One poster wrote his motivation for studying the martial arts was to be able to defend himself without hurting someone. And this was echoed to some extent by an Aikido practitioner I met who told me that in Aikido he was taught that if you have to fight you have already lost. Is it indeed possible to avoid hurting an attacker without being hurt? Well, if you can run faster I could see that happening. Could you somehow dodge, evade, move out of the way of blows to cause somebody to give up in frustration? Could you perhaps put somebody in a wrist lock or some such restraint and stop the attack through restraining someone? Well, I would say it depends on the situation. I don't personally believe in every situation one could defend himself without hurting the other person, that indeed, doing moves that would hurt the other person would be necessary at times, perhaps the vast majority of the time. What do you think, can you defend yourself without hurting your attacker?
I would say that it depends on what is meant by the word, "hurt."
Hurt
could mean
pain. I am unconcerned about inflicting pain, in fact, I would say that that is preferable. Negative reinforcement can be very effective and physical pain is a great form of negative reinforcement. An attacker or predator expecting an easy victim may be put off by the pain that I just inflicted and there is a chance that he may break off the attack, thus preventing me from having to inflict
injury.
If by hurt, you mean inflicting
injury, then I would say that in most cases, yes, you can escape without doing injury to your opponent. By injury, I mean damage beyond scrapes and bruises.
Now, if there is no means of escape, such as being cornered in your house, or if you have already inflicted pain and that is not deterring them, then as much injury as possible
must be inflicted as quickly as possible to whatever part of the body that will most effectively end the attack.
If my attacker is unarmed or armed with a knife, that means knees.
If my attacker has a gun, I am in a pretty bad position. If that I can get a hold of him and control where the gun is pointing, and mind you, that is a pretty big if for most of us, then ideally, I want to disarm him and hold him at bay with the gun.
Should I not be able to quickly wrest the gun away from him, I need to change my tactics. The longer that I spend wrestlling with a gunman the greater the chance of my getting shot. I have no qualms about firing his gun into him in order to end the attack.
I think that it is laudable to desire to disable your attacker without doing injury. But if that is not possible, the attacker does indeed have it coming.
As the Bible saith, as a man soweth, so shall he reap.
As Daniel Sullivan saith, "Do violence unto others, and sooner or later, violence shall be done unto you."
Daniel