David Dubrow

Author

Vester Lee Flanagan: Lessons Learned

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Vester Lee Flanagan stalked and murdered two of his former colleagues: Alison Parker, 24 years old, and Adam Ward, 27.  He walked up and shot them both to death on a self-shot video, posted the video on social media, and committed suicide not long after.  This entire crime is an unmitigated horror.

But, as I always say, it would be worse if we didn’t learn anything from it.

I’ve written about personal defense several times before, but there’s one element of it that I haven’t touched upon, mostly because it’s not typically relevant to the average person: if someone really wants to kill you, he eventually will.  You can be aware, avoidant, trained, alert, and strong, but if you’ve made the kind of enemy that really does just want to kill you and carries out a plan to do so, you’re most likely going to die unless you’re very fortunate during critical moments of his assault.

“Situational awareness” is a buzzword we throw around that describes being aware of your surroundings, especially in a public space.  The “situational” modifier is unnecessary, as anything can be described as a situation, but to sound more tactical we like to add those sorts of adjectives.  Situational awareness includes the act of looking around to see if someone with obvious malicious intent is nearby.  Muggers don’t teleport in to attack you.  If you’ve ever been attacked by surprise, it’s probably because you weren’t aware of your surroundings.  Muggers rely on the fact that most people don’t pay attention to what’s around them.  They profile potential victims by seeing if they’re alert and looking around or not.

Would being situationally aware have saved Parker and Ward?  I doubt it.  From the video he shot, it’s clear that they weren’t paying any attention to him during his approach.  His dark clothing and the way he crept up reminded me of the video of an assassination attempt on Imelda Marcos.  It’s not bloody or visceral, so take a look at it here.  Note that everyone else in the crowd going up to talk to Marcos wore white, seemed to be smiling.  And then the assassin walks up: dressed in black, scowling, reaching into his sleeve.  Nobody noticed this guy until he started trying to hack her up, including her bodyguards. Why not?  Because they weren’t practicing situational awareness.

Parker and Ward were not in any position to defend themselves: both were deeply engrossed in a task, both were entirely unaware that a deeply disturbed man had fixated on them.  It’s also likely that nothing in their lives had ever prepared them for this attack.  They were nice people like you and me.  Who expects to be shot to death doing a 7:00 AM interview in Moneta, Virginia?

I don’t think anything could have saved those people from Vester Lee Flanagan.  He stalked them, chose a moment that was least advantageous for them, and struck.  You can practice awareness, avoidance, de-escalation techniques, and physical combat all day every day, but if someone’s going to go through the same trouble that Flanagan did to stalk and kill you, you’re screwed.

Don’t leave the house mad.  Tell your loved ones that you love them.

And be aware, just in case.

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DC Metro Stabbing: Cause and Effect vs. Courage

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I wrote about this story and its attendant considerations here, but in light of a recent article by R. Douglas Fields purporting to explain why so many able-bodied people abandoned their duties as members of civilization, I thought I would return to the well this one last time.

Predictably, the author sets his and everybody else’s default to coward:

“It may be comforting to indulge in speculation about how you would have responded to the deadly attack on Sutherland, but the fact is that it is difficult to know how anyone will react to a sudden threat.”

Pre-determining that in a dangerous situation you’ll act to save another human being’s life isn’t an indulgence, nor is it comforting to do so.  It’s an acknowledgment of our shared burden as members of society.  Just because it’s difficult to know how you’ll react, it doesn’t mean that you can’t react courageously, or that you shouldn’t do it, or that you shouldn’t prepare yourself to do it.

“The multiple factors and uncertainties mean that there is rarely one correct response to a sudden threat.”

This is where we get caught up in minutiae to justify inaction.  Hick’s Law notwithstanding, there really is one correct response to the threat that has led me to write two articles: stop the guy stabbing someone else to death.  This response can take many forms, of course, but all of them are correct if you’re stopping the killer.

“Bystander apathy is a psychological phenomenon in which witnesses to a person being harmed are less likely to intervene the more people there are present. This is thought to be a consequence of the herding instinct of human beings to do as they see others do. But when many people are present it is a much more complex situation. This leads to confusion. Is the person being attacked a victim or another criminal involved in, say, a gang fight? The Metro riders who saw the assault on Sutherland experienced neither apathy nor confusion, however. They experienced terror.”

