Most martial artists who train for self-defense regard disarms as one of the most important skill sets. In particular, they strive to perfect their ability to defend against the gun, knife and stick, which are the most prevalent street weapons in the Western world.

For expert guidance along this path to proficiency, we spoke with Kelly McCann, a renowned combatives expert based in Fredericksburg, Virginia. McCann isn’t just a martial artist who’s obsessed with weaponry. He’s a former U.S. Marine Corps special-missions officer who was responsible for counterterrorism and counter-narcotics operations.

In 1993 he founded Crucible, a company that trains military, government and law-enforcement personnel and conducts security missions in high-risk environments.

McCann, who was Black Belt’s 2008 Self-Defense Instructor of the Year, has spent the past three decades researching and teaching combatives.

— Editor

What are your thoughts on gun defense?

For military members, street cops and others who have to deal with firearms in their face, gun defense is essential. The military knows its special operators need to spend time developing motor memory for gun defense.

Unfortunately, law enforcement doesn’t devote as much time to it as they should, often because of overtime issues and budget limitations.

With respect to civilians, until about five years ago, I was concerned that in a standard two-day combatives seminar, how much time can you devote to this one aspect of self-defense and all the variations of it? The gun could be in your face, aimed at your chest, pointed at your side or behind you.

Then a point was made to me by Nick Hughes. He said that every day in America, people who know nothing about self-defense defend themselves against a firearm. He said those of us who teach the military and law enforcement should share the material with civilians because anything you give them only ups their chance of surviving.

Even if they understand only the main principles — avert the muzzle, control the gun, get behind it and so on — they’ll be far better off than if they tried to figure it out in a moment of duress. So we started including disarms, which we believe will keep people from being shot and enable them to control the gun.

Yes, gun disarms are very important, but how to disarm is less of a problem than when to disarm. How to disarm is about mechanics and body movement. When to disarm is much more challenging. If a guy has a gun in your face but just wants your stuff, you give him your stuff and he goes away. It’s no longer a problem.

The hard part is trying to get a sense of whether this untrained gun handler in front of you — who is nervous, agitated, afraid or whatever — really will shoot you. That’s the bigger problem, and it’s impossible to teach. You have to figure it out in the moment.

Taking all the variables into account, can we assume that in combatives, principles are more important than techniques?

What we do is all principle-based. In self-defense, you don’t want your techniques to be too complicated, but you want to apply those principles in all your techniques.

In a moment of duress when things are coming unraveled, you’ll be OK if you apply the principles. It may not be pretty, but you’ll be OK.

What’s your opinion of the gun disarms of the traditional martial arts?

Some of the techniques are dangerous because they don’t account for the guy’s finger being on the trigger, maybe with some tension already, or retraction of the weapon arm. Sympathetic muscle tightening often occurs when you make your self-defense move.

Also, there’s the flinch that can occur when you startle him with your movement, which can cause him to step back and pull the trigger. That’s why gun defense is so sketchy. Some techniques look great and are very fast, but they don’t account for these things.

My point is, if you apply good principles and have good technique, that’s OK, but the more important thing is deciding whether you should risk your life by trying to disarm someone who may not have intended to shoot you in the first place.

Gun defenses commonly end in one of two ways. One, the defender gets possession of the weapon and uses it to strike the attacker. Two, he uses it to shoot the attacker. Where do you stand on this?

We’re clearly on the side of the first option. You can’t back off and shoot the guy because the threat may have ended when you took the gun away.

Also, the idea that you would strip a gun out of a guy’s hand and then figure out what’s in your hand — is it a BB gun, an AirSoft gun, a Beretta, a SIG, and are you familiar with it? — is problematic. In reality, you don’t know what you have or even if it’s functional.

At the end of your gun defense, can you run? Yes. Can you hit the guy with his gun to make sure he can’t get it back? Yes. Can you drill him? I don’t think so. You’d have a real explaining to do. It’s a different situation altogether if he attacks again to take his gun back from you.

Does the possibility that you will be unfamiliar with the gun you just took from the bad guy and won’t know whether it’s functional also mean you shouldn’t back off and say, “Stay there — don’t move!”?

You can make him think you know how to use it. If he knows it’s a BB gun or not functioning, you could still have to deal with a charging attacker because he knows he had a piece of shit in his hand.

At the end of the day, can you back off, give verbal commands and make him believe you’ll shoot him? Sure. Can you shoot him? No. Are you a cop? No. Should you try to arrest him? No. I say knock the guy unconscious with his own gun and get the hell out of there.

