There a couple of interesting takeaways from this incident.
That it happened in the first place. A private citizen, facing gun, went hands on to disarm and take the gun away and use it. He is not doing that from across the room. He must be attached at some point.
That ii was against two attackers. One of the great criticisms of grappling for self-defense that gets trotted out like clockwork from so-called experts is that grappling leaves you more vulnerable when you are not one on one. But what we see in the real world over and over again is that once one bad guy is facing violence back one them, any other bad guy very often heads for the highway. Obviously, this is not something we can assume will happen, but to assume the exact opposite – that all attackers are looking to engage in gladiatorial combat and will price the fight no matter what – is just as foolish. If we throw out highly functional strategies just because they do not work 100% will leave us with exactly zero options, because nothing works at 100%. Ever.
I was deeply, deeply involved in the Filipino and Indonesian Martial Arts from around 1982, through 1997 or so. I even had instructor certifications in multiple systems. I have carried a knife on me every day of my life since the original Spdyerco Police model came out in 1984. So my bonafides are deep and rock solid.
One knife I have always loved since being introduced to it circa 2006 is the Shivworks Disciple. It appeals hard to my inner FMA nerd, and it was a nice segue to being convinced of the efficacy of the Clinchpick.
While not quite as easily concealable as the Clinchpick, the Disciple is still good for concealed carry, and it is a bit more intuitive to use. But back in the day, they were very, very rare. Even Craig Douglas, the man behind the idea and concept of the knife did not have ready access to them.
I was resigned to never being able to have one, until my good friend Michael Brown gave me one of his original Trace Rinaldi made ones. I could not believe what a fantastic and thoughtful gift it was. Michael could have sold it for a good chunk of cash, but instead, being the good man that he is, he gave it to me after a seminar I taught for his training group of LEOs in Tulsa. I loved it and wore it all the time, even risking losing such an almost irreplaceable tool.
A bit later, I became a convert to the Clincpick, and the Disciple became a sometimes carried blade, but that gift always has had a great palace in my heart.
A few years ago, Craig – through the Shivworks Product Group – brought the Disciple back into availability at a great price that put it in reach of pretty much everyone. I have a number of them and they are everything the older blades were.
I even tried to make a Disciple version of my IAC Clinchpick sheath (from JM Custom Kydex). Myself and Tony Mayer of JM tried many iterations, but it just did not work unfortunately. The handle length of the Disciple defeated the deep concealment aspect of the sheath.
Pictured here are all of the above. The far left is the original Rinaldi blade that Michael gave me, the middle two versions are the current SPG produced ones, and the far right is my failed attempt to do the IAC sheath.
With the risk of sounding like a horrible cliche, I have been a life-long shooter. I shot my first firearm (my dad’s winchester ‘97) during a dove hunt when I was five. I shot in an adult skeet shooting league when I was 12 and 13 (and generally finished in the middle of the pack). My first dove and quail hunt when I was actually participating in the shooting was at 11. My first coyote, javelina, and deer hunts were when I was still in middle school. My first defensive oriented shooting class was with Chuck Taylor in 1985, and I went to Gunsite and took 250 General Pistol when I graduated college in 1987.
I say this to establish the very real fact that I grew up in a time when firearms were treated as the precision machines that they are. I was indoctrinated that after firing any gun, I did not go to bed with it dirty. A firearm was to be maintained at all times, and it was to be treated as a valuable tool to be preserved while being used, with the idea that they would be handed down to the next generation in as close to the same condition as when they were originally obtained. In fact, that very first gun I shot – the Win 1897 – was my grandfather’s that he had from when he was a young man in the early 40’s (before he went off to India in WW2 to help fly the Burma Hump) and my Dad still sued it until is was stolen around 1976. The same time that my father taught me how to use a gun, during that same lesson he taught me how to clean them. The two things were intrinsically intertwined.
But somewhere along the way, that concept has at times seemed to be lost. Now, it is fashionable to brag about not cleaning your guns, to the extent that the brag is how long has it been since the last cleaning.
In some ways, there is some validity to that with the preponderance of polymer guns, that have a slightly less need for as much cleaning and lubrication as all metal firearms do. It’s certainly nice to be able to just shoot a gun, and occasionally dump some more oil on a few moving parts and call it a day. I just can’t be one of those who do so. I feel that anything made of metal to any extent, that has moving parts that rub against each other, that I am counting on to possibly save my life, should be taken care of as the machines they are. When I was a teenager, I worked in a machine shop that made high end aerospace parts. The CNC machines they used were the lifeblood of that business, and got a lot of use. At times round-the-clock use. But every chance they got, each one was cleaned as often and as well as possible, along with massive amounts of lubrication. They knew it was needed to keep them working, and those machines were built to a far higher tolerance and massively stronger than any firearm ever built, and still cleaning was crucial.
