Gweilo
Master Black Belt
- Joined
- Jan 11, 2019
- Messages
- 1,141
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My instructor is retired army. The knife & gun self defense he teaches is what he learned in the army. Still, I don’t feel like there is any realistic gun defense unless you happen to be behind the guy with the gun. Of course I know nothing about guns except a healthy fear so I could be wrong.
As for knife, I’m a bit more optimistic. That may be partially due to the old style I trained with. It certainly wasn’t a McDojo as the members didn’t have a set fee. The suggested donation was $2/week (mid 1990’s) but you weren’t turned away if you couldn’t pay. It was non-competitive and the whole focus was in self-defense. We had a drill called “walk the street” which involved everyone lined up in two rows facing each other. One person would be at the end of the row with their back to the rows. My Sensei would pick 1-3 attackers and give some or all of them knives and then when everything was hidden the student would turn around and “walk down the street.” The student would have to defend against whatever came at them. We used wooden knives so we didn’t actually get hurt, but it was a very intimidating drill. We often did it outside after dark with only the headlights on one car pointed at us to see by (which often. Could be blinding too). I felt like this was a fairly decent way of testing knife self defense. It was always stressed that if it was a robbery of some sort, generally the best way to get out alive is to just give the guy your wallet.
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IMO, the type of drill you quote, is the best type of knife defense available, many arts are trained for one on one senario, many arts train for a student trained to receive one student, the key I beleive is unexpected multiple drill, we train like this in systema, we all line up facing the wall with arms behind our back, the instructor will explain the drill, but will give one or more students a knife, he will then say, if you was given the knife, consil it, then everyone walks around the room, if you do not have the kniife, you job is to see if you can recognise who has the knife, if you have the knife, your job is to target one or two people, the instructor will say live, then it is down to the individual knife holders when to attack, no time limit, so to soeak