July 4 DC Metro Stabbing: Four Things to Consider

This is an absolutely horrific story from start to finish. The only way it could be worse is if more people had been murdered.

If we're going to be grown-ups, we need to confront stories like this, analyze them, and draw reasonable conclusions. As always, it's horrible when things like this happen, but it's worse if we don't learn anything from it.

When you're done reading the article, read this Redditor's account of what happened, and then read this analysis of the behavior of the bystanders.  

There are a number of issues that need to be unpacked before we can slot this into its proper context.  

• He's Got a Knife: The weapon Spires used was a "small, black folding knife." Knives are very difficult weapons to deal with in a self-defense context. It doesn't take a lot of muscle to power a knife: one touch and you've been cut. Knife wounds are particularly horrific. When I worked in the self-defense industry, just about every person I knew who taught personal defense said that they'd rather go up against a person with a gun than a knife any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Guns miss. They jam. They run out of ammo.  Knives don't have those problems. If you've ever seen surveillance footage of knife attacks, you'll learn how fast a knife can do life-threatening damage to an opponent. Even if you don't bleed to death when cut, the aftermath of a knife attack can be permanent: a colostomy, nerve damage, disfigurement. Across the board, it's all bad.  
• Batman Fantasies?: Once you've read a story like this there's a temptation to think, "Well, if I was there, I would've done something. I would've tackled the guy." Good. You need to think this way. Visualization is immensely helpful to success. If you take the opposite view, "Oh, if I was there, I would've cowered like the rest," or the ever-popular wishy-washy, "Well, I don't know what I would've done in that situation," then you're setting your default position to coward. You're virtually guaranteeing victimhood. Don't do that. General James Mattis of the USMC famously said, "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." When you're out in public, that's a far better thing to internalize than, "What I don't wish is that I had somehow tried to attack the assailant. I am a little bit larger than he was, but I would not have won."
• I've Got a Family: A common explanation used to excuse not getting involved is, "I've got a family." Kevin Joseph Sutherland had family who loved him. I've got a family. So why should I put myself at risk, potentially make my wife a widow and my child fatherless on behalf of someone I've never even met? Because to not do so when circumstances call upon you is far, far worse. One vital part of living in a society worth maintaining is doing the moral thing despite the cost, especially when lives are at stake. Spires has already forfeited his right to be a member of polite society; he's a blight on civilization itself. The price of DC metro trains and internet and Game of Thrones On Demand and the right to free speech and Pizza Hut Limited Edition Hot Dog Bites Pizza is sometimes paid in blood, and if you've decided that your blood is too precious to be spilled above all others, then you're not pulling your weight. Pediatric brain surgeon? Millionaire philanthropist? Schoolteacher? It doesn't matter. Answer the call or get out. How can you look at yourself in the mirror afterward if you don't? Civilization occasionally demands us to act in an uncivilized manner to protect itself. You don't get to opt out of the tough stuff because you've got a family.
• What Second Amendment?: Part of what contributed to the mass cowardice in this situation was that nobody on that train was armed. When you're unarmed, you're putting yourself at the mercy of vermin like Spires. Places that deliberately disarm their citizens like Washington D.C. have an absolute responsibility to protect their citizens. The DC Metro police utterly failed in this case, and Sutherland's death is as much on their hands as it is the sheep who watched him die.  

It's fascinating to read the comments on the Reddit thread and see just how many people have normalized victimhood. The comments congratulating the eyewitness on his consoling the dying man are disgusting when you consider that Sutherland need not have died at all. Had the other riders on the train accepted their responsibilities as American citizens, the outcome may have been different.

Yes, knives are unbelievably scary. What's scarier is being stabbed to death by a drug-addled monster in full view of able-bodied but passive citizens who will only step forward when the monster has fled. Don't hold my fucking hand. Grow a backbone, carry a weapon, and fight alongside me.

White House Intruder's Got a Knife: Part Two

Part one is available here.

There are two elements to the White House intruder story that have recently come to light, and each of them bears some examination.

First, we now know that the deranged individual who had broken into the White House had gotten farther into the actual residence than we'd originally learned.  The reason why is very simple:

[Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah)] said two people inside the agency told him that [alarm] boxes were silenced because the White House usher staff, whose office is near the front door, complained that they were noisy. A Secret Service official told The Post that the usher’s office was concerned the boxes were frequently malfunctioning and unnecessarily sounding off.

Let's unpack that: the Secret Service is blaming the security breach on the White House staff, claiming that vital alarm boxes had been silenced because of complaints.

Complaints.

