Anyone who lifts weights understands the concept of specificity; that is, if you want to get stronger arms, you don’t do squats e.g. exercise your legs. This seems a very obvious principle and one that should be applicable in everyday life, however when it comes to self-defense, specificity often gets lost or goes out of the window.

A few weeks ago I happened to watch a Krav Maga/Self-Defense instructor, who had a free program teaching teenagers how to survive a school shooting. I’m not going to judge his program as a whole because I understand how the media can portray things unfairly, and the problems of trying to explain the principles and ideas of something that may be quite expansive and comprehensive in a 3 to 5 minute segment etc. In the clip, his students demonstrated some third party gun disarms that are commonly taught on a lot of close protection (bodyguard) courses e.g. disarming from the rear when an individual is pointing a firearm at somebody else. The techniques he taught were valid for the scenarios he presented, however the scenarios he presented were not reflective of active shooter scenarios. They were appropriate for situations where a principle is being threatened, and a member of the close protection team finds themselves or is positioned behind the threat etc., however they are not really appropriate for dealing with an “active” shooter who is moving through a school or office building, not threatening people, but actively firing on them. In this situation, performing the techniques he was demonstrating would be extremely difficult. The lesson to take from this, is that you can’t simply take techniques that are designed to deal with a threat/danger in one environment/situation and blindly apply them to another.

Unfortunately, I see this idea of taking something that works in one environment, and applying it to another an awful lot. It is especially prevalent in reality based self-defense instructors taking MMA techniques and incorporating them into their syllabuses. Just because a technique has been proven to work in an MMA setting, doesn’t mean it will by default be applicable in a real-life scenario. It is tempting to look at certain techniques and escapes that are used in the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship), and after seeing their success in that setting, believe that they should be used in real-life situations. However, if you look at the environment that a UFC fight takes place in, it is very, very different to those of real-life situations e.g. the Octagon is 750 square feet of uninterrupted matting- that may have some resemblance of an empty parking lot in the room that people have to maneuver- but has little in common with any other location where violence takes place, etc. To blindly take a technique that requires a large amount of space to make it work, and/or a prolonged period of time with several uninterrupted steps etc. and say it is applicable for real life situations is naïve and dangerous, and shows a great misunderstanding of what real-life violence looks like. I have lost count of the number of 5 to 6 step escapes from Guard, which work well when you have the time to apply them – in a one-on-one combat sport setting, such as an MMA match – but would fail miserably in real-life encounter, where a second person would have the time and opportunity to smash a bottle over your head, as you went through the steps on the ground.

Too many times people look at the technique and not the environment; there are good techniques that work well in one situation but are terrible in others. You can’t take a technique that is applicable for a close protection scenario, and say that it directly applies to an active shooter situation, just because you find yourself in the same position relative to the shooter, as their intent and their movement is different. You can’t just take a technique that works well in MMA, and say it is applicable to real life, where the luxury of time and space isn’t afforded to you. Techniques have to be specific to the environments and situations where they will be used. Will a technique work on a moving subway train, on the back seat of a car, on a moving escalator, in a crowded bar? Start with the environment and create the solution based on that, rather than simply looking at what other people are doing in their environments and blindly copy them. Look at the intent behind the situation; what is the assailant’s motivation – is the attacker(s) looking to actually take hostages to bargain with, or to act as a buffer between them and the security forces, as they shoot them one by one? Both involve a shooter(s) with a long barrel weapon but the two situations are very different, and it would be incorrect to treat them as exactly the same, prescribing the same solution.

Violence is both simple and complex, and students need to be taught how to understand these complexities in a straightforward and simple manner, whilst techniques and solutions need to be explained and taught in the contexts where they will be used, as well as under the emotional constraints that the persons in them will find themselves under. The threat recognition and decision making processes for one situation may differ to another, and these need to be explained e.g. a close protection scenario is different to an active shooter one etc. Techniques by default are not interchangeable.