There are cases and forums where these techniques are appropriate but civilian use is not among them if this is the only response taught.]
So basically a punch delivered by my friends drunken grandmother or 12 year old cousin might not be that great a threat, but a punch delivered by a 115kg steroid raging member of a 4 man group intent on doing me serious harm would be taken as a more serious attack.
This is what I was referring to as "reasonableness" and demonstrates the importance of being able to scale our responses.
OK, so here are two things you say which, to me, appear to be a bit at odds...
Hello Exile,
With respect I did not post a question but rather I posted a clarification of my position on the topic.
... and I was referring to what you were saying as a question, rather than the apparent contradiction it seemed to be, as per the two passages from your posts I've quoted, because taken together, they read as an implicit question: when is what level of force justified? In your first post, we have a blanket statement that appears to condemn high-intensity responses in civil contexts across the board. In the second, you make a major distinction between scenarios, one of which is going to be fairly minor and trivial and the others of which are life-threatening. My comment that you had answered your own question was a preface to what I would have thought was fairly obvious: in the second kind of scenario, extreme violent empty-handed responses are indeed justified by the circumstances.
[B[It seems you and I live very different lives, or perhaps are at very different stages of our lives,[/B] as I have had numerous punches thrown in my direction and in every case have acted in accord with my training.
Very likely. I'm 60 years old, lived much of my life in New York City and have a perspective on street violence which reflect both of those facts.
Thankfully my training allows for each response to be scaled in a manner to suit the individual circumstance. Had I acted in the way you describe, that is to presume every punch is thrown with lethal intent, I would be serving a very long time in one of our fine corrective facilities.
Since I clearly specified the circumstances which I regarded as evidence of lethal intent—street attacks, assaults by thugs or dangerous defectives in confined spaces and so on—I have to say I have no idea of where you got the impression that I was saying that every punch ever thrown required deadly force in response. Let's take a look at some of the cases you mention:
For example, some of the people who have meant me some degree of harm include a number of elderly or infirm people affected by medications, senile dementia, alcohol withdrawal, drug addictions, various states of psychoses, post traumatic stress syndrome or other disorders that found them in my care. I presume the majority of these individuals had family and friends who loved them and in many cases relied on them in various ways.
I have to say, I'm baffled by these comments. I itemize a specific set of dangerous scenarios involving street violence, and you then respond with a set of circumstances which have nothing to due with the scenarios I mention and insist that these people should not be subject to the kind of response I specifically identified as appropriate for the completely different situations I mentioned. I'm not sure how setting up this kind of straw man advances the discussion, which seems to me to center on whether or not training for extreme violent defensive responses is ever justified
as defense. I gave a number of examples where I think a good case can be made. Your response that defense at level would be inappropriate for an elderly person suffering from senile dementia is true but
irrelevant, since neither that situation, nor any of the others you mention, is covered by the range of cases I provided. And it is
that range, not the ones you refer to, which is the target of almost all MA training, regardless of style.
As a parent I am sure you can appreciate my decision to exercise "due discretion" and a scaled response to violence directed at me by the countless drug and alcohol affected youths, both male and female, while working at various nightclubs, pubs, and entertainment venues.
As a parent with a family dependent on me to protect, I can tell you that if anyone, youth or not, affected by alcohol, drugs, or macho aggressiveness, presented me with a threat at the level of extreme danger that a hard-thrown punch at the head represents, I would see to it that they wound up on the ground, and stayed there long enough for there to be no further danger of attack from them. I am not talking about an attempted slap from some drunken customer; I'm talking about a clear intent to damage me via the standard swinging roundhouse, attempted headbutt, or any of the other habitual acts of violent assault initiation that your own Patrick McCarthy has done so much to document in street attack situations across different societies. If the elderly person whose case you seemed to think is relevant throws a punch at me, the deflection which is
part of my response when the two-time felon loser does it will be more than enough to keep them from contacting me without doing them any harm; the difference is that if the street punk throws
his version of the punch, the deflection is only the first step, and a hard elbow strike to his face, or a knifehand strike to his larynx, or some combination of those or similar moves, will be the last step. I train knifehand strike board breaks on three inch-thick board stacks, and when in my view my survival is at stake, I will use that same level of force on my attacker's throat. Period. In dealing with the kind of assailant I just identified, I believe I have no other rational choice.
Though all of these assaults took place in the course of my employment in various jobs they should be considered no less self defense than an assault that takes place in a parking lot, as I am not employed as a professional fighter or punching bag!
I find this somewhat oddly put. Again, it seems to me something of a straw man to be rebutting a claim (which no one has actually made!) that the kind of relatively harmless assaults you refer to wouldn't count as self-defense. Clearly, any time you stop an unprovoked assault on your person, that counts as legitimate self-defense; what is at issue is the level of danger. Not one person I know who trains for maximum effective street defense would say that you should respond to an obviously low level of physical hazard with maximum force, and furthermore, I don't know of a single street-effective combat system that gives you no options in handling a sub-lethal level of danger except to respond with lethal force yourself. Not karate, not the TKD I train in, not Hapkido, not jiujitsu... none of them give you an exclusive, maximum, level of response. What they do equip you to do is defend yourself in extremis—and if you train for that, you have no problem using a lower-grade version of the tech sequence simply by stopping before the point where you would direct a finishing strike to a soft-tissue target above the shoulders, or something equally effective in a survival-level violent encounter. The idea that unless you specifically train for lower-level response, you will execute a lethal technique sequence automatically without any choice because your training wires it into you is the stuff of MA fantasy, I think.
