Tragic Death

Deolexrex sent me a link to an article about a tragic death in the Front Sight Blog. I passed it on to a few people whose email addresses I have, but after some reflection, I think it's worth putting in a blog post.

The article contains to a video from a surveillance camera, and it depicts a shooting in which one of the subjects is killed. If you are easily upset, I am warning you beforehand. If you are a minor, you should check with a parent before viewing.

Here is a link to the article over at Front Sight Blog:

The Survival Triad

Ignatius Piazza, the author of the blog gives his evaluation of the incident:

What went wrong is these four citizen only possessed TWO of the THREE aspects of the Survival Triad.

Although they demonstrated the Combat Mindset with their willingness to fight and they demonstrated Action by taking the fight to their opponent, they lacked the skill to inflict immediate and incapacitation damage to finish the fight.

As a result, the four of them cannot incapacitate an average sized, street punk. The first private citizen who moves to deflect and disarm the gun is later critically wounded and the fourth citizen who is hitting the armed criminal with the effectiveness of a junior high school girl ends up paying for his lack of skill with his life.

This is so unfortunate, because these four citizens did what was right. They just lacked the skill to use the tools that they had.

Even unarmed, once the gun was deflected and grabbed, had any of the four citizens used a thumb to gouge out an eye of the gunman, or smashed the lateral aspect of the gunman’s knee with a forceful kick, or crushed his windpipe with a directed punch, or any number of empty hand defensive moves that are easily learned in a basic course, the outcome of this lethal encounter would have been completely different.

Notice that those skills that he mentions are not the self-defense equivalent of nuclear physics. Stick your thumb in the orc's eye and keep pushing -- hard! Disarticulate his knee with a powerful kick. Smash a half-fist into his windpipe.

You can learn these rudimentary skills in a matter of minutes. (Do NOT practice them on a partner, except at extreme slow motion speed.) Practice them full-force on a heavy bag or practice dummy (no, NOT your brother!).

My barber sent me the following quote:

Don't hit at all if you can help it; don't hit a man if you can possibly avoid it; but if you do hit him, put him to sleep. (Theodore Roosevelt New York City, February 17, 1899)

That's just another way of saying, if at all possible, avoid violence, but when violence is unavoidable, you must neutralize the threat.

On dealing with armed assailants, you may wish to review Poetry and Other Deadly Pursuits and Knife Defense Video.