Your worth as a person is measured, in part, by doing the right thing despite what you see others doing.  The number of people present in the subway car didn’t create confusion or even lead to it, unless they were engaged in mass telepathy and were all thinking the same thing.  This was obviously not a gang fight.  Experiencing terror does not excuse you from acting properly.  Courage is determined by how you act despite your terror.  Ask any soldier, firefighter, or cop.

“I cannot know what those witnesses lived through on that train, but I am confident from my knowledge of neuroscience that they did exactly the right thing. Their response was not a matter of bravery or cowardice or apathy—it was a matter of mortal strategy. Engaging the homicidal robber physically could have resulted in mass casualties. From all the situational information those people rapidly assimilated, that was their collective conclusion. So the passengers tried to appease the robber with cash instead and no one else lost their life.”

C.S. Lewis must have known R. Douglas Fields, because he described him perfectly in his Abolition of Man: “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”  The witnesses on that train did not do exactly the right thing: Kevin Joseph Sunderland, were he able, would likely agree.  Neither a scientific explanation of cowardice nor a redefining of the term bravery excuse the shameful inaction of the passengers on that train.  Your mortal strategy needs to be flexible enough to take monsters like Jasper Spires into account.

Spires was one man with one knife.  Against numerous assailants ready, willing, and able to subdue him, he would not have prevailed, and mass casualties need not have been the result.  Appeasing monsters never works in the long term: they’ll always come back to eat you.  If not now, later.

“Honed by eons of evolution in a dangerous world of survival of the fittest, the reaction these neural circuits trigger is usually correct; otherwise our species would have gone the way of dinosaurs. This is why rational Monday morning quarterbacking about the passengers’ response on the Metro is misguided. No fault should be leveled against any individuals on that train. They did as their brain and evolution equipped them to do.”

Thousands and thousands and thousands of human beings have overcome what their brains and evolution equipped them to do over the course of civilization, from the Vigiles of ancient Rome to the modern United States soldier, from the blue-painted Pict to the grandfather punching out a would-be mugger.  Scientists like R. Douglas Fields would simply distill us into mere products of brain chemistry, despite the overwhelming evidence that we, as thinking people, transcend that every day.  We’re not products of cause and effect.  There’s more to us than evolution.

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July 4 DC Metro Stabbing: Four Things to Consider

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This is an absolutely horrific story from start to finish. The only way it could be worse is if more people had been murdered.

If we’re going to be grown-ups, we need to confront stories like this, analyze them, and draw reasonable conclusions. As always, it’s horrible when things like this happen, but it’s worse if we don’t learn anything from it.
There are a number of issues that need to be unpacked before we can slot this into its proper context.  

