Your empty-hand, immediate-response tactics will also influence your knife and gun carry positions and drawstrokes. Ideally, they should support both. For example, against a downward stabbing attack, the defender must respond with an empty-hand defense — here an inward parry with his left hand — to survive long enough to access a weapon.


drawstroke to deploy your knife still makes perfect sense. You just need to make sure you have a plan for your empty/inoperative gun that frees your hand to draw your knife. My preference would be to pass the gun to my non-dominant hand and use it as an impact tool to amplify the effect of my “live hand” (a term used in the Filipino martial arts to refer to the non-weapon hand) tactics. Obviously, this is something you’d want to incorporate into your training, using a blue gun or similar safe-training gun to enable you to work through the mechanics. Another option would be to use


the gun as an impact weapon and/ or a projectile weapon — in the lit- eral sense — to create an opportunity to draw your knife. In other words, smack him with it or chuck it at him to create the opportunity to draw your knife and finish the fight. One often-overlooked reason to


The second movement of the initial defense is a wedg- ing block with the right forearm that further deflects the attacking arm and turns the attacker away.


To create distance and off-balance the attacker, the defender pushes him with his left hand as he pivots and begins his drawstroke. The combined action of turning the hips and shoulders, pow- ers the push and feeds the motion of the draw. Note: he carries a handgun and a folding knife on his strong side.


draw your knife is to stack the odds in your favor in uncomfortable or poten- tially dangerous situations. Walking to your car through a dark parking lot is a happier thing when you’ve got a knife concealed in your hand. That gives you an “immediate-response” tool in the event of a sudden attack and puts you way ahead of the curve com- pared to drawing spontaneously from a pocket or sheath. Some shooters might argue that in a situation where you might need a gun, you should sur- reptitiously draw your gun and skip the knife. While there’s certainly logic to that argument, the fact remains it’s easier to be sneaky with a knife than it is a gun — especially a folding knife clipped to your pocket. Casually hook- ing your thumb into your pocket puts your hand on the knife. From there, it can be easily drawn and palmed in the hand. Closed,


it can be used as


an impact weapon against low-level threats like unarmed attacks or quick- ly opened to address sudden, more se- rious attacks. If you feel the situation justifies it, you can palm the knife with the blade open and have it ready to put into action immediately, either to ad- dress the threat conclusively or cause enough hesitation or damage to pave the way for you to draw your gun. With practice, this approach to


At the conclusion of the empty-hand defense, the attacker is off balance and the defender is mov- ing even further outside the attack, gun drawn and ready to fire. If he had chosen to, he could have used the exact same sequence of motions to feed deployment of the folding knife.


52


prepping a knife becomes a subtle sleight of hand, moving the knife from pocket to hand and back without drawing any attention. And sneaky manipulation of a folding knife is far easier than “palming” a 1911.


Are You Trained? The key to using any weapon


effectively is training. And since PERSONAL DEFENSE • FALL 2011 SPECIAL EDITION


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