Weapons Defense

[Gaidheal]

The canonical range is "21 feet". Inside 21 feet if you have a holstered gun and the other guy goes for you, trying to pull your gun is suicide if he can and will kill you.

Balicki replied, "The guy had a knife! What was I supposed to do???"

Balicki respects blades.

Only people who do not are those who have never faced them or know nothing about self-defence. The former, if they do know about SD are heading for a life-changing and possibly life-ending experience. The latter can be forgiven when you consider TV portrayal of MA, guns, etc.

John

 

[Tydive]

Notice how nobody is afraid of the stick, but it is the most effective weapon against a knife (at close range).

 

[Gaidheal]

I am afraid of nothing. Honestly. But I already stated that I would not choose to be in melée range when someone has a melée weapon (and presumably I don't).

John

 

[Nightwish]

I am afraid of nothing. Honestly. But I already stated that I would not choose to be in melée range when someone has a melée weapon (and presumably I don't).

John

Everyones afraid of something John, don't be ridiculus. Its ok to be afraid, having fear is fine...you just have to know fear, and how to harness it, to make it usefull towards you and not against you. I've always found with people that say "i'm afraid of nothing" are people who are overconfident. I'm not saying this is true with you, but please think hard about that issue.

I guarantee you if you were out with yuor mom/dad/best friend, whatever, and a guy came walking along and all of a sudden pulled a gun on your relative/parent/friend, you would be scared for there lives HOPEFULLY.

If someone put a REAL gun to your head with LIVE ammo with the intent to kill you would be afraid, trust me man.

And how can you not choose to be in melee range? your opponent will choose wether or not you'll be in melee range by encroaching you somehow. Now i'm not an advocate of letting people approach me on the street, most of the time, they just stay away, but maybe your on a crowded bus/subway. Maybe your in a mall where there are people all around you. You can't profile 500 people at one time in that big of an open space....the variables are infinite.

Some people believe distance creates safety, i STRONGLY disagree, and think distance creates opportunity. If the bad guy gets away from you and makes distance he has time to deploy weapons and you may not be able to get to him befroe he starts gutting you like a cat fish, or shooting you. However if you keep him close range by ripping his neck apart or whatever, and he goes for a weapon, you can jam his hand before he draws, and thus you do not need to deal with whatver it was he wanted to kill you with in the worst of terms...the weapon may be still there, but you jammed his hand and he can't deploy it, and while he's trying to deploy it, you are hurting him very severley.

 

[Gaidheal]

Apologies for the delay, been at parents' place for a while (father is away working, mother wanted to visit her sister in IoM).

I'm not afraid of anything, sorry if that bothers you. Thought about it long and hard quite a lot at various times for several reasons. It may be that my faith (or lack thereof, as the case is) has something to do with this, it might be irrelevant - I am still not sure. In any case, it's not because I am convinced I would always prevail, it's because it actually makes no real difference whether I do or do not. I will either succeed or I will fail; if I fail I will not be around to worry about it, in a life/death choice. If I succeed, great. In neither case does fear aid me, it's generally considered to be a hindrance and I am not worried about the outcome in a way that will cause me to feel fear. Excitement if the stakes are high, but not fear.

If someone put a gun to my head, I'd seriously injure, if not outright kill them. Assuming I was aware that they had just done so. The issue of why they stand a good chance of losing that particular scenario has been done to death elsewhere, but in short, they are too close to keep the weapon on target and there are literally hundreds of ways for me to injure and ultimately kill them whilst immediately making myself a very difficult or impossible to hit target.

