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Self Defense
What matters probably isn’t what you think matters
We live such safe and comfortable lives in the West that most people get their ideas about physical conflict from movies and television. As movies and television are the least reliable guides to reality we have, this means that most people’s ideas about physical conflict are totally erroneous.
In movies, Bruce Willis can destroy a fifth-generation fighter jet with nothing more than his perpetually self-satisfied smirk and a Q-tip. In movies, protagonists throw each other through glass windows, smash each other against hard objects, punch and kick and stab each other with astonishing force, and yet the results are merely photogenic superficial scratches. In the movies, good guy rounds reliably find their target while bad guy rounds reliably go wild while also never hitting an innocent bystander, nor ricocheting unpredictably off surrounding walls or other hard surfaces.
We can therefore discount everything we see in the movies and on television when we begin to talk about self-defense.
Unfortunately a lot of so-called self-defense classes are modeled on the entertainments we see on the screens we gaze at so avidly for hours at a time. As a result, they impart a false sense of confidence and can therefore actually do more harm than good. I’ve personally seen far…
