BOOK EXCERPT: GOLDEN RULE #3 - LIVE BY EXAMPLE

On the first Monday of the month for a while I’ll post a chapter from the book. If you love what you see here, you can get 100 more very much like it by picking the book up on Amazon.

Here’s a frustrating fact about parenting. Our kids don’t listen much, but they are always watching. It’s frustrating because that’s how they catch us when we don’t walk our talk.

I grew up in the 1980s, during which time there was a famous public service commercials on television about not using drugs. It featured a heated exchange between father and son. When the father asked “Where did you learn to do this?” about the son’s drug use, the son replied “I learned it from watching you!”

The ad’s a bit over the top, but that message applies to so much more than drugs. How your child wears a seatbelt in the car, they learn by watching what you do with your seatbelt. How your child thinks and talks about school, they learn from watching how you talk about your education and theirs. How they treat their romantic partners, how often they tell the truth, whether or not they text while driving. Whether they wear a helmet while riding a bike.

All of it, they learn by watching you.

Which means it’s our job as parents to live by example, demonstrating the safety habits and practicing the techniques we think are important. First they see us do it, then they help us do it. Eventually they’ll remind us to do it…and as adults, they’ll teach the same things to our grandchildren.

The Next Level

When I work with clients or present at events, the biggest questions I get asked is how to talk to kids about safety without scaring them.

I understand the worry. Many parents fear that discussing potential dangers will plant the idea of those dangers in a little one’s mind. I’ll go into that in more detail later, but for now…

When our kids see us,  looking both ways when crossing the street, at first they don’t think about it at all. Later on they might ask about it. When we tell them we do that so we’re safer from being hit by a car, one of two things happens. In one case, they’ve already been exposed to the idea of that danger, and you give them a new tool to help prevent it. In the other, this is the first time they’ve thought about the risk of being hit by a car, and their first exposure to this potentially scary idea comes with the knowledge that you are already doing something about it, and teaching them a way to be safer, too.

That seems to me less scary and more empowering than any other way to discuss safety with our kids.

Statistics and Safety: What That Means for Protector Parents

Long-time readers won’t be surprised by this, but here’s an infographic I encountered recently.

It’s 12 years old, but (excepting the COVID spike and continued reduction in violent crime) it’s reasonably accurate for this decade…at the very least we can still draw accurate conclusions about where to put our safety efforts.

Here’s some things you might notice after giving it a good, long look.

• 90% of the deaths here are from disease

• Of the 10% remaining, less than half are from crime

If you dig down you can find other points of data that are at the very least interesting, but those two are the big ones from me.

This tells me that most of us — focusing on crime prevention and self-defense against assault — are putting our energies in the wrong place. It accounts for less than 5% of deaths.

Meanwhile, accidents cause more than twice that many deaths, and transport accidents (car crashes) are of equal importance. Bottom line: new tires are at least as important as a new gun. Working on our balance and falling skills are far more important than learning a knife disarm or joint lock.

Going one step further out from assault and murder, we underscore the lesson of Zombieland. Rule One is CARDIO.

Good cardiovascular conditioning isn’t a guarantee of good health, but it does reduce our susceptibility to about half of the death causes in the overwhelming 90% of illness-related mortality.

As somebody who used to say “I got my black belt so I don’t have to run”, that’s bad news for me, too. But facts are facts.

So…I dare you to get some cardio in today. Whether that’s a 10-minute walk or your third ultramarathon. Do more today than you did yesterday, and more tomorrow than you did today. Model it for our kids, and live it so we can properly spoil our grandbabies.

Hotel Safety For Families

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Let’s talk about Hotel Safety

“What you don’t know about your hotel can kill you.”

Not really (most of the time). I’m just riffing off those old scare pieces from the network nightly news.

But seriously folks, hotels can be zones of false safety. They’re “home” while we’re away, a place where we feel like we can let down our guard.

And we can let down our guard, but if we take a few steps we can let down our guard more safely…which means better rest for us, and safer days on our trip. 

I learned a lot of his in two books very much worth checking out. These are How to Be Your Own Bodyguard by Nick Hughes, and Choose Adventure: Safe Travel in Dangerous Places by Greg Ellifiritz. They’re densely packed with good information, much of which matches my own experience traveling in places like Guatemala, Cambodia, and India. Both are available on Amazon.

