CHAPTER ONE

VIOLENCE IS A TOOL

Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.

—Marshall McLuhan

As a society, we struggle to distinguish between violence and the people who use it. Since we mostly associate violence with criminals, we tell ourselves that violence itself is criminal, violence is evil, violence is bad. We think that because violence is undesirable, to study it is to endorse it—to say that we think it is desirable. There is a certain logic to this point of view at the surface. If criminals do something often enough, that something is probably going to be criminal itself. The problem with that logic, however, is that it conflates the means with the ends. Because we are so uncomfortable with violence, we have convinced ourselves subconsciously that the “what” and the “why” are the same things: in other words, we tell ourselves that, because criminals often use violence, violence itself is always criminal. But that’s a big mistake: violence is a tool like any other. As with any other tool, the proper object of our moral and ethical judgment isn’t the “what”—after all, you wouldn’t call a screwdriver or a toothbrush evil—but rather the “why,” the ends to which human beings choose to direct it.

I want to take you through a hypothetical scenario to make this point a little less abstract. I’ve posed this thought exercise to thousands of new students and seminar attendees over the years. It’s about a woman I’m calling Diane and it is an amalgamation of several real-life stories.

It was supposed to be an ordinary night for Diane. Her husband was away on business and she had no other plans, so she chopped up a salad for dinner, put the baby to bed, took out the trash, then turned on the TV in the kitchen while she washed the dishes.

Unfortunately, she forgot to lock the back door.

As she casually scrubbed a plate with one eye on a Law & Order rerun that she’d seen a hundred times, the kitchen door swung open behind her. Before she could turn around, a pair of massive hands grabbed her and forced her up against the kitchen counter.

These were definitely not her husband’s hands.

She tried to scream, but it was too late. The intruder covered her mouth and reached for the drawstrings on her sweats. She struggled and squirmed, but his grip, even with one arm, was too much for her. Scared for her life, Diane’s mind suddenly flashed to the baby upstairs. She had to do something.

In desperation, she reached back and clawed at the man’s face, digging her nails deeply into his skin. She hoped it would force him to let go of her and she could run and scream for help. The intruder let out a horrible howl as blood streamed down his face, but he didn’t let up. Instead, he got angry. He grabbed the chef’s knife still sitting out on the cutting board and plunged it into the side of Diane’s neck.

Her eyes rolled back. It was over in seconds.

This story is very disturbing. But alongside the reflexive pain we feel when we hear this story is a deep anger when we think about the man—the murderer—who destroyed this family. For him, any semblance of sympathy quickly disappears. This man should never see the light of day again. At a minimum, he should be incarcerated for the rest of his life. It is an understandable and entirely justifiable reaction—legally and morally.

Now let’s rewind to the moment Diane is at the sink washing the dishes and watching TV. I want to tell you this part of the story again, but with a twist…

… the kitchen door swung open behind her. Before she could turn around, a pair of massive hands grabbed her and forced her up against the kitchen counter.

These were definitely not her husband’s hands.

As she was thrown up against the kitchen counter, Diane immediately sensed that the man attacking her was bigger, faster, and stronger than she was. This triggered a pair of realizations in her mind: 1) If she tried only to scream or scratch her way out of his grasp, nothing good was likely to come of it, and 2) If she had any hopes to escape, she would have to inflict serious injury on this man.

In desperation, she looked around for something to grab—anything with some weight or an edge. She saw the chef’s knife she’d used to make her salad; it was just within her reach. She grabbed the knife while the man fumbled with her drawstrings and plunged it into the side of his neck.

His eyes rolled back. It was over in seconds.

This version of the story is equally disturbing, and again most of us probably have a very similar response to reading it. In this version of the story, we see a hero. We see a mother who, in a life-or-death situation, acted in self-defense to protect not only herself, but her infant child. She should face no legal consequences, right? In fact, she should be lauded, protected to the full extent of the law, and held up as a shining example of someone who courageously fought off a violent criminal to save herself and her family.

But, wait. Violence is evil. Violence is a crime. Only criminals use violence, remember? Doesn’t that make Diane a bad person? A criminal? That’s how the logic of our normal mental model for violence is supposed to work. Sure, you’re probably thinking to yourself, but this is different.

That is exactly my point.

