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The Bravado of Self Defence

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Krav Maga North Bristol Instructor Will Bayley discusses the harsh realities of violence in the context of home defence and why you should make sure you keep your training real.

I was in a bar recently waiting for a mate when I heard an all too common conversation about home self defence – what to do when someone breaks into your house in the middle of the night. You can imagine the people having this conversation. A small group of blokes, beered up. Normal, average blokes. Workers not long out of work, ties off, collars undone, sleeves rolled up for the serious business of Friday night drinking and setting the world to rights.

The common conversation and the inevitable bravado.

God help anyone comes in my house. I keep a bat by the door. I have a Maglite by my bed. I’d do em with that. I don’t care what the law says, if someone breaks into my house I’m going to drop them.

I appreciate the sentiment. Even agree with it. But I want to throw out a tiny bite of reality for you because your life may depend upon thinking about this in another way

There’s a place called violence. It’s a lonely and terrible country, torn apart by war. The people you find there are monsters, predators, everything that you, in your seat of civilisation, would call evil. How many times have you been to that place? Honestly? I don’t mean the scuffles you had at school or that time your mate got loud at that party and you shoved each other. I mean how many times have you been attacked by a wild animal and had to fight, literally, for your life?

Most haven’t.

If it’s happened to you, you won’t be full of bravado. The people who know what I’m talking about are typically silent on the matter. Humble.

And those who have been there, how many times have you been there? Once? Twice? How long each time? Most assaults are decided in seconds. So your experience, throughout your lifetime, of that place is approximately ten seconds. Does that make you an expert, a travel guide to that country’s horrors?

No.

And I want you to imagine for me something.

Someone.

Imagine this person…

He’s early twenties but he looks a decade older because of the brown he’s been putting in his arms for the last seven years. He’s lean and underfed, malnourished, his body fucked up on years of opiate abuse, on the cycle of constipation and laxitives, on junk food and chain smoking, his teeth falling out and his nose half fucked from his forays into stimulants – amphetamines adderall and cocaine. At the moment he comes through your door he’s been off the smack for a day and a half. He’s in a fever of pain, fear, nausea, cramping and worse. He knows that his hunger will deepen by the hour, until it incapacitates him, until he can’t do what he’s doing now to solve his problem. He needs his solution more than you have ever needed anything. He knows desperation like you never have and never will. He will take something from your house and sell it for a fraction of its value to fund a solution that will last him a few hours at best. And he will literally kill to do it.

Let me state that in a more complete way: There is nothing he won’t do to get what he wants. Literally nothing. If you don’t stand in his way, that means take and run. If you stand in his way, it means stabbing you or punching you to the floor and taking and running. If you go at him with a weapon – and you’d be the thousandth person to try – he’d take it off you and beat you to death to make sure you didn’t present a threat to him, before taking and running.

Your morality, he doesn’t have that. It’s gone, along with any notions of self respect, guilt, conscience. It’s been drummed out of him by years of addiction.

But don’t think that the addiction makes him weak. Once he was a strong kid, stronger than you can ever know, driven to the solace of the drug by a life of terrible violence and abuse.

When you were taking your first steps, he was sitting in a house full of addicts, starving, undernourished. When you were going to nursery he was stealing food and getting beaten when he was caught, learning how to take a beating with the minimum of damage, desensitising to the pain and the fear. When your parents came home from work and cooked you tea, his sent him out to run money and drugs, or came home loaded and beat him until his eyes swelled shut and his gums bled. When you were doing your entrance exam for secondary, he was out in the parks fighting other kids over selling territory, knowing that if he lost he’d lose everything, that he’d take it badly at home, that he might not get to eat. While you were mastering maths and english, he was mastering violence, learning through the weekly, if not daily fights, threats and skirmishes how to most effectively beat another human to the ground. While you were learning the ropes in your first job he was learning how to use surprise to paralyse a victim so that he could take what he needed with the least risk to him. By the time you were competent in your career, he was a master of his, the veteran of a thousand or more fist fights, stabbings, muggings, breakins and arrests.

