A common approach to self-defense is to mirror and outmatch. Fight fire with fire. In a way, that’s what Master Leeper did in that chapter on plain ol’ winning. If speed, surprise, and violence of attack are what makes an assault effective then the way to approach self-defense is with more speed, surprise, and violence than the other guy. It’s an approach. I’m not going to tell you that it doesn’t work. But it’s expensive. And it’s hard to pull off if you’re smaller and less naturally inclined toward aggression. Is there another way?

You can mitigate the risk and severity of assaults with distance, deterrence, and detection. Those concepts seem pretty straight forward, but let’s dive into them a bit. We’re also getting toward the end of this body of thought. We have a lot of tools to work with now. For the rest of this chapter we’ll be examining the mechanics of distance, deterrence, and detection, how they relate to each other, and how they relate to speed, surprise, and violence of attack. Just to see how many subtleties we can expose to help you really absorb these ideas.

We’ll also see how things turned out for Laurel, and draw some important lessons from that story. And in the next chapter, we’ll be putting it all together.

The rest of this chapter will become available following the success of this Kickstarter campaign.

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