Virginia tech massacre. Greyhound bus decapitation. Now, the Christmas Eve killer in Covina. I’m almost traumatized listening to the news these days. It seems like people are just spinning out of control, a total inability to deal with adversity combined with easy access to weapons. It seems every day some bozo tries to take out his frustrations on the random public. Worse, in two out of three of these cases, there was absolutely nothing in the perp’s personality to indicate a propensity for slaughter. No warning at all. Very scary. Will my seatmate or co-worker blow up next?
OK, since it seems we can’t prevent every situation by prior application of counseling and other supportive social services, the question is: Could these guys have been stopped??? Could the application of some self-defense or martial arts knowledge on the part of the intended victims have stopped the situation a little faster? If so, what could have been done in each of the three scenarios? Which discipline could have been used? I have heard that classical martial arts are impractical for real fighting. I hope not, but I’ve heard that.
Here’s an example: Last May, a divorced and court-order restrained asshole walked into a Catholic Church fair in the San Fernando Valley and started blasting away. (After dropping off his son there. Sheesh!) He was immediately tackled to the ground by some Church members. Some lightly wounded, nobody killed. Nothing was cancelled; the very next day, my band played at the fair. I met one of the heroes, who joked, “Never mess with an old hockey player!” (He’s also a Burbank police officer.) He probably prevented several deaths. But since we can’t always count on there being an off-duty cop in the crowd, should we just make defensive martial arts a mandatory subject in school? Might prevent a lot of rapes too.
And, what discipline should I learn to do my part in these situations? I’m 43 and overweight.
Self-hijack: I wish these guys wouldn’t kill themselves afterwards. (Not all of them do, but too many of them.) If they were captured alive, someday they might open their mouths and talk about why they did what they did, and we could learn something. Could martial arts save their lives too?
Second self-hijack: What is it with this “taunting” thing? The ones who are captured alive are often heard “taunting” their captors. What exactly do they have to taunt anyone about? They just ruined their own lives and many others. A self-destructive idiot cannot taunt a sane person. If I were pinioning one of these creeps, I might be tempted to smash him in the mouth a few more times, step on his face, loosen a few teeth, to stop the taunting. Could I be prosecuted for that?
The likelihood of anything like that happening to, or near to, a specific individual, you in this case, is vanishingly small.
Which, while not negating the scariness of the incidents, makes it somewhat less worth worrying about. To train for years with the sole intention of preventing such an attack would be largely pointless - though the beneficial side-effects would probably make it worthwhile.
My brother taught one of the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting in high school. When he was shot in the leg, he made a tourniquet out of his belt and applied it to himself - it kept him from bleeding to death. He was an Eagle Scout and had learned first aid as a teenager.
That seems a far more useful skill to have than any illusions that martial arts training will be of much use against firearms.
It is also true that guns in the hands of private citizens have been used to stop spree killings in progress - there are several examples of this just in this country alone. While I wouldn’t say that this fact argues for the advisability for people to carry all of the time even if they weren’t inclined to do so otherwise, it does have implications for policy that do need to be considered.
There’s no evidence that these sorts of events are more common than before. What we have now is a news at a national level that covers events that before were only covered at a local level. People are now worrying about events that they would never evem hear about before. There are (so-called) news shows, like Nancy Grace’s, that are about nothing except local crime stories that are being pushed as if they were national events. The murder rate fell very fast from the early 1990’s to the mid-2000’s in the U.S. during the period when this sort of reporting of local news stories as if they were national ones became common. The amount of news about crime stories on TV (and, to an extent, in other media) has nothing to do with the crime rate. Worry about crime rates and quit watching junk news shows that obsess endlessly about a small number of crimes.
No. You’re a victim of overactive reporting and perhaps worrying too much about very unlikely events - just like how I keep hearing parents claim that mysterious strangers out there are snatching babies left-and-right. Do some research on how likely it is that you will die from a random mass killing - IIRC you have a greater chance of being hit by lightning.
