‘Threat assessment’ is something I mentioned in the post below; it is a simple concept. Martial arts skills can be crudely divided into two parts: what to do and when to do it.
The ‘what to do’ part is more easily taught, and is what is studied in dojos and on traditional shooting ranges. The ‘when to do it’ part is more complex, both because it deals with real-life situations in which there are many uncontrolled variables, and because it introduces the element of uncertainty and risk.
Uncertainty is important because in real life, threats seldom walk up to your door, knock, and introduce themselves as threats (actually, two of my favorite cinema bits…the ATM mugger in “LA Story”, who introduces himself as “Hi, my name is Bob and I’ll be your robber tonight.”; and the brilliant Wile E Coyote v. Bugs Bunny cartoon…have threats that introduce themselves). So you have to make a decision, and the problem is that on one hand the decision probably shouldn’t be to shoot anyone who seems vaguely menacing, nor should it be to wait until that vaguely menacing guy is within Tueller range or worse, has you in “the hole” (a close enough distance where being armed or skilled isn’t enough to overcome the element of surprise, and where a skilled opponent could effectively control you). These concepts are important, because they add the variable of ‘potential threat’ that must be assessed. A guy with a knife is not necessarily a significant threat to someone with a gun, until the opponent is within about 21 feet…the Tueller range at which someone can close and strike before a typical person could unholster and shoot. A skilled jujitsu practitioner will most likely control, disable, and kill an armed opponent if the fight starts with the two within arm’s reach.
The best class I have ever seen (although I did not take it) in dealing with this issue is the IMPACT/Model Mugging series. They teach their students to actively interact with potential threats, which allows you to make the determination of risk at a range you select. When I walk up, the IMPACT student is taught to say “Excuse me, but you’re coming too close to me,” and then escalate from there depending on the response. If this were directed at me (affable, but sometimes irritable), I’d back up, and probably shake my head at the oversensitivity and lack of trust in the modern world. The Bad Guy won’t, and that difference in behavior lets you know what you are dealing with.
My role model Clint Smith puts it pretty well: “You better learn to communicate real well, because when you’re out there on the street, you’ll have to talk to a lot more people than you’ll have to shoot, or at least that’s the way I think it’s supposed to work.”
This is relevant to our situation in the ME, because we are, as they would say in the South, all full up with ‘what to do’ and pretty well dry on ‘when to do it’.
Neither the leadership of the country nor the citizenry has really come to any resolution on what constitutes a threat, and how we agree we can appropriately react.
I genuinely believe there are people who wonder why we haven’t turned the Middle East into glass in response to 9/11, as I believe there are folks whose response to two nukes and smallpox in U.S. cities would be “but killing all those innocent people won’t bring back the dead”.
Somewhere between those two factions, we’d better come to a conclusion on the level and source of the threat and our response and do so fairly quickly.