“Avenue of escape”
Understand this legal term because not considering it can get you into trouble even when that street beggar jabs a hepatitis C-infected needle at you.
You’re going to get asked in court, “Yes, the street beggar poked a needle at you, and yes you had a right to use lethal force against him with your martial arts-trained feet and hands. But answer this: Couldn’t you have backed away? Could you have turned and ran? Isn’t it true there was an unobstructed sidewalk behind you?”
Your heart goes kuthunk, and you mumble, “Uh …”
“Yet you chose …,” the attorney says dramatically as he looks at each juror in the eye, “… to crush a homeless, hungry man’s face with your martial arts-trained fist and trip him with some martial arts-trained move that caused the man’s head to smash into the concrete.”
Suddenly, your life is about to change.
Instructors: don’t even joke about it
After I had been teaching the police academy for a number of years, the brass decided, and wisely so, that the instructors needed to use caution when making funny remarks about anything related to using force on someone. They were finding that some comments made in jest were coming back to haunt them.
While instructors always want their profound teachings to stick with a student, sometimes, according to anecdotal evidence, it’s the wisecrack, the funny comment, the exaggerated technique that some students remember most of all.
“Now that you have your opponent’s wrist locked, what do you do? You break it. Ha ha.”
“Okay, you’ve knocked the guy down onto his back. Now, run away. But as you leave, give him a nice kick in the ear. Ha, ha”
“You’ve trapped his knife arm. Twist his arm so that that he stabs himself in the gut. Hey, that was so fun why not make him do it two or three times. Ha ha.”
Might these little jests, underscored by humor and the mental image of the teacher’s exaggerated technique, remain in the minds of some students and reappear in their actions under stress?
Yes, and that is why we were ordered not to joke around in any class that involved functioning under stress: empty-hand fighting, police baton, and firearms. Some students will only remember that you leaned on your subdued attacker’s eye socket and forget that you did it for a laugh.
Important point: A private citizen has a legal duty to retreat. He or she must always explore evasion or escape first before getting physical.
Question, evaluate and research
I could give you dozens of examples and you could come up with dozens of: What if … Yeah, but … But can’t you just … That’s just not fair … So let me leave you with some advice that will not only improve your martial arts study, but just might keep you out of the slammer.
Question what you’re taught. Be polite about it but ask so that you understand how certain techniques and responses fit into the force continuum. If your teacher hasn’t thought about this, your questions just might get him to do so.Evaluate techniques and responses. Is this technique over the top? Not enough? Does it push the legal envelope? For practice, evaluate the techniques in this book as to where they fit into the continuum.Research the laws where you live. Remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse. Maybe you really, really believe that it was okay to hit the guy 42 times with a brick when he pulled a knife on you. Well, just because you thought it was okay doesn’t make it okay in the eyes of the law. Know the laws, know the continuum, and know what you can and can’t do in various situations.
Perhaps you have heard the saying, “I’d rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6.” While there are lots of incarcerated folks who might debate that, by questioning, evaluating and researching you give yourself one other option that is better than being carried or judged:
An informed, intelligent and highly-trained response.
Loren W. Christensen’s biography appears in the “About the Author” page at the back of the book.
30 Questions to Ask Yourself: You Will Fight the Way You Train
By Loren W. Christensen and Lt. Col. Dave Grossman
You will fight the way you train. I’ve been around the martial arts long enough to remember when no one said this now often-repeated phrase. Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, most martial artist never thought about it or, if they did, they just assumed they could alter their training to fit a real situation. Or worse, they assumed their bad training habits and methods would win the day.
While driving home after our first karate class in the summer of 1965, my buddy and I were confronted by a road rager, long before there was even the term “road rage.” He pulled up along side us and threw a beer bottle at our car, missing the windshield by inches. Psyched from our introductory class, we just laughed at the bearded giant, convinced that what we had just learned would be more than enough to whip this guy into confetti. Fortunately, oh so fortunately for our dumb hides, the guy cackled madly out his window, then turned right at the light.
Over confidence is a terrible thing, and sadly, there are far too many martial artists walking around convinced that their tournament training or their aerobics kickboxing class is going to save them.
The problem isn’t an isolated one in the martial arts. It’s also a problem in police work and in the military. Fortunately, cops and soldiers are more aware of it now than ever and the problem continues to be addressed and fixed in their training. Also fortunately, more and more martial artists understand the concept, though, in my opinion, they are still behind cops and soldiers.
Lt. Col Dave Grossman and I wrote about this phenomenon in our book On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflicts in War and Peace. Here is an excerpt titled:
Whatever is drilled in during training comes out the other end in combat - no more, no less
Whatever you would make habitual, practise it; and if you would not make a thing habitual, do not practise it, but habituate yourself to something else.
Epictetus (1st century A.D.)
How the Semblances of Things are to be Combated
In January 2003, Col. Grossman went to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to train the 2d Marine Division. He filled up the base theater twice, each time giving a four-hour block of instruction to Marines about to deploy to Iraq. “As usual,” Col. Grossman says, “I taught them, and they taught me. One marine told me, ‘Colonel, my old Gunny taught me that in combat you do not rise to the occasion, you sink to the level of your training.’”
We can teach warriors to perform a specific action required for survival without conscious thought but, if we are not careful, we can also teach them to do the wrong thing. Some trainers call these “bad muscle memory” or “training