Since I have been employed in the professional-protection industry as an edged-weapons and firearms instructor for more than 30 years, I am often asked about self-defense with a knife versus self-defense with a handgun. Turns out there are more similarities than differences—especially when it comes to deploying either with one hand. Most folks who carry a [...]
Finding yourself right smack in the middle of harm’s way can give pause even to the hardest of the hard. However, chance favors the prepared. Ask any real-world tier-one operator about preparation, and he will tell you that one of the most effective tactics in your personal defense arsenal is consistency. Hailing from the operational [...]
The martial arts offer an age-old perspective on something critically important to your shooting performance – reaction time. Employing a punch, a round kick, an edged weapon or a firearm in self-defense means that you’re reacting to a rapid and dynamic escalation of force. Your objective is to stop or gain control of that escalation. The single [...]
When things get ugly, the world can be divided into two types of people: the mentally prepared (who can rely on their mindset and their ability to make decisions under duress) and those who depend on Lady Luck, or her equally fickle stepsisters Desire and Hope. Your survival in any life-threatening altercation depends squarely on your [...]
Back in my early Filipino Martial Arts training days in edged and impact weapons, I would put in anywhere between forty to sixty hours (sometimes more) of hard skills training every week. During that time, one of my Masters, Punong Guro Edgar Sulite (founder of the LAMECO fighting system), would always remind us, his committed [...]
The demand for self-defense was born at the dawn of time when the first cave man b*****-slapped the second cave man. Ever since, we humans have scratched and clawed our way up the evolutionary ladder of personal defense tools. Starting with brute physical strength (punching, kicking, grappling, etc.), our ancestors soon found that stabbing with [...]
When it comes to engaging a violent physical threat at bad-breath distance, most would rather solve the tactical problem with a handgun as opposed to going hands-on with an assailant. You can never know why, when or where an attack may occur. You won’t know if it’s a knife attack, an active shooter or a baseball [...]
When it comes to personal protection against an active threat, having a defensive action plan is not a luxury but a necessity. The advantage of such a plan is: You’re not waiting around to be caught in the middle of an attack You are not forced to come up with a solution on the fly You have a [...]
As a defensive-tactics instructor, my contracts range from NAVSOC (Naval Special Operations Command) to NSA (National Security Agency) to FBI and pretty much any other three-letter agency you can think of. Part of my responsibilities include T3 (train-the-trainer) objectives or teaching professional instructors how to teach various skills. Since personal-defense techniques have roots stemming from [...]
Since the forging of the first knife, the proverbial “tip of the blade” has since held many shapes. These are too numerous to list and, in fact, many have been lost to antiquity. Over millennia, knife-blade styles and designs have undergone thorough development and beta-testing phases eliminating, by trial and error, those that were proven [...]