The other reason that I clean the guns so often is that I enjoy handling firearms. That time breaking the guns down, cleaning, oiling, and reassembling them is just more time to build intimate familiarity with them, and have a greater and deeper sense of proprioception when I use them. I like shooting, and I like having extra excuses to be around guns.
I do the same thing with all of my knives and edged tools. Whenever they are used in any way, even if it is the knife equivalent of dry fire, I tend to at the very least wipe them down with a soft cloth and check to see if they need a light coating of oil. When I was super hardcore into the Filipino Martial Arts in the 80’s and 90’s, not a day went by that I did not use a blade for practice and that was always followed by a bit of polishing/wiping down. I have a WW2 style kukri that is a big blade and at my old house whenever I needed to do landscaping, that kukri was my main tool. It did a great job keeping my giant Palo Verde tree under control, but afterwards it was covered in tree sap/muck/bark/shards, and even though it was relatively inexpensive and easily replaced, I still treated it with the reverence a Ghurka soldier probably would, and it got the careful cleaning.
So I will continue to be a Fudd and clean my guns every time after use, or at least as soon as possible in cases as when I am traveling. I certainly am not advocating for anyone to follow my path, and I don’t judge anyone else for their way if they choose to do the more modern thing of ignoring these extra steps, but for me, it is not a chore, but something to enjoy.
There are people that like to dispute the fact that grappling happens in self-defense scenarios, even with all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The following video is another example of how that type of thinking is wrong at times. Not every time, but a large amount of times it is provably so.
This is a longer video showing multiple situations, so fast forward to 6:37 and you can watch a very common criminal attacking type of occurrence. The bad guy is running from the cops and he jumps into a car stopped in a bank drive through lane. He gets in from the passenger side, but immediately moves over to the driver and tries to drive the car. This did not become an entangled fight simply due to the fact that the innocent victim 1) obviously did not know how to engage in such a fight, and 2) was too busy panicking. But the point I would like to drive home is this : IT WAS AT CONTACT DISTANCE THAT WAS DICTATED BY THE BAD GUY.
Bad guys move into contact or near contact distance far more often than otherwise.
We in the gun community know that honest data and knowledge are key to our safety and success in a self-preservation paradigm. It makes very little sense to base our wellbeing or the wellbeing of our loved ones on a guess. We need to know, not maybe think what is.
The problem though is that few people know how to judge what is true. Gathering data correctly must be done first, and then the analysis can only proceed from there. The issue that scientists have dealt with for centuries is that this seems really simple, but in actuality is incredibly difficult. The Scientific Method was developed over those centuries to try to ensure that what we think we are seeing is truly what we are seeing.
Unfortunately, not many people in the gun community have much, if any, training in the Scientific Method. There are a great deal of experts in the community that are incredibly intelligent, and have high level degrees, but rarely are those degrees in an area where a grounding in the SM is a thing. Engineering, history, marketing, theology, etc. are all challenging fields of study, but they have little to do with a deep grasp of real world data gathering.
I am going to do some articles on the Scientific Method and hope to bring up the level of discourse and analysis, and why understanding the SM is so crucial. But today I am just going to touch on what is probably the biggest understanding gap that happens again and again in the gun community.
Many commentators like to point out a handful of real world incidents and then proclaim some overriding dogmatic statement of fact based on what they have seen. This is a fallacy. Looking at a small data set that has not been scientifically gathered negates any definitive factual conclusion. Essentially, what we see is not the totality of what there is.
In other words, just because in the set of data you have you see – or don’t see – X, that does not mean that X does not exist. The scientific way to express this is “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
Last year, I discussed the concept that some commentators online pushed that physical fitness does not matter in self-defense. They would then point out a small number of cases where that was true. To them, because the tiny amount of videos or documented cases they looked at supported their preferred narrative, they then made absurdist dogmatic statements that it did not matter. I then showed multiple cases where it did absolutely matter. But my point was not (and I never stated thai at any point) that fitness was a crucial prerequisite for successful self-defense. I did not make the mistake they did. I merely pointed out that there were cases where it mattered deeply.
