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Always look at your opponents eyes, (if they're not highly skilled) they will usually look at an area before making a move in that direction.

Please mod this down. Looking at your opponents eyes is the last thing you want to do. Nor do you want to stare at a weapon, or at their chest as someone else posted. You want to see all of the opponent, and not focus at any one particular place. If anything, you want to fix your gaze slightly past the opponent. Then any movement, be it head, foot, hand, can be seen equally. Just watch UFC if you disagree. See that kind of glassy unfocused look in their eyes? That's what you want.

My last post in this thread was modded as flamebait. That wasn't the intention. Really and truly, all of you do not know what you speak of. This is silly talk, like 'what is the best knife grip', or 'do you punch with the top two knuckles or bottom three'?

I love (certain) traditional martial arts, and am presently looking for a good tai chi instructor (or even bagua). But this kind of stuff DOES NOT MATTER.

A real fight, not UFC, or a karate tournament, or what have you, takes less than a minute. When it does happen -- you've gotten past the 'interview' stage (assuming you haven't been outright ambushed) -- it isn't David Carradine. It's ugly and quick and then it is over. There's no subtlety.

For your edification:

Marc McYoung
P. Quinn
Bill Kipp

I attended RMCAT this year. Eye-opening.

Your entire post is a "man up" reply. Funny how it's in a thread raising issues about potential sexism.

If you're offended by jokes, joke back

Uh, yeah, and physically abused women should just punch their husbands back. Now, you're going to give me the knee-jerk response that jokes are not physical abuse to which I will answer that psychological violence is still violence. You can repeat "It's a joke." until you're blue in the face, if you're being derogatory, offensive, disgusting, you're violent.

Violence doesn't stop at sucker punches.

Karate is such a big subject that you should not judge it on such a limited experience. Having said that, martial arts clubs (Karate ones included) are not often focused towards self defence. Here is an in depth opinion piece on the divide between martial arts and self defence. I do not agree with everything in that article, the picture the author paints of martial arts is a bit biased towards describing the arts that ignore the divide but the basic premise that you will learn street effective self defence quicker in a self defence class is correct. If you find a good martial arts club that knows the limits of their training method then this should not be a big issue in the long term and the tools from training in martial arts are a lot more effective than anything you can learn in a self defence class.

The experience you describe is one you hear a lot about in martial arts, the art and the time you commit are no where near as important as the understanding of the people involved. If you consider that a lot of martial art forms view black belt as the starting point and the progress to sixth Dan may just be the counting of years then the story isn't too surprising.

I'm not too sure what I think about the whole duty to retreat thing, but that's not really what I want to address at the moment.

I just want to point out that, almost every time and for almost everybody, retreating is a damn good idea.

Have you (generic you) ever been in a fight? A real fight, not just some schoolyard brawl? Most people haven't, and I can almost guarantee you that if you try to fight someone who's attempting to use violence on you, you will almost certainly lose. Criminals are, generally, not idiots, and they won't pick a fight with someone they don't think they can beat fairly easily.

An excellent website about this kind of thing is No Nonsense Self-Defense.

The work of Arthur Kellermann is probably the most comprehensive. Here's a few of his statistics. Scroll down and click on the tables for a quick overview.

The second statement is a common fact that is tought at the very basic level of (serious) selfe-defense.
The idea of defending yourself against a mugger is rediculous. Crime is the criminal's job. Would you expect to be able to outsmart him, even when he is prepared and has set everything to his advantage? Would you expect the mugger to have a chance if he say, turned up at you office and were to do your job?
The best strategy is de-escelation, so the last thing you want to do is start waving your gun about.
For more on this topic, I would recommend some of the articles at http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/robbers.htm
Unfortunately I could only find a study about carrying guns specifically for the workplace: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1449263

Read & Learn, And Legalize Marijuana

Since the article is often pulled from websites, the first article you should read and burn into your mind is this, Google for the title and archive a copy for yourself:

"A break-in to end all break-ins"
"In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program"

It's an amazing story, and in 2008, how much has this expanded into every corner of our lives? The majority of Americans are brainwashed sheep consumers with a limp wet noodle for a brain, thrashing around with their Wii and Paris Hilton media like a fat dinoasaur in a tar pit. Stay informed, we have no privacy, encryption is good but useless with acoustic monitoring, reflections in the eye and objects in your environment, etc.! If it's electronic, there's always a loophole. You shine brighter with each electronic device you use, in many ways. Don't trust Hushmail or any web based mail service to keep anything of yours secure or to provide any reasonable degree of security. Secure your computer room and rig your computer to shut down if you use encryption like Truecrypt or other when your environment is entered by someone other than you or those you permit and trust (you shouldn't trust anyone, everyone has a price)