The White House staff complained about a security measure, and rather than saying "tough titty," the Secret Service moved to address the complaints in a way that compromised security.  That's inexcusable.  That's ludicrous.  Remember, the nature of personal security is that it's inconvenient.  That these so-called security professionals forgot or ignored that is unconscionable.

On his Facebook page, former Secret Service agent Daniel Bongino said:

"The jurisdictional mess around the White House has to be cleaned up. Between the Secret Service, the US Park Police, DC Metro PD, the National Park Service, and others such as the White House staff and the White House Historical Association, too many cooks have their hands in the security-soup. Also, the Secret Service role in the decision-making chain at the White House has to be at least co-equal with the White House staff. Any manager within the Secret Service who insists on kneeling at the feet of an 18-year-old White House staff member, while throwing his agents under the bus, in order to maintain his 'network', needs to move on ASAP. This is too important of a mission for sycophants."

I couldn't agree more, though I think he doesn't go far enough.  There needs to be massive housecleaning at the Secret Service.  Many, many people need to be fired.

The other element to this story is how it was portrayed in the Washington Post.  In the article I linked at the top of the page, the Post says:

After barreling past the guard immediately inside the door, Gonzalez, who was carrying a knife, dashed past the stairway leading a half-flight up to the first family’s living quarters.

The knife Gonzalez was "carrying" was a folding knife (also called a folder).  What we don't know is if Gonzalez had actually opened the knife and had it in his hand when he "barreled" past the guard.  The term "carried" here suggests that he did indeed have it in his hand.  And if he had it in his hand, he meant to use it, right?

Well, we don't know.  We know he was nuts.

From the way the White House situation has been presented, it can be safely said that I entered my son's preschool today, carrying a knife.  It was folded and clipped to the inside of my pocket, under my shirt, but I did indeed carry it.  Horror of horrors, I was carrying a knife.  With children right there!

The rhetoric our sloppy, biased news media has used is imprecise at best, and inaccurate at worst.  To be fair, the Post isn't the only news outlet to use this sort of language; check everyone from the AP to the New York Times and you'll see the same thing.

Whenever you read a news story, you always have to ask yourself two questions: what are they trying to make me feel?  And what aren't they telling me? 

White House Intruder's Got a Knife: Six Things to Think About

Much is being made of the fact that the deranged person who unfortunately succeeded in breaking into the White House was carrying a knife. Without context, this becomes a frightening notion: if he was carrying a knife, it means he intended to stab somebody, likely the President of the United States.

I'm not going to try to unpack Gonzalez's insanity; that's for his doctors to sort out.  But, we should talk about knives a little bit.  People carry knives all the time and they're not insane.  It's a legal tool of personal defense where I live, and if you believe, as I do, that you have a moral duty to protect yourself, then it's actually foolish to not carry a knife.  Especially if you can't or won't carry a firearm.

1. Building on the concept that personal security is by its very nature inconvenient, you also have to consider that when you're attacked, it will happen when conditions most favor your attacker and least favor you.  A criminal isn't interested in a fight: he wants an ambush.  So you're already going to be at a disadvantage.  With that in mind, you're legally and morally correct in using a force multiplier to defend yourself.  A knife, properly placed, can end a physical threat more effectively than a fist.
2. Just because you carry a knife, it doesn't mean you intend violence.  Again, it's clear that Gonzalez was crazy.  The vast majority of the knife-carrying public isn't.  It's a tool, nothing more.  
3. Before Muslim extremists flew American airplanes into American buildings, it was perfectly legal to carry a knife with a blade length of under 3.5" onto a plane.  That was a factor in the carry knife choice I made fifteen years ago.
4. It takes a great deal of practice and frequent maintenance training to access, open, and deploy a folding knife under the circumstances laid out in Point 1.  You're not going to be able to do it if you've already been hit in the back of the head with a chunk of pavement.  
5. As in all self-defense situations, you have to be aware of potential threats, avoid them when possible, and de-escalate (or run) if you can.  If you find yourself opening your knife for any other reason than to cut an inanimate object, everything else has gone wrong for you that day.
6. There are plenty of people who geek out over knives.  They own many, they carry multiple knives, they talk about them ad nauseam, they lionize knife makers.  Barring some notable psychopaths, they're no different from Apple fans, Tim Burton fans, or fanatics of Game of Thrones.  Don't let someone else's embarrassing gushing get in the way of your legal choice to carry a knife.  

Like firearms, knives don't act on their own, and ownership of one doesn't imply eagerness to use it on another human being.  As in all things, media representation of knives and knife owners reflects a distorted mirror of reality.  Learn about these things for yourself, rather than unquestioningly consuming the pap from the news media.

Flash Fiction: Freshman Day

Warning: NSFW.