  • He’s Got a Knife: The weapon Spires used was a “small, black folding knife.” Knives are very difficult weapons to deal with in a self-defense context. It doesn’t take a lot of muscle to power a knife: one touch and you’ve been cut. Knife wounds are particularly horrific. When I worked in the self-defense industry, just about every person I knew who taught personal defense said that they’d rather go up against a person with a gun than a knife any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Guns miss. They jam. They run out of ammo.  Knives don’t have those problems. If you’ve ever seen surveillance footage of knife attacks, you’ll learn how fast a knife can do life-threatening damage to an opponent. Even if you don’t bleed to death when cut, the aftermath of a knife attack can be permanent: a colostomy, nerve damage, disfigurement. Across the board, it’s all bad.  
  • Batman Fantasies?: Once you’ve read a story like this there’s a temptation to think, “Well, if I was there, I would’ve done something. I would’ve tackled the guy.” Good. You need to think this way. Visualization is immensely helpful to success. If you take the opposite view, “Oh, if I was there, I would’ve cowered like the rest,” or the ever-popular wishy-washy, “Well, I don’t know what I would’ve done in that situation,” then you’re setting your default position to coward. You’re virtually guaranteeing victimhood. Don’t do that. General James Mattis of the USMC famously said, “Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.” When you’re out in public, that’s a far better thing to internalize than, “What I don’t wish is that I had somehow tried to attack the assailant. I am a little bit larger than he was, but I would not have won.”
  • I’ve Got a Family: A common explanation used to excuse not getting involved is, “I’ve got a family.” Kevin Joseph Sutherland had family who loved him. I’ve got a family. So why should I put myself at risk, potentially make my wife a widow and my child fatherless on behalf of someone I’ve never even met? Because to not do so when circumstances call upon you is far, far worse. One vital part of living in a society worth maintaining is doing the moral thing despite the cost, especially when lives are at stake. Spires has already forfeited his right to be a member of polite society; he’s a blight on civilization itself. The price of DC metro trains and internet and Game of Thrones On Demand and the right to free speech and Pizza Hut Limited Edition Hot Dog Bites Pizza is sometimes paid in blood, and if you’ve decided that your blood is too precious to be spilled above all others, then you’re not pulling your weight. Pediatric brain surgeon? Millionaire philanthropist? Schoolteacher? It doesn’t matter. Answer the call or get out. How can you look at yourself in the mirror afterward if you don’t? Civilization occasionally demands us to act in an uncivilized manner to protect itself. You don’t get to opt out of the tough stuff because you’ve got a family.
  • What Second Amendment?: Part of what contributed to the mass cowardice in this situation was that nobody on that train was armed. When you’re unarmed, you’re putting yourself at the mercy of vermin like Spires. Places that deliberately disarm their citizens like Washington D.C. have an absolute responsibility to protect their citizens. The DC Metro police utterly failed in this case, and Sutherland’s death is as much on their hands as it is the sheep who watched him die.  
It’s fascinating to read the comments on the Reddit thread and see just how many people have normalized victimhood. The comments congratulating the eyewitness on his consoling the dying man are disgusting when you consider that Sutherland need not have died at all. Had the other riders on the train accepted their responsibilities as American citizens, the outcome may have been different.

Yes, knives are unbelievably scary. What’s scarier is being stabbed to death by a drug-addled monster in full view of able-bodied but passive citizens who will only step forward when the monster has fled. Don’t hold my fucking hand. Grow a backbone, carry a weapon, and fight alongside me.

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St. Louis Train Beating: Lessons Learned

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This story has made the rounds for a few days now.  As responsible adults, we need to dig a little deeper into both the coverage of the event and the event itself:

“When one man sat down next to a second man in a St. Louis light rail car and asked him his opinion on the shooting of Michael Brown, it was not the beginning of a discussion.

It was the start of an assault, police said.

The second man, who was white, didn’t want to answer the question. Then the first man, who was black, boxed him in the face. Two more African-American men joined in the beating, according to a police report about Monday’s incident.”

Odd that the writer, Ben Brumfield, used the term “boxed” here instead of “struck” or “punched”.  Why is that?  To mitigate the savagery of the attack?  I’ve never heard the word “boxed” used like this outside of a specific reference to the sport of boxing, the metaphorical enclosure of someone or something, or the actual use of a physical box.

As with all violent encounters, it’s terrible that this happened, but it’s worse if we don’t learn anything from it.  The biggest takeaway is that the victim was profiled before the actual attack.  While this particular assault is a bit peculiar for its lack of a robbery (perhaps another chapter in the Knockout Game), it was still brutal.  And unnecessary.  I’m not blaming the victim when I say that if the victim had taken steps to make himself a less attractive target, I’d be looking for a different story to write about.

Before we go further, watch this video of the attack with the sound on.  The audio is important.  I’ll wait.

What’s striking is that the person who shot the video knew that an attack was imminent.  The videographer knew that the guy was going to get victimized.  So did everyone else on that train except for the victim.  We’ll ignore the videographer’s sniggering and tittering other than to say that it’s particularly disgusting.

This assault started before the attacker asked to borrow the victim’s cell phone.  It began in the profiling phase, when the victim sat down on the train, oblivious to his surroundings.  At that moment, the attacker knew out of everyone on that train who he was going to punch.  (We’ll save the racial elements for a different discussion.)  Everything followed from that profiling phase, including asking to use the victim’s cell phone (who does that?), sitting next to the victim, asking the victim a racially charged question, and reacting to the victim’s non-answer.  At every one of those points, the victim could have done something to change the outcome, but didn’t.  He ignored them, probably scared but hoping nothing would happen.  You leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone, right?

