Page 101 - Pat O'Keeffe Combat Kick Boxing

Knife Attacks

Summary
Defending yourself against a knife is a very risky business. The chances are that
you will get cut and if the man attacking you is skilled in any of the knife based
arts – silat or escrima for example – your chances are virtually nil.
If you are attacked you will, instinctively, try and protect yourself. With that in
mind, go back and re-read ‘Protection and Diversion’. As a rule of thumb, it is
better to shout at or agitate a knifeman and calm a gunman.
Whatever happens, don’t be a passive victim. If you shout, struggle or delay,
your assailant may be forced to break off the attack. Deny him time and you
increase your chances. The five essentials give you a chance, no more. Learn
them by heart.
The Timetable of Death is quite simply a surgeon’s bleak assessment of the
potential damage caused by a knife attack. It should be read to reinforce the extreme
dangers of confronting a knifeman.
Finally, to hammer home the theme of this chapter, here is a sobering, and at
first hard to credit story of trials conducted by police in America.

Disturbed by the number of armed policemen being injured or killed, a policeman called
Tulleners carried out a series of experiments where a knifeman was pitted against a pistol-
carrying policeman.

Standing alongside each other the policeman and the knifeman were given tasks.
The armed policeman’s task was to draw his pistol, aim, fire and hit the target.
The knifeman’s task was to draw his knife, charge down the range and strike the
target.
At all ranges under twenty-one feet the knifeman won, not just once, but every
time.
Now mark out twenty-one feet and imagine you have a gun. It is almost
impossible to concede that the knifeman has the advantage, but Tulleners
proved it!
In this country it has only been in recent years that our police have been given
the equipment – Kevlar vests, side-handle batons, CS gas – to deal with knife-
wielding criminals, and then only because of a series of incidents where policemen
and women were badly injured or killed. The clamour for better protection for
the police was such that the Home Office and police authorities had to act.
You will not of course have the weapons the police are now armed with, and
for you the situation would be all the more serious.
Lastly, should the point need to be driven home any more (pun intended),
consider this. Many Special Forces personnel still carry knives into combat in
theatres of war where every conceivable weapon, including short-barrelled
automatic weapons made specifically for close combat, is available. They know,
the police know, the criminals know: knives are deadly – perhaps the ultimate
close-quarter weapon.

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