We can be safer in hotels by dividing our work into three stages: what to do at home, what to do when we check in, and what to do while we’re there. 

At Home:

• Don’t skimp on the hotel price. Get a good hotel in a decent neighborhood, preferably one with a pool and an in-room kitchen. 

• Ask for a room on the 3rd to 8th floor. Lower is a target for burglary. Higher is out of reach for most fire ladders. 

• Use Google Maps (satellite view) to check out the neighborhood around the hotel. You can see a lot of red and green flags by doing this.

Checking In:

• Confirm that they gave you a room on the floors you requested. 

• Identify a manager by name, and introduce them to your kids. Make sure your children know to go to or ask for this person if they need help and can’t find you. 

• If the receptionist says your room number out loud, ask for a new room. 

While You’re There:

• Shortly after settling in to your room, walk as a group through the fire escape route. Learn it, and confirm the way isn’t blocked or locked. 

• Set up your emergency equipment someplace you can reach it easily.

• In any country where you don’t feel 100% safe, bring a 3-dollar rubber door stop. Kick it into the door when you lock in for the night. 

• Avoid sending any sensitive information on the hotel wi-fi. It is almost never secure. 

Greg’s blog is a great source of safety information of all stripes, written by a smart and experienced human being doing good things in the world. Check it out here. 

One Last Little Thing

A related habit I’ve found works very well is what I call the two-day travel day. Get up early, before it’s hot, and go do a thing in your destination. Come “home” to the hotel in the early afternoon and rest for 2-4 hours. Nap, use the pool, let the kids play video games, whatever. Then go out in the afternoon to evening for a second round of travel experiences. Have dinner, come back to the hotel, and go to bed. It really is the better way to travel, and travel safely. 

The Biggest Lie in Martial Arts

Have you heard about the website “Bullshido”? It’s a community of martial artists who brand themselves as crusaders against “fake martial arts”. Mostly, they’re macho, 20-something chest thumpers who want to convince themselves that what they learned is better than what other people learn.

But they have a point.

Martial arts is (a) shrouded in mystery, (b) built around a topic few people truly experience, and (c) has an integral hierarchy that encourages blind obedience. This triple threat means there can be a lot of bad advice out there. Much of the time, that bad advice is being taught by people who don’t even know they’re giving bad advice.

That’s one of the biggest risks of deciding to get some self-defense training, and if you’re part of martial arts culture you know it’s one of the most common and least productive arguments novice practitioners get into. It’s real, but it’s not what I’m here to talk about today.

Today, I want to talk about the biggest lie in martial arts and self defense training. I’m speaking to this lie after nearly four decades of experience, and to me it’s the most important safety lie you’ll find in family security circles.

The Biggest Lie in Martial Arts Is…

That you should ask a Navy SEAL to teach you self defense. Let me tell you what I mean by that.

A Navy SEAL is in better physical shape than you or I have ever been. He has extensive knowledge of defensive tactics. He’s probably armed. His response to injury and danger is different from ours. He has been trained to never hesitate about hurting a human being who threatens him.

How many of those traits and qualities describe you? How many tacit assumptions will he make about a defensive encounter that simply won’t be true about you in the situation he’s discussing?

Hell, folks. I’ve trained for 37 years as of this writing. I’ve had guns pulled on me twice, been stabbed once, got sucker punched four or five times. I’ve split up bar fights, had a (unjustly) jealous husband come at me with a bat, and was once mobbed by wild dogs in Malaysia…and I’m not up to the speed I would have to be for a SEAL’s self-defense assumptions to match my reality.

This isn’t just about Navy SEALS, either. I’m 200 pounds of aging, male jock who’s been in more tussles than anybody could call intelligent. The tacit assumptions I make about what self-defense will be won’t be true about a 110-pound suburban mom who’s last fist-fight was in 7th grade after gym class and who’s peak athletic experience is her Wednesday spin class.

Or consider a lithe, athletic female instructor trying to tell somebody with a disability how to respond while under attack. Or a white, middle class, female martial artist explaining to a young black man how to talk to police.

Okay, So…What’s My Point?