Wrong.

We have to learn from his mistakes and not do what he did.  How do we do that?  Remember these five easy steps:

  1. Always carry a weapon.  Always.  Especially if circumstances force you to travel at night.  Gun, knife, pepper spray, whatever: if you don’t have a weapon of some kind on you at all times, you’re putting yourself at unnecessary risk.  Practice accessing and deploying your weapon under duress.  Take your personal safety seriously.
  2. If you’re tired, suck it up and don’t look tired.  Look alert.  Take visible notice of your surroundings.  If I’m a felon, I’m going to go after the guy who looks tired and oblivious over the guy who looks like he’s going to be a problem every single time.
  3. Failing that, when someone who’s obviously up to no good wants something from you, leave.  Get out of there.  Switch train cars.  Move to a place where you have enough room to access and deploy your weapon of choice.  Don’t interact with him.  He’ll call you a pussy and ask if you’re afraid of him.  Remember that you have more to lose than he does and get away.
  4. If you can’t run, at least stand up.  Don’t just sit there.  A serious person who’s got a plan for his own defense is unattractive as a victim.  Once you’re up, get that weapon out.  If you think that’s extreme, remember the context: you were sitting there, minding your own business, when a person or people who gave you a legitimate reason to be concerned (that scared feeling in your gut is a legitimate reason) got into your personal space and wouldn’t let you move away.  He’s already assaulted you by arresting your movement.  
  5. If after steps 2, 3, and 4, plus firm verbal demands for your attacker to back off haven’t worked, you’ll have to get proactive in your own defense.  Every situation is different, obviously, but just remember that as a peaceful, law-abiding citizen, you have a legal and moral right to defend yourself.
I’m not a lawyer, so don’t take any of this as legal advice.  It’s ugly.  It’s scary to think about.  It’s difficult.  And it’s part of being an adult.  Your personal defense is your responsibility.  Own it.

In more situations than anyone would like to admit, being a victim is often a choice.  Choose something else.

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War Stories: Battlefield Pankration

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One of the projects I’m most proud of during my time as the director of video production for a small but notorious publisher was the book and video project Battlefield Pankration by Jim Arvanitis.  It’s a turnkey personal defense system, including everything from pre-combat de-escalation techniques to handling weapons like sticks and knives.  Jim stands out among a hugely overpopulated crowd not just for his skill, knowledge base, and devotion to fitness, but also his personal experience in actual fighting.  Until you know how you’ll react to being hit in the face, you have no business teaching self-defense.  Jim Arvanitis is the real deal.  

I’d worked with him before on his video Secrets of Pankration, so I was pleased when he’d approached us with a new project, one that bridged the gap between MMA sport and streetfighting reality.  We’d blocked out a week’s worth of shooting, put it on the schedule, and worked out the details until he arrived.
Little did I know that the project would be one of the most difficult studio shoots of my career.
The first shoot day had gone splendidly.  Jim’s one of those rare authors who doesn’t need a second take.  Without getting too deep into the nuts and bolts of the shooting process (a subject worth discussing in future pieces), we did the usual thing which was to shoot through lunch and end the day in the late afternoon to give the author time to rest and me time to review some of the footage.  In those days I got to the office around 4:45 in the morning and left between 4 and 5 PM.  I loved the work.
And then around mid-morning on the second day, Jim strained a hamstring doing a side kick and we weren’t sure if we could complete the shoot, let alone finish the day’s work.  (I may have the exact details of the injury wrong, but it was definitely a leg thing.)  Jim’s as tough as nails, the rub-some-dirt-on-it kind of man, but if you can’t perform, you can’t perform.  It was the worst luck imaginable.  Two weeks prior, we’d had to cut short another shoot because the author had rolled his ankle and could barely walk.  A great deal of money and time had been invested, and a work stoppage represented a real hardship.  
Pleasantly, the next day Jim was able to return to work, and things went well; you’d never know he was nursing an injury.  The morning after, I had some trouble starting my edit suite (a Final Cut Pro machine), but it finally did boot after a few odd error messages.  I made an offhand comment about it to one of Jim’s assistants, who happened to be a computer engineer.  He told me that my edit suite was about to shit the bed (without using those exact words).  Macs don’t have the same problems as PCs, and the errors I’d gotten were clear indicators that the hard drive was dying.
The next morning, it wouldn’t start at all.  A large part of my job wasn’t just shooting the videos, but editing them, too.  Without an edit suite, post-production ground to a halt.  So in the midst of a shoot where we were already behind due to injury, I had to deal with Mac repairs as well.  
In the end, we shot all the video parts, but couldn’t finish the hundreds of still photos for the book, despite very long days and few breaks.
My wife’s family lived not far from where Jim lives, so a couple months later during a vacation to Florida, I spent the day with Jim, his son Brandon, and his friend Bob to shoot the remaining photos.  Jim was in the midst of suffering a nasty flu bug, but it didn’t slow him down at all.  Being the friendly, giving sort he is, I caught the bug myself and spent the plane ride home trying not to die from what I called the Greek Flu.  Fever, chills, coughing, you name it.  It sucked.
Despite everything, we produced a great piece of work that I’m proud of.  Out of the many authors I became friendly with during my time in publishing, Jim’s one of the few I’m honored to still call a friend.  Even though he gave me the Greek Flu and almost killed me.
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Gray Men of Horror

