The Warrior Scholar Ideal Blog: Crime, Self-Protection, Self-Empowerment - 004

Crime, specifically violent crime, has been, and, in this presidential election season, promises to remain a hot button issue.

While political actors wax indignant and parrot partisan talking points as to how best to protect law-abiding citizens from the predations of criminals, those citizens need to be able to act themselves, and act immediately—rather than wait for others to act in the name of their protection. This is, after all, and quite literally, a matter of life or death.

So, if you are a peace-loving, law-abiding citizen who wants to know what you can begin doing today to keep yourself and your own safe from the violent designs of the predators among us, then you have come to the right place.

To put it simply: You must train.

More specifically, you must train to excel in the use of violence.

Granted, there are “soft skills,” like situational awareness, avoidance, de-escalation, and diffusion that must be acquired through practice and that are indispensable to precluding a violent attack from materializing.

If, however, the soft skills fail, then one must possess the skill and the will to unleash the dogs of war upon the enemy.

Nor is the language of “war” hyperbolic: A violent attack against one’s person by an aggressor that regards his target as a resource to be exploited and disposed of is akin to war, for the attack is, at the very least, potentially mortal.

It is war on a microcosmic level.

Thus, as was self-explanatory to people in past times and places, the essential point of training in a martial art was to become a peerless combatant, a warrior, a human weapon, a maximally efficient killing machine.

Undoubtedly, this characterization of the martial arts, though historically and etymologically unassailable (“martial” means “of, or pertaining to, war”), will offend the sensibilities of many of our contemporaries. Intellectually, this is puzzling, as many of these same people are outright eager to express their appreciation to the members of the military for killing, or at least being willing to kill, those who are believed to pose threats to America’s well-being. They also profess to champion the Second Amendment, the right of citizens to “bear arms”—arms, like guns, that are designed to kill. Yet they become remarkably squeamish over the thought of citizens, via training in a martial art, transforming their bodies and their minds to inflict, with their natural weaponry alone, maximal damage upon an aggressor.

While it’s curious in an intellectual respect that Americans who support a military and the Second Amendment can’t readily reconcile themselves to training in a real martial art, an art of war, psychologically it makes sense:

For all of our lives, courtesy of a combination of the prevalence of “combat” sport; tens of thousands of images from action films and television series; and, for lack of a better term, the “Statist” dogma that only government agents (law enforcement officers, soldiers) are justified in employing violence to stop bad actors, average Americans, especially those who are middle-aged or older, have been conditioned into thinking that neither legally, physically, nor mentally can they acquire the ability and the resolve to prevail in an attack against their persons.

Now, if a violent attack of the kind to which too many have lost their lives was akin to the regulated violence that occurs in a sporting venue, and if such attacks possessed the choreography on display in pop culture media, and if it was true that only those who wear the badge of the State were entitled to wield violence, and, moreover, sufficiently skilled to do so successfully, then it would indeed follow that the mass of humanity (those of us who aren’t athletes, action-stars, and soldiers and law enforcement officers) are hopelessly defenseless against the wolves.

The good news, however, is that each of these propositions isn’t just false, but patently, demonstrably false.

Each is bullshit.

And this messaging is disempowering.

So, American citizens who seek to make themselves into people who can defend themselves against the wicked who would prey upon them need to get their minds right. They need to develop the critical thinking skills to, first, recognize that these are in fact the propositions that have been programmed into them and, second, recognize these propositions for the invidious fictions that they are.

Then, they must grasp one more lie that they’ve swallowed.

Guns are not magic wands. Both gun-clingers and gun-grabbers share one assumption in common: They personify the gun. Undoubtedly, there’s no small number of readers of this column who are thinking right now, “I don’t need to learn hand-to-hand combat. I’ll just use my gun.” To this refrain, which is all too common, I can only say:

Maybe you will...and maybe you won’t.

Unless and until people train to develop their unique bodies to move as pliably, as efficiently, as smoothly as they can move, under the adrenaline-charged dynamics of a real-world attack, and with ruthless intention to neutralize the attacker(s), then, regardless of how skilled at shooting they may be, their chances of emerging victorious are still sub-optimal.

Gun shooting is one thing. As for gun fighting? Well, that’s something else entirely.

It’s been over 70 years since the Marines fought with bayonets. Yet the USMC incorporates bayonet fighting in its training program. Why?

Essentially, the visceral nature of the experience of using bayonets in training disposes the mind for mortal combat to an extent and depth that gun training, shooting from a distance, can’t quite approximate.  

Similarly, to maximize their odds of being victorious in the battle for their lives and the lives of their loved ones, decent people need to train in an art whose methods of training are meant to make them competent to strike with effortless, bone-crushing power from within the closest of quarters, yes, but, critically, comfortable in doing so. To do this requires some measure of mastery over one’s own movement.

The point, though, is that once this goal is realized, then the gun or any other weapon in hand will be gravy, the extension of one’s natural weaponry.

Start training, today. If you are interested in learning more about the mindset that decent people must develop, check out, The Warrior-Scholar Ideal Revisited: New Essays on an Old Vision (Stairway Press, 2023). This is a book that I co-authored with my master, Al Ridenhour, USMC Lieutenant-Colonel, Ret.