With 2015 well underway, and those flimsy New Year’s resolutions underwater, here’s an easy project. Tune up your mindset and increase your awareness. And without breaking a sweat you will increase your personal safety.
A great book to read about this is Jeff Cooper’s Principles of Personal Defense. First published in 1972, and reprinted a couple times since then, it is a self defense classic. In short, he explains seven qualities that you should cultivate:
- Alertness: Trouble can appear at any time — know what is behind you, and pay attention to anything out of place.
- Decisiveness: Decide instantly upon a proper course of action to be carried out immediately, without hesitation.
- Aggressiveness: Whether it is a counter-attack or a pre-emptive attack, give it everything you’ve got.
- Speed: Be fast, not fair — end it before the loser fully realizes he has bitten off more than he can chew.
- Coolness: If you know that you can keep your head, that you must keep your head, you probably will keep your head.
- Ruthlessness: Anyone who willfully and maliciously attacks another without sufficient cause deserves no consideration from you–don’t hold back.
- Surprise: The criminal does not expect his prey to fight back — surprise him!
Track down a copy and read it. In the meantime, here is an exercise Cooper mentions in the book to increase your awareness:
“Make it a game. Keep a chart. Every time anyone is able to approach you from behind without your knowledge, mark down an X. Every time you see anyone you know before he sees you, mark down an O. Keep the Os ahead of the Xs. A month with no Xs establishes the formation of correct habits.”
Try it for a week or a month and see how you do. Increase your awareness and you never know what you might notice.
Stay safe and we’ll see you in class.
By Alan Hines
Have you been keeping up with our new Tactical Moment video series? Here’s the 5th episode where John shows the value of movement. We’ll be posting the other previous 4 episodes here soon, or you can visit our YouTube channel to catch them. Be sure to share the video on your Facebook page if you like it!
Tactical Moment 5
After reading some of the discussion about having some kind of CCW Identifier (badge, sash, or drop down panel) I have to conclude that this an answer looking for a question.
The theory is that if there was some kind of incident, an armed citizen would display this credential and be less likely to be shot by responding police officers. The bad guys can’t get these? Who says the police are going trust people wearing them? If you are at ground zero of an incident and holding a gun you just have to hope that the police are observing your actions rather than simply seeing you as a “threat target.”
If you are standing there with a gun you are forcing the police to deal with you immediately and I would rather have the police deal with me after they have a handle on the situation. Once the police arrive on scene I want to be holstered and I want to have moved to a location where the police can deal with me on their terms (meeting the police in the parking lot would probably be best), hands up and identification out.
Self defense isn’t about punishing criminals, our system is not set up that way. It’s nice if burglars get arrested, tried, and punished but that has very little to do with self defense. The goal of the defender is to protect themselves and their families from harm. That could have been accomplished by ordering the intruder to get out of the house (at gun point) and letting him do so. Click here to read more »
There is some discussion over at Sharp as a Marble regarding the link I posted here regarding aggressors claiming self defense.
I think Rob is correct in pointing this out:
… ‘proportionate response’ doesn’t translate into the real world easily …
Using the least amount of force is generally the most legally defensible option. If an aggressor is trying to flee and you are preventing them from doing so it is pretty hard to argue that you couldn’t escape. Self defense isn’t designed to be ‘punishment’, we have courts for that. We must fight until we are sure that we can escape, and then we should do so.
Tactically speaking, if you are spending time on a neutralized threat you are creating an opportunity for another assailant. You have already confirmed that you are in the location where fights happen and we don’t know if the first assailant brought along a (tougher) friend. His friend might have been staying out of it because he didn’t want to get hurt, didn’t want to get in trouble, or thought the first guy could handle it. If the defender starts winning, that equation can change.