LEARNING LAB: Lessons to be learned from violent interaction. (Graphic video)

We bring you a video (hat tip to Miguel at Gun Free Zone – if he’s not on your daily stops on the web, he should be) that’s terribly illustrative of pre-violence indicators.  It shows what happens when a well-meaning and confident big, strong guy tries to calm down an out-of-control bully.  “Man to man”-style, you know.

It goes poorly because the would-be good Samaritan makes a host of profound errors and ends up getting a pretty good beat down.

Watch the video and ask yourself, how many pre-violence indicators can you spot.  I’ll give you a clue:  There are several, ranging from the overt to the quite subtle.

Do you want to be able to spot these behaviors to interact with/avoid people like this more effectively?

Remember, when it comes to life-and-death, there are no rules.  Bad guys don’t play fair.  You shouldn’t either.

At GSL Defense Training, we offer a cutting-edge “Force on Force” training course for civilians called “Critical Threat Management“.  It will help you avoid finding yourself in that situation and if you do, how to do things better to come out on top.

We’re not the only crew offering force-on-force training for civilians in Illinois.  In northern Illinois, Black Flag Firearms Training also offers force-on-force training, as does Fortress Defense Consultants.  We’re lucky in Illinois, because there are only a handful of companies offering this training to civilians nation-wide.

Force-on-force coursework adds a pain penalty for making mistakes, so instead of getting half beaten to death or killed in the real world for making rookie, sheeple-like mistakes, you merely get a modestly painful “ouchie” to help you internalize your error.  Knowing that you risk getting that painful reminder if you screw up helps activate your body’s autonomic nervous system, triggering fear, an adrenaline rush and all the rest of the fight-or-flight reactions to a potential danger.  Stress-induced failures in even the most fundamental tactics tend to rear their heads as well, helping students learn their weaknesses.   In a sense, it sort of inoculates you to the stress of a real-life danger and helps you perform better under stress.

FoF course content for civilians varies.  In GSL Defense Training’s Critical Threat Management course, we teach folks the finer points about situational awareness, avoidance, de-escalation and disengagement.  And we also teach how to employ violent, both empty-handed and with firearms should violence be foisted upon you despite your best efforts to identify it and avoid it early on.

Criminals are creatures of habit and they exhibit subconscious behaviors before they attack.  We’ll teach you how to identify those pre-violence indicators and subtle pre-attack cues that almost inevitably precede a violent attack.  You know how your “sixth sense” sometimes will tell you something is wrong?  We’ll tell you why that is and why you should listen to your gut.

Here’s Black Flag’s course description.

Our FORCE ON FORCE workshops are designed to give participants a real time taste of stress inoculation training while contemplating a series of drills that will test their ability to deal with threats in a myriad of conditions.  This coursework is designed to promote critical thinking at all stages of action, and condition your mind to function when your body’s own defensive systems begin to activate.  The drills force you to recognize, override and incorporate your body’s physiological responses to combat stress.  This is the only viable means of measuring real time performance.  The “square rage” concept has no place here.

And a video from Black Flag.

And some stills from GSL Defense Training’s course:

Regardless of where you get it, get training.  Knowing how to avoid a violent confrontation can prove priceless for both you and your family!

For more information on the Critical Threat Management course and registration materials, click here.