The 5 W's of Personal Defense - Why?

William, you said that, things aren't the way they ought to be in the world. You know, I say that evil exists and you may be visited by that evil, you have to kind of accept that. But, and yet one of the five W's is why? Is there an answer to why? Sure, there are whys that affect both, you know, the good guy side of the ledger and the bad guy side of the ledger.

When you think about the bad guy side of the ledger is motivation, is you know, it would seem very straightforward, that I want money, I want your watch. But sometimes there's more to it than that, that's instrumental violence and it makes perfect sense. A dog uses its teeth to either scare another dog away from something to eat or to fight the dog off and take, what it wants. Violence is just a tool, just because we don't have claws we use other kinds of instruments. But so, use of violence to get something we're after makes sense, it's understandable.

Expressive motivations for violence are harder to deal with, violence that seems to have no gain behind it. It just doesn't fit into our sense of why someone would do especially extreme violence because we can't picture ourselves in any sense ever doing that, ever being motivated to do it. So, you know, common violence or street violence as it used to be called is almost always instrumental for very short-term gain. But expressive violence is more dangerous because we don't understand it and it's less predictable. Street violence, common violence, instrumental violence, the mitigation factors are much more clear.

So what would those mitigation factors be? Obviously, understanding times and places of greater risks like we talked about, understanding the perspective of someone who wants material gain from a violent assault, right? Flashy jewelry obviously is going to draw someone whose attention is drawn by flashy jewelry. And so those mitigation factors are much more straightforward. It's very hard to get deselected from expressive violence.

And what are some of the things that when you've talked to these criminals and you when you actually engage in hearing their perspective, what are some of the things that they use then that we might not think of on the expressive violence side? Well, I was involved in a case where a very high-end home burglar had a extensive career of, he worked for an alarm company. So he had tremendous skills with alarm systems, but he was in very expensive homes, setting up alarm systems and he would engage in incredibly involved surveillance, electronics surveillance and physical surveillance. But he enjoyed violence and if a chance came along, he viewed it as a bonus. At one point he was, completing a robbery in a home and realized that the homeowner was there, asleep on the couch the entire time.

Now the robbery was successful, he had everything he needed and he was going to get away with it. He took time to torture and murder the homeowner. And that's an act that could get him caught, just the time that takes raises his exposure to getting caught dramatically. But it, to him, the trade off was clear. I have this opportunity and he took it.

And was that... In his words then, was that part of his plan that he was looking for those opportunities or was it just completely spur of the moment and... He used the word bonus? His actual quote was, "I had some time." The robbery was completed, his sense of what he wanted, superseded that, you know what he viewed it as a successful robbery if there had only been the physical violence and not the monetary reward? I don't think so, but to him it was a bonus and a kind of a category of bonuses that's just incomprehensible to us.

And because it's incomprehensible to us, how do we deal with that why, with that motivation? More by recognizing that it does exist, that covering all your bases, getting your ticket punched whatever cliche you wanna use. Taking appropriate defensive measures, doesn't remove you from the risk pool. Because there are kinds of risks that we just can't anticipate. And I think that that's vitally informative to accept, that again coming back to not always being on balance.

There are things that, aren't gonna be rational, at least from our worldview. Completely irrational, almost impossible to even conceptualize much less understand. And you can't create a purposeful defense against that except to be ready for it? Accept the structures that already exist you know, without any notion that I'll have a chance to sort of, get warmed up or somehow get more prepared, that if you're not prepared to fight for your life with what you have right now, you won't be able to respond to an expressive violence incident in any way. So this kind of goes back to the who?

The people that haven't accepted this reality. That somebody would say, well you need to take these steps to protect yourself. Sure. And your response would be, well why? Why would anyone want to hurt me?

Exactly. But moreover, you'll see people straddling that gap. I'm carrying a gun, therefore I am safe. I have a pocket pistol, I am safe. I have covered that base and that's not the case at all when someone wants to beat you to death for your shoes.

