Non-Lethal Self-Defense

When the topic of self-defense or home defense comes up with a lot of people that aren't actively engaged in the training community, a lot of people will tell me that they don't know if they could kill someone. Well, obviously it's not necessary to kill someone to stop them from hurting you or hurting your family and it's certainly not necessary to think that you're going to have to kill someone just to be safer. There are a lot of areas of non-lethal defense that start with personal security, safety, situational awareness and of course simply locking your doors at home or making sure that your family is accounted for and that you have open lines of communication, you know where they're going and what they're going to be doing, when you can expect them home or where you can find them if you need them. There are a lot of ways to be safer without necessarily even being armed with a defensive tool that's capable of killing anyone. Of course, on the other side of that coin you have to realize that even if you are armed with nothing but your bare hands, you could cause someone to go through an injury that kills them. If someone comes at you and starts attacking you, you defend yourself and you just flail your arms about, knock them down and their head hits the ground and they receive a head wound that causes them to actually die, that non-lethal defense as we would normally think of unarmed defense just cause someone's death. But, ultimately remember what caused their death was the fact that they attack you. When someone puts you in a position of needing to defend yourself or defend someone that you care about, the ramifications of those actions that come back against them really aren't your fault, the action that you're taking is the action of responsibility. You have an obligation to defend yourself, you have an obligation to defend those that you care about and if that obligation, if meeting that responsibility results in someone's death or even something close to that if someone becomes paralyzed, if someone becomes disfigured because of the action that you had to take, remember that is on them. Now it doesn't mean that you're not gonna have to deal with the aftermath of that, of course, any normal person that goes through something that traumatic, somebody that has to hurt someone, someone that has to kill someone to defend themselves is probably gonna have an emotional and a social aftermath, they're going to be things that happen to you. Preparing for those things is important, the best way that you can prepare for them is realizing that there is evil in the world, there are people who are mentally disturbed, there are people who are desperate, there are people who don't have enough control over their temper, over their anger to keep them from putting you in a position where you may have to take action. Even if your plan is to be non-lethal, if your plan is to use empty hands, if your plan is used blunt object, if your plan is used chemical tools, if you're plan is to use electrical weapons to defend yourself and not go all the way to a firearm, not go to a knife, not go into a situation where you believe you're going to kill someone, you still may injure someone very seriously or take their life, doing so in a defensive capacity falls within the line of justice, falls within the line of what is right, if you do so in a justified way your aftermath is gonna be much more easy to deal with. If you realize now, beginning today when you commit to defending yourself, commit to defending someone else whether you choose to go armed with a firearm or you choose to only use situational defensive tools or defensive concepts or techniques that you believe are generally non-lethal, the result of taking that action, the result of using justified violence against the bad guy is on them, not on you.