A word to the wise, don’t get caught up watching thousands of videos of violent attacks with the intention of analyzing and breaking the videos down by identifying perceived points of failure – until you have identified the common denominator in all (or nearly all) successful defenses.
Without an understanding of the one or two key mechanisms that facilitate success, those that try to understand all the means of failure will endure two flaws, (1) attempting to fix problems that can only be addressed by the mechanism that fosters a successful defense, and (2) losing the proper perspective in analyzing the footage (i.e. what went wrong in each attack as opposed to what went right consistently over a large set of samples). In general, this errant process will lead to faulty conclusions.
There is no shortage of commentators across the Internet that breakdown violent attack videos, draw dangerous conclusions, and “dress” those conclusions up by either (1) connecting the analysis to their own preconceived ideas/agenda, or (2) missing the common denominators of success and focusing on smaller errors that ultimately do not lead to success (as an attack would play out).
I often point out to my students that by “fixing an error” called out by a commentator offering an analysis of an attack on video, the defender only prolongs the attack by a second (or less ) before again coming to a predictable, catastrophic point of failure.
As a general rule for edged weapons defenses, a powerful, aggressive counterattack and an average execution of the defense will yield far better results than an excellent execution of a defense that does not include a counterattack – every time, all the time.
Finally, never take anything presented by others (including me) as fact in self-defense analysis or situations, and always “prove it to yourself”.
