I've had some discussion recently with some buddies about the effectiveness of aikido at making a real life bad guy stop what he is doing right now. That is, when a situation is critical and imminent and you have to force someone to cease their misdeeds immediately. Some practitioners suggest that in such a critical situation, the typical tools of aikido might not be sufficient, and a better way to make the attacker stop right now is by causing massive physical trauma (broken finger or arm or knee, gouged eye, broken neck, etc...).
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And this is a pretty reasonable suggestion on the surface, but how much trauma is enough? Here are a couple of recent examples of guys that functioned just fine after massive physical trauma. One of them survived a bear attack that laid open his scalp and broke his arm - not only survived, but was clear-headed enough to hike miles to his vehicle then drive to get medical help AND make a video! The other one managed to survive days of pain and dehydration before amputating his own arm, climbing out of a ravine one-armed, and then hiking for miles until he got help. Point is, massive physical trauma did not make these guys stop.
How many of y'all think you can do as good as a Grizzly bear at the massive physical trauma paradigm?
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Also, the massive trauma paradigm is not scaleable. It's not possible, especially in the heat of the moment, to figure out how to apply just enough trauma to make the bad guy stop - so you are left with the desperate strategy of applying as much (literal) overkill as possible. Taking the massive physical damage to the logical extreme of maximum overkill may not be legally or ethically defensible.
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Now, I've heard all the "tried by 12 or carried by 6" talk, and I've heard all the "go home to your family at the end of the night no matter what" stuff, and I don't have any particular problem with those sentiments, but what if we were able to keep all those trauma skills (jutsu) in the back of our mind as a sort of a safety net or backup plan while we develop some other equally or even more reliable way to make attackers stop right now?
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What could that skill be that is just as reliable as destroying the attacker but is also scaleable and probably more legally and ethically defensible??
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Patrick Parker
www.mokurendojo.com
