A video of two students fighting (and a third appearing to come to one student’s rescue) at Potomic High School in Virginia is making the rounds.
Two students were fighting in a hallway. One is getting beaten fairly badly. A third student comes to rescue the boy who is losing and temporarily distracts the attacker. During the distraction, the student who was originally losing draws a folding knife from his waistband, opens it, and attacks the kid who originally was beating him.
The best video I found was hosted on Facebook (and is labeled as not violating their community standards). I’m going to link to it below. If you don’t want to click on a Facebook link, google the incident and you will see tons of news sites serving a partially blurred version of the video.
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1CzfUDueuq/
A couple comments…
Drawing while you are entangled and fighting is a difficult proposition. As the Shivworks crew originally discovered and taught, drawing while in contact distance requires a dominant position or control of your opponent’s closest limb to be successful.
Drawing from this position is tough. The kid with the knife is wearing the black shirt.
The other option is to wait for an opportunity to get distance/distraction. That’s what our knifer did here. He couldn’t safely draw while under attack, so he waited for a better opportunity. Sometimes those opportunities happen organically (like this one did). More often than not, you will have to create an opportunity before you draw. This holds true for guns as well.
Knifer (in black) waits until attacker (in red) is fighting the rescuer in the white shirt
Waistband Carry and an inertia opening technique. I really like carrying my folding knife in the appendix position clipped into my waistband with an untucked shirt. This is how I carry a defensive blade when I’m in a foreign country and can’t carry a gun. It’s very concealable and accessible to either hand.
You can hear the kid “snap” the knife blade out. He’s practiced that. It’s a fast opening method, but unless it is well practiced, I see folks dropping their blades with some regularity. I caution students to avoid that opening method if they have any other method available. It worked here. It may not work for you.
Even though the the knife armed student was getting beaten, this is likely not a justified self defense case. I hope most of you recognize this. The break in contact allowed the student to draw the knife. A reasonable person would have used that opportunity to escape. The knife-armed student’s attorney will likely argue that this is a third party protection case, saying that the boy stabbed the other kid to protect his friend from a beating. That’s going to be a tough