Sadly, the first version of that story is much more common than the second. When we hear stories about someone being stabbed to death by a stranger, the majority of the time the stabber is the villain and the victim is the innocent. Between 2006 and 2010, for example, the FBI reported more than nine thousand homicides by “knives or cutting instruments” in the United States, yet only three were deemed legally justifiable.^* That’s because, like in the first version of our story, there is almost always a crucial asymmetry between the perpetrator and the victim in the application of violence: only the story’s villain was willing to inflict injury, even to kill, and so the villain won.

But along with the differences between the two scenarios, there is also one key similarity: The knife to the side of the neck worked the same each time.

In the first case, the knife ended the life of an innocent person. In the second case, it saved the life of a woman and her child. But it was the same knife. It worked in the hands of the “good guy” the same way it worked in the hands of the “bad guy.”

That knife is just a tool. It has no moral compass or intention. It does not pick sides. It does whatever the person wielding it wants it to do, for whatever reason they want to do it. It can be used for evil or for good, to destroy or to protect. Diane’s attacker used a kitchen knife to end her life. Diane used it to save her life. But the only thing we can truly judge about the knife itself is whether it worked.

There is a broad spectrum of purposes and intentions for most tools. Awareness of that fact is what is often missing when we think about violence. Its absence leaves us with tunnel vision, it renders us unprepared and ill-informed, and it prevents us from evaluating this admittedly uncomfortable subject for what it truly is. This is a clinical, dispassionate way to look at the subject of violence, I know, but when it comes to moments of life or death, if you enjoy being alive, all that is going to matter is that whatever you did to save your life actually worked. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, the answer will not be violence. It will be avoidance or de-escalation. But that one time when violence is the answer, make no mistake, it will be the only answer.

That is what you need to understand when your life is at stake, and it starts with the sober recognition that violence is not an ideal, or a way of life, or a value—it’s a tool, plain and simple.

Sure, even in the first story Diane tried to defend herself, by instinctively scratching and clawing. But it wasn’t enough: one person was engaging in real, serious violence, and the other was only reacting to it. The person who merely reacts to violence—who is unwilling to meet their assailant on an even playing field when their own safety demands it—is always at a disadvantage. Perhaps you want self-protection to be a sanitized form of violence, one that doesn’t hurt quite as much. Sorry to say, there’s no such thing. A knife wound inflicted in an act of self-defense looks just like a knife wound inflicted in an act of murder. Violence is violence.

What that means is, we need to think about scenarios of violence not from the perspective of the victim, but of the winner—even when the victim is the “good guy” and the winner is a criminal. Of course, we can do that without condoning unprovoked violence or sympathizing with the criminal; we’re not thinking morally here, but tactically. And tactically speaking, we need to answer some key questions about every violent encounter: When did everything shift to favor one person over the other? When did they get a result with the tool of violence? How did they get that result? Is it something that can be replicated by anyone on a regular basis?

Again, these aren’t moral questions. Everything that happens prior to violence has a separate set of rules, many of which have to do with defusing dangerous situations before violence breaks out. Before violence, we can practice anger management, meditation, or simply the habit of walking away when situations get too heated. Similarly, everything that happens after an act of violence is handled by our justice system. That’s when we start using words like “self-defense” or “murder” (which are technical terms with very specific legal definitions). There are reams of books on either side of the discrete points of violence, but very few on the act itself. This book focuses on the moments when violence is actually happening. That narrow window of time where we, as sane, socialized citizens, would be justified in using the tool in defense of self or others. My message is a simple one: to avoid being a victim of violence, you need to learn from it.

LEARNING FROM VIOLENCE

Have you ever heard of “the knockout game”? Here’s how it’s supposed to work: An unsuspecting citizen walks down the street, going about their day, when one of a group of (typically) young males points them out and challenges a friend to sneak up on that person and knock them out with a single sucker punch. A few years ago, stories of marauding groups of young men playing this game flooded in from across the United States and, in a few cases, even Europe.

It was violence at its most random.

Chances are, if you heard about the knockout game, it was from a news broadcast or an article on one of your social media channels. The commentary was probably breathless and frightening, and if you are like many of my first-time seminar attendees, you mentally braced yourself to shake it off as you turned up the volume or clicked the link: This is too unpleasant to think about. It’s just an urban legend, you told yourself. If those people really were attacked, there had to have been a reason for it.

