“I study a complete martial art,” the young man said, with decided emphasis on the ‘complete.’
“Really? Because that, to me, would mean that you study everything from avoidance and communication up through firearms and at least small unit tactics. We may just be defining things differently…”
We hope that if you have taken one thing away from this book, it is that conflict and violence are a very broad range of human behavior. The things that you may have to defend yourself against range from intimidation to murder and your appropriate defenses also must range from doing nothing skillfully to possibly taking a life.
Almost any martial art you can name focuses on one or at most two narrow ranges of response. MMA and classical jujutsu probably have the broadest range, training hard at Levels 4 and 5 and flirting with Level 6, but the most effective of the lethal techniques are banned or given lip service. It is not just that you fight with the techniques that you train, but you also ignore the techniques you have been trained to ignore.
That’s a hole. It’s not insurmountable, but it is a hole.
The lower-level force options are, for most martial artists, a much bigger hole. Almost all of us have been told it is better to run than to fight or that it is better to apologize and walk away…but who actively practices that? If you do not practice you WILL make mistakes and go with your social conditioning. Serious criminals thrive on your social conditioning.
Here is a scenario: A two-hundred-pound guy has promised that he is going to meet you at a certain place and time. At that time and in that place, he will beat you senseless or make you scream for mercy. Do you show up?
If it’s self-defense, hell no. That would be stupid. If it is a match, you live for that shit. Get it? There are some fundamental strategies and assumptions that differ between any style of martial arts and self-defense. When the situation happens in an uncontrolled environment, you must be able to switch to the self-defense-centered strategies. You need to be able to act at any level of the force scale, from the highest to the lowest. You must be able to choose the appropriate level.
Spending a decade studying Level 5 and praying that any situation you might get into will just happen to be justifiable and solvable at Level 5…that’s not a strategy. That’s just stupid.