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"Kali" player on trial for killing bouncer

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Ted T.:
"How do we ensure/develop this standard?"

1. Vet your students carefully. Bad friends show a lot about a person even if they present well, for instance.

2. don't teach knife until after the student has reached the free-sparring level and are assisting with class. These things will help show her/his character.

3. Make a strong emphasis on the legal and moral qualities of your teachings - the 'weight' of this will sound good to a good guy and be a burden to the bad guy.

What would you add?


And yes, a combatives teacher in town here does exactly that...he can point to any and every thing he has taught, to the lesson plan, to the daily video record of what he teaches and precisely to all his instructions and warnings to his students to obey the law and legal use of force restrictions. He's teaching a deadly art, and his s-d starts with protecting himself.

Tiny:
SB Mig, and all,

I hear you're still waiting for an answer...

I don't know that there is one, especially since such prose is mandated by the media, and a form of job preservation (the flashier and more dramatic the story, the more likely you won't be fired, or dissolve into the crowd of freelancers).

I suppose that one way to stem the tide of negativity would be to become active in the community (both in the martial arts community, and the general public), giving the martial arts positive publicity...of course, this will work directly against you if media hype prevails, so its double-edged-sword potential is high.

By becoming active I mean such things as:  youth, senior, and women's self-defense seminars, neighborhood watches (do they still exist?), guest speaking about self-protection at local events, working with newspapers and local news crews for stories on classes, seminars and the importance of community vigilance to reinforce the notion that martial arts are born out of a desire to safeguard.  Do most of us have time for these sorts of things?  Not many of us, I'd imagine...but I think if your goals are as stated, that's along the lines of what it would take.

Crafty_Dog:
Does anyone have any updates on this case?

buzwardo:
I guess the thing that bugs me about this news coverage is the implicit editorializing, editorializing that to my mind simply is not congruent with reality. "Deadly martial art," for instance, strikes me as a redundancy, and a fairly silly one at that. If a skill set is going to be used in a martial context, then injury or death is a given. If a martial art doesn't have a combat component, then it's not a martial art, and if that combat component cannot cause death or injury, then it's not a combat component. The editorial construct is such that the reader is led to believe that extra deadly training is the root cause of this tragedy, when to my eye the cause is a person who made a very bad choice.

Same deal with the deadly slash. If you think you have good cause to stick a knife in another human being then you'd be an idiot to do it in any manner but a deadly one. Again, the fault here lies not with the technique, but with the person who applied it. The reporter chooses not to make that distinction, instead implying an art is the proximate cause of a crime, when it looks to me the fault lies with the art?s practitioner.

This phenomenon is hardly confined to stories with a martial arts component. Though journalists wave ideals like fairness, accuracy, and balance around, most of ?em are effected by forces far removed the ideals they espouse. Some involve rank commercialism?their ability to report is underwritten by their ability to shill snake oil and other stuff; others like viewer attention span and the costs associated with a given medium elbow aside nuance and ambiguity in favor of stark, easily labeled dichotomies that can be quickly told. The bottom line is that every Rash?mon gets converted by most of the press into a simpleminded passion play capable of selling soap. Hurrah for the Fourth Estate.

One of my favorite quotes is ?Everything you read in the paper is true except for the rare story of which you happen to have first hand knowledge.? Most of the folks reading this post have spent enough time training to understand that a given art or technique does not a mad slasher make. How many people have you stood next to on the training floor that haven?t used their art to a homicidal end?

Firearm owners have been dealing with this sort of foolishness for years: there are 200 million plus firearms in private hands in the US; some miniscule percentage of which are used in crime in a given year, but that doesn?t keep the press for clamoring for sundry firearm bans. Further, it?s been reliably estimated that there are over 2 million instances of defensive firearm use in the US each year, though you rarely hear about any of ?em in the press. I wonder if martial artists need to prepare for the same kind of treatment regularly received by law abiding, gun owning, citizens?

alex:
I agree with Buz but bear in mind that it was the Prosecuter who made an issue of the deadly nature of the art in the first place, the news coverage simply reflects that. Clearly they are using some emotional scare tactics as you describe but in this case to secure a conviction by inflaming the jury. As I understand it, it's a fairly common approach in any trial, he's simply trying to demonize the defendant to counter the defense's claim that he was helping a friend.

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