Life is not black and white, interpersonal interactions, be they positive or negative are complex things and I know that the friends and relatives of the people with whom I have had altercations are thankful that it was myself and not someone who shares your combative ethos that was the target of their relatives misguided aggression. With that I can say I share the original sentiment echoed by Sanchin-J in their original post.
Since, in spite of my explicit identification of deadly force situations, you are attributing to me an ethos—in all situations, act as though you were confronted with deadly force—which my own comments make clear is not mine, I think you need to read a bit more carefully before making such statements. In particular, consider again what I wrote to you in my first paragraph:
exile said:
You are not going to get assaulted in a parking garage, watering hole, or apartment lobby by anyone's grandmother or your own 12 year old cousin. In those situations, you have every right to expect that the initiation of serious violence against you constitutes a deadly threat.... and respond accordingly.
Is it all that unclear here that I am identifying a set of circumstances in which exactly the kind of straw-men alternative scenarios you raise are
not going to happen, and am
excluding the old people and juveniles that you apparently think are relevant? I am talking about a particular kind of violent assault by a dangerous individual who is clearly intent on hurting you and has the capability of doing so, to a potentially deadly degree, if you do not defend yourself. The relatively few violent altercations I've been in in my adult life have been exactly of this kind. And there are plenty of people who have had the same kind of experience.
I am new to this forum so am unaware of your individual personalities and experiences however I encourage you to open your combative eyes and see the world for what it is.
I have, as I say, been seeing the world for what it is for more than six decades...
There are shades of grey in all things, this is not a black and white world with goodies and baddies. I am as aware and capable as anyone of the kill or be killed mentality, however such mindset is best reserved for the battlefield or life and death struggle, there needs to be appropriate levels of engagement for all combative encounters. That is if one intends to act within the bounds of the law.
... and one of the things I have seen in the world as it is is that people are severely crippled or killed in street attacks by remorseless attackers who are either attempting to rob them, or gratifying the kind of sadistic impulse we find in bullies of every kind. I've seen it happen on NYC streets, and on the strees of Columbus, Ohio. And no, there are things in which there are
no shades of grey. An attempt on your life by someone well-equipped to take it has a very simple two-valued logic: you survive or you die. A serious attack on you, even without weapons, can get you killed, and therefore has to be treated as an attempt on your life. Equivocate in your own defense and you will very likely be fatally damaged or incapacitated, possibly permanently. If I have to defend myself against that kind of attack, then I will take my chances with the law, and trust my own judgment.
To clarify, I am actually saying that kill or be killed type thinking does constitute self defense, however the original question posted by Sanchin-J was one of ethics not self defense.
I find this a thoroughly false dichotomy. No system of ethics which does not recognize the primacy of survival in the face of unsought violence has the slightest claim on our consciences. And if the level of violence is, as you put it, 'kill or be killed', and thus self-defense, then if follows from what I just said that any ethical system which does not recognize the primacy of self-defense has any claim on our consciences. Your cases of less-than-deadly levels of attack are relevant here only to the extent that if someone responds with deadly force to a nonlethal level of threat, then there is a serious ethical issue that person's conduct raises, precisely because it is not clear that what they have done is confined to defense. And as I was very explicit about in the section of my post to you that I quoted, I was referring spcifically to lethal levels of threat—which the ordinary street attack must be presumed to be.
However I also raise the idea that threat assessment needs to be realistic and in combat, as in all things there are grey areas.
Again—I cannot imagine that anyone would take a physically aggressive action by an Alzheimer's patient, or an attempt to push you out of the way by a falling-down-drunk cousin at a family event which went sideways, to be
combat; I take 'combat' to involve a serious level of assault. But once we actually
get to that level, I do not believe things are at all grey. Someone who strikes at me in a way that makes it clear that they are willing, and able, to hurt me badly if they connect has, in my view, removed all greyness from the situation. Again, I am not saying that you are justified in damaging your attacker once he's clearly no longer a danger; but your first imperative has to be to ensure your own safety. And there are many situations of the kind I was referring to where, with the best will in the world, you have no choice but to damage your attacker severely enough to ensure that he is no longer capable of threatening you physically.
. Seriously, and I mean no offense here, if you are an instructor who claims to be teaching self-defense, you need to have this sorted out. You need to understand the legalities of the issue based on the laws in your area (like I said, go talk to a lawyer). And you need to work on your understanding of what constitutes self-defense in the context of a criminal assault. Instructors who have an unrealistic, improper, or incomplete view of the situation end up doing their students a disservice because they end up teaching material that may not be appropriate for the situation. I believe that the idea of "unreasonable force" can apply to using too little force just as much as it applies to using too much force. 