If you have good situational awareness you always make most of the choices regarding your personal safety not least of which is knowing when you are somewhere it is not good to be right at that moment. There are plenty of contrived scenarios where you people are asked "what would you do if...?" but in point of fact, if someone tries to attack you with a melee weapon, improvised or otherwise, you have usually had ample warning of their intention and therefore can choose the range or more sensibly choose to get the hell away without even fighting, unless that really is impossible. If it is crowded, by the way, they will not be using melee weapons - it requires a lot of space to swing and more than many people realize to thrust with all but the smallest knife. For the same reason, high spinning kicks are not used much even by people who are confident enough to try it - there is rarely the space. Indeed, when most people have to get "down and dirty" (and be honest; most never will have to) it is going to be very close range, involve a lot of punching, elbowing and employing of any improvised weapon that can be used well at point blank range (ashtrays are good, glasses can be). You don't need to profile 500 people because at most 20 are close enough to see you, much less attempt to attack you and people are rarely attacked in large public crowds anyway for obvious reasons. This is especially true of any scenario involving a weapon.

Distance does creat safety. Unless s/he uses a ranged (read: gun, in most cases) weapon, your phantom attacker has to get within at least 12 more likely 6 feet of you to have any hope of attacking you with even a large melee weapon, such as a pool cue, baseball bat, etc, without you or someone else being very much aware and able to simply run away, pull a gun, or whatever your choice is to be. Outside of guerrilla warfare people are not ambushed with "deployed" weapons. If you have distance and he is not firing/throwing something at you, the nastiest weapon he has is name-calling.

John

 

[Mark Weiser]

I have a healthy respect for knifes due to the fact they are more versatile in attacks than a gun which attacks linear. A firearm once redirected can only fire in one direction but a knife in the hands of a trained person is more lethal.

 

[Gaidheal]

Good point.. the right knife in the right hands will always have an angle of attack. Even in inexperienced hands, knives are difficult and very dangerous to attempt to redirect or disarm; at least you can just grab a stick/bat/baton and hold on or try to. This is suicide with a knife. Of course any (that I can think of) melee weapon has the same advantage in terms of angles, but those which rely on concussion rather than penetration are generally a lot easier and safer to face in all regards. I can think of some useful stick disarms that I would consider employing if someone attempted to strike me by swinging such a weapon. I would almost never attempt any disarm technique (unarmed assumed) on a knife wielder - they are extremely unlikely to succeed, despite the hype and involve (usually) you getting dangerously close to the knife and its wielder. I would not choose, as a rule, to close distance on someone with a knife. I would often do so for specific techniques to deal with bats/batons/clubs/etc - e.g. a very effective technique, space permitting, for someone swinging a bat is to close with it, grab and at the same time move in the same direction as the bat whilst pivoting so as to pull the weapon along the axis of the user's arm. Performed correctly (easy enough with some careful practice, bringing the speed up until it is a full speed technique) this should avoid you taking much if any of the impact at all, as well as redirecting it in such a way as to practically guarantee stripping it from the attacker's hand. At the very least it will be a less than optimal hit and s/he should be off-balance, especially if they over committed to the swing. I think you would have to be mad to attempt anything similar with a knife.

John

 

[Adept]

If he has the gun out at 10 feet you can be next to him in the time it takes him to decide he is going to fire... and obviously, you jink. Worse with shotgun if it has shot rather than shell because of the area spread, but actually at that range, the nearer you get the more accurate he has to be for a "winging" because the pattern spread is wider the further from the muzzle it gets. Inside about 3 metres you can close the distance in under, literally, a couple of seconds. I.e. 2s

[snip]

John

P.S. I am not claiming 'Super Powers': if you don't understand why it is easy for someone, especially someone well-trained, to deal with fire-arms at close range, as compared to dealing with melée, please go and study or just ignore.

A simple analogy - If you are fast enough to see someone throw a punch, and move to react, then you can bet your bottom dollar that a reactive trigger squeeze will leave you bleeding and in shock on the ground.

Try a simple exercise. Stand 10 feet from your training partner. Have him hold a rock in his hand, by his side. Tell him to drop the rock as soon as you start moving towards him. If you can catch the rock before it hits the ground, you might be able to beat the reaction time of a man with a shotgun. If not, your best bet might be to just do what he says.

Even if you think you might be able to beat him, the risk is simply too great. If you miscalulate by even a tenth of a second, you lose big.