Compromising Reflections or How to Read LCD Monitors Around the Corner
http://www.infsec.cs.uni-sb.de/~unruh/publications/reflections.pdf [uni-sb.de]

And more:

http://www.eff.org/wp/detecting-packet-injection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer
http://cryptome.org/tempest-law.htm
http://seclab.uiuc.edu/pubs/LeMayT06.pdf
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dfrankow/files/lam-etrics2006-security.pdf
http://cryptome.org/nsa-vaneck.htm
http://www.alobbs.com/macchanger
http://lifehacker.com/software/ssh/geek-to-live--encrypt-your-web-browsing-session-with-an-ssh-socks-proxy-237227.php
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/five_stages.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-92/SP800-92.pdf
http://csrc.nist.gov/itsec/guidance_WinXP_Home.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-84/SP800-84.pdf
http://all.net/books/document/harvard.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc2/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc3/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/optical-faq.html
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590/06wi/
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/mcnamara/links.html
http://lifeha

Since the article is often pulled from websites, the first article you should read and burn into your mind is this, Google for the title and archive a copy for yourself:

"A break-in to end all break-ins"
"In 1971, stolen FBI files exposed the government's domestic spying program"

It's an amazing story, and in 2008, how much has this expanded into every corner of our lives? The majority of Americans are brainwashed sheep consumers with a limp wet noodle for a brain, thrashing around with their Wii and Paris Hilton media like a fat dinoasaur in a tar pit. Stay informed, we have no privacy, encryption is good but useless with acoustic monitoring, reflections in the eye and objects in your environment, etc.! If it's electronic, there's always a loophole. You shine brighter with each electronic device you use, in many ways. Don't trust Hushmail or any web based mail service to keep anything of yours secure or to provide any reasonable degree of security. Secure your computer room and rig your computer to shut down if you use encryption like Truecrypt or other when your environment is entered by someone other than you or those you permit and trust (you shouldn't trust anyone, everyone has a price)

Compromising Reflections or How to Read LCD Monitors Around the Corner
http://www.infsec.cs.uni-sb.de/~unruh/publications/reflections.pdf

And more:

http://www.eff.org/wp/detecting-packet-injection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer
http://cryptome.org/tempest-law.htm
http://seclab.uiuc.edu/pubs/LeMayT06.pdf
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dfrankow/files/lam-etrics2006-security.pdf
http://cryptome.org/nsa-vaneck.htm
http://lifehacker.com/software/ssh/geek-to-live--encrypt-your-web-browsing-session-with-an-ssh-socks-proxy-237227.php
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/five_stages.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-92/SP800-92.pdf
http://csrc.nist.gov/itsec/guidance_WinXP_Home.html
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-84/SP800-84.pdf
http://all.net/books/document/harvard.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc.html
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc2/
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-keyc3/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/optical-faq.html
http://www.cs.washington.edu/education/courses/csep590/06wi/
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/mcnamara/links.html
http://lifehacker.com/software/home-server/geek-to-live--set-up-a-personal-home-ssh-server-205090.php

Thats a very uncommon version of common sense. Check out: http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/ For ways to determine actual threats vs imagined and avoid real ones easily without changing your lifestyle. It's a self defense site built around understanding how violence occurs and stopping it before it starts, rather than teaching how to hurt people first then get arrested later.

That is a different case.

Most states have specific laws in place for when you can defend your home with lethal force (shooting with a deadly weapon) whereas adding laxitive (not a poison, etc) to your food is not covered and would be a simple civil case...which probably wouldn't amount to much in the end anyway.

If it came down to it he could have simply said he'd been blocked up lately and it was for his own health reasons.

And what works in one environment doesn't always work in another

...can be found at nononsenseselfdefense.com.

so... let me get this straight...

You pick a fight with a badass, then, when he takes you up on it, you realize, "Oh my god! I forgot! I'm a big fucking pussy!"

What are you going to tell the police? "I provoked this asshole, now he wants to fight."

Police arrest you both for fighting or just wasting their time.

Ignore annoying people-- or run the hell away from them-- do not poke them with sharp sticks.

Or, you know, maybe call the cops with a noise complaint.

Chill out with this self defense crap, Travis. The guy was not threatening you-- he was annoying you. Then you decide to *follow* him and act all crazy honking your horn and shit. What do you expect him to think? What do you expect him to do?

If that guy who chased you to the police station *had* gotten his hands on you, there's no way in hell you'd win with self-defense, even *if* your candy-ass won the fight. Because *you* started the fight. *You* got out of your house and followed a complete stranger to his house (is that legal?-- stalking?). *You* started acting crazy toward him with your horn-honking. *You* were a willing participant in whatever shit was going to go down next-- just because you hadn't thought it through doesn't mean you weren't.

Read this page.

This is an excellent site, lots of free material from an expert:

Tips on how to avoid being robbed