Everybody lives inside of a context, and that context impacts how we keep ourselves and our families safe. If you’re learning family safety — and here I mean self defense, but also fire safety, mental health, first aid, everything — it’s important to consider how your teacher’s context differs from your own. Ask yourself:

• Are they larger or smaller than you?

• How might their gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation impact how they interact with the world?

• How much experience do they have with violence, trauma, and stress compared to your own?

• Is their moral compass congruent with your own?

• Do they have a family to protect, or are they responsible just for their own safety?

• What legal rights and responsibilities do they have that you don’t, which might impact assumptions they make about security and safety?

• How does their mobility and athleticism compare to yours?

• Do their goals for safety, self-defense, and training match your own?

• What equipment do they regularly have with them, compared to what equipment you regularly carry?

• How much more often do they train than you do?

All this isn’t to say that you should ignore training from somebody who’s not essentially your twin. Everybody can learn something valuable from anybody, on any day, if they want to. This is to say that you should view anything you learn about keeping your family safe through a lens that includes your instructor’s context.

Start by identifying the context. Move then to how your contexts differ. Then consider what changes you might need to make, and what questions you should ask during your training, to modify what you’ve learned to suit your context.

My Favorite Weapon to Carry

Alert readers know I have an extensive background in martial arts and self-defense. I think about that stuff a lot, both from the POV of a scared parent and from the POV of what I might do if my family were attacked. I also teach a lot of folks about weapons for self-defense.

Today, I want to introduce you to my favorite personal defense weapon. But before I do that, I want to talk about reality and weapons. There are five points you need to consider:

Weapon Training is Lots of Fun

Doesn’t matter if you’re fencing, getting range time, working double sinawali with a stick in each hand, or working knife patterns. It’s fun, and done right can improve your martial prowess and your development as a human being. This is great, but I think it gets in the way sometimes of really thinking about the applied reality of using a weapon on another human being, even a bad guy who arguably has it coming or objectively will do harm if not stopped with a weapon.

There Are Very Few (If Any) Experts on Weapons for Parents

Maybe none. The overwhelming majority of weapons teachers fall into two camps: martial artists who train with weapons, and high-tier military or police experts. Martial artists rarely (if ever) get into actual fights with the actual weapons they train with. Those military and police experts use their weapons, but rarely (if ever) in the context or with the mindset of a parent. This makes it very, very hard to get realistic training and good advice about using weapons as a family protector.

You Must Know Your Capacity

Rory Miller draws a line between capability and capacity. Capability in this case is your skill with a weapon: how much you know, how fast you can cut, how accurately you can shoot. Capacity if your ability to use that weapon on a live human being, without hesitation, in the moment it matters. This bears deep thinking, and there’s no shame in admitting that you’re not prepared to cut anybody. This is important because the bad guys have the capacity to use weapons, and to use your weapon on your family if you hesitate.

You Must Practice Deployment, Not Just Use

Using a weapon is one part of the equation. Getting to your weapon while flooding with adrenaline, and then putting it to use is a whole other skillset — but one you must have if you plan to use a weapon. That means not just shooting at the range, but drawing and fire quickly and with accuracy. It means getting your hand in your purse, around the pepper spray, and out pointed in the right direction swiftly and unerringly. This takes practice above and beyond the fun stuff.

You Must Know the Law

It’s on you to know what you can carry, how it’s legal to carry it, and what the law says about using that weapon on a human in self defense. Without that knowledge, you set yourself up for jail time and a losing civil suit even if the situation was a bad guy about to do bad things to you.

Put those five things together and there’s not much to recommend carrying a knife, gun, baton, or other weapon when it comes to the reality of protecting your child. The risks usually outweigh the benefits, and cases of a weapon being taken away and used on a victim are depressingly common (see “You Must Know Your Capacity”).

All that said, though, here’s my go-to weapon to carry on the day to day:

Yep. A modern, LED flashlight made out of airplane aluminum. Here’s some stuff to consider about these:

They’re Lightweight and Easy to Carry

Seriously. These will fit in your pocket and weigh next to nothing. Also, they don’t have pointy bits that can nick your fingers when you’re digging out your phone.