I’m actually helping Cecil to research the effectiveness (if any) of martial arts training in real-life situations, anywhere from resisting a mugging to the worst case. Thus far there appears to be almost no data to say that any martial arts training makes a difference - but I have found a preponderance of data which says that fighting back with anything - hands, biting, improvised blunt weapons, knives, and yes even with guns, does reduce the chance and severity of injury to yourself and others.
The following however is informed speculation on my part, not the result of any research I’ve done.
There are many, many cases in history where message board Walter Mittys can say “boy, if just 3 or 4 people had immediately tackled the guy, he couldn’t have killed them all and they could have stopped it”, and it might be true. But there are several problems here - the first is that most “average” Americans are not used to the sound of close-range gunfire to the point where their brains will allow them to do anything other than scream, wet themselves, and run in a random direction. It takes some serious self-control and/or experience to think of a plan when someone starts shooting near or at you. The very loud, concussive sounds can make me instinctively stop sometimes when I first open the “soundproof” door to my local indoor gun range, especially if someone is firing a really large caliber handgun.
The second problem is that even if a person is not totally unnerved or paralyzed with terror, most people simply do not have it in them to charge a person shooting at them - the tendency for self-protection is very strong. And finally, you have to be able to physically do something about the shooter if and when you reach them - since most (if not nearly all) mass shooters are male, and running on adrenaline or worse, you’re going to need some serious strength yourself to tackle them and get their gun away or incapacitate them without being shot yourself.
As far as shooting back, the following is also informed speculation: as a result of helping Cecil with the column on handgun deaths a few months ago, it certainly seemed clear to me that handgun use overall was more likely to be positive than negative overall for injury and death prevention. I say “more likely” with italics because the data is not entirely clear and there are not enough data points. The impact of concealed carry laws is also in dispute by many - my opinion is that there is an overall positive effect, albeit small. Cecil was not as convinced as I was, but he did recognize that there was a decent amount of evidence on either side, and that’s why he wrote the column the way it was. The short of it is, it’s unknown whether handgun availability in general will prevent or lessen the impact of crime in general, and any type of crime in specific, but IMO it’s more on the positive side than the negative side. And I think to have a broad mandate for more people carrying weapons in public for the specific purpose of preventing mass killings (note emphasis) can’t be supported strongly by fact.
The following is also opinion: situationally, one can always say “what if one person was carrying in Luby’s” or “what if one student at VT had a CCW license and was carrying”, but you can’t look at those in a vacuum, and not include the other impacts of accidents and the possible misuse of the guns. While it probably is a net positive from what I can see, just not a strong and convincing net positive to radically change public policy.
It’s been debated on this board for a while, and one over-arching theme seems to come out of the debates: that the best self-defense exercises are those between your ears. Having the will to fight back, the calmness to not panic, the foresight to have a standard “plan of action” that becomes instinctive. There is argument that the best thing that martial arts does is that it puts people in the mindset of “think fast - avoid - fight back - run with a purpose” that is far more helpful to them than flying sidekicks and Bruce Lee impersonations. Others say the ability to “take a punch” and not freeze or immediately give up is a good side-effect of martial arts training. Martial arts can even just improve general physical fitness - how many Americans over the age of 30 can even run (and I don’t mean jog) half a mile without collapsing? I’d bet the number is less than 25%.
As far as making it mandatory in schools - I’d like to see it even offered as an option, but as far as making it mandatory? I can see the protests by the parents now. “I don’t want my little girl to learn the culture of violence” and similar dreck.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter to me if it’s increasing or not. One incidence is too many. Two incidents I mentioned in the OP (Covina and church fair) were frighteningly close to me. I was scheduled to perform at one of them the next day! Fortunately, the band decided to play on Sunday instead of Saturday.
So…guns only? No use for non-lethal martial arts at all?
I’m also having trouble understanding the “overreporting” argument. The three incidents I mentioned (Virginia Tech, Canadian bus, Killer Santa) were not insignificant stories. These were not deaths from random muggings or Saturday night tavern brawls. If anything, the reality was probably far gorier and sensational than the reporting allowed for. They would be reported all over the world in any news media, and probably in any era. They will probably go down in history, just like (to name similar incidents): Alferd Packer’s cannibalism, the 1930’s school bombing in Michigan, and the serial killer Albert Fish. These examples are from the era before television news.
