I thought the principles contained in here to be applicable and important to all preppers looking at adequate preparation for a 'self-defense' situation.

The Ultimate Concealed Carry
I'd really rather just shoot you dead.

Hand-to-hand violence, the way we train for it in TFT (Target Focus Training, see: http://www.targetfocustraining.com/media/videos), is outrageously inappropriate for fighting with people. When you look at crushing a man's throat, or blinding him, or purposely bouncing his head off the ground to give him a brain injury in the context of dealing with the aggressive loudmouth, the bully or the man who "deserves a beating" it is, literally, insane.

But where is the disconnect? Are we teaching things that are needlessly excessive and fly in the face of the law? Or is it a misunderstanding of what we're training for?

It's all a matter of context. It's the difference between "fighting" and "hurting people." To the layperson, all violence looks like fighting—it's all punching and kicking. Boxing, MMA, bar brawls and street fights are similar in action and results. There's a flurry of blows, maybe some clinching, and while someone might get "beat up" it's rare to have life-changing or life-ending injuries. If someone does die, it's almost always an accident, usually from falling down and striking their head on the ground. And, because that really wasn't the intention of the fight, everyone's really, really sorry.

Hurting people is an entirely different endeavor. It's about breaking the human body and shutting off the human brain. When you need to hurt someone, you need specific results: asphyxiation, blindness, crippling. It's for when making him quit, submit, or "teaching him a lesson" won't do.

This is what you need when you'd rather just pull a gun and shoot him dead.

With TFT we're not training to be an "overkill fighter," but to be able to do the work of a firearm with our bare hands, from zero to three feet.

Why? Because you can't always have a firearm with you. You may not have the time or space to deploy it. You do not have an unlimited supply of ammunition on you. And, as a mechanical device, it could fail.

Knowing how to cause serious injury with your bare hands takes care of all these limitations at close range.

And, I would hope, no one confuses the needs of "fighting" with shooting a man to death. While TFT may look like the former we're really training as a proxy for the latter.

Knowing how to use your bare hands to do the work of a bullet has some compelling advantages:

- It's with you everywhere you go

- No one knows you have it

- It's always handy

- It can't be lost, dropped or taken from you

- It's probably the last thing the other guy expects.

And equally important disadvantages:

- Very limited range

- Requires physical effort

- You can't brandish it as a threat to change behavior

- The temptation to use it for fighting.

As Heinlein said, "An armed society is a polite society," and having this knowledge and training means you are never unarmed. It follows, then, that you must go out of your way to avoid, defuse, and otherwise minimize the chances of being involved in a legally indefensible use of violence. Much in the same that way you understand that shooting a man to death for being an aggressive loudmouth, a bully or otherwise "deserving a beating" would get you prison time. Or worse.

If you carry a firearm, how often do you expect to be involved in a shooting? Considering the unthinkable and preparing for that moment are not the same as hoping for it to happen. Or going out of your way to find the opportunity. If you've ever had to swim to save your life, you know what I'm talking about. You'd never willingly put yourself back in that situation if you had a choice. At the time you found the only choice was swim or drown and you did what you had to to survive. That doesn't mean you're looking forward to doing it again.

True life or death situations are thankfully rare. Chances are, you'll never have to swim for your life, shoot a man to death, or put him down and stomp the life out of him. But just because it's rare doesn't mean you don't need to prepare for it. Swimming is fun, but that's not why we teach our kids to swim. We teach them to swim because people drown.

And so it is with violence, whether it be with firearm, knife, club or bare hands. Training for it is an insurance policy against a day we hope will never come, but are nonetheless willing to face. And we must accept the responsibility of that knowledge by understanding that "fighting," as a casual, sporting thing, is no longer an option. No more than you would think it sensible to be involved in a fist fight while holding a gun.