Let’s move on to knife defense. What are the main things to keep in mind?

The same things that make a knife a great weapon also make it a scary weapon. A knife is dangerous because it’s inherently short — normally 4 or 5 inches long.

It can cause damage while it’s coming at you and while it’s moving away from you, on projection as well as on retraction. For example, if a guy tries to stab you and you hollow out to move your stomach away from the blade and if the knife touches you on retraction, even by accident, you can be cut.

Also, a knife is very difficult to see at night. It can be difficult to even determine if a guy has a knife. If the thug just sticks you, you may not know right away that you got cut — it might feel like a punch. Remember that a knife maims at first, after which it may or may not stop the person.

Finally, people who never had a single day of training with an edged weapon can kill you with one. All they have to do is stab and slash — it doesn’t take sophistication to murder.

All that makes disarming a guy with a knife very difficult.

You always have to account for the retraction of the hand. In a lot of schools, instructors use a “pillar assault method” that supports the disarm technique and actually makes it look straightforward. For example, the attacker attempts a stab, then his arm just stops while the defender does whatever he wants.

In a real attack, the guy will probably drive the knife out repeatedly like a piston. In order to isolate it, you’ve got to rely on counterintuitive movements.

For instance, in our stab-to-the-midsection disarm, once you contact the arm while he’s thrusting his knife out, you know he’s going to retract, so you charge in. You maintain contact between your arm and his so you know where the weapon is. Then you’ve got to isolate it and control it. That’s a learned response. It’s counterintuitive, so unless you drill it all the time, it’s difficult to pull off at full speed, under duress and perhaps with limited visibility.

Does what you said about not being legally able to disarm a gunman and shoot him also apply to disarming a guy who has a knife and cutting him? Absolutely.

Then how do you approach knife disarms?

Remember what our definition of “disarm” is. In combatives, a disarm isn’t necessarily the act of taking away the weapon. It can mean that, but it doesn’t necessarily.

Our definition also includes knocking the person unconscious so he can’t use the weapon. Or breaking the limb that holds the weapon so he can’t use it. Or making him unwilling to use it — he’s unwilling to come inside because you keep hitting him on the shin with your boot, finger-jabbing his eyes, hitting him with cupped-hand strikes or nailing his leg with Muay Thai kicks.

Another way to disarm a criminal is changing your body demeanor and making him think he lost the element of surprise, which causes him to decide not to attack you. An example of this is using situational awareness to detect the threat and then putting a physical barrier between the two of you.

You shouldn’t get hung up on the notion that a disarm always means you’ll end up with the bad guy’s weapon. Anytime you can stop him from using it, prevent him from using it or make him unable to use it, it’s a valid disarm.

If a person always trains to disarm an attacker and then retrieve the weapon, is there a danger that in a real altercation the martial artist might fixate on gaining possession of the weapon?

Absolutely. In my book Combatives for Street Survival, I highlight a story of one of my students who killed two attackers with their own knives.

Actually, he killed one with his own knife and then picked up the knife that guy dropped and used it on the second attacker, so sometimes that can work, but you don’t want to get fixated on it.

Again, if you disarm a guy and take possession of his weapon and the guy attacks you again, you can use it to defend yourself again. However, if you disarm him and he’s just standing there, begging you not to hurt him, you can’t cut him — or shoot him or hit him with a stick.

When it comes to self-defense, is the threat posed by a screwdriver the same as the threat posed by a knife? Should you respond the same way?

You can get killed just as quickly by a guy with a Phillips No. 10 screwdriver as by a guy with a knife. It’s still a weapon.

We define a weapon of opportunity as an everyday implement that wasn’t designed to be a weapon but can be used as one. Criminals carry screwdrivers because they don’t want to catch a felony charge for carrying a weapon. Both present the same level of threat — the same way a .22-caliber pistol offers the same level of threat as a .38-caliber revolver.

What’s the combatives approach to stick defense?

When you’re attacked by a guy with a stick, you want to get inside so you’re no longer at the range where the power of the weapon is concentrated. Then, once you lock that arm down, you’ve disarmed him. From there, it’s just a matter of making him unconscious.

Our stick disarms are that simple. They’re designed just to get you inside the arc of the weapon.

Imagine the attacker is trying to strike you with a one-arm blow. You move inside, and he winds up hitting you with his wrist instead of the end of the stick. You’re fine because there’s no power.

You then use the principle of simultaneity and palm-heel him in the chin or face-mash him with the goal of knocking him out. Whether you need to control the stick after that depends on the effect your strike had.

