London knife crime - Modern Warrior Handbook - Self Defense
So what can we, the ordinary citizen, do to protect ourselves against violent crime?
A few years ago I decided to try and tackle the problem, so I set pen to paper and wrote a self defence book about the subject, which became more or less a thesis on the matter which I called the Modern Warrior handbook. Below is an extract from the original Modern Warrior manual.
The first means of defense open to the swordsman is to avoid the attack... to be where the sword is not. Hans Talhoffer 1476.
Conception:
What I will advocate in this section is something that was deeply and seriously researched, practiced and then adopted as a realistic possibility to successfully defend against a knife attack, the sets of techniques that you are about to see are what I and some of my brethren adopted whilst working on the doors of clubs and pubs back in the nineties. At the time we felt that it was essential for our continued survival to try and discover a simple and effective strategy in readiness and anticipation to combat a deadly encounter with a knife wielding attacker. As I have mentioned at the beginning this stratagem was further compounded when a compatriot of ours was stabbed to death one night whilst working as a bouncer at one of our regular venues.
I started my deep research into the subject of knife defence shortly after this dreadful incident by firstly scrutinising the many self-defence and martial arts books that I have accumulated over the decades. Much of what I had subsequently unearthed would be far too difficult for the ordinary untrained person to use with any hope of success; I know this because we tried them all. I also found that there seemed to be an overabundance of unrealistic ideas and notions on this subject, and most of the techniques advocated were far too complicated, risky would be putting it mildly for some and some others that I discovered were almost laughable and would no doubt get you killed if you were to attempt them.
A significant step forward into countering the problem of potential knife attacks began with a book that I’ve had in my collection since the late seventies, the book is called This is Karate written in 1975 by the late karate master Mas Oyama. At the back of the book there is a small section called Karate v knife and in one photo there is a karate practitioner grabbing the hand that holds the knife of his attacker, this is a small section and doesn’t go into too much detail, but for me it didn’t have too, that photo was enough to get me thinking and from this single photo an idea began to take hold from which a series of techniques began to evolve. And so what finally emerged from the research and much practice was a straightforward strategy that is effective and simple. This is where my karate training came in, I concentrated on the evasion techniques that I was familiar with, which is basically a method of stepping out of the way of a strike coming at you, which is something that is taught at all karate schools, and I combined these evasion techniques with the grasping of the knife hand, to which I then added some karate counter striking techniques.
So this is how it all started. In the Modern Warrior I show you the end result of what we subsequently discovered and put it all together in this easy to follow step by step fully illustrated manual.
Be safe out there.
Bill.
Self Defense - Modern Warrior Available at
