The Little Black Book of Violence

good look on anybody. Giving everybody a hard stare is not too beneficial either.

Being at either end of this spectrum is a bad idea, yet being overconfident is a great way to find the fast path to a good beating. You are more likely to go “hands on” than an under-confident person is. Knock that chip off your shoulder. Truly tough guys don’t need to prove it. Smart guys don’t try to find out.

Violence always has consequences. Know what is worth fighting for and what is not, dispassionately evaluating your priorities and values before you need to make such judgments in the heat of the moment. It is far better to live to fight another day than to make rash choices you may live to regret.

Do you think you are pretty tough, a good fighter? Maybe you did a little boxing in the neighborhood and took some martial arts for a couple of years a while back. Or maybe you were a Golden Gloves champion or a big league tournament competitor with a display case full of trophies. Perhaps you’re even a black belt. Big deal! You’re nothing compared to the guy standing across from you, the one with the dead-eyed stare who wants to rip your arm off and beat you to death with it.

This guy, to paint one possible scenario, used to get pummeled by his mother’s boyfriend at least once a week… for twelve years. He learned fast and early how to bully, intimidate, and get his way by physical force. He knows what pain is—inside and out. And he revels in it. He is well known to the police too, compiling an impressive rap sheet and a fair amount of prison time. As a younger man, he got passed around among the prisoners yet nowadays he’s the one putting the hurt on. In and out of the joint, he has had to fight. He is familiar with both ends of the knife, gun, brass knuckles, and bludgeon, and has some pretty impressive scars as well to prove it. Violence is an everyday occurrence to him; it means little other than a tool that is used to satisfy his wanton desires. You, my friend, are nothing but a blip on the chart of his evening’s events. He can throw you to the ground, stomp on your neck, and walk away without a second thought. You live, you die; it makes no difference to him.

Perhaps he’s a contractor for Blackwater Global Security. After three tours, half a dozen Purple Hearts, and a Bronze Star or two, he mustered out of the service but found that he couldn’t adapt to civilian life. An adrenaline junkie, he loves to fight and got more than his share of action in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a host of Third World countries with unruly populations and acute violence problems. He used to keep a mental log of how many people he has killed but lost track somewhere around 80. He not only has the best training that money can buy, but he’s got more than fifteen years of hard-earned, hands-on experience that has helped him refine how to use it. He’s killed with a knife, gun, and his bare hands, not counting various and sundry pieces of heavy artillery. He loves the smell of napalm in the morning; blood and mud, sh*t and sweat are nothing new to him. He may not look much like Rambo, but he’s a real life, snake-eating SOB who can take you and all your friends apart without breaking a sweat. You are not even a road bump along his path but rather a slug to be salted, a bug to be squashed, or a fish to be gutted.

Violence always has consequences. Know what is worth fighting for and what is not, dispassionately evaluating your priorities and values before you need to make such judgments in the heat of the moment.

Or, maybe he looks like a little old man, but he’s spent a lifetime studying traditional karate. He learned old school in Japan, starting at the age of four where his father trained him five hours a day year-round, beating him with a rattan stick whenever he made a mistake. He spent years just perfecting a single stance and has since mastered every aspect of his art. His form is so good that you can punch him in the solar plexus as hard as you like and he’ll just laugh and tell you to hit harder. By the time he reached his late teens, he was dojo busting, dueling with local sensei[10] who paid him protection money for the privilege of continuing to run their martial arts schools after he had beat them down. In his early twenties, he beat down a yakuza[11] member in the blink of an eye, crushing him so severely that the rest of the gang was too terrified to seek revenge. His body mechanics are so flawless that at the age of sixty he can still perform ikken hissatsu,[12] killing with a single blow. Throw a punch at this guy and if you’re lucky he’ll laugh in your face and walk away. If he’s in a bad mood, however, he’ll crush you like a grape.

All three of these aforementioned characters are based on real people, guys who know violence inside and out. Will you always run across a “heavy hitter,” such as we have described, every time you get in a fight? Odds say that you won’t, yet just like a nuclear bomb it takes only one to screw up your whole day. No matter how tough you are, there is always someone out there who’s tougher. No matter how good a fighter you are, there is always someone out there who’s better. Walk away; you are not that good.

Here’s a chilling, real life example of what tangling with a “heavy hitter” is actually like. On March 7, 2003, Sgt. Marcus Young, an 18-year veteran of the Ukiah, California Police Department received a seemingly routine shoplifting call at a Wal-Mart store. He had a 17-year-old police cadet named Julian Covella riding along with him at the time. They met briefly with store security to understand the situation, collected the suspect, and then proceeded to bring her out to the patrol car. No big deal, right?

Wrong. As Sgt. Young and Wal-Mart security guard Brett Schott put the shoplifting suspect Monica Winnie, 18, into the back seat of the patrol car, her 35-year-old companion Neal Beckman tried to intervene. A dangerous looking individual with small devil horns tattooed on his forehead, he approached the group with his hands hidden from view in his pockets. As Beckman approached, Sgt. Young commanded, “Take your hands out of your pockets,” but received no response. He repeated his command to which Beckman responded, “I have a knife,” drew his blade, and began to attack.

Do you really have what it takes to tangle with a heavy hitter, a career criminal, mental case, or a seasoned street fighter in a live-fire situation? You’re not that good. And even if you are, it doesn’t pay to find out.

It only takes a highly trained police officer a second or two to draw his weapon and fire an aimed shot. Regrettably, Young didn’t have that long. Since he was caught flat-footed, we’ve suddenly got an open-hand battle against a committed, competent, and downright psychopathic knife-wielding attacker. But it gets even worse yet; what Young did not see was Beckman’s gun, a .38 caliber revolver, held in his other hand.

Utilizing both his police training and the skills he developed as a 2nd dan black belt in karate, Young quickly wrenched the attacker’s arm into a lock but was unable to force him to let go of the knife. As the two of them slammed into the side of the car, Beckman began firing, hitting Young in the face, body, and arm.

Schott, the unarmed security guard, leapt into the fight, wrenching the revolver away from Beckman. He aimed it at the suspect and pulled the trigger. Before Schott realized that the gun had already been emptied into Sgt. Young and would no longer fire, the suspect stabbed him in the chest with his knife, collapsing a lung. Weakened by this massive chest wound, Schott disengaged, trying to find cover.

While this occurred, Sgt. Young had a brief moment and a little space to even the odds, bringing his own weapon on line. He regained his feet and tried to reach for his gun. Unfortunately, he quickly discovered that his humerus (upper arm bone) had been shattered by the Beckman’s bullets, paralyzing his gun arm from nerve damage. He tried to draw with his left hand instead, only to find that it had been ripped apart during the struggle with the knife, its separated tendons visible through the opened skin.

Deprived of his weapons as well, Beckman dove into the front seat of the police car, closed the door, and frantically began searching for the hidden switch that would release the loaded Remington shotgun and HK sub- machine gun locked therein. As the suspect tried to free the heavy weapons in the vehicle, Young turned to his cadet Covella and said, “Take my gun out and put it in my hand.” The boy quickly released the safety strap and placed the firearm into Young’s mangled left hand.

Kneeling to steady himself, Young tried to shoot the suspect through the closed door to no avail. His bullets did not penetrate all the way through. Re-aiming through the closed window instead, he managed to place two rounds into the suspect, dropping him. Young then asked Covella to call for assistance and began deliberate, controlled breathing exercises to keep himself calm, conscious, and alive until medical personnel could respond.

Schott, the security guard, recovered from his horrific injuries. Both he and police cadet Covella received