“If all you have is a hammer all your problems will look like nails,” this adage seems an appropriate metaphor for how most gun guys view knives.
Look at most gun guys and you’ll see all manner of knives on them. Most will carry a folder clipped to a pocket on their strong side. 99% of the guys I meet have never had any training with a blade as a weapon, viewing it more as a utilitarian tool that may be pressed in to service as a weapon of last resort.
This is a shame as a blade is a lethal weapon and excels as a specialized tool in certain situations with the appropriate training. Imagine for a second that you’re in a crowded room and a life threatening attack presents itself, the sheer number of people around may make it almost impossible to shoot the target without jeopardizing the people behind the target due to the potential over penetration. A knife could be a better option as you still retain the ability to inflict lethal force but with more control.
A similar scenario could play out if you were to get taken to the ground making it much more difficult to draw and shoot depending on your position. Or consider that your situational awareness may indicate a potential threat buy may not have developed enough to the point where you can just draw a pistol. In the same scenario it would be relatively easy to palm a blade or keep a hand over a clipped folder in case you do need a weapon.
What if you have deployed your gun (pistol or rifle) and someone attempts to grab it or disarm you? While there are a variety of techniques to retain the weapon, almost all involve striking with the weapon before getting the muzzle on line to shoot the threat. But what if you could simply deploy a blade with your support hand and clear the attacker off your weapon?
These are just some of the scenarios that the instructors of Sayoc Tactical Group introduce to students as part of their Combatives training. Most of their courses are restricted to Military or Law Enforcement and include blocks of instruction on topics as diverse as mindset, anatomy, blade selection, mass attack, deploying multiple blades, improvised weapons, multiple target engagement, sentry removal and vehicle extractions.
The instructors are drawn from the larger group of Sayoc Kali which is focused more on civilians and martial artists. In other words, civilians are more likely to be trained on how to defend themselves from a blade attack rather than deploying it as the attacker.
The military curriculum is the more aggressive as they view the blade as a specialized offensive weapon while the LE curriculum is focused on how to be aware and defend against a knife attack long enough to deploy a firearm. An SRT team leader from DHS summed it up to me once by saying, “you teach your guys weapons retention not because they will be defending against gun grabs all the time but because they’ll have the situational awareness to avoid being in that situation to begin with.”
The training is not something that will make someone an expert in 8 hours or even 40 hours, just as with firearms training the skills are perishable and it is up to the student to continue training on their own time.