Or just beat you to death for the entertainment value of beating you to death. Which doesn't make any rational sense to us. None at all. But so, the false security, of the let's say the pocket pistol and then not downing pocket pistols but that person thinks that base is now covered, I am prepared. What happens when they're approached by a violent incident that exceeds those expectations, the startle threshold is so profound, they can't recover, they can't catch up and get ahead of that curve and go from reacting to responding quickly enough and the cost can be everything.

So the gun has to be more than a magic talisman, the condition yellow needs to be more than a ritual. Someone once said to me, a gun is not a vitamin. You don't take it in the morning and get the benefits all day. Right. When we talk about violence and personal violence we talk about why the...

We're always very interested in why would someone want to do violence, bring us harm? But there's some why factors on our side too. Sure, it is an interaction. It's an intersubjective experience, and on the good guy side of the ledger, there are other, you know there are motivations and why is this taking place? You know obviously there are some other directed motivations, let's say for a sworn police officer, there's a duty.

A duty to go looking for trouble and find it, right? A duty to protect a child, duty to protect another loved one. And a lot of armed citizens, feel that duty profoundly almost to their own detriment. They'll, jump into situations, where the call of duty is so strong that it overrides better judgment or even understanding of the circumstance. Now, self-directed motivation is harder to figure but it's also very potent.

My sense of what is right in the world and in what way should I act to have my vision of the world going right be expressed. You know, neighborhood watch, right? Is an excellent example of a self assumed self-directed motivation, for assuming certain kinds of risk because that's the thing these other directed and self-directed motivations come with risk profiles and thresholds of risk and are we willing to accept the ones that go with them? There's a, word responsibility keeps coming to mind. What responsibilities are you going to take on?

What responsibility do you have? Not only to the fellow citizens but to your family members and to yourself. And I think, maybe sometimes people don't factor in the risk that is balanced against that responsibility. You'll hear often about a two-sided coin, rights and responsibilities. I think of it as a triangle, you know, rights, responsibilities, and risk.

They go hand in hand. Someone who steps in as the freelance bodyguard of a woman being physically accosted, is buying the totality of the circumstance, whether or not he understands it. And I think, again this is another one of those ones and zeros situations. It's not all or nothing, if you see something happening, you can assert your sense of what should be done and what's right with the world and fixing wrongs and protecting other people and meeting your responsibility as a citizen and part of your community, without necessarily pulling your gun out and firing shots. Exactly, we'd like to think that you have, skills and tools to give yourself options and one of those options is time.

Time helps me gain understanding, right? If I don't intervene and wait for the situation to eventuate, knowing that if it took a turn for the worst, I could intervene even physically, you know. It's the time, the skills that give us options. So that's the... You're sitting in the restaurant and all of a sudden you realize there's a guy, with his gun pointed at the cashier, demanding the money for some people that's going to be a sign to go and do something, and that's something maybe run out the back door, that's something maybe draw a gun.

For others, they're gonna have no preparation for it and other people are going to sit and sort of bide their time and start making a plan. Well, and also though, you know, the worst case scenario would be someone who has a real unexplored sense of what they would do in that situation but a very powerful sense that what is going on is wrong and that would drive an intervention that's really groundless, that intervention has no basis in practice or even in understanding and next thing you know, you've shot someone in a Halloween costume or been shot by the wing man of an actual armed robber. And that's the case where the internal motivation not being explored, not being understood, has led someone to assume a risk profile they weren't ready for. We talk about, the reaction, the decision-making process and the fact that you observed something going on, you will have a reaction, and from that point on, you've got either the option of a recognition of what's going on, something you've planned for in a trained response or just an improvisation? That if you act on an improvisation, I think is what you're talking about...

Sure. You'd really get yourself into trouble. Absolutely. It's our goal that we don't react to anything, but instead, respond. A reaction is involuntary, if you throw sodium into water, it explodes.

Its a chemical reaction, it doesn't get to choose. A response is to feel the reaction, whether the reaction, whether even the startle response, you know that shock threshold and then decide what our response will be. If that's nothing or what flavor of something that will be running out the back door, engaging an armed threat, who knows? But then it's a response not a reaction, that's the goal. So why you're involved in this confrontation, isn't just because the bad guy chose you, quite often why you're involved in the situation is also going to be because of things you do.