They’re Not That Violent…

You’re not going to kill anybody with this, or even permanently injure them. It’s a good option for that capacity question I mentioned above. With some training and dedication, you can use them to give somebody a very bad day, but they’re not the same emotional burden as a knife or gun.

…But They’ll Give You 30 Seconds

These things are so bright they’ve been shown to stun (briefly) moose and grizzlies. In dark conditions, flashing somebody in the eyes will leave them blind for 30-60 seconds. That’s more than enough time for you to get out of harm’s way, or to turn the tables if escape is impossible.

They’re Hard to Use Against You

Even if the bad guy takes it away from you, all he’ll do with it is shine it in your eyes…which stings, but isn’t life threatening.

They’re Useful for Stuff Other Than Violence

This might be my favorite part. Flashlights help you see, which you’ll need far more often than you’ll ever need a weapon.

So yeah, that’s my favorite carry weapon these days…especially since I’m overseas in countries where I’m unfamiliar with the laws around carry weapons and deploying weapons in self defense. Consider picking one up and playing with it, see how it feels.

One last thing: you can spend hundreds of dollars on super-tech tactical flashlights, or you can get to for something like 15 bucks on Amazon. As weapons one is about as good as the other. As flashlights, they’re pretty much equal as well. The cheaper model costs less, so you can have several, and you don’t mind if you break one during practice.

Real Deal Self Defense: Who Targets You?

When I interviewed Rory Miller for the show, he made an important point. We spend a lot of time thinking about how we act, how we think, how we observe, and how we might defend ourselves. That’s good, but at the same time we don’t often think about the bad guys. What’s going on in their minds?

To really keep ourselves safe, we need to think about them in three different ways. What do they want? What are they afraid of? How do they operate? By knowing these things, we can focus our safety efforts for our family.

What Do the Bad Guys Want?

At the most basic, there are two kinds of bad guys. Resource predators want your stuff. Process predators want you. It goes deeper, of course. Some resource predators just want something they can sell for their next drug fix. Others want specifically cell phones, or laptops, or cash, or jewelry. Some process predators want a small victim who’s easy to cow and intimidate. Others want to make a trophy of somebody who looks big and athletic.

And we can take it one step further. Most predators are good at what they do, which means they’ve identified the kind of person most likely to have what they want. They have a type. For example:

• A smash-and-run mugger who just wants easy money is likely to target women and small men wearing nice clothes.

• A woman who wants to steal money might target men who look like they’re in town on business, especially drunk men who meet that description.

• A group of young men out to feel tough might target other young men in numbers smaller than their own.

Step one in setting up your own safety profile is understanding what kinds of bad guys consider you a target.

Example. I’m a large, aging jock who moves like he’s trained for a long time. Also, I wear no jewelry and don’t spend much on clothes. Mostly, I need to worry about three kinds of bad guys. Aggressive panhandlers might approach me in front of my wife and kids because they think I won’t want to look cheap in front of them. Women running a scam or rolling drunks might focus on the aging jock part, trying to trick me into letting down my guard when I think “the old man’s still got it.” Some process predators looking to feel tough might also zero in on the aging part, thinking they could take the middle-aged guy and win points because I look like I’m still in shape.

My list is much smaller than many other peoples’ lists. Who’s on yours?

What Are the Bad Guys Afraid Of?

All bad guys are afraid of getting caught, and getting hurt. They’re also afraid of whatever pressures push them to do bad things, and often that fear outweighs the first ones I just mentioned. The trick is to make sure you present in a way that emphasizes the fears of getting caught or hurt. Some of the universal ways to do this include:

• Staying visibly alert by looking around at eye level

• Moving with confidence: arms swinging, medium gait

• Not looking at our phones while out and about

• Staying sober and off drugs in public

• Keeping in shape

Beyond that, you can look at your list of personal predators and make some strong predictions about specific things they might be afraid of. This forms the beginning of a personal safety plan.

Examples: That aggressive panhandler fears little, because it would be illegal for me to attack him, but knows he can’t spend too much time on any one person. That drunk rolling woman likely fears physical attacks and the police. The process predator who wants the fight fears being made to look or feel weak and foolish. Each of these fears presents a potential strategy for avoiding their notice, or escaping them if they begin to make contact.

