Sunday, December 02, 2007

An Old Issue

Working on a presentation for a Writer's Conference and simultaneously teaching a class, I am hit once again with how absurdly ignorant people can be.  It's not their fault, but there is something about the subject of violence where people both completely miss the reality and CAN NOT accept that they are off.

The section of the presentation (on PowerPoint) opens with one of my range qualifications targets- not bad, if I say so myself, but I need to lock my left arm out more- and compares it with a real shooting.  They are nothing alike.  To boil it down a lot: 50% misses at 5-10 feet; only two hits anywhere near center mass and the fatal shot wasn't one of those.

It makes me tired, sometimes.  I showed the data to this kid and he immediately explained why it would never happen to him, why it makes no sense, that missing at that range would be harder than hitting... all those things.  Same as the people who watch the video of Kyle Dinkheller's murder and can't figure out why he didn't do what they are so sure in the comfort of the classroom they would have done.

They try their slick knife defenses against the Manson Drill and they fail utterly, but I know they go back to their dojos and teach what they always taught.  It makes me tired.  We want to believe that we will "fight the way we trained" and it is sort of true.  Sometimes.  Almost never the first time (unless it was a conditioned reflex and lasted a fraction of a second) and when it gets ugly it is this weird chaos and stew of stress hormones and instinct and some training... but the best officer involved shooting stats I've found can't find a good statistical relation between officer's performance in a real gunfight and their range scores.

But I know from experience that if you can survive some critical number of fights (10? 20?) you can use your training, and you can function in almost inhumanly efficient ways.  And I also know that once you achieve this level, something very slight can change and you are at ground zero again.

Here's an analogy that has been bouncing around in my head- when a martial artist plans what will work in an assault, he is about as accurate as a farmer trying to use his knowledge of crop rotation to build a boat.  The difference is that vast.

No one wants to hear that.

5 comments:

Kai Jones said...

This is generalizable. *Many* things don't turn out the way you'd expect, no matter what experiences you have.

This is why I focus on recovery and coping skills. Preparation is important but won't take you all the way--the point is to survive, not win. Survival in the long term has to include ...meh, my focus is on a lot more than a fight.

The piece I want to learn from you is breaking the frozen loop. I like your idea of attacking as soon as you recognize it.

Steve Perry said...

No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Old saw, but still valid.

And yet, wars -- small and large -- are apt to be started and fought as they have been since the first men stood upright.

How does one train for when it happens? Experience is a great teacher, but as you point out, because you survive one or ten times doesn't mean that the next time something won't reset your counter to zero.

Can nothing be done, save to fight for real and get lucky enough to get through? I get the sense from some of what you've posted that anything short of actual experience has been diluted too much to be of real use.

If that's the case, then nobody can teach anybody else anything in this arena. Obviously you don't believe this, or you wouldn't be trying to help people learn.

I've always believed that the fight is not under the glove, it's under the hat, and that attitude is more important than just skill. But that attitude with skill beats attitude alone.

How do you get there from there ... ?

Anonymous said...

This conversation makes me think about NLP and the "learning to bake a cake" analogy. If you analyze the behavior of a great cook closely enough (including asking questions and learning what's going on in his head while he's working), it's possible to distill the essence of what he's doing into steps you can teach someone who has never set foot in a kitchen before how to bake a great cake. Which works great for baking cakes.

Not so much for dealing with the endless variations on violence. Especially since even an experienced violent-ista can, as Rory says, run into something slightly outside his experience and find himself just as lost as anyone else.

So do you teach people the absolutely basics (how to recognize a freeze and break it, say) and only then move on to techniques? Can you? Or is that too subject to the same limitation--a slightly different situation can leave you without even _that_?

This all makes it seem that "the only winning move is not to play" is the best choice. But what do you teach someone for the time when you don't get that choice?

Mark

Steve Perry said...

"They try their slick knife defenses against the Manson Drill and they fail utterly, but I know they go back to their dojos and teach what they always taught."

Maybe not always. A few years back, one of the silat students, called him Tim, who was ranked in another art and teaching, fourth or fifth dan, told us a story: One of the teachers in his style was one one night with some friends. They ran into trouble, and to make a long sad story short, he was stabbed to death as he jumped into a car to get away.

This hit TIm hard because he knew the dead guy had the same knife defenses he had. So he went back to his school, grabbed another teacher, and said, "Okay, look, no bullshit. Take the practice knife and come at me full speed, nothing pre-arranged, let's see what happens."

What happened was, none of his defenses worked.

So Tim stopped teaching knife defense, and told his students why. If you think they will work and they don't, that gives you a confidence you don't want to trust.

Steve Perry said...

"Here's an analogy that has been bouncing around in my head- when a martial artist plans what will work in an assault, he is about as accurate as a farmer trying to use his knowledge of crop rotation to build a boat. The difference is that vast.

No one wants to hear that ..."

I agree with this; at the same time, not all martial arts plan in detail for assaults in advance -- leastways to the detailed specifics.

Sure, you will in most styles practice defenses for punches or kicks or whatever, but for us, this is generalized -- here's a saw, here's a hatchet, an axe, a spike, and we won't know what we are going to need until the tree starts to fall on us.

For us, it's more about the space we occupy than the specific weapons we will use. I don't know what I am going to do, but that I am going to do something, and if I learn to move in balance and with proper intent, it will more likely be something useful than if I didn't train.