In case of a violent attack, J. A. Drew Diaz says that it’s time to embrace the corollary to the Boy Scout motto: be prepared to fight back.
Hmmmmm.
Police Now Advise Assertive Response to Mass Attacks
Of course they do …
Gallant thinks it is because the authorities realize that they can’t be everywhere at once, that there were cops on site when Columbine, Tucson and Fort Hood started, that if the rule of law worked, the judge you saw in traffic court wouldn’t have a carry permit.
Goofus thinks it is because most cops count on being struck by lightning before they have to draw their weapons on duty and that they are more interested in their vinyl siding business, putting in their twenty year and retiring with medical, than they are in shooting it out with some kook.
So maybe you better remember the Boy Scout motto: “Be Prepared.” Oh, and good luck: if you wait for a killing to become mass to consider an action plan, to contemplate the morality of braining someone with a ketchup bottle, then you are too late. If you act on your suspicions, you are the NYCPD doing stop and frisk, or George Zimmerman, and are probably at fault.
Do it in school and chances are you’ll be disciplined, if not suspended.
Do it on the street and chances are you’ll be sued.
Do it in the subway and you’re a racist who can’t find any peace, like Bernie Goetz.
Do it at all and you risk getting branded as some kind of toxic-macho aggressor.
Be a toxic-macho fool who can’t mind his own business, and you shoot Trayvon Martin.
My first real boss was retired from the Coast Guard. “We get paid to go out, not to come home,” he’d say. He taught me that you move in a crisis: either towards it or away. Me, I suggest moving away from gunshots. He would have laughed at the Steubenville first responders who are all stressed out at having to see bodies. Well, too bad for you, sometimes it isn’t all swagger and lights and sirens, I hate it, too when I have to do my job.
The dirty little secret of the Columbine shooting is that the police were behind fire trucks and ambulances waiting for some other guy to go in and do the job for which they were hired, while children and teachers bled out. Hillary Clinton was visiting my children’s elementary school while Columbine went down and the school went into complete lockdown while waiting for Marine One to whisk her away. Shortly afterwards, I sat my kids down and explained they were under no circumstances ever to stick around for another lockdown: break a window, lay coats or books over the glass, and head for the hills. Of course the Jefferson County cops might very well have shot a few students fleeing the school, they were so dysfunctional that day.
The lesson of 9/11 might be that only 25% of Americans could get organized to fight back. Todd Beamer was a rugby player, so by definition he made football players look like wimps and practiced some kind of proto-heteronormative masculinity by playing a contact sport. But he was able to use his faith and his team working experience to quite possibly have saved other lives on the ground.
Colin Ferguson reloaded magazines, he didn’t swap out mags, but pushed bullets into the magazine for his pistol while the other riders on the LIRR waited for the authorities to do something. Nobody took a ball point and stabbed him in the eye, ear or neck. Eventually, passengers did rush and overcome Ferguson when the police didn’t show up. But bodies did stack up waiting for the authorities. The night of this shooting my phone rang several times and the callers said “Good, you’re home.” I had no idea that this had occurred on my train line.
So what is a Good Man of vetted liberal credentials to do, a guy who agrees that post Steubenville and Torrington, football should be outlawed? How can a man who believes that physical aggression is an extension of toxic-masculinity pick up the slack while waiting for the cops? It’s tough to toe the line and admire Anonymous taking things into their own hands, unless you can include physical action in your solution tree to physical confrontation. It is all a slippery slope. Maybe you can see yourself speaking up to a line cutter or grabbing a fire extinguisher if you see a trash can ablaze. Now try and grasp the basic theory behind gun ownership: “when seconds count and the police are minutes away, what are you going to do?” You are stuck with the logical progression of the fight back argument. And who wants to show up at a gunfight with an umbrella?
The problem is that most of us just don’t know how to fight. In a world of zero tolerance for aggression, the will and ability to fight back is stripped: we’ve been programming boys away from it for the last 40 years. This is the Good Men Project here, so let’s talk about men and boys. If every push or poke is treated as bullying, how one does develop the skill set of fighting back? You don’t learn to street fight in the dojo. You may learn some techniques that might work in a fight in a sterile situation. But until you’ve busted a guy in the mouth while he is still talking smack, you haven’t fought. Until you’ve had your eye opened and your knuckles busted, you don’t know what you can do and more importantly, how you can carry on hurt.