How Do the Bad Guys Operate?

Each kind of bad guy who might target you has a playbook. Many of these playbooks are fairly common knowledge: things you can look up in interviews and research papers. This is where you do your research into the kinds of criminal who might target you, and work out the sorts of attacks that are most common.

Once you know the way your most likely predators operate, you can come up with a specific response. That response starts with presenting as the living embodiment of those fears we just talked about, but also includes what to watch for, how to avoid it, and what to do if it looks like it’s about to start.

Example in depth: an aggressive panhandler isn’t likely to rely on physical intimidation with somebody like me. Instead (like I mentioned earlier), he wants me to hand over money to not look cheap. So his plan will be to get in my space and loudly demand money, putting on a show for the people with me. My plan starts early. I have a rule about people who ask for money. I carry around some singles and fives in public, and anybody who’s trying gets paid. They could be playing the guitar, juggling, selling flowers or fruit. Doesn’t matter. If you’re trying, you get paid. People just asking for money get nothing. My wife and kids know this policy, so I have no fear at all that they’ll think I’m cheap when I refuse an aggressive panhandler. His strategy is completely disarmed, and he’ll move on to a softer target when he sees his plan isn’t working.

Time to Do Some Profiling

All right. Your turn. Take some time. Do some research. Ask some experts. Answer these three questions for each member of your family. You can make this as formal or informal as you like, but this kind of preparatory work can help your family feel safer, and be safer, for the rest of your lives.

If you haven’t yet, check out the full interview with Rory here…it’s worth the listen. He remains one of the most knowledgeable and intelligent people writing about self defense.

BOOK EXCERPT: FIRE SAFETY - Practice With Fire Extinguishers

On the first Monday of the month for a while I’ll post a chapter from the book. If you love what you see here, you can get 100 more very much like it by picking the book up on Amazon.

Practice with Fire Extinguishers

How would you like to exponentially improve your family’s fire safety for twenty dollars and half an hour?

That was a rhetorical question. Of course you would. Here’s how to do it, with a method I use at my house. As far as I’ve been able to tell, this is a Jason Brick Original, but it’s possible I heard it sometime long ago and just forgot.

This method solves a serious problem of fire safety. Most safe homes have a fire extinguisher, maybe several. It’s a smart and inexpensive tool to add to any house. But also, most homes with fire extinguishers are equipped with exactly zero people who have used one in the past few years.

Fire extinguishers are built for ease of use, but when you’re trying to put out a fire is not the time to be looking up instructions on YouTube.

My uncle, a career Marine Force Recon soldier, has a saying: “A plan you don’t rehearse isn’t a plan. It’s a hope.” Which means, if we want those fire extinguishers to do us any good, we need to train and practice with them. Here’s how we do that in my home.

Once each year, usually just before the Fourth of July, I buy a new fire extinguisher. In our house, we have three. None of them are fancy. They’re just the $20 models you can get at Home Depot. We replace the oldest extinguisher in the house with the new one.

The old one we take into the back yard. On the patio, we build a small campfire. We put on gloves and goggles, and everybody in the house takes turns putting out the fire.

Even when my children were very young, they did it with the help of an adult. Now that the youngest is a teenager, everybody in the house is rated for basic fire extinguisher use.

As a bonus, we also get to practice basic fire building, which can be lifesaving in a wilderness situation and just convenient during family camping trips.

It takes about thirty minutes from start to finish. It teaches important safety skills to my family. It’s fun, especially for the young ones, but also for adults. Because something’s on fire, there’s even a little pressure testing and adrenaline, especially for the younger kids doing it the first few times.

I encourage you to steal this and put it to work for your family. We do it just before July 4th because of fireworks and camping, but any time is a good time.  

A Quick Review

If you’ve never been formally trained on how to use a home fire extinguisher, there are two sets of information you need to learn.

The first is what kind of fire extinguisher to have and use. Extinguishers are rated on a letter system, with different letters corresponding to different kinds of fires:

·   Class A extinguishers put out regular fires from wood, paper, carpet, etc.

·   Class B extinguishers put out flammable liquid fires, like burning oil or gasoline.

·   Class C extinguishers put out electrical fires.

·   Class D extinguishers put out flammable metals like sodium or magnesium.

