Reddit reviews Left of Bang: How the Marine Corps' Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life
We found 10 Reddit comments about Left of Bang: How the Marine Corps' Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Left of Bang How the Marine Corps Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life
Since getting a gun isn't feasible for most people, I suggest the following (especially the sisters)
OK, risk manager pondering a degree in Finance, currently I'm reading Left of Bang by Patrick Van Horne, Jason A. Riley.
This is a brief cut and paste of what the book is basically about. Left of Bang will teach you how to read your environment and respond to it faster than those around you.
Real self defense training starts with developing situational awareness.
If you're talking about stepping outside a bar to 'settle' a dispute, that's not self defense. Self defense is dealing with the threat of violence or violent action and don't confuse that with fighting. The guy who is being violent toward you is typically going to want to end the violence before you even knew it was about to start.
I enjoy training but if I find myself in the middle of a violent encounter then I've screwed up badly. Read this book, implement the lessons in your daily life, and just enjoy your training whether you choose BJJ, MT, KM or all three.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Left-Bang-Marine-Combat-Program/dp/1936891301/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1459024912&sr=1-1&keywords=left+of+bang
Left of Bang by Patrick Van Horne: https://www.amazon.com/Left-Bang-Marine-Combat-Program/dp/1936891301
Fantastic recommendations here. I can't add much (just a couple), but I'll also summarize the "top picks" in my opinion with links:
And finally, I like this summarizing post from the Art of Manliness. It takes a lot of the core concepts from multiple sources above and distills everything down into a fairly easy-to-read article.
A great book on situational awareness called Left of Bang
Good book on Mitigation, coming from a community-centric perspective. A little unconventional but I think brilliant. Same goes for The Long Emergency by a guy named James Kunstler. He's got a great blog too- talks about Peak Oil a lot.
As far as training goes, you should be looking into FEMA online courses, especially the Professional Development Series (PDS)- which is all online.
Get the book “ Left of Bang” it will teach you just about all you need to know. If you follow its ideology it will help tremendously.
The rest you basically need to learn on the job.
Just keep your head on a swivel. Don’t have your head buried in your phone all the time and such.
https://www.amazon.com/Left-Bang-Marine-Combat-Program/dp/1936891301
I hear you. Remember, though, that a gun is a tool like any other, and there are only certain situations it can help you out of.*
The single most important and effective defense mechanism to keep you safe is your brain. Your behaviors, your situational awareness, and your body language all contribute to your likelihood of making yourself a target. Some things are obvious—don't walk alone at night; favor well-lit, busy areas; don't walk while using a phone or while using headphones—but there are plenty of smaller, subtler actions you can take that add up to you being more challenging prey.
Some examples:
The most essential thing you can do to protect yourself—and your friends, and your girlfriend, and your family, and whomever—is cultivate an incredibly strong sense of situational awareness. When you can see and feel what is happening around you, when you notice subtle shifts in behavior, when the energy in a room suddenly changes, you can anticipate things and react before they happen. That's how you save yourself from bad situations: by not getting into them in the first place. Train your gut and listen to it. If the current situation feels bad, get out. Worst case is you're wrong, but you're no longer suffering in a situation that feels uncomfortable; best case is your gut was right and that you're not dead.
There's a whole host of interesting books—many written in response to lessons learned after almost two decades of combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan—that can help you develop that mindset.
*Side note: there are other tools you can use, too, to make yourself a more difficult target. My favorite is a really bright flashlight. Few criminals want to be easily identified, and getting a face full of bright, white light is a big (and painful) deterrent, especially at night. There are even some—like the Surefire E1D and E2D—that have serrations to make them more effective for striking. I carry a Surefire EB1 in my pocket and a G2X LE in my bag every day. You wouldn't believe how handy a flashlight is day-to-day ("shit, dropped my phone under the car seat again"), and having the ability to check a dark alley or the space between my car and the one next to mine is great for maintaining that situational awareness.
Ah, I gotcha. I was thinking of it more in terms of measuring whether someone in general is enervating or energizing. I suppose you could tally state changes over time to find a generalization of a persons affect.
You're right though, this is highly qualitative, relative, and subjective. If a girl's favorite rock star is standing on the stage four feet away from her, playing her favorite song, there'd be little you could do to energize her in your favor...in that moment.
If you're a fan of reading/sizing up people check out these easily read books:
It's subtle. It's an intuition thing, something that Aspergers folks struggle with.
I'm going to suggest a book to you. Left of Bang which breaks down how the military teaches intuition to their combat troops in order to use it to identify dangers within crowds. Read it, I think you will learn a lot.
It breaks down like this: As humans we are wired to recognize patterns socially. When we see something that does not fit it raises our fight or flight response. Think of ancient humans walking through the forest and seeing leaves on a bush rustle for no reason, it's out of place and could mean a predator about to eat us, or an animal we could kill for dinner.
We still operate with those same reflexes today. And they can be trained.
This military program teaches soldiers how to scan crowds for things that are, for lack of a better word, weird. That weirdness can be a suicide bomber or someone holding a grenade in a crowd.
Women are weaker than men, so often this defense mechanism is more highly tuned in them since they realize they are going to lose most physical fights they get into. When something is out of place, when a guy steps past normal social boundaries... alarm bells go off, it's unavoidable.
Does any of this make sense?