How you react to this kind of news matters, because our instinct is to focus our attention on the types of violent encounters that feel like they have an explanation—rape is about sex, robbery is about property, bar fights are about social hierarchy, murder is about vengeance, etc. These acts make sense to us, so we can envision scenarios for avoiding, protecting, and defending ourselves from them. The same cannot be said for an act of pure, inexplicable violence like the knockout game. We can pretend like it doesn’t exist, but that’s not only impractical, it’s imperiling. It won’t protect you, and it will never make you safer.

Still, our instinct with something like the knockout game far too often is to avert our gaze from the grisly details and to distance ourselves from the kind of people who play it. I understand this mindset. Life is already complicated enough, we shouldn’t have to wrestle with the reality that we live in a world where kids can attack you in the street for the thrill of it. It’s a perfectly comprehensible modern, gut response—but a dangerous one just the same. Because the people who play the knockout game are the only ones who can teach us anything about how not to lose at it. When we say, “Geez, I hope that never happens to me,” all we’re doing is closing ourselves off to learning while giving the perpetrator super-powers in our minds—as if the only thing that can protect us is hoping and praying.

When we ask, “Why did that work?”, on the other hand, those super-powers start to dissolve as we begin to empower ourselves with the knowledge that we possess the same basic ability. There’s nothing magical about clocking an unsuspecting stranger in the head—each of us could do it today. We won’t, of course, but understanding how this kind of raw violence works reminds us that the perpetrators of violence are human, just like we are. It replaces irrational fear with a mindset primed for preparedness, and it can make the key, initial difference in how you stand up to and face down violence should it ever come into your own life.

There is a lot we can learn from random violence if we approach it from an investigative, even clinical perspective, analyzing any violent situation the way a coroner would examine a fatality. A coroner will certainly have compassion for innocent victims of violence—but when it comes time to do her job, she’ll put feeling aside and think dispassionately. She’ll identify damaged organs and the nature of the damage they sustained. She’ll try to understand what happened and how it happened, and she’ll do that by breaking down the physics and physiology of the perpetrator’s actions. In just the same way, when we hear about victims of random violence, we have to temporarily put aside our compassion for them, and dispassionately ask how the perpetrator came to turn these people into victims and what kind of physical damage they were able to inflict.

The basic idea isn’t so different from what I did in military intelligence. We want to learn as much as possible about our enemies. We want to get inside their heads—not because we want to imitate them, or because we are unsympathetic to their victims—but because we want to stay a step ahead of them.

So, what can we learn from something like the knockout game to make its abhorrent existence actually useful to us?

First, that random violence happens. We don’t need to embrace it, condone it, or even understand what drives it, but we must accept that it is an inevitable part of being alive. People hurt other people—physically, sometimes fatally.

Then we can examine the act from a purely tactical perspective. The knockout game is an example of indiscriminate, asocial violence. But why does it work? Tactically speaking, it is an attack that utilizes the element of surprise on an unsuspecting, unprepared victim. The inability to anticipate the threat allows the perpetrator to put a well-placed strike into a vulnerable part of the human body resulting in severe injury—usually a concussion, but sometimes death from blunt force trauma if the unconscious victim’s head hits the pavement or some other hard surface or sharp edge.

With knowledge of how an attack works we can then develop avoidance tactics. If lack of what we called in the military “situational awareness” is a significant factor in acts of random violence like the knockout game, how can we be more alert to make us less ideal targets? How about not walking around with our earbuds in and our heads buried in our phones? Listening to music full blast and staring into the abyss of our never-ending Facebook news feed effectively makes us deaf and blind. In the wild, a deaf and blind animal is the ideal prey for any opportunistic predator. It’s no different for the kind of person who would play the knockout game. Anything we can do to be more alert makes us less likely to become a target.

None of these insights are revolutionary. They’re common sense. Sitting in the comfort of your home or your subway ride to work, you have the luxury of reading this and saying, “Well, duh!”, then turning the page. But is it really that obvious? Have you ever really imagined yourself becoming the victim of random violence? Have you ever come up with a concrete game plan in response, or even ahead of time? Have you ever considered that your best defense against this kind of violence is using it first, and better? (It’s not hard—this section just taught you what it takes to knock out a knockout artist)

I can assure you that most people have not. The 70 percent victimization rate across my three decades of first-time students is a testament to that reality. For them, these insights were like learning a new language—the language of violence—and their obviousness only developed in retrospect, after they’d become conversational in the language in which those insights were spoken.