Would an untrained person on the street ever attack with an intricate kali technique, or is it always going to be what’s usually a “cave-man strike”?

The bottom line is, you can’t know, can you? As far as technique goes, that’s pretty much what you’ll see — unsophisticated, brutal attacks. But they can be clever and sneaky before they strike. Remember, cheating isn’t in the lexicon of thugs.

That’s why we rely on principles and not necessarily defensive techniques. Three of them apply here.

The principle of moving your body off the line of attack means getting out of the path of the swing.

The principle of perpendicularity says that when you’re blocking an attack, you want to be perpendicular to whatever’s coming at you.

The principle of simultaneity says that you want to hurt him right away, so when you defend, you should also attack.

You’re moving yourself off the line of the attack, you’re using perpendicularity to make sure you really did stop the thing that’s coming at you, and you’re using simultaneity to get in there and hurt him. No matter what angle the attack comes in on, you are OK as long as you’re in the moment. As Bruce Lee said, don’t think about anything but where you are right now. Don’t think about what he might do, what he could have done. Just be right there in that moment and use his offensive action as your trigger.

Some martial artists spend their time learning how to defend against weapons they’ll probably never encounter on the street — like the nunchaku and the sai. Do those skills transfer to the weapons we’re talking about?

Knowing how to keep any weapon from touching you transfers. Some of the techniques that are specific to the attributes of the sai or tonfa or nunchaku may not work on the street, but the general principles of not getting the sai in your rib cage, not getting the nunchaku upside your head and not getting the broadsword right down the middle of your skull are valid.

Of course, all that has to do with moving off the line and avoiding the weapon.

With respect to the gun, the knife and the stick, does knowing how to use these weapons help a person defend against them?

On the street, you don’t know who you’re standing in front of. If a guy pulls a stick out and looks like he’s going to do a cave-man strike on you, you can’t know whether that guy has studied arnis for years or whether he bought a couple of escrima DVDs and knows basically what to do. As a martial artist, you need to know how all weapons function because that forms your ability to measure the threat he poses.

If you’re facing an attacker on the street, you have to assume the worst: That nitwit with the stick never went to a martial arts school to learn how to hit with just enough force to knock me out, so if he hits me now, I could end up dead.

Is there value in training to use a weapon against a person with the same weapon — in other words, doing stick-vs.-stick fights and knife-vs.-knife fights? Or are such self-defense situations movie fantasies?

You can’t say two guys with knives will never square off because it does happen. However, the speed at which it happens may prevent you from ever drawing your weapon.

Years ago, one of my students was attacked by a man with a knife, and the student had a knife and was trained with it. But there wasn’t time for him to pull his knife out. He got cut badly on the forearm but managed to knock the guy out with kicks to the head once he hit him enough to get him to the ground. The guy just wouldn’t stop trying to cut him, even from the ground.

In the vast majority of situations, however, you won’t see a guy with a knife fighting a guy with a knife or a guy with a stick fighting a guy with a stick. But you could be in a situation in which a weapon of opportunity makes the circumstances very similar to that. For example, a guy attacks you with a knife and you initially fend it off, then grab something like a broken bottle and start wielding it like a knife.

When practicing gun, knife and stick defense, how important is it to use training weapons?

It’s important to use training weapons for safety, but you don’t want them to be too unrealistic.

First, throw away anything made of rubber. It doesn’t have the rigidity of the weapons you’re training to defend yourself against. A stick that’s too soft won’t behave like a real, rigid stick when you try to rip it out of your opponent’s hand, and that flexion might keep you from disarming him.

The same is true with training firearms. When you try to turn it or manipulate it, it might bend, at which point the defense turns into a grab-ass contest. It’s also true with knives — it’s hard to take seriously a floppy knife being thrust at you.

For all weapons, make sure you eliminate the sharp edges. A lot of training firearms have sights, and when the gun goes flying through the air, those sights can cut people. I’ve seen it happen many times. If you have one that has sights, grind them off. The gun should be able to be twisted and turned in the hand without cutting or abrading.

A training knife should have a broad, flat tip so that if a thrust gets through, it might leave a bruise but there won’t be a puncture.

Finally, training weapons should present the same problems real weapons do. For gun disarms, don’t just get a full-frame-size trainer. Also, get a snubbie revolver and a little .32-caliber — they present a whole different problem because of their size. It’s the same with knives. You don’t want only large knives that present large opportunities. You want a range of weapons so you develop all your skills.

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