·   Class K extinguishers put out oil and grease fires.

Your typical home fire extinguisher is rated A, B, and C. That means it puts out any fire you’re likely to have at home, except for cooking fires involving oil and grease. For those, you don’t want the pressure from a fire extinguisher anyway. Dump some salt on it, or contain it with a lid. For the rest, that Home Depot extinguisher does the trick.

The second set of information is how to use the extinguisher.

For fires smaller than a beach ball, grab your extinguisher. Stand six to eight feet away (between two and four paces). Remember the acronym PASS:

·   Pull the pin out of the extinguisher, just like the guy did with a grenade in the last war movie you watched.

·   Aim the extinguisher at the base of the fire. Flames feed from fuel, so you’re going to douse the fuel.

·   Squeeze the trigger to get the extinguisher going.

·   Sweep the flow across the base of the fire to put out all fuel.

If the extinguisher runs out before the fire is gone, or if the fire spreads to larger than a beach ball, evacuate and call the fire department.

If you successfully put out the fire, evacuate and call the fire department. The air inside will be full of toxic fumes, and the professionals will check for hot spots to make sure everything is extinguished.

I’d also encourage you to watch one of the dozens of great YouTube videos on fire extinguisher use before you do your first training. Reading is good, but seeing is better.

 

You Have Permission to Keep Yourself Safe

Marc MacYoung needs no introduction in self-defense and martial arts circles. He’s a violence professional with a loooooong list of books to his name:

• Cheap Shots, Ambushes, and Other Lessons

• Safe in the City: A Streetwise Guide to Avoid Being Robbed, Raped, Ripped Off, or Run Over

• Knives, Knife Fights, and Related Hassles

• “Secrets” of Effective Offense

• Pool Cues, Beer Bottles, and Baseball Bats: Animal’s Guide to Improvised Weapons for Self-Defense and Survival

• Taking it to the Street: Making Your Martial Arts Street Effective

• Fists, Wits, and a Wicked Right: Surviving on the Wild Side of the Street

• A Professional’s Guide to Ending Violence Quickly

• Violence, Blunders, and Fractured Jaws

• Becoming a Complete Martial Artists

• In the Name of Self-Defense

• Street Escape & Evasion

• Beyond the Picket Fence: Life Beyond the Middle Class Bubble

• What You Don’t Know Can Kill You

• Floor Fighting: Stompings, Maimings, and Other Things to Avoid When a Fight Goes to the Ground

• Multiple Attackers: Your Guide to Recognition, Avoidance, and Survival

…and I’ve probably missed a few. My point is, the man is prolific and expert at things related to violence. He’s a good guy to listen to.

Most of his books are aimed at violence professionals, or wanna-be violence professionals. His latest, Safety Doesn’t Have to Be Scary, is for civilians like you and me. It educates without being scary, bringing violence prevention into a space where it’s needed. It’s full of great advice, and you should read it, but today I’m going to share with you the most important insight I found in the book:

You Have Permission to Keep Yourself Safe

I’ll say that again. You Have Permission to Keep Yourself Safe. This is so important I’ll say it a third time in a different font:

You Have Permission to Keep Yourself Safe

I’d apologize for overstressing this, but it can’t be overstressed.

As a human, you have the right to keep yourself safe. You must give yourself permission to hurt people, to be rude, to embarrass yourself, to do whatever you have to to stay safe and to keep your family safe.

This is important because the bad guys have given themselves permission to hurt you. They’ve already worked that out before they attack. In that moment, you have time to defend yourself OR time to work out how you feel, morally and emotionally, about staying safe.

You.

Have.

Permission.

To.

Keep.

Yourself.

Safe.

Got it? Good. Spend all the time you need to internalize this, and to visualize situations where you might need permission. This ranges from giving yourself permission to be rude to somebody in your personal space, all the way up to understanding the circumstances under which you might kill somebody, and everything in between.

10 Things You Should Know About Keeping Yourself Safe

1.Violence Comes Last

You are safer, and your family is safer, if you are prepared for violence and give yourself permission to use it. That said, not getting involved with violence is almost always the safest course.

You know how to de-escalate things, but also recognize that violence comes last from the other side first. Bad guys have a path to violence that includes steps of observation, testing boundaries, assessing capacity, closing distance, and others.