He’s experienced front-line violence almost every day of his life. Immediate. Total. Around him all the time.

He’s lost count of the amount of times he’s struck someone, knocked them down, stabbed them when he was too weak to fight any other way. And he’s lost count of the amount of times someone did that to him. The violence, it holds no real fear for him, like it does for you. And in that lack of fear, in that desensitisation, there is a certainty, not that he will win, because truly he doesn’t care about win or lose in the way that you do, but that he will fight, and do everything that is necessary to get the job done and come home with his solution. While you’re finding your feet he’s already beaten you. You’re the hundredth person that swung a Maglite at him. The hundredth person to leave a cricket bat by the door for him to arm himself with when he comes in.

And when he comes he will come without hesitation. From the moment you are aware of him he’s already had hours to come to terms with what’s about to happen. He’s got momentum, practice, initiative.

Think about this.

Carefully.

That land we were talking about, the country of violence, at best you are a visitor to that land. He lives there.

Real world violence isn’t a place where bravado is well rewarded. Hard training is the answer, based on solid research.

And here is some research:

Survey after survey, when we study violent crime, there are only two significant predictors of success in the survival of real world violence.

  1. By far the most significant. Exposure to previous instances of real world violence.
  2. Self Defence training that involves close approximation of real world violence through stress inoculation, contact drills and adrenalisation training.

Whatever else you do, come to the fight prepared, without the bravado, and see it for what it is. Come to the fight not with bravado but with realism and humility. See that to run is not shameful. To die defending property is hubris, and ludicrous. You fight when there is no other choice, when you’re on the stairs and you meet that man and it’s clear there’s no other way. And if you have to fight, make sure it isn’t a fight. Find a way to surprise. Hit first. Hit hard, with so much aggression you overwhelm the opponent. And train for that moment with the real world firmly at the front of your mind. The research. The numbers. The facts. The statistics.

You bend your training to fit reality. Then you don’t die doing it the other way round.

Train hard, fight easy. Your life depends on it.

Will Bayley – Krav Maga Swindon, Krav Maga Bristol Central, Krav Maga North Bristol, Bristol University Krav Soc.

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Krav Maga Rule number 1

Krav Maga North Bristol instructor Will Bayley has an unofficial rule-book when it comes to the learning, teaching and practice of Krav Maga. Some of you might be most familiar with Rule #5, but here’s rule #1 from that rule-book:

Rule#1

If something bad is happening, move towards it as rapidly as possible.

The world of violence is not well understood by most people. And to the uninitiated, raised on a diet of Hollywood Kung Fu and Karate Kid since the ’70s, it may appear as if all violence is won with skill. Nothing is further from the truth. Most people carrying out successful violent attacks on their victims – assaults, muggings, beatings – have no more skill than the victims they assault. And when the victims do manage to fight back and are successful in turn, it is often not because they have skill over their attackers. No, the currency of violence is not skill. It’s aggression.

And management of fear.

Let us state that in another way:

The person in charge of their fear is the person moving forward, taking action. The person taking action is the person winning.

There are other truths about violence that go towards our Rule #1. Here’s one:

You can’t win a defensive fight.

Take the recent case made public this week in the Sun of a small unit of British Special Forces soldiers who got ambushed by 50 or so ISIS fighters. They ran out of ammo engaging the threat and still had 30 or so left to fight. Running would have invited pursuit, almost certain capture, torture and death by burning or beheading. So they made their peace and took the fight forward. And so fierce was their resolve, so immediate their attack that a good number of the 30 fled for their lives.

Of course, the 30 ISIS men could have won that fight, if they had committed to it. But the battle wasn’t won in the territory of skill and number; it was won in the territory of fear.

These British soldiers had one chance, and it lay in Rule #1.

If something bad is happening, move towards it as rapidly as possible.

