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

by Tim Larkin

Violence is rarely the answer, but when it is, it’s the only answer.

Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, the answer will not be violence. It will be avoidance or de-escalation. But that one time when violence is the answer, make no mistake, it will be the only answer.

The person who merely reacts to violence—who is unwilling to meet their assailant on an even playing field when their own safety demands it—is always at a disadvantage.

“An ounce of prevention,” he counseled Philadelphia’s leaders, “is worth a pound of cure.”

Nelson Mandela famously said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”