What’s interesting, though, is that this language isn’t new. In fact, it might be our native tongue. What I mean is, humans as a species are good at using the tool of violence. With opposable thumbs, big brains, forward-set eyes, and strong canine teeth, we have a predator’s build. One that makes us hardwired to be good at violence. We can create weapons, work in packs, and manipulate situations. Our ability to think strategically, tactically, and judiciously about violence has been core to our survival as a species from day one. Our brains have made us the smartest species on the planet, and our capacity for compassion has made us the most advanced, but our natural ability for using violence to our advantage has made us truly superior.

You possess that same innate ability to consider, to be comfortable with, to even utilize violence, even if those capabilities are deeply latent. And along with the hardwired ability to inflict violence comes the protective “spidey sense”—the capacity to anticipate violence before it happens—that is also wired into our biology.

In that sense, I am not trying to turn you into someone or something you are not. All I’m trying to do is reactivate that primal ability to defend yourself and protect the ones you love. To do that, we have to look at the tool of violence as straightforwardly as possible, and strip away all the emotion, drama, and social baggage that keeps us from using our prehensile hands to pick it up when we need it most.

THE TRAINED PERSON IS NEVER HARMLESS

I was once hired to give a self-defense presentation to a corporate group aboard a cruise ship. The company had arranged a Caribbean cruise for several of its employees and their families, and my presentation was informally billed as a kind of father-daughter event. One of those women, whom I will call Sara, was the daughter of a man I happened to know fairly well. He told me she was coming with him to the seminar whether she liked it or not, since she was getting ready to go to college. Many of the other daughters came to the seminar under a similar state of silent protest—they wanted to go do other things, like tan or swim or hit the buffet—anything else but this. I understood: it was the Caribbean, after all.

When I met Sara she was a carbon copy of Reese Witherspoon’s character in Legally Blonde. Bubbly and effervescent, she talked like her, she carried herself like her, she was just that girl. Learning about self-defense was clearly not at the top of Sara’s list of priorities that afternoon, but to her credit she went through all the training with a standard level of disinterest and did nothing to make the event more difficult (unlike some of the fathers, intent on impressing their daughters). Afterward I didn’t think much of our limited exchanges, frankly. It was just another corporate seminar.

Three years later, I was holding a series of seminars in New York City and she walked in with her three younger sisters in tow. “Do you remember me?” she asked. She didn’t have quite the same stereotypical “ditzy blonde” affect, but she looked more or less the same.

“Of course I do. Nice to see you again.”

“Did Dad call you and tell you what happened?”

“No,” I said, “what happened?”

Soon after the cruise, Sara moved into the dorms to start her freshman year. She had a first-floor room, a roommate, a lofted bed with a desk underneath, the whole college dorm experience. One morning, when her roommate was sleeping over at her boyfriend’s apartment, Sara woke up with a man on top of her. This was not a drunken hook-up, this was a stranger. A man who had somehow managed to climb through Sara’s window and up the ladder onto her platform bed without being detected.

Sara’s nightmare scenario isn’t a common one. Twenty-eight percent of sexual assaults are perpetrated by strangers,^* but the reality is, women like Sara are much more likely to be attacked by someone they know. That statistical unlikelihood didn’t make Sara’s situation any less real. She could smell this strange man. He was grabbing at her. By the time Sara could clear the cobwebs from her brain, he had her pinned and was about to pull back the sheets. Most young women’s first reaction in this scenario would be to scream. Not Sara. She instantly recognized the situation she was in. Her first reaction wasn’t a reaction at all, it was a thought: “He’s not close enough.”

During our training aboard the cruise ship, we ran the girls through a series of sexual assault scenarios. One of the things we taught them was that after a man grabs you, in order to perpetrate a rape he will have to move in at least two ways: 1) he will have to remove, unzip, or pull down his pants, and 2) he will have to remove or pull down any of her clothing obstructing his path. In this scenario, he would also have to pull down the comforter and sheets under which Sara was sleeping. When that moment of adjustment occurs, the attacker will have to loosen control of her body and remove at least one of his hands from her. Doing so would also bring him closer to her and expose one of his most vulnerable body parts—his face.