British soldier drowns ISIS thug in puddle as SBS troops fight like ‘crazed warriors’ killing extremists with their bare hands after being ambushed in Iraq

 

Will Bayley, BKMA Graduate Instructor, Krav Maga North Bristol.

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Krav Maga North Bristol – Judged by 12 or carried by 6

Krav Maga North Bristol examines the old adage and how preparation and training can mean it’s a choice you don’t need to make.

There’s an old adage in the martial arts world. “It’s better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6.” It’s been around a long time, that saying, and with good reason. The practice of functional, real-world self defence is all about balance. Not balance as in falling over or standing up; balance as in walking the fine line between six undertakers or 12 jurors.

When violence comes to take you, certain strategies work and others do not. We know, statistically, that pre-emptive striking is essential to street survival. The numbers leave no room for argument. Some ninety-odd percent of people hit by an attacker’s first punch go on to lose the fight and succumb to the assault. In short, to survive an assault by even one attacker, you need to hit first. And you need to do this early enough that you are still in control of the situation. If you leave it too late, even if you take the first attacker down with your first strike, the subsequent attackers might be close enough to you to finish the job the first one failed to finish.

But here’s the balance: Throw that first strike too early, and without proper justification, and you could be looking at prison time.

There’s a phrase used to describe what can happen when you hit someone once and unlawfully. One Punch Manslaughter.

So here’s the balance stated again: You must hit early enough to give yourself a tactical advantage so that you can survive the oncoming assault. You must hit late enough that you can show, morally and legally, that you did everything you could to avoid conflict, that your actions were justified.

Remember, you need to demonstrate that the situation was such that any reasonable person would have been in fear for their life because of the actions of the aggressors, and that the force you used was reasonable, proportionate and necessary in that situation.

Sometimes it can feel like a no-win situation, which is why the old saying came into being. Better to find yourself in court than in the ground. But we train specifically to avoid this terrible dilemma. Our practice with conflict de-escalation, the Fence, the Back Away drill, are designed not only to give you a tactical framework for your defence, but to set up a legal defence for your actions.

Remember that the justifications for force in legal terms are the same justifications we use in tactical terms. If you can make the decision making process conscious, you can simply explain why you did what you did in terms of the threat you saw. You can build a legal defence, an explanation of your decision to use force, even as you use that force.

Of course, real self defence goes beyond these desperate measures. Our first principle is avoidance. This is at the top of the Hierarchy of Responses for a reason. As Miller says: “It is better to avoid than to run. Better to run than to de-escalate. Better to de-escalate than to fight. Better to fight than to die.”

And if you do fight, be sure, absolutely sure, that you are fighting to defend life – yours or another’s – and not to defend ego. Sometimes, in the heat of it, you may not be able to tell the difference, but there is a difference. And it’s a difference that could see you in prison for a long, long time.

One Punch Can Kill – the family left behind

If you ever find yourself in a situation where tensions are running high, please stop, think, act responsibly and walk away. Don't let a split second of anger turn you into a killer. One punch can kill.The family of Greg Beyer, who was killed following a one punch incident in Swindon in 2016, talk about their loss and why it is so important that people think before they act.

Posted by Wiltshire Police on Friday, July 7, 2017

One man couldn’t tell the difference, one night in Swindon. And he went away for 8 years for One Punch Manslaughter. Wait another year and there’ll be ten more in the papers across the nation. It’s common. And utterly unnecessary.

Fortunately, there’s something that tends to happen to people who train in Krav Maga. The longer they do it, the less likely they are to find themselves in a fight. There’s a bunch of reasons for this. The first is that your awareness will keep you out of trouble. The second is that, with a confident bearing, you are less likely to be selected as a victim of violent crime. The last, and perhaps most important, is that you will be far less likely to engage in risk-taking violence for reasons of ego. Once you have confidence in your ability to fight, you just don’t need to fight. There’s nothing left to prove.

Will Bayley – Graduate Instructor, BKMA. Krav Maga North Bristol,

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