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As I buckled my preschooler into his car seat, we had a brief conversation:

Him: When Uncle J— comes back, I want him to sit next to me in the back.
Me: Well, sure, but that’s not going to be for some time.  He lives really far away, you know.
Him: Is Uncle J— yours father?
Me: No, kiddo.  My father is dead.  Uncle J— is my brother.

At this point, his eyes filled with tears.  He’s familiar with the concept of death as a practical, if not philosophical matter: we had two cats, and one of them died of heart disease some months ago, so he knows that death is a permanent state.  I didn’t feel good about telling him about my father’s death, but it’s something we’ve discussed before.  It often takes several conversations for certain concepts to sink in.  The tears he shed over his grandfather suggest that he got it this time.  This time, it made sense.

Him: Yours father died?
Me: Yes, kiddo.  He was very, very sick, and he died a few years ago, when you were a baby.
Him: *crying now*: Did I sit on his lap?
Me: Yes you did.  I have a picture of it.  He really liked you, kiddo.  It’s okay to be sad about it.

I hugged him in the car seat, wiped off his face, and he was fine by the time I fastened my own seat belt.  His resilience is an enviable thing.

Death is an aspect of human experience like any other, but too much emphasis on it is unhealthy, like an obsession with certain bodily functions.  So my little boy knows about it.  As someone who reads, watches, and writes horror, I consider it in ways that few people do as a matter of course.  After all, death is one of horror’s most central themes.

I write about death and unspeakable horrors, but you wouldn’t know it to look at me.  When I worked in the publishing industry, learning about self-defense, combat shooting, knife fighting, and similar subjects, one topic that came up from the more competent instructors was something called the Gray Man concept.  The best way to win a fight is to not be there when it happens: to be aware and avoidant.  A Gray Man doesn’t wear BDUs and an NRA Life Member T-shirt to go to the 7-11.  He carries, but he blends in.  He trains in personal defense techniques but avoids fights.  He’s unremarkable.  You just look past him.  That’s the Gray Man.

Many horror fans aren’t Gray Men (or Gray Women).  You know it to look at them.  Goths and metalheads, two subcultures that typically embrace the horror genre, select their appearances so that you know what they’re into.  I attach no judgment to this: people like what they like and do what they do and that’s just fine.  It’s reasonable to make assumptions about a Goth’s interest based on his appearance, as much as we’re told to ignore judgment based upon experience and refuse to judge a book by its cover.

What of the Gray Man of horror, then?  How much horror can one consume without it coming out in the pores?  In large part, I suspect horror fans all come to the party for different reasons.  Some of us enjoy the vicarious thrill of terrible danger.  Others groove on how justice is so often meted out to the deserving in most horror stories (or, conversely, how the bad guy sometimes wins).  And yet others really like death.

What do I like about horror?  I’m a Gray Man.  You’ll never know until I tell you.

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