your other weapons.
Draw Your Weapons On The Ground Savvy self-defense practitioners
... fighting on your knees is not one of the better ones.
to the street is potentially lethal force and you must be justified to do so.
Fight; Don’t Wrestle One of the biggest dangers of train-
ing in sport grappling is that it encour- ages you to grapple in situations where there are much better options. I have seen this many times during hard- core, self-defense training, when stu- dents practicing stand-up techniques tangle and end up on the ground. All too often, they revert to sport-grap- pling tactics and one student ends up in the other’s guard or half-guard po- sition. He also wastes his time trying to “pass” the guard with sport tech- nique to grapple some more. Think about it: You’re defending
yourself on the street and you decide to purposely, willfully, spread your legs and wrap them around your at- tacker. Or, conversely, your attacker wraps his legs around you and you ignore his groin to struggle for other targets. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet it happens all the time. In a real fight, you keep your legs
together and hit your attacker in the groin every time he’s too stupid to do the same. Take the cheap shot — don’t wrestle!
Use Your Attacker As mentioned previously, train-
ing to put your knees on the ground when groundfighting can be a recipe for disaster if you go down on con- crete or gravel. Train to always place your knees and elbows on your op- ponent when you go to the ground. This practice safeguards your body parts, but just as importantly, it al- lows you to both hit and apply bone pressure to your attacker the moment you hit the ground. With practice, you’ll learn how to immediately rec- ognize targets of opportunity to step, kneel, grind and pin strategic areas of his body while you wreak havoc with
WWW.AMERICANHANDGUNNER.COM
know empty hands alone are often not enough to keep yourself safe. If you’re a member of that crowd (if you’re reading this magazine, you should be), you have probably already made the commitment to carry a weapon. You should also have thought about the practicali- ties of using that weapon on the ground and incorporated those skills into your training. Using weapons on the ground
can certainly allow you to even the odds and maybe even stack them in your favor. However, carrying a weapon doesn’t automatically eliminate the need for empty-hand skills (as many “gun guys” like to think). If you carry a weapon on your belt, inside your waistband or in a pocket, you need to consider things like the challenge of draw- ing that weapon when someone has mounted you and is trying to crush your head like a grape. Going di- rectly for your weapon leaves you exposed and vulnerable, and there’s no guarantee you will actually get it into action. You’ll need to combine unarmed tactics and grappling- style body mechanics to minimize injury to you, allow free access to your weapon and allow you to draw and employ it effectively. Fighting at contact distance
with weapons is also very differ- ent than stand-up fighting with the benefit of distance. The possibility of injuring yourself while “fighting by Braille” with an attacker is very real, so you need to learn to rely on a physical touch or index to locate a target, followed by directional application of the weapon that keeps you out of its path. Groundfighting
skills should
definitely be part of any sound personal-defense
system. How-
ever, it’s up to you to determine where to draw the line between what’s practical, realistic and rel- evant to real situations and what is nothing more than sport grap- pling or MMA on concrete. Once you’ve drawn that line, you need to reinforce it through regular, in- tensive training in the tactics you really want to use on the street. As the saying goes, we will fight the way we train. Make sure your groundfighting training is consis- tent with the reality of street self- defense so you can fight the way you want to. *
PREMIUM 1911 PARTS AND LOGO GEAR
Magazines Night Sights Custom Parts Grips Leather Premium Finishes .22 LR Conversions Custom Shop Logo Apparel
Order direct at
kimberamerica.com or (914) 964-0742, or visit a Kimber Master Dealer
© 2011 Kimber Mfg., Inc. All rights reserved. 33
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180