The 5 W's of Personal Defense - Overview

When someone gets ready to think about this mindset with the violent criminal actor, where do you start? It's a big thing. I start with the notion that it's an interaction. It's an interaction between the self-defined person that we've talked about and a violent criminal actor, at this point. I think of the five W's of that interaction.

Who will be involved? From the audience's point of view, this is everything from regular Joe, regular Jane, all the way up to somebody who is carrying weapons for personal defense and has assumed a different kind of persona in the world. That person will encounter all sorts of different folks in the world. First off what I call the artifact. Just the artifacts of your daily life in the community, a homeless guy, an older person confused, young kids running down the street.

All the way up to in intensity and acuity of need to address them, of violent criminal actors, somebody whose purpose is to do you violence to complete what it is that they wanted to do. That's the who. The what is they're being targeted for violent aggression. Most importantly being advantaged for dominance. That's positional dominance, relational dominance, all the ways that dominance can be exerted upon you.

Then the enactment finally of physical violence. That's the what. But the what also involves conceptualizing yourself as a target, not as a victim. We can talk quite a bit about that if you want. Targeting is an external process.

Victim selection involves a lot of feedback from you, from your audience, or from the good guy so to speak. Who, what, when. It will most certainly not be a time of our choosing. The old joke, if you knew there was gonna be a gun fight at two you would brings friends with long guns. Myself, I wouldn't go at all if they told me there was going to be a gun fight at two.

We can think about in terms of least and most and minimum and maximum. The least advantageous time for you and the most advantageous time for a violent criminal actor is when it will happen. The least and most likely are also kind of confusing. Because the least likely time for an assault is actually the best time for it, because you will be less prepared for it. That least likely moment.

That's why break-in robberies are so dangerous. When you get home there's this natural pause. I'm home, I'm safe. You're not. Where will it happen?

It's easy to say that a violent criminal actor can attack anywhere. We kind of operate under the old rubric of Farnam's Law that if we just stay away from stupid people and stupid places and don't do stupid things we'll be safe. That's not the case though. Violence can come to us. Why, why is this encounter happening at all?

First off, violence is an intentional act. You can harm someone, you can even use force against someone unintentionally. But to commit violence, it's an intentional act, it's an expression of will. The person committing the violence is expressing their will upon you in physical form. Those motivations really break down along two lines.

Instrumental motivation, which is the use of violence to an end. Meaning if I hit you in the head with a socket wrench in order to get your expensive watch, violence is just a tool. Just like a shovel is used to make a hole. Expressive violence, on the other hand, is where violence is the purpose. Terrorism is the classic expression of expressive violence.

The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, to use that violence. Some of the most virulent form of anti-social criminal aggression is expressive violence, where the point of the crime is to exert violence on someone else. Who, what, where, when, why, I think of the kind of governing dynamics. The last why is the why for us, for the good guy, for the armed citizen. Our motivations are really other directed.

Let's say a sense of duty. I have a duty to my community. A police officer obviously has a sworn duty. If I'm an armed citizen I've assumed a duty. A range of duties.

But then they can be self-directed. A duty to protect a child is other directed. Self-directed, I just don't feel that in my community it's good to be threatened by others and so I want to instill a sense of safety around myself and in and around the community. Each kind of motivation brings with it a risk profile and a risk threshold that you'll accept. I know plenty of people who would accept extraordinary risks to protect a child, to protect a spouse, but they would never run those risks to protect themselves.

There's a lot going on and who, what, where, when, and why I think is the most important place to start. Remember, as Nietzsche said, when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you. When you think about these decisions you have to think deeply because these decisions are feeding back into how you're going to be and how you're going to act in the moment. Every moment spent planning for this reality, eventual reality, is important.