When a peaceful resolution is no longer an avenue with acceptable levels of risk it is time to become violent.
The speed with which you go violent will be telling in your advantage. Overwhelming force applied accurately to the situation and then dialed back when the situation becomes safe to do so will greatly enhance your survival and injury chances.
In a fight you never want to be behind your adversary’s aggression curve. We are put in the situation at minimum once by the nature of defensive and reactionary fighting.
Self defense is reactionary, the aggressor steps into lethal force territory first. Once that step has been taken it is your task to surpass them through efficiency.
The majority of violent aggressors only have two advantages, they know it’s going to happen and they have lesser or no inhibition on using violence.
You can’t readily overcome the first advantage but you can lessen its influence through observation. The second advantage is where people will struggle. Peaceable people have difficulty rationalizing violence even if it is immediately necessary.
Violence is connotated with evil. Violence is not evil. Violence is force. The major inhibition comes in the form of struggling to separate defensive violence from criminal violence.
Begin thinking in terms, not of harming another person, but of efficiently stopping life threatening action. Your swift decisions are based on observations and they will scale as the actions of the threat change.
If they are lethal, you are lethal. If they scale back so do you, but once you have taken the initiative from them you do not give it up. Never go below a threat again on the Use of Force scale. Keep ahead of them, if they believe their aggression can out match yours they will attempt. You must not allow that to be true, whether they believe it or not.
Remove your inhibition to violence and put it in its proper spot in your tool box. Right beside peaceful deescalation. Then be ready to grab the right tool for the job.
