Krav Maga Weapon Defenses. David Kahn
The brutal reality of a violent encounter
• Violence’s aftermath including first aid and legal redress or ramifications
To harm you with an edged or impact weapon, an attacker must close the distance. To have better accuracy with a firearm, an attacker may also close the distance. If you see the attacker brandishing a weapon before he can close on you, naturally you would try to escape when possible. The assailant usually knows this and will conceal the weapon until the opportune moment to present it. In addition, a criminally-minded assailant would prefer not to have witnesses or as few as possible up until the very last moment of the attack. Note: If you witness a crime, you may be the next victim because the attacker wishes to eliminate anyone who can identify him.
Human Emotional Responses in a Life-threatening Encounter
One of my best friends, Sgt. Major Nir Maman (res.), provides a superb explanation of the range of human emotional responses when encountering a life-threatening encounter:
“Do not become a victim of shock. When confronting a life-threatening situation, shock can be more of a problem than fear. If you go into shock while under attack, you will freeze and not do anything. The reason people go into shock when attacked is a lack of response preparation. The mind is divided into two sections, the conscious mind, and the subconscious mind.
“The conscious mind is your cognitive thinking process. The conscious mind engages when you have the time to assess a situation thoroughly and respond deliberately. If you are caught off guard and are overwhelmed with stress, your conscious mind shuts down and transfers all thought process to your subconscious mind.
xxi
“This happens because your mind does not have the time to thoroughly go through its four steps of reaction due to the overload of information and stress. The mind short circuits and shuts down. Your subconscious mind is nothing more than an instinctive response command or a data bank of muscle memory. If your subconscious mind has no concrete muscle memory stored to engage the immediate problem, it simply makes your body defend itself the best way it knows how. Often, this is to throw your arms up in front of your face and chest to protect the body’s vital areas and crouch down to become a smaller target.
“If your subconscious muscle memory cannot summon an instinctive response, your conscious mind will still make your body respond with its own primitive defenses described above. Instincts will always dominate over cognitive response under stress.
“You may be familiar with the expression ‘I saw my life flash in front of my eyes.’ Many people experience this response when they are in a situation where they think they are about to die. This response happens for a very specific reason that is geared at helping you survive under stress. The reason you see your life flash in front of your eyes is simple. When overwhelming stress shuts down your cognitive or conscious mind, responsibility transfers over to your subconscious mind. If your subconscious mind has no proper muscle memory stored, it is confounded with no solution. Your subconscious mind scans the entire data bank of your life, from the day you were born to the present second, to evaluate if you were ever in a similar situation and how you responded. If there was a similar or parallel situation, your subconscious mind will take that same response and implement it to the current situation to help you survive.
“To avoid going into shock under stress, like in the training to deal with fear, constantly visualize yourself in every possible attack situation you may find yourself in and train yourself over and over in your mind until you have effective solutions for those situations.”
Sgt. Major Nir Maman (res.) served in the Israeli Special Forces (ISF) Central Command Counter Terror and Hostage Rescue Unit and the Special Forces Counter Terror and Special Operations School (CTSO) Nir’s duties included training the CTSO’s instructors in CT Warfare, Tactical Shooting, and krav maga. He also held the Lead Counter Terror Instructor position on the CTSO’s designated Hostage Rescue Take-Over (HRT) Units Instructor Team, where he was responsible for training new recruits and active operational members of the ISF’s designated HRT units in all areas of counter terror warfare and hostage rescue including hostage rescue operations in friendly and hostile/foreign environments; close-quarters combat; dynamic entry; aircraft, ship, train, and bus interdiction; suicide bomber interception; urban warfare; tactical shooting; and krav maga. In April 2009, Nir was awarded the IDF Ground Forces Infantry and Ground Forces Command Soldier of the Year Award of Excellence.
xxii
In the case of an edged-weapon attack, there is a good chance if someone attacks you by surprise, you will see an arm movement, but you may not always see the weapon. To be sure, running away from a threat or impending attack is a real and sensible option. Do not let ego, a sense of indignity, or just plain anger get you seriously hurt or killed. Of course, there are circumstances when you cannot run, such as being with family or friends who are not mobile. You will have to stand your ground and defend.
Realistic physical training, along with mental training to envision different kinds of attacks, regulates your response. Training “hardwires” your brain to move your body instinctively to bypass conscious thought and streamline the self-defense process: to think without thinking. The self-defense process may be understood by using the following four-part process:
1) Threat recognition
2) Situation analysis
3) Choice of action
4) Action or inaction
Krav maga’s goal is to embed your subconscious with the proverbial “[I have] been there done that (through a training scenario).” Most important, you should have confidence in your krav maga training because all techniques are battle-tested and field-proven. Do not, however, mistake your training for a real attack. In an actual attack, you will experience an adrenaline surge, a likely decrease in your fine motor skills, your heart rate will skyrocket, your hearing will diminish (“auditory exclusion”), and your vision will narrow (often known as “tunnel vision”).
Notably, most people who have survived violent confrontations had the mental commitment to prevail. They do not often attribute their survival to a specific technique. With this in mind, krav maga provides latitude in its techniques, and flexibility in its thinking. In a successful defense, while there may an optimum tactic and strategy, if the defender survives, optimally unscathed, his krav maga worked. Critically important in defending weapons: You do not have the latitude for error that defending an unarmed attack might allow. Technique deficiency can get you seriously injured or killed.
xxiii
The essence of Israeli krav maga is to neutralize an opponent quickly. There are no rules in an unscripted fight, especially in an armed confrontation. This lack of rules distinguishes self-defense from sport fighting. To stop an assailant, krav maga primarily targets the body’s vital soft tissue, chiefly the groin, neck, and eyes. Other secondary targets include the kidneys, solar plexus, knees, liver, joints, fingers, nerve centers, and other smaller fragile bones. In addition, krav maga teaches you to disarm the assailant and, if necessary, turn the weapon against your assailant. Krav maga differs from other self-defense systems that may rely primarily on targeting difficult to locate nerve centers. In the heat of a violent struggle, this type of precise counterattack strategy is extremely difficult. Conversely, a krav maga combative to the groin or strong combative to the head is precise enough to debilitate the opponent while simple to deliver.
When defending against weapons and escape is not possible, krav maga’s essential philosophy is to close the distance between the defender and assailant to neutralize the weapon and, whenever possible, take the defender out of the “line of fire.”
Optimally, the distance between the defender and the assailant can be closed before a weapon is deployed