Pro-gun as I am, I wouldn’t make the mistake of suggesting guns are the solution to every problem. That would just be dumb - as dumb as overemphasizing any one factor over others. And yes, that includes martial arts.
If the young man my brother taught had been able to return fire, that still wouldn’t have stopped him from bleeding to death in his classroom unless he had done what he did. How many people in that school would have been able to put a tourniquet on their own leg? How many more might be able to do so with first aid training?
Anecdotal: as a veteran* of several dozen bar fights and brawls I can tell you there is absolutely no difference “performance-wise” between the guys who had martial arts training and the guys who didn’t. Once somebody punches you in the face, you forget everything you know and start operating on instinct. There was one guy I knew who was a collegiate (and later professional) wrestler who never ever lost a fight, but he was no better at fisticuffs than anyone else; he just got in close and went with what he knew, none of which would have been any use against a guy with a gun.
There was a significant difference between the guys who didn’t mind hurting somebody and the guys who did; you could tell just by looking at them. The first group were extremely effective, and the latter group were extremely ineffective.
I’m almost certain that in the “lone gunman” situation you describe, attempting to employ self-defense techniques would be far less effective than running toward the gunman and trying to knock him down or wrestle the gun away.
*I used to work security in a fairly rowdy club, and I was in a fairly rowdy fraternity. I hardly ever got physically involved in a fight unless I was actually attacked, which is good, because I’m definitely in the “worried about hurting someone” group. Also, a shrimp.
So why the paranoia? There have been shooting sprees throughout modern history; if anything, things are better now than at certain times, since we no longer have lynch mobs roaming the South, or gangsters running around Chicago with submachine guns.
I would like to retract something stupid i wrote in the OP. OK, maybe you think everything I write is stupid but this was even stupider.
The thing about smacking a restrained shooter to stop him from taunting. Dumb! I realized one minute after writing that, that if you have somebody pinioned, and you get mad enough to un-pinion him just enough to smack him, that gives him a chance to keep fighting back, or to escape. Which is probably why he was taunting you in the first place. So, never mind that stupid suggestion.
Loss of self-control due to anger: that’s the whole problem, isn’t it?
Obviously, “every day” is an exaggeration, as you might have been able to tell from the qualifier “seems”.
Is it not within the realm of possibility that certain TYPES of killings happen more frequently than they used to? How far back do the FBI statistics go? Do they distinguish “Multiple homicide” from simple “homicide”?
That’s my whole point - that what you wrote in your OP was on an unsound basis and clearly not based on fact. If you wanted to ask a different question in the OP then ask it.
Here are two quick references from my notes - I don’t have all my notes on this PC.
From Hunting Humans, page 244: between 1976 and 1989 an average of about 2 killings of more than 3 people at a time happened per month in the US. Further on 244, “nor did they find evidence of any recent increase in the rates of these offenses.”
From: The patterns and prevalence of mass murder in twentieth-century America 1
(above abstract is available online somewhere)
Within the realm of possibility? What hard research have you done so far? Why don’t you show your sources and we can discuss them.
Coincidentally, this article in today’s paper may be of help to your research. The guy not only disarmed his assailant, but beat the living crap out of him using “bojuko”.
Una, very interesting. Have you found any sources that allow you to differentiate between types of martial arts training? I’d wildly speculate that boxing or other sports that routinely practice full contact sparring would be more likely to make a difference. This is mostly riffing off of Really Not All That Bright’s observation that things change once you’ve had your bell rung.
It may not be entirely relevant, but I would highly recommend the book The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. Everyone should read this book anyway, and you can get it in a cheap pocket paperback now. One thing he talks about is what motivates people who commit crowd violence, so that might answer some of your questions. A lot of the book is about how you don’t need to be afraid all the time; pay attention to your intuition (which is really rational; it’s just you noticing small anomalies in environment and behavior), learn how violence works, and you can relax most of the time and react appropriately if you need to.
I just gave this book to some of my husband’s family, who are having trouble with a guy making threats to them. It really helped them calm down and analyze what’s going on, instead of just freaking out.
but this was even stupider.