So, Sara waited. The next thing she realized was that to escape this situation unharmed she would have to inflict an injury (we will cover the concept of injury in great depth in Chapter Six). She wasn’t going to escape by yelling—only by doing, and by doing something terrible. Pinned to her back, with his legs positioned inside hers, the only vulnerable body part she could reach was the man’s eyes. (It was one of several body parts we trained briefly with her cruise group.)

Sure enough, the man began to adjust. He pulled down the sheets and then his pants, forcing him to lean in closer to her. That’s when Sara snapped into action. She wrapped her left arm around the back of his neck, and attacked his left eye with her right hand. She remembered from the seminar that when you attack anywhere on an assailant’s face—but especially the eyes—they are going to move away from you violently. This is both an instinctive self-preservation response and an attempt to retain control of the situation by pulling away from the attack. If you’re a young woman like Sara, who weighed probably 110 pounds at the time, that means you can’t let up. You don’t have the same margin of error as a man or a larger woman. You literally have to hang on for dear life, and keep attacking. (Remember what happened to Diane when she scratched blindly at her attacker’s face?)

Sara’s attacker was easily 235 pounds, and strong. When she dug into his eye, he wrenched back in the opposite direction like a rodeo bull. Their combined momentum pulled them both off the lofted bed and onto the hardwood floor below. Knowing something like this was going to happen, Sara focused on her grip around the back of the man’s neck and latched on. While her grip around his neck stayed secure as they fell to the floor, she lost her grip on his eye and her forearm slipped down his face. This was not a conscious decision on Sara’s part, but as they hit the ground, she sent all her 110 gravity-aided pounds through her right forearm and into his throat.

She felt the injury happen right as they hit the ground. His body went weak. Any vile intention his brain may have been conjuring became moot the moment his body ceased to function at its command. This gave Sara the opportunity she needed to get away and run screaming down the hall for help. By the time campus security got to her room, the man had asphyxiated and died right where they’d landed.^*

Can you imagine yourself in Sara’s situation? Someone bigger, faster, and stronger than you, crawling silently into your bed? Can you imagine having the guts to stay calm and plan your attack? Sara had guts. She had composure. And the thing that anchored both of those traits was her training. The second the man grabbed her, Sara told me it was like I was in her ear. This is a foundational truth about violence and self-protection: When random violence finds you, you’re only ever going to be able to do what you’ve trained to do, and you’re only going to be able to draw from your established knowledge base. Sara had just one training session (which she didn’t even want to be in), and from that limited exposure to instruction alone she knew three important things: that she couldn’t compete with her attacker’s size, that she would need to inflict an injury, and that once she did, she had to stay on it. All this information was stored in her brain for instant recall when her life was at stake. (See Chapter Seven for our discussion of the brain as your deadliest weapon.)

HESITATION KILLS

In 1997, on a busy country highway in Carthage, Texas, a twenty-three-year-old police officer named Michelle Jeter pulled over a beat-up blue minivan for speeding. Officer Jeter began the routine traffic stop by the book, asking the driver for his license and ordering him to step out of the vehicle. The driver was a thirty-seven-year-old man named Jorge Orozco. He had his eight-year-old daughter with him, who stayed in the front passenger seat, as he exited the minivan and joined Officer Jeter on the shoulder of the road. Jeter then moved to her patrol car and radioed in Orozco’s driver’s license number with a request to search for warrants and criminal history.

While waiting for the background check results, Officer Jeter made conversation with Orozco and casually asked him if he’d ever been to jail before. He had. When the check came back it revealed multiple outstanding traffic warrants from the Texas Department of Public Safety. At this point, Officer Jeter asked Orozco for permission to search the vehicle. He consented and his daughter joined him on the side of the road. At first glance, the van was full of furniture and other personal belongings, but since there was not a clear view into the back, Officer Jeter had to open things up and look deeper inside. When she discovered a duffel bag containing marijuana, she went into detainment mode. She turned from the van’s driver-side door and corralled Orozco from the back of the van toward the hood of her patrol car, on which she ordered him to place his hands while she readied her handcuffs with one hand, and radioed for backup with the other.

We know all this because the events were captured by the dashboard camera in Officer Jeter’s patrol car. The dash cam also shows that while Jeter was searching the vehicle, Orozco had started to get agitated. He was pacing nervously, muttering to himself. Even without the benefit of knowing how this story ends, you get the sense that this guy probably wasn’t going to go quietly.

