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Sunday, March 28, 2010

Ending Violence Quickly: A Professional’s Guide to Ending Violence Quickly by Marc MacYoung

Mark “Animal” McYoung. “On how bouncers, bodyguards, and other security professionals handle ugly situations.” Probably not wrong, but so badly written as to be ridiculous. The guy quotes Robert Jordan, in a section on tactics, for Chrissakes. This book is two-hundred and fifty pages of bravado and juvenile writing with a few useful diagrams on how various take down principles.

Unfortunately, so much of what Mr. MacYoung is trying to explain is marred by poor illustration and prose so tangled that it regularly loses track of whatever point it was trying to make that the book as a whole is not all that informative. If I were to try to summarize:

1. Best to neutralize the situation before it escalates into the realm of physical violence.
2. If it gets to violence, you need to end a fight in three moves or less.
3. Break the threat’s attitude using pain to shock them out of their aggressive posture.
4. Drop them to the ground.
5. Make it clear that further resistance or aggression will result in far worse pain or injury.

These principles probably work pretty well for most bouncers. So in the immortal words of The Dude, “You’re not wrong, Marc. You just come across as an illiterate asshole.”

I’ve got a couple more books on the topic to get through, but so far the genre seems to be mightily short on capable writers.

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