If you want to learn how to stay safe, to defend oneself, to know how to fight, to understand violence, to learn about conflict, to protect oneself, to avoid being targeted – one needs to learn martial/fighting arts. Particularly those from the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, China, and Korea. It can’t possibly be done without. If one doesn’t study these, one simply doesn’t or can’t know anything about violence and cannot be taken seriously.
Some examples where this is not true:
1. Prisons. Filled with people experienced with violence…and predominantly untrained.
2. Gangs, organized crime, street criminals.
3. People that fight with regularity at the bar or on the street.
4. Most doormen, security, LE, prison guards (outside of a bare minimum introduction and yearly refresher, maybe) Daily, they deal with violence sans training but with experience.
5. The vast majority of violence survivors who fight back and often rely solely on innate survival skill, most often against very dangerous asocial/asymmetrical violence
6. The intelligence community, home security, private investigations, CCTV specialists, and other professional branches that come from a totally different direction to curb violence than head-on.
7. People who grew up in violent environments that needed to learn about and understand violence for pure survival means.
8. The many people in the self-defense, personal preservation, and conflict management realms.
9. People who work in other high-risk occupations: troubled youth, mental hospitals, mental health, low-income housing, public school systems, etc.
Also note that, by far the greatest amount of “human/civilian kills” is perpetrated by civilians….untrained.
Really, I’m not talking down in any way about TMA/fight training if that’s your thing. (and it can greatly benefit survival quotient, no doubt…it has mine) But, in all honesty, if you truly believe this is the ONLY way and that your style and fight training is sooo special that all else is moot or irrelevant, you have a level of Dunning-Kruger that I’m unfamiliar with.
