What Do You Have in Your Hand?

River Tam:  Also, I can kill you with my brain.

Your most potent weapon is the one between your ears.  Though I have to admit, if the mind is a weapon, some people are walking around armed with squirt guns. 

I grew up knowing some dangerous people -- not mean people or vicious, ruthless people, but dangerous people.  Without exception they were people who knew how to gain “an edge”, as they say in Josey Wales, to take advantage of the terrain or the obstacles in the room or the clothes they were wearing.  I have fought other guys fairly, but only in a sport or game – boxing, wrestling, football.  For games, you play by the rules.  In real life, you do whatever you have to do.  Learn to analyze and to think and to take any advantage you can get.

My wife has a favorite detective show that is no longer on the air.  I bought her the DVD set of one season from back around 2004 or 2005.  We were watching an episode the other night that involved an intruder in the home of a female protagonist.  The intruder was looking for something on the first floor of a house while the woman and her young daughter slept on the second floor.  The noise of an object knocked over by the intruder awoke the woman who proceeded to creep down the stairs armed with a baseball bat.  I do not know if it was an aluminum assault bat – you know, one of those with no sporting purpose.  Naturally, the intruder grabbed her from behind, and she lost control of the bat during the ensuing struggle.

The scene did not involve the 100-pound woman throwing the 170-pound man around like a ragdoll, so, in that regard, it was much more realistic than most television fights these days.  In fact, though the woman put up a determined fight, she was losing.  But she did not give up.  Penned onto the sofa and being choked by her attacker, the victim groped on the coffee table behind her for a pair of scissors her daughter had been using on a school project.  I’ll bet that’s one time she was glad her little girl didn’t pick up after herself. 

These were obviously tactical scissors.  The woman got a grip on them and very forcefully stabbed her attacker in the upper left side, possibly under the man’s extended arm.  The man immediately fell backward on the floor, stone-cold dead.  I’m getting me a pair of them scissors. 

The average human body has about 10 pints of blood by volume.  If a person has severed both carotid arteries and the jugular vein, e.g., decapitation or having one’s “throat cut”, brain death could occur in a little less than 20 seconds.  In other words, the person subjected to a complete loss of blood supply to the brain would lose consciousness in probably 10 to 20 seconds.  Any injury to a vein or artery not supplying oxygen directly to the brain requires a significant loss of blood -- probably at least one quart, maybe two, to induce unconsciousness.  There is a major vein called the Axillary that runs into the chest and is formed by the convergence of the Basilic and Brachial veins in the vicinity of the arm pit.  Presumably, our heroine’s tactical scissors penetrated such a major blood vessel.  I am pretty sure they did not reach the heart of the attacker from the angle of the strike, or any part of the central nervous system.  That’s not to mention how much force would be required for the scissors to effectively penetrate the bad guy’s clothing, skin, and muscle tissue.  The heroine would have been full of adrenaline. 

We are not too surprised that television is unrealistic in its depiction of how difficult a bad person is to incapacitate.  If anything, film and television go the opposite extreme in depicting the injuries a good person can sustain and yet keep fighting.

Sometime, when no one is watching you, slam a knife into a ham, or perhaps use you kitchen shears.  Be careful.  It is possible to have the hand slip on impact and go up on the blade.  Stabbing into ‘meat’ can require quite a bit of effort, depending on blade geometry.  Conversely, slashing with a sharp blade does not require a lot of force, especially for shallow cuts.  I was told, back in the ‘80s, that prisoners using shanks typically attack with quick, superficial cuts around or above the eyes so that an opponent or victim is blinded by a direct cut or by blood flowing from the vessel-rich skin of the face.   The attacker then moves in with multiple stabs or slashes to the throat.  The aftermath of such an attack is very ugly. 

One of the reasons we train is to learn the strengths and weaknesses of our tools, whether it is empty-hand martial arts or high-tech firearms.  Everything has limitations.  Most tools have some things they can do well.  Most of us as fighters have or can develop tactics that will work well for us as individuals.  I have a cheap and dirty leg-sweep move that has helped me in a couple of scuffles with drunks or other folks who wanted to give me a hard time.  It is surprising how fast a guy will change his mind when he trying to figure out how he wound up flat on his back.  I am certainly no martial artist or grappler, but I usually did not have to be.  A small set of moves that you can execute at full speed without having to think about them will serve you quite well.  If you know a strike, a take-down, an escape, and a submission hold, you are already ahead of the masses. 

My point in all this is that we often spend time and money acquiring some new thing or skill that somebody tells us we need.  There is not necessarily anything wrong with that, but it is might be better to learn to use what you already have.   What are your own strengths and weaknesses?  What things do you already do well?  Acquire new skills, sure.  But build on the skills and abilities you already have with the equipment you already have.  Make the fullest possible use of the resources you have right now, or find out now -- when it is not a matter of life and death, that something just isn’t going to work for you.  And there is no shame in that.  We all cannot be really, really good at everything.  Though every one of us can be expert at something.