Dog Brothers Public Forum

...stop his resistance even if he is unusually tough, or full of gusto! Can this concept be applied to the knife somehow? Is relying on pain the best plan?

It can, as long as we don't expect the analogy to be too direct, i.e., we aren't likely to go immediately for a choke when a guy is flailing away with a knife but we certainly can look for ways to remove his ability to fight.

One general strategy I prefer when working counter-knife (i.e., I am defending myself using a knife against his [criminal] knife attack] is to cut his fingers or arm, while largely remaining outside of the range of his knife with my body.

This is not a unique idea, but I have been working up integrated set of tactics and techniques to aid this goal.

It is quite possible that merely bringing our knife out (into the fight), getting a small cut on the attacker, up to and including destroying his ability to hold the knife or otherwise disarming him will give him sufficient reason to remember a previous appointment.

Criminals don't usually want a 'fair fight' so unless there are overriding issues of rage or drugs, most of them will not want to continue an assault if you can demonstrate it will not be easy for him.

My choice of tools even gave significant weight (pun intended) to this strategy when I choose my left hand knife -- a Cold Steel Spartan which has a lot of heft and chopping ability, as well as the ability to stab and rip.

There are likely several other ways to approach this idea (strategically and then tactically.)

The way that a knife duel is most likely to happen for us (good, law-abiding people) is when attacked by a knife wielding attacker, where we are carrying our own knife (and not carrying our pistol.)

If we are able to survive the initial attack, and access our weapon a couple of things are then likely:  we run away successfully, he sees our knife and realizes that he is not going to win easily (he doesn't want a 'fair fight') and leaves, or now committed to the attack (for whatever reasons) he is still trying to hurt us.

For those of us who carry a defensive knife and know the dog-catcher or have other skills the is not unthinkable event -- even though knife duels may be rare, they are going to be more likely for those of us with skills and knives than for the average person.

Of course a second reason for offensive knife skills is to "give good attacks" to our partners who need to practice their own defensive skills -- we do not want to be in the practice of testing our techniques against poorly executed or unrealistic attacks.

One of the strengths of what DBMA does (as well as the Suarez folks and the AMOK! folks of Tom Sotis) is to test all proposed solutions (eventually) against full speed QUALITY attacks by a fully resisting partner who is physically capable (e.g., young, strong, fit, fast).

If we don't give good knife, we cannot be sure that our partners are learning and using good defensive techniques.