hard as you can. Always—as hard as you can. “Holding back” reduces the chance of injury. Now we’re into the realm of slapping each other around, pissing people off, and delivering nonspecific, superficial trauma that is neither a persistent disability nor spinal reflex-inducing. It’s wasted motion that lets them know it’s on.

The author did believe, however, that in a real worst-case scenario a magical transformation would occur—that even though you’d been neutering and watering down your training by waiting, making targets off limits and slapping at them, you could suddenly rise to the occasion of your impending murder by crushing the throat or tearing out an eye with full force and effort.

That’s a neat idea, but it flies in the face of “you do what you train.”

So, to that point, how does the way we train serve you? It would seem, on the surface, that we onlytrain for the worst-case scenario, that to use what you know in any other situation would be like using dynamite to open your car door.

Let’s put it this way: the “worst-case scenario” encompasses and includes all other possible scenarios; going in purely to cause serious injury, put the person down and then pile it on (e.g., start kicking a “helpless” person on the ground) covers, handles, and takes care of anything and everything they may have wanted to do to you.

But the real beauty is that you can stop at any time. You’ll typically do this the moment you recognize that they’re nonfunctional. Let’s say you start out by breaking their jaw at the TMJ. You get the minimum expected reaction—they turn slightly, somehow keeping their feet. You come back with a shot to the groin and get a HUGE reaction, they go down face-first and try to curl up into a fetal position. You break their ribs and then strike to the side of their neck, knocking them unconscious. At this point you recognize that they are nonfunctional (to your satisfaction) and stop.

(Notice that I didn’t mention any techniques or tools—that’s because they don’t matter. Results matter.)

This sequence could have been different at each node of injury—you break their jaw and they spin around three times and lie down, out cold; you stop when they go fetal after the groin strike; you stop after breaking the ribs because as far as you’re concerned, your read on them is “done.” You also know how to carry it to a more final conclusion with a stomp to the neck or throat. But always as an informed choice—not out of desperation, and not after having been trained that it is “wrong” or morally less-than.

You also know how to start right off with the eyes, throat, or a broken neck—but again, as a conscious choice. If killing is what will see you through, you will kill them. If killing is not appropriate, you can still operate because you know where the line is. This is because you are trained in the totality of violence, understanding it for what it is—a single-use tool that does not have an intensity dial on it. You can’t make guns shoot “nice.” And what a bullet does is the purest expression of everything we’re ever talking about. All violence is the same.

So, what does this mean for you?

First and foremost, it means you understand that violence is not a plaything—you won’t goof off with it any more than you would with a loaded firearm. This is healthy. It means you won’t get sucked into stupid (antisocial) shenanigans thinking you can use what you know without any negative repercussions. It means you’re going to be smarter about when to pull it out and use it. This is going to save you tons of wear and tear, not to mention legal troubles.

It means that when you do use it, you’re going to use it the only way you can be sure it works—with no artificial social governors restricting what you can and can’t do. You’ll strike them as hard as you can to cause injury. And you’ll take full advantage of that injury, replicating it into nonfunctionality.

If we view this through a social lens it is savage, brutal, dirty, unfair, and very probably illegal somewhere. This was the essential thesis of the self-defense author. But the question you have to ask yourself is are you going to bet your life the other person is playing by the rules? If they are, well, then you’re a jerk, aren’t you? If they aren’t, you’re dead.

The moral of the story? Screw around with hand-to-hand violence the same way you’d screw around with a firearm—don’t.

— 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)

Training to Wait & See

June 4, 2024/0 Comments/in Violence in the Wild/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

A frequent question we get is, “Okay, I get this whole violence thing, but what if—” and then it’s usually followed by something the other person is thinking of doing, trying to do, or just plain in the middle of doing. This is code for “I don’t want to get hurt.” Well, nobody does. If not getting hurt were something that you could reliably choose, it would be a central part of our training. But it isn’t.

The truth about violence is that you’re going to get punched, kicked, stabbed, whacked, and shot—whether you’re the “winner” or not. Any other outcome, e.g., you walked through it and put your person (or people) down and kept them there without getting a scratch on you, is pure luck. What you can realistically expect as the survivor is to limp out of there alive.

Accepting the reality of the situation ahead of time will save your life. It’ll keep you from quitting right at the point where things are at their worst. Let’s say you are trained in “knife defense”. And then you get stabbed. Your first thought will be omigod I screwed up which will lead to the result of screwing up—death. You’ll be thinking about the result of your mistake—I’m going to die!—instead of what you need to be thinking to survive, primarily take the eye.

Look at the difference there. We have an abstraction versus a concrete action. Which one do you want coming out of you when your life depends on it? It’s also important to note that the people who are best at violence completely ignore the “What’s he up to?” side of the equation; they simply put all their efforts into making violence one-sided, and keep it that way. They wade in and get it done, to the exclusion of all else. And so should you.

Success is our benchmark. We are going to do our best to model the efforts and behaviors of those who are successful at violence—in short, we’re going to act like the survivors. We are obviously not going to act like the dead (that goes without saying), nor are we going to model behaviors and action that we wish were present. Rather than accessing violence the way we wish it worked, we’ll look to reality for our training cues. This is a huge leap into uncomfortable spaces.

It would be really nice if we could impose our collective will upon violent conflict—if waving your hands a certain way meant you couldn’t be stabbed or shot. In a lot of ways, this is the definition of magic, and in many places such training is elevated to the status of superstitious tradition. You’d be best served to never forget that the intersection of magic and reality is often tragedy.

Instead of training the way we wish it were, we’re going to train the way it is. We’re going to start at the point of injury, and let the other person worry about waiting and seeing. They can wait and see what you’re up to while you do it to them.