As Officer Jeter moved Orozco toward the car he asked her repeatedly, “What’s wrong?”, rocking oddly back and forth from one leg to the other, almost like a boxer. She got him to the car and he put his right hand down on the hood. She was directly behind him at that point. For a second it looked like everything was going to go according to procedure. But the next second, instead of putting his left hand on the car next to his right, Orozco turned around. Orozco, 5'10'' and 220 pounds, was now face to face with Jeter, 5'5'' and 125 pounds. This was the moment—the moment he was going to decide whether to give up or run. But all Officer Jeter could see was the little girl.

The two-year Carthage PD veteran with an exemplary service record thought to herself, there’s no way a man would do anything in front of his child that would traumatize her. She asked herself, if I were getting arrested in front of my little girl, how would I want the police officer to act toward me? In seconds, Jeter had fabricated in her mind a kind of social contract with Orozco in which he wouldn’t act violently and she wouldn’t initiate violence, either.

Proper procedure in this situation is very clear: the instant Orozco turned to face Jeter, she should have increased the distance and escalated through the force continuum—beginning with firm verbal commands, then moving to pepper spray, the baton, and her firearm as necessary—like she was trained by her department. Instead, Jeter hesitated. Not because the moment was too big for her. Not because it moved too fast. Not for too long either. Just the second and a half it took Orozco to make his fateful decision. While her empathy for Orozco’s daughter kept her hand away from the tools on her utility belt a split second longer that it should have, Orozco planted his right hand squarely into Officer Jeter’s jaw. He knocked her to the ground, straddled her body, and pummeled her into unconsciousness. Right in front of his eight-year-old daughter. The entire violent encounter lasted nine seconds. Jeter’s hesitancy to use violence and Orozco’s willingness to engage it immediately put them on a crash course that resulted in one of the most vicious officer assaults ever captured on video.^*

And I want to be very clear about this: if Jeter, as a police officer, was mistaken to hesitate in that situation, you, as a private citizen, would be even more mistaken to hesitate in a similar situation. Officer Jeter was sworn to serve and protect, and she had a mandate that extended beyond self-protection—for instance, de-escalating an encounter that involved an innocent child as a bystander. It’s tragic that her attempt to balance those responsibilities with self-protection put her life in such severe danger. But that’s why we honor law enforcement officers for doing their jobs—because they take on more responsibilities than the rest of us. As a private citizen in a similar situation, your case is like Officer Jeter’s in one key way: in both, hesitation kills. But because your mandate is less complicated than hers—protect your own life, period—you have even less excuse for hesitation.

In either case, hesitation—the difference between acting and reacting—can be the difference between life and death. In all my studies of self-protection, training and debriefing military units and law enforcement agencies, examining security footage from prison yards and talking to prison guards, I have discovered that the odds of winning a violent encounter swing precipitously in favor of whoever inflicts the first debilitating injury. That doesn’t mean anytime you feel nervous or fearful that you should impulsively look for stray chef’s knives or ready yourself for well-timed eye gouges. You should always endeavor to remove yourself from any situation in which you are uncomfortable. What it does mean, however, is that if you are getting asocial cues from someone, you need to act. If violence becomes inevitable and inescapable, you must never hesitate to harness your knowledge and lean on your training to protect yourself. You must never let thoughts about what violence means or says delay its utilization, because in those moments where it is necessary, there is no room for nuance and semantics. There is no time to parse a predator’s intent, to figure out what is going on inside their head, to understand how they think and what kind of moral code they have (or don’t have). Even if there were time, those things are basically unknowable.

Your power is in your knowledge and understanding of violence, in your awareness and preparedness, in your training and capacity to act. Every time you shrink from an act of violence like those Diane and Sara endured, or you project empathy toward a person who is showing you their true colors, or you choose to make some directionless prayer like, “I hope that never happens to me!”, you are relinquishing all that power. You are giving first-mover advantage to your potentially mortal opponent.

If you take one thing from what you’ve read so far, I hope it’s this: anytime you attempt to bury your head in the sand and deny the existence of violence in your world, not only are you giving up your power, but you are giving it over to the very perpetrators of random violence whose existence you are hoping to ignore.

Instead, look violence in the eyes and ask yourself, “How did that work?” Because in learning what the tool of violence truly is and how it really works, we remind ourselves that the perpetrators of violence are human beings—the same as us. We possess the same abilities, with access to the same tools. The difference between us is not in the “what,” but in the “why.”