No magic wands
Published: Tue, 02/26/13
I have been thinking quite a bit about weapons and weapon training.
Perhaps I should have other things to think about but I am a
martial arts teacher and, as you probably know, a good deal of the
training and practice in Stav is weapon based. Two things have
particularly stimulated my thoughts, one is that Matt Easton is
putting together the programme for the 2013 Fightcamp and I am
going to put in a proposal that I teach staff there this year. I
taught an axe workshop last year which seemed to go down well. The
other thing was the Guided Chaos workshop on Sunday. It was a
really good three hours training with a lot of emphasis on contact
flow and at the end the GC method of power generation which is very
interesting and, once you get the hang of it, very effective. We
also did some work with sticks and the emphasis was on movement and
fluidity as is always the case with GC. This was fine and I am all
in favour of simplicity and efficiency but skill and control are
important too. It is also essential to understand the dynamics of
a weapon since then you also know what it can't do and what a
determined opponent might be able to do to take the weapon off you.
It is often assumed that bringing a weapon into a fight will
always turn the situation to your advantage but in reality the
complete opposite can easily be the case. An extreme example is
facing an assailant with a gun, a situation I would find rather
frightening, but if it was apparent that the weapon was not loaded,
or the safety catch was still applied then I would be less worried
and attempting a disarm may be feasible. (it is surprising how
easy it is to forget to switch the safety catch, but if you carry a
gun around with the safety off you have a high chance of an
accidental discharge). A knife is dangerous because of its sharp
edge and point and the likely hood of getting injured while
disarming someone is very high. If using a knife yourself you have
the advantage that it is relatively difficult for an opponent to
just grab it off you without getting cut themselves. But on the
flip side it can be easy to simply drop a knife in a high stress
situation and then it is a matter of who manages to grab the weapon
first, you or your opponent (plus the fact that you don't want
to be groping around on the floor for your knife while one or more
people are beating you up). In the UK introducing a gun or knife
to self-defence situation is going to be highly problematic from a
legal point of view. I can elaborate on that another time if
anyone wants me to. Suffice to say that the only weapon you can
legally carry in the street is a walking stick or umbrella. If in
the countryside a shoulder length walking staff would be fine too
but in an urban area it would look a little out of place.
So is a stick an effective weapon? Yes, you can hit harder and at
a longer range than with hands and feet. If dealing with an edged
weapon attack then a stick won't get damaged in the way your
hand or arm would. However the dynamics of a stick means that it
only does harm as it hits at speed on a vulnerable target with the
right part of the tip, or certainly near the end. The main problem
with a stick is that it is easy to hold either end and once your
opponent grabs the other end then all bets are off unless you are
very skilled at weapon retention. At Fightcamp in 2012 Milo
Thurstan taught an excellent workshop on French stick fighting for
self defence or 'Le Canne' as it is known. Part of the
workshop involved trying to defend against 4 attackers wearing
protective masks and padded clothing. I lasted about 25 seconds
before someone grabbed my stick and the other three pulled me to
the ground. Most other people didn't do much better, and the
one or two who did survive did so by running around very fast
rather than relying on hitting with the sticks. Okay, it was a
little artificial but it was instructive.
At the next course we will look at working with the cudgel/walking
stick for self defence. We will look at training with the stick to
develop basic competence in handling such a weapon.
http://www.iceandfire.org.uk/train.html I will also be happy to
bring it into the USA training in May http://iceandfire.us
. But sticks are not magic wands that simply make your enemy
vanish. However informed training with weapons and without them
makes us aware of both our potential and our limitations and that
is how we learn to keep ourselves safe. At the Summer camp we will
have time to see how the Staff exercises provide the foundation for
developing competence with the staff and then extending out to
spear, axe and cudgel. http://www.stavcamp.org