I know I should be much more pleasant and professional with these articles, but I keep finding it harder and harder to act that way. When you have prominent members of the training community screeching over and over again how entangled fights with weapons never happens to private citizens (to the point one of them even specifically said after watching thousands of videos he’s NEVER seen them go to the ground!), it becomes very difficult to play nice. When I keep reading/hearing/seeing this kind of either willful ignorance or willful lying, I admit to my blood pressure spiking.
And this has nothing to do with any personal offense. I quite literally don’t care when people say the material I teach is not applicable. It is something I have dealt with publicly for 25 years. When you have well known instructors actually go behind your back to spread lies about you, you learn to just shrug it off and keep going.
What does get me angry is that by saying these insipid and provably wrong statements like “grappling does not happen in the street”, these “experts” are setting the stage for good people to get hurt or even killed. THAT bothers me, and yes, I can get overly worked up about it.
This was brought home to me a couple of days ago when I was sent the following video. A perfect illustration of if you don’t know and have not trained for this scenario, the only way you will survive is entirely based on whether the bad guy kills you or not. It is totally at his discretion, not yours.
Watch the video and take note of the following points:
- Note how the victim had no idea of what to do to stop the attack. He held on to the attacker’s body all while the bad guy was hammering him on the head with the pistol. THIS is why I get so angry at the idiots who insist these kinds of scenarios never happen. Anyone with just a small bit of grappling understands how to look to control the arms of the other person. Not just conceptually, but with proven and easily applied high percentage techniques. Even if the attacker started the fight with surprise, the good guy had plenty of time to control the attacking arms. It is not hard, it just takes a bit of knowledge first, and then a bit of practice.
- Look at how the attacker proceeded with his assault. He had a gun, and he still closed the distance to grab onto the victim. This is the common action. Even with a gun, the bad guy has to get close enough to the victim to get the profitable thing the bad guy wants. How realistic is that he will stand 20 yards away, wave a gun, and say “drop your wallet there”?
- Where did the good guy end up? ON THE GROUND! Did he want to be there? Almost certainly not. Did the bad guy intend to put him on the ground? Most likely not, but he does not care. As long as he can maintain control and get what he wants, where the situation goes is not relevant to him. He does not need to be a trained grappler; he just needs to apply force against someone who has zero idea of how to counter it. Why did it go to the ground? Because the victim’s head was forced back past his tailbone, which is the main reason we fall down in these circumstances. Regardless of how you desire the fight to go, it easily will go to the ground if you don’t have the slightest idea of how to prevent it. Just having the idea in your head to “not go to the ground” (because some moronic internet expert said it is a bad idea) has nothing to do with actually being successful at not going there. You need a physical action to stop that, not well wishes.
- For those non-grapplers who advocate foul tactics as a way to combat grapplers, please point out where the victim could have employed any of them? Not standing because the bad guy was completely free to pistol whip the good guy. And once on the ground, the bad guy had control not only of his arms, but of the space and position as well. Even if the victim had any notion of eye gouging, biting, hair pulling, etc. it was irrelevant because he had no opportunity to utilize them. A basic tenet of Brazilian Jiu-jitsu is the position trumps submission, and this is a perfect encapsulation of that. The only way for the good guy to have won this scenario was to have an actual grappling skill set. Period.
I know this might come across heavy handed in my attitude, but trying to help good people be safer is important to me, and when “experts” give stupid advice that contributes to them possibly getting hurt or killed, I get angry. And for that, I will not apologize for my advocacy.
https://www.audacy.com/1010wins/news/local/video-man-pistol-whipped-robbed-on-queens-street