I could have argued using their method, and based my conclusions solely on the cases I presented, but I understood that said cases were only part of the puzzle. Sometimes fitness matters a lot, sometimes it does not matter at all. Because that conclusion is what the actual data supports, not a cherry picked set that only serves to preserve the narrative I prefer.
So before you make blanket statements, make sure you have true, scientifically valid data first. And in further articles, I will talk about ways we can accomplish that feat.
An entangled fight where the good guy is confronted in his tiny office where he has no room to move and no time to get a gun out. While we cannot see what happened in that room, we know it happened in a couple of seconds, there was nowhere for the good guy to go, and he would have zero knowledge of the bad guy coming in until it was already happening. If the good guy had been carrying a gun, it wouldn’t have changed a thing. Even with a .98 draw, he would have certainly been shot while trying to drag race to his gun. His only hope was to do what he did : use grappling techniques to stabilize and control the attacker and keep the bad guy from using the gun. And he was successful at not only that, but keeping any other person from being shot. A big win for the good guy and his choices.
I have a friend in law enforcement who has an excellent story of using bottom half guard to keep a guy between him and a group of dudes trying to kick his skull in with his back to the tires of a car while he waits for backup to arrive.
Or let’s say you’re at a holiday party, there’s family and friends all stuffed into a little kitchen while the food is coming out. Children are running around at ankle height. Just then the door comes in, and here comes your one friend’s baby daddy fresh from jail. He’s screaming he wants his kid; he grabs a knife off the butcher block. Now I’ve seen plenty of systems where you NEVER get entangled with a guy, you NEVER go to the ground willingly, and I’m sure there are some “I’ll just shoot him” types… in a room full of people… in front of his child… that’s your choice to make. Personally I think having a skill set that allows you to effectively control someone while your buddy calls the cops and lends a hand is probably a good choice given the totality of the circumstances.
On the one hand, yes, staying upright, mobile, and conscious are priorities. On the other hand is the “all fights go to the ground” mantra. Well, here we are as a student stuck with catch phrases and empty slogans in a rich, chaotic, messy tangle of limbs and uncertainty. What’s the answer? What if I told you, it depends? What if the capability to stay upright and keep someone off you is not independent of the ability to take someone down at will and control them? Or that those same take down skills translate directly into one’s ability to stay upright? And there’s the rub. The guy training BJJ isn’t just learning cool submission moves from bottom, he’s also defending them, and trying to stay on his feet while another grown man tries to throw him around and pull him down.
Here’s a performance driver: if I’m going to the ground I want it to be on my terms, because I’ve made a choice to do so based upon the circumstances. The one dimensional fighter doesn’t get to take the fight where he wants; he tries desperately to keep it wherever he is comfortable.
“A boxer is like a lion, the greatest predator on land. But you throw him in the shark tank and he’s just another meal.” – Renzo Gracie
In Renzo Gracie’s book, Master Jiu Jitsu, he speaks at length about the early days of MMA and about all the ranges of the fight and why the BJJ fighter had such a dominant advantage in those days. The part that translates best for our discussion is simply that it is easier to take the fight to the ground than it is to keep it standing once the players have become entangled. Simple as that. You need to not just be better than your opponent, you need to be MUCH, MUCH better if you want to stay upright and he does not. Further, the number of fights we see where guys simply fall over one another, or a curb, slip on gravel or ice, ect. and wind up going down with no intention to do so is too large to ignore. Gravity is out to get you, it takes effort to stand even when you’re not being punched in the face.
Once we hit the ground, without some basic horizontal grappling skills we are in for trouble.
And then we could go down the rabbit hole of this discussion. What techniques or styles translate best to the Weapons Based Environment (WBE, as per Craig Douglas)? What about Gi vs no-gi ? What BJJ do we see in modern MMA where everyone has some sort of grappling? I’d like to talk about some of those points later, but for now I want to talk about why I believe in BJJ as a core foundational element for self-defense.
Pressure.
From day one the BJJ student will face a live adversary. There will be technique, and there will be drilling, there will be learning a new skill, and there will be some guy that’s bigger, stronger, younger, and more experienced than you attempting to force his will on you while you try to execute it. From the very first you’ll need to deal with suffocation, panic, making observations and decisions when you’re gassed out tired and hit with adrenaline.
Over time, it will take more and more pressure to overwhelm the practitioner. We learn piece by piece to deal with stress and to become functional in the jumbled mess of limbs and be able to execute complex techniques based on intuition and feel.