Reality is a smog-belching bulldozer with the elves and fairy folk of nice ideas all broken and snarled in its iron treads. If you have a choice—and you do—then put yourself in the driver’s seat, and the other person beneath the blade.

— 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)

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

Keeping It Simple

August 2, 2018/0 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Taylor Good

In nature, everything takes from something else. There is no evil and there is no innocence. The relationship of predator and prey is a fixed equation, but the variables can be fluid. One day you are predating on a blueberry bush, the next day you’re lunch. So all animals, even apex predators like grizzly bears, killer whales or human beings can run either set of behaviors: predator or prey.

For predators it’s simple. ATTACK. They incapacitate their prey by inflicting grievous injury, often (but not always) resulting in immediate death. In true predation events the outcome for most prey animals is inevitable no matter what they do. Ultimately, the only long-term effective response to death rate is birth rate.

For prey items however there are actually five recognized responses to a perceived threat: fight, flight, freeze, posture or submit.

Fighting is hard work and a risky business. It is seldom employed in the animal kingdom except by prey animals attempting to wrest themselves from the current day’s menu or by individuals of a social species testing/reinforcing the legitimacy of their hierarchy.

Flight, with its low cost-to-benefit ratio, is often the preferred response. This covers everything from going out of your way to navigate around a sketchy area to running in terror from a rustle in the bushes — as long as there is a flight window with enough time and space to make the success of a flight attempt likely. This is how most potentially dangerous unknowns are dealt with in the wild.

The freeze response occurs when the efficacy of a potential threat is being evaluated or as a last-resort form of concealment from a predator that might be inside the flight window. This too is a very economical response as it costs almost nothing to be still and it makes for effective camouflage as most predators visually scan for movement. This innate response in animals can be beneficial, like when a newborn elk lies perfectly still (and nearly scentless) at the feet of a marauding grizzly sow — or maladaptive, like when a deer is “caught in the headlights” of an oncoming vehicle or an office worker huddles motionless in plain view while an active shooter manipulates their third reload.

If physical contact is imminent the decision becomes whether combat can be avoided or not. Animals attempt to avoid combat whenever possible because it is likely to degrade their function… even if they’re successful. A mountain lion with a broken jaw doesn’t get better; it slowly starves to death. In order to avoid the perils of physical combat, animals may posture or submit. Posturing is an attempt to intimidate your way out of combat while submission is an attempt to capitulate. I use the word “attempt” because unlike with fight, flight or freeze, these two options (posture/submit) put the ball squarely on the other side of the court. Unless the motivations and inclinations of the other individual(s) involved (as in the social dynamics of a wolf pack) are intimately understood, these options have the very highest cost-benefit ratio and are therefore extremely risky.

So what’s the lesson in all this? Behaving like a prey animal is complicated and treacherous. Better to keep it predator-simple: Attack and injure!

— Taylor Good

Stop Making Sense

March 23, 2018/0 Comments/in Rabbit v. Wolf/by Chris Ranck-Buhr

There are no contradictions in the physical world. At the scale of our experience the universe is a perfectly tuned machine that simply does what it does — everything can be mathed out in a predictable dance of cause and effect. Contradictions only exist in human language, a necessary construct to provide flexibility in social interaction. Our survival as a species depends on our ability to make non-deterministic, nuanced, judgment calls. We have a word for the kind of hyper-literal people who are incapable of that: psychopaths.

The cause and effect of violence — a simple physical interaction like a finger in the eye — contains no contradictions. In terms of monkey-see/monkey-do training, nothing could be more straightforward… until we try to make violence fit into a social framework, round-holing that square peg with the mallet of language, contradictions meant to make ourselves feel better about doing it and to communicate our sanity, stability, and continued trustworthiness to others. In other words, to convince everyone — including ourselves — that we’re not psychopaths. But there is nothing about “self-defense” that suggests the finger in the eye. Indeed, such language obscures the necessities of physical action, injecting our hopes and fears into the matter — thick strokes of contradictory emotional content that obscure the requirements of cause and effect — language that acts not as a window but as a painting.

Trying to make violence “make sense” is pointless, and even dangerous — violence is by its very definition irrational, an utter failure of everything language seeks to build. This is why the finger in the eye is not “self-defense”, and why “self-defense” does not communicate the physics of the finger in the eye. There are lots of ways to describe the simple physical act of breaking the human machine, and the most direct and straightforward are naturally repellent. Our response to this must be to understand that it is a separate thing from our emotional selves and our desire to cooperate with others — it’s not about maintaining our social standing, it’s about maintaining our existence during the very thin slice of time of our attempted murder. And it’s okay for the descriptions of the action required to hurt another person so they can’t continue to be chilling, disturbing, and otherwise uncomfortable. We’re describing facts, and the more we use language that gives us comfort or distance from them the less likely we are to be able to execute on those facts when our survival is at stake.

There are two ways to arrive at what’s required:

We can do violence every day, where we will learn a thing or two through trial and error, and how we do that work will begin to converge toward a specific point — form following function where all effective violence ends up looking the same, or
We can look at examples of that work (videos of effective violence) and emulate that movement on the mats, all the while seeking hard, spare language that describes that mechanical work (and the results) in the clearest way possible.

What’s required is the objective description of science, not the poetry of the heart.

— Chris Ranck-Buhr

Tag Archive for: self-defense

Defense Makes the Perfect Victim

The Illusion of Fighting

Dead Men Tell No Tales

Training to Wait & See

Splitting Hairs or Splitting Heads: The Semantics of Violence

Tactical Cruelty

Stop Making Sense

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