                “You’d think the freshmen would learn by fifth period not to use the bathrooms on fucking Freshman Day.  I mean, he goes in, sees three guys twice his size staring at him, and still tries to take a whiz?”  Tyler shook his head.  “Dumbass.”

                “Come on, guys,” the kid whined, reaching futilely for his bookbag.  “Just…just please.”  Andre held it just out of his grasp.

                Enzo said, “I’m getting tired of just dunking these limp dicks.  Let’s do something else with him.”

                The kid immediately made a run for the door.

                “Ah ah ahhh,” said Tyler, grabbing him by the back of his shirt and putting him in a headlock.  “We ain’t done with you yet.”

                Struggling, the kid yelled, “Get off!  Get the fuck off!”

                Andre tossed the bookbag into an open toilet stall, grinning when it landed in the commode.  “Two points.”

                Enzo pointed his chin in the direction of the broom closet set between the stalls and the sinks.  The door handle was rusted, but the padlock was shiny and new-looking.  “Our new bud here could use a time-out.”

                “No!  No!” the kid shouted.  “Help!  Somebody, he—“

                Tyler muffled the kid’s panicked screams with his palm.  “Well, let’s hurry up.  He’s drooling on me.”

                New or not, the padlock popped open after a few strikes with the edge of a trash can.  “You ready?” Andre asked.

                The crotch of the kid’s jeans darkened.  His cheeks puffed out as much as they could against Tyler’s hand as he struggled wildly. 

                “Hurry the fuck up!” Tyler shouted, barely maintaining his hold.

                Andre yanked the door open.  The closet was empty but for a weird drawing on the side that kind of looked like a guy sitting down.  He’d have liked to have seen more, but Tyler stuffed the shrieking kid in and slammed it shut.

                Re-hooking the broken padlock, Enzo snickered.  “If he’d been a couple pounds fatter, we’d’ve had to grease him to get him in.”

                “Let’s get outta here,” Tyler said over the kid’s racket of screaming and kicking.  “Before someone hears.”

                Still looking at the door, Andre muttered, “Yeah.”

                It really had been a weird drawing.  It was kind of like the guy put one leg behind his head, and in his hand…Andre closed his eyes and stopped even pretending to listen to Dr. Bermel drone on about covalent bonds or some shit.  What had been in the guy’s hand?  And he’d been smiling, hadn’t he?  Just weird, the whole thing.

                Andre didn’t bother staying through seventh period Chemistry.  What would be the point?  It was all bullshit.  He walked out in the middle of lab and went home.

                An hour of Grand Theft Auto 5 later, he was bored out of his mind.  Even the torture scene got pretty tiresome until he noticed that the dude sitting in the chair with blood on his mouth kind of reminded him of the drawing in the broom closet.  Except the guy in the drawing had been smiling.  Really wide, like the Joker from Batman.  Like he’d had help getting his mouth open that wide.

                Andre tossed the game controller on the floor and stood up.  What had been in the guy’s hand?  And how did he get his leg up like that?  If fucking Tyler had given him just a few more seconds to look, he wouldn’t be getting a goddamn headache trying to remember. 

                He could wait until tomorrow and look again, but he needed to know now.

                “Shit.  Shit, shit, shit.” 

                What if he tried to recreate it?  There was a big mirror in his mom’s room.  All he’d have to do is sit on the bed and he could see himself.  He’d have to take his clothes off like the guy in the picture, but Mom wasn’t getting home until late anyway.

                Several minutes of grimacing and grunting later, he found that he just wasn’t flexible enough to put his leg up like that, and it hurt like fuck trying.  He’d have to wait until tomorrow.  Glaring at his sweaty reflection in the mirror, he wished he had a knife like the guy in the—

                That’s right!  The guy had had a knife in his hand.  A little one, like a steak knife.  Smiling, Andre went to get one from the kitchen drawer.  Yes, the one with the little points on the edge.  As he curled his fingers around the handle, he realized that he’d gotten erect, like the guy in the picture.  Well, he’d take care of that later with some moisturizer and YouPorn.

                Holding the knife helped, but he still couldn’t quite hook his heel behind his head.  He was so fucking close!  It was just that tightness where his ass cheek met the back of his thigh.  All he needed was an inch or two more space there, and he could do it.

                Wasn’t that what the knife was for?

                It was red in the picture.  Like the guy’s mouth.  Like his whole face.

                Just one small slice.  That’s all it would take.  From there, straining and stretching would widen it.  Then he could work on the smile.  It had to be just right.

                Looking carefully at his own reflection, he lifted his leg as high as it would go, set the serrated edge of the knife against his flesh, and began to cut.

