When Violence Is the Answer: Learning How to Do What It Takes When Your Life Is at Stake

by Tim Larkin

After the action, “self-defense” becomes a legal question: it’s civil society deciding whether to give you an official pass for using violence to protect yourself or save your life. No jury would rule that what Sara did was “illegal.” But during the action, those questions go out the window. It is an issue of practicality in the most literal sense. In the midst of a violent encounter, to think merely of “defending” yourself—rather than incapacitating your opponent—is essentially to curl up in a ball and hope for the best. Waiting for your attacker to give up—or worse, expecting him to follow the rules—is, putting it bluntly, to risk participating in your own murder. Your only reliable course of action to save your life is to do what your attacker is trying to do to you, but do it more effectively and efficiently, and to do it first. To use the very same tool of violence.