This is where BJJ shines. Constant, relentless pressure.
It’s not about under what circumstances the triangle choke is appropriate for self-defense, or whether breaking an arm will stop an attacker. It’s about what you do when you’re overwhelmed, when you can’t breathe, when your muscles give out and dizzy from exertion.
The BJJ practitioner knows this place. He goes there every day.
In part one, we looked at how far away seven yards truly is, and how that impacts our defensive reactions. In part two, we are going to examine how that distance understanding plays into our access, draw, and use of a firearm.
As we saw in the previous part, it is well established that the average person can cover seven yards in a second and a half, and we can now understand that an average means there will be plenty of people on either side of that mark. So we cannot assume we will always have a full 1.5 seconds even at seven yards.
Once we know that, we need to match it to what we can do. Do you know what your cold, on demand concealed draw is, while wearing normal day to day clothing, that has not been shifted to a position ahead of time to help facilitate the draw? In other words, what can you do when you are not warmed up and wearing a loose shirt that you have already cheated to start to get it out of the way. That is the only metric that matters.
Once you truly know what your realistic draw is, then you can look at what you can do against an encroaching attacker. However, it is not quite this simple. There are some mitigating factors that come into play.
First, Let’s look at the setup of the Tueller test. Good guy seven yards away from bad guy, both waiting for the start signal. Then the bad guy runs at the good guy and attempts to touch him in the torso with his fake knife. So the good guy knows what is coming and all he has to do is go at the buzzer. That has almost nothing to do with the private citizen moving through the real world. You will rarely have equal initiative with the bad guy. I know we like to believe we are walking around like John Wick, but we are not. There will almost certainly be a reactionary mental gap, which tends to be .20 – .25 of a second. So we now need more distance, perhaps as much as a yard.
Second, the bad guy in the real world is not always coming at you with a knife. He may be rushing at you and all he needs to do to stop your gun use is to grab it. So if he reaches as he closes the distance, he gains up to a yard extra that is covered by his outstretched arms and not his whole body. Which means we need even more distance before we begin.
Third, all of us in the gun training community tend to default to full extension of the handgun, because that is generally the best way to use it – it gives us a better grip for stabilization and recoil control, and it gets the gun into our eye line for better accuracy. Usually this is a plus, but if the bad guy is rushing at us, we are now giving him up to a yard (our outstretched arms) less distance to cover. Which translates once again to us needing more distance to make sure we can use our gun the way we would like for it to be effective.
So let’s add this up. If you have a solid cold 1.5 second draw, and you are facing an average bad guy, if he starts at seven yards or less, he will be on you and be able to grab your gun before you can fire the first shot. Realistically, you will need 8-10 yards to be able to get 3-5 rounds into him. If he is faster than average (and remember, we have zero way to know if that will be the case), and if your actual draw is slower, you may need even more distance.
Am I arguing that all bad guys will rush you every time? Of course not. They may well stand their ground, or move at a slower pace. And our standard range training prepares us well for that event. However, that will not be the case every time, and you will not know ahead of time what the bad guy will do, so perhaps we need to at least entertain the possibility, and maybe do a bit of physical preparation for such a scenario. Dennis Tueller gave us the baseline, so lets not waste his work.
First, it is awesome to watch the sheer “don’t give an eff” attitude from the good guy. He is not going to stress about facing a pointed gun. I would love to know his backstory!
The other main takeaway is that this video is a great example of how bad guys, even armed with firearms, will continually move into contact or near contact range. Why? They have to in order to impose their will and take what they want. If they want property – a wallet, keys, a phone, etc., they have to physically grab it. It is rare for them to be able to tell a victim to put their goods down and walk away, and then the bad guy has time to move over and pick it up before leaving. That is not just not how crime works.
So there is no entangled fight here most likely because the citizen has zero idea of how to grapple and therefore decided not to. This is a huge reason we don’t see more entangled fights (and something critics of this never understand or realize), but it does not change the fact that if the good guy had decided to go hands on, it would have happened, because the bad guy, even with a long gun , voluntarily WENT TO CONTACT RANGE. Bad guys get close more often than not, period.
Another entangled fight with weapons – in this case a handgun wielded by the bad guy – and private citizens. Without grappling, there is a good chance the clerk may have been killed.
Further, grappling resolved the situation without ANYONE being killed, which makes the post incident life for the good guy much, much more pleasant and peaceful. Which most likely would not have been the case if he had shot the bad guy.