Frank Herbert Would Get His Ass Kicked in a Knife Fight

I just got finished a reread of Dune.  The ecology, philosophical and religious aspects of the novel, of the universe he built, are incredible.  I'm looking forward to reading the sequels, of which there are many.  Even if you didn't know a lot about the author, even a casual reading of Frank Herbert's most famous novel would tell you that he did an incredible amount of research on life cycles, planetary ecology, Middle Eastern culture, the nature of aristocracy, and how science and religion can clash.  Herbert was a brilliant man.

But he didn't know a single thing about knife fighting, and it shows.

Part of my problem with how personal combat was portrayed in the novel was the strange hierarchy of fighters in the Dune universe.  To briefly sketch out the background, personal shield technology had been developed so that most fighting men had force fields around them that they could turn on and off.  A fast-moving object like a bullet would be deflected by a shield, but a slightly slower object, like a hand holding a knife, could slip through.  So for personal combat, you had to go fast on defense and slow on attack.  Also, if someone shot you with a laser weapon (called a lasgun) while your shield was activated, both you and the person holding the laser would be obliterated in a massive nuclear explosion, known as the Holtzman effect.  In essence, Herbert wanted to eliminate guns of all kinds in his science fiction universe.

The best individual fighters in the known universe were both attached to the main character Paul: Duncan Idaho, a "swordmaster," and Gurney Halleck, a former prisoner of Paul's enemies.  They developed a form of fighting that was so good, it rivaled and maybe even beat the most feared armies known.  What didn't work in the novel was that all of this had to be told to the reader, and not shown.  Herbert went into great detail about how the gigantic sandworms of Dune created the spice melange, but when it came to fighting, he fell back on what he knew, which was fencing.  It was unconvincing.

Fencing isn't anything like fighting with knives.  It's a long-range form of fighting (or, well, sport).  A knife fight is, by its very nature, an extreme close-quarters encounter.  Blades don't touch in a knife fight.  You can't elevate it into a fencing duel; it's too quick.

The winner in a knife fight is almost always going to be the one with more will, more speed, more strength, and more reach.  He'll get that all-important first hit in.  Let's also keep in mind that the idea of a knife duel is an entirely constructed fantasy, not unlike West Side Story.  The vast, vast majority of us don't get into knife duels. Someone looking to cut you isn't going to give you a chance to defend yourself: he'll wait until your back is turned and shank you.

There aren't a lot of places that teach knife dueling.  Filipino martial artists do flow drills that approximate it like sumbrada and hubud-lubud, but they're intended to ingrain fighting reflexes, not draw out a fight into a duel.  So the lack of resources available to Herbert isn't surprising.

Nevertheless, the fight scenes lacked authenticity.  An awesome book despite that.

The Rebar Knife - A Beautiful Thing of Hideousness

In March of 2009, I traveled to Sedona, Arizona to shoot an instructional video series on survival skills.  The shoot took the better part of a week, and it rained on and off the entire time we were there.  During the shoot, we learned flint knapping, improvised weapon construction, do-it-yourself smithing, and plenty of other primitive skills.  The best part of the shoot for me was the smithing, something in which I'd been interested since childhood, and the video we produced on that topic was called The Poor Man's Forge.  In it, the author took a piece of rebar and forged it into a knife using a forge he'd constructed out of recycled materials.

As you can see, the knife is ugly.  It's hideous.  It's got hammer marks, a small notch from testing the edge on a penny, and one of the sections of handle rope is gone.  I love it.  It's what it's supposed to be: functional, brutal, and effective.  It started out as a length of rebar, which is made of all kinds of scrap steel melted down and made into lengths of bar or wire.  It used to hold up a building.  Now it's a different sort of tool.

Note the strange sunset of colors from the middle of the blade to the back.  This is from the heat-treating process that produces a hard edge and a soft back, which is what you want.  You want it to be able to flex a little if it has to, but maintain the hardness of the edge.  The smith who made it, a true artisan who has produced some really beautiful pieces, deliberately left the hammer marks in to show that it isn't supposed to look good.  It's supposed to do its job, which is to scale a fish, skin a deer, carve some wood, or whatever else you need to do with it.

This is the back of the handle.  In Filipino martial arts, this is called the punyo.  To make this part of the knife, the smith first shaped the blade and determined the length of the handle.  He then heated the other end of the unfinished rebar to the proper color (a bright yellow), hammered it out, and curled it on the edge of the anvil.  This was a process that took many heats, a great deal of time, and dozens of hammer beats.

I'm not a knife guy.  I don't love knives, as such.  But I do admire craftsmanship.  And despite its deliberate, inherent ugliness, the rebar knife is a thing of beauty.  It's the ultimate symbol of transformation.