This post, written by a LEO and trainer of other police officers, is one of the best I've read on knife defenses. Read it, and learn.
A while back in our silat class, we spent the better part of a year training basic knife stuff, we focused on it every session. (This on top of doing it now and again for years before that, and the fact that pentjak silat is a blade-based art.)
At the end of that intensive training we were all pretty much convinced of one thing: If you go barehanded against a guy with a blade who knows squat about how to use it, you are in deep shit. You will get cut, and only the questions are, how bad, how many times, and where. Even having a knife of your own and some expertise in its use is no guarantee you won't spend some quality time in the ER being stitched up. In fact, that is the choice you might have to make -- as opposed to being entubed in the ICU, or pushing up the daisies at Forest Lawn.
The old Javanese proverb: In a knife fight, the loser is ashes -- but the winner is charcoal ...
6 comments:
Funny seeing that image ... Been a decade or so since I last saw Butch and Sundance ... Until Sunday night, when I got a high def copy. Just beautiful ... I started the movie, clicked ahead on the timeline ... and Butch kicked Lurch I'm the nuts.
All 3 of my sons said, "Oh!"
If you didn't keep talking about how to kill people on this blog, maybe fewer people would have shaky hands, posting ... Like anon a few posts back, his "I didn't want to bother you" translates to "Please don't kill me."
Just trying to help ...
Great movie. Not really a western so much, but full of moments. Harvey getting it in the nuts. The old guy giving them up to the posse. Butch and Sundance jumping off the cliff into the water. And Sundance's line, "Can I move?" just before he shoots that plug of tobacco, pops it up off the ground, and then hits it in the air. "I'm better when I move?"
Like Sorkin's dialog on Sports NIght, West Wing, and Studio 60. People didn't really talk that way, but they should have ...
As to the killing stuff, I'm just trying to help keep my readers alive by warning them of the dangers out there.
I can't afford to lose any of them, and if they watch moves and the tube and think they are going to take a knife away from the bad guys and give them an enema with it, they could die real quick ...
Had an LEO colleague of mine have to shoot a mentally disturbed sixty year old grandmother one afternoon when she charged him with a LARGE butcher knife and a freaking meat cleaver! Even her husband initially said he didn't blame the officer, he said that she had stabbed him several times in the past. Even so, you should have heard the shit storm from the public.
Guess the critics had never been seriously cut.....
Dave
Back in the day, I had an unarmed combat instructor who said much the same thing: "If you're unarmed and facing a guy with a knife, even if he knows how to use it just a little bit, your best choice is to run away." Good advice then, and good advice now, I'd say. And in the LEO versus cleaver-armed granny situation, I'd say the LEO made a wise decision.
See a person coming at you with a big wicked knife and their intent appears to be to carve you like a Thanksgiving turkey, make like Monty Python's knights and "Run away!"
If you can't, because your back is to the wall, find a weapon -- a chair a table, anything longer than it is wide, and use it to clear a path.
If you are an LEO and you cannot allow the perp get past you to the civilians, then the Mozambique Drill is probably your best bet -- assuming you already have your piece cleared. If your hardware is in the holster and the knifer is within seven meters, don't bother trying to draw unless you give him (or her) something else to think about.
The knifer will get to you before you can get your sidearm online, unless you are a quick-draw champion having a good day. (And we already know you aren't having a good day or this wouldn't be on your plate ...)
Apparently I did the right thing in my one knife fight. I rammed the guy trying to rob me with my shopping cart -- longer than it is wide -- and then I ran away, pushing my shopping cart furiously.
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