If you want to learn to react instantaneously to violence, the next best thing to schoolyard fighting is competitive contact sports: that would be sports with winners and losers, bumps and bruises. I’ll go on record now in saying that I’d rather be kicked by a Tiger Schulmann disciple than booted by a soccer player.
The rest of the world isn’t worried about participation ribbons. A few million kids got out of bed this morning and hoped that someday they will kill a kid just like yours. Children the age of your little darling woke up in Asia, Africa and South America grabbed their Kalashnikov and went to work. A few thousand troubled souls awoke this morning, right here in the US, planning on raping your child or shooting up a public place.
Years ago I had to face that I am not brave enough to be a pacifist. A few years later I came to understand what I disliked about my mother’s favorite novelist, Pat Conroy. I disagreed with his message that it is better to live on your knees than to die on your feet. The only promise she ever asked of me was not to be a cop or a fireman, as she was convinced I would run into a burning building. The piece I did, Ten Things I’ve Learned About Walking into a Bucket of Blood in a Strange Town (and Getting Out Alive) was interpreted by some as funny—it was a serious piece told in a jocular manner. Threat assessment is a good habit every day and every place.
Dan McKown was prepared at the Tacoma Mall and is in a wheelchair because he fought fair, because he didn’t practice total war. As Sean Connery asked Kevin Costner in “The Untouchables” “What are your prepared to do?”
Read more:
Hyperarousal: Beyond Fight or Flight
The Importance of Pecking Orders to Boys
Image credit: USAG-Humphreys/Flickr
I’m a martial artist and I’ve actually been in real street fights, and I have to say that this article contains some of the most moronic advice about self-defense that I’ve ever seen. You win fights with well-practiced technique and strategy, not by having a lot of schoolyard-style animus or a capacity to endure pain. If you come at somebody who’s a trained fighter with that macho grab-ass stuff, you’re going to end up with a concussion or a broken arm or leg, or worse. As for the bit about punching a trash-talker in the mouth, the last thing you… Read more »
Thx Patrick – I have about 30 yrs in various dojos & gyms, sparring & grappling as opposed to learning Katas and I hate the term “martial artist” almost as much as I do “practice yoga”… And have never been hurt by a Kung foo kick, I kind of think that MMA has answered the question of whether fights are decided on the deck.
I’ve been in street, bar and workplace fights and all my planning happened long before fists were thrown- hence bust him in the mouth while he’s still flapping his gums.
30 years of experience, huh? And that’s your best tactic–try to sucker-punch the other guy? Since you know so much about grappling, you must know how easy it is to put an attacker on the ground who busts in and throws a long, high punch like that–it’s like wearing a sign on your chest that says “choke me out.” Maybe you can star in one of the Gracies’ BJJ demonstration videos sometime.
Of course, if the guy you attack has done some muay thai or taekwondo, he’ll probably just front-kick you in the ribs. That’s the kick that Anderson Silva famously used to knock out Vitor Belfort in a UFC match. Silva, btw, trained in both of those traditional martial arts, in addition to boxing and BJJ. Of course, you think that MMA has proven that martial arts are worthless, so maybe you should write to Silva and tell him to start over. Maybe you could give him a few pointers, even.
Listening to the radio on the way home this evening- it appears that the neighbors had called the cops twice in the past few years on the house where the 3 Ohio women were imprisoned.
http://www.newser.com/story/167528/what-if-kidnappers-neighbor-had-just-walked-away.html
And a gun is always handy in a knife fight….
GUN CARRYING MAN ENDS STABBING SPREE AT SALT LAKE GROCERY STORE
http://www.abc4.com/content/about_4/bios/story/conceal-and-carry-stabbing-salt-lake-city-smiths/NDNrL1gxeE2rsRhrWCM9dQ.cspx
Ultimately the end of the Boston situation came about due to a civilian.
“Then one man emerged from his home and noticed blood on the pleasure boat parked in his backyard. He lifted the tarp and found the wounded 19-year-old college student known the world over as Suspect No. 2.”
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/04/20/us/ap-us-boston-marathon-explosions.html?ref=us
Drew. Can’t take credit for the felicitous phrasing. But it’s not merely esoteric. It’s icky. The Right Sort of People would not want to be thought capable in this area.
Foppish & trendy incompetency- effete ineffectiveness, me I’m embarrassed about not having a surgical stapler in the junk drawer….
But I guess there is a whole subculture where you get it wet by never having been in a fight, fired a gun or had harsh words with a line cutter.
A couple of guys bragged about it following Zach Weinberg’s piece…
https://goodmenproject.com/the-good-life/seven-things-i-learned-being-a-plumbers-son/
Drew.
I was referring to the passivity of the passengers during the reload process, not Ferguson’s reloading technique.
It was said that one of the kids who took down Kip Kinkel–while with at least one round in him already–jumped when he heard the pin come down on an empty chamber. Real hero. Also said that, once the MSM found out he knew the diff because he was a member of NRA, they dropped him like a hot rock. I can’t corroborate that, but I’d take it on faith in a New York minute.
I understood @Richard, what you were getting at, and forget that it is another, (was it you who coined the phrase) , esoteric redneck art– for the uninitiated let’s explain….
With no bullets in the magazine, mag in the pistol or even a single feed in the chamber– Ferguson’s weapon was a rock there for a while….Which might have been a good time to go after him..
I could definitely buy the dropping the NRA kid from the talking head rotation story…
Drew.
Ref the LIRR shooter’s reloading technique: Tell me it’s not so. What the fucking fuck?
Perhaps it’s a result of living in a nannied subsociety–which is getting worse–where initiative is actively sanctioned.
The kids at Thurston HS did better than that, one of them shot. See Kip Kinkel.
@Richard- indeed it was reportd in the trial coverage. But then there is an increasing disconnect from the mechanical aspects of our existence, food comes from the foodation corporation I guess. A set screw is choreographed sex… We are watching shows on history and tlc about people who shoot as if they were a formerly unknown tribe of head hunters in the wildes of Borneo. Count the shots in an old western, 5 or 6 from those old revolvers- depending on Tex’s safety strategy and then it’s time for a reload… Bruce Willis in Russia in his latest movie seems… Read more »
@ Josh- Yes I don’t think we can be expected to act like the police; I can’t see standing at a blind corner & popping people for no seat belts or expired registrations- or cribbing up and studying for a law school exam while at work.
And good gracious walking and texting is an invitation to getting taken off…
Of course I also won’t carry an open umbrella or an attaché case, I use a back pack, because I want my hands free.
It isn’t a secret what the cops did at Columbine, that was just the procedures then and they followed them. They were the wrong procedures for something we had never really seen before so they, and many other police depts, changed the procedures to act and not wait for backup. Procedures are there for a reason for law enforcement. The rest of us in society have just become too comfortable or preoccupied in our lives to notice anything else around us. We can’t see past our tablets and cell phones enough to notice the suspicious person next to us. We… Read more »
I’m trying to keep an open mind about this, but the devil is in the details. I’m going to assume that I could just be ignorant or misinterpreting things, so let me ask for some more concrete information. Explain to me the rules of engagement that you recommend in order to be prepared to stop a mass shooting. If the cops have ineffective rules of engagement or are overly cautious, then lay out for me what the rules should be for a civilian. Walk me through a scenario where I as an armed citizen am trying to prevent a train… Read more »
@wellokaythen– yeah it is a big old skull f*** isn’t it? I’m not a lawyer, clergyman or ethicist.
Next try and get your head around the decision tree of shooting down a passenger jet that may or may not be hijacked….
In my case I’ve made a couple easy choices; hip checked a purse snatcher into a wall and broke up a store robbery where there was no ambiguity and then there is my every day “polite police” stuff as I’ve written about here.
So, just to make sure I understand, your easy choices were in situations where you didn’t use a gun?
No one was shot.
Especially in the hip check.
This came to my attention last night- that most maligned male the Football Player comes to the rescue.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/04/10/176768652/students-stopped-stabbing-suspect-at-texas-college?utm_source=NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130410