Combine those two things, and you have a handbook for staying safe before you need that permission to keep yourself safe.

2. You Need to Understand Conflict

Conflict and violence are sciences. The better you understand them, the better you can keep yourself and your family safe. You will see it coming from further away, have more tools to avoid them, and be faster and safer if things come to violence.

Books like Marc’s, and shows like mine, are a place to start building this understanding.

3. Violence Doesn’t Come Out of Nowhere

At the risk of harping on the lead-up, violence almost never comes out of nowhere. In the overwhelming majority of cases, warning signs were there for people who could recognize them:

• That abusive spouse showed signs of controlling and manipulation far before the first hit

• That school shooter had a case file two inches thick, and mentioned shooting classmates on social media

• That rapist tested social boundaries at the party or bar before pushing physical boundaries later

• That mugger had been following you for three blocks

I’m not saying this to blame the victim. In all cases, the bad guy is entirely to blame. Knowing how to spot those signs of impending violence help you avoid being a victim.

4. You Must Understand the Rules

Violence has different social rules in different places. This includes reasons an otherwise rational person might get violent with you, the ways you indicate you’re a poor choice to target for violence, rituals and phrases for avoiding violence, how far you can go before bystanders intervene…and many more details.

Breaking the rules of violence is a quick way to get badly hurt by people who feel 100% justified in hurting you.

The rules change according to where you are. If you’re in unfamiliar territory, pay attention to how other people are acting. It can give you good cues and clues.

5. It’s On You to Know the Law

Besides the social rules, each jurisdiction has its own laws surrounding the use of force and violence. Although self-defense is an almost universally recognized human right, the legal definitions vary.

For example, a bad guy with a knife is coming toward you and your children. You have a gun. In some states, you’re 100% okay shooting to kill right away. In others, you can only shoot if there’s no escape route behind you. In still others, you get additional rules about whether or not you must warn the bad guy before opening fire. In much of the world, you’re already breaking the law by having a gun.

If you intend to use violence (and you should, under circumstances you set for yourself after reflection), it is your responsibility and yours alone to understand how self-defense interacts with the laws where you are.

6. Be Ready for the Aftermath

Violence is bad in the moment, and arguably worse in some cases afterward. Even if you “win” the altercation, you will suffer emotional damage. You might also face criminal action or a lawsuit because of what you did to stay alive.

Be prepared for this, and get the help you need to weather this second storm.

7. Ego Has No Place Here

You have permission to keep yourself and your family safe. You do not have permission to hurt other people as a way of boosting or protecting your ego.

I don’t care what they said about your mom, or your date. It doesn’t matter what name they called you. Violence is for safety only.

Most people who read my blog are parents, and already know this. But in case you need reminding, or want somebody to back you up when you tell your teen boy, I figured this should be on the list.

8. Know Your Goals

Permission works best when you understand why. When you think about surviving violence, or find yourself in a dangerous situation, set a goal immediately and do everything you can to get there.

For example, the advice in a mass shooting incident is “Run, Hide, Fight.” It sounds good, but it lacks a goal. Where are you running to, and why? Where should you hide, and to what purpose? When you fight, what are you trying to accomplish?

Run away from the danger, so you’re nowhere near the flying bullets. Hide someplace that offers cover, so the bad guys moves past you. Fight to disarm and destroy the attacker, using whatever tools are necessary.

That’s just one framework for this, but you get what I’m saying. Make that decision quickly and act on it.

9. Training is a Must

People do not rise to the occasion. They fall to their level of training.

If you are serious about staying safe, take time to learn and practice safety skills. You don’t have to become a black belt, but at the very least become familiar to the point of habit with whatever self-defense devices you carry regularly.

10. Accept Reality

The biggest mistake victims of violence make is they’re still trying to convince themselves violence won’t happen when it’s happening.

The world is mostly safe, and mostly filled with good people, but when a bad guy reveals himself as bad, look that information squarely in the eye. Accept that you are in trouble, and that you bear the primary responsibility for getting yourself out of it.

People not doing that is the main reasons bad guys are able to keep being bad. It’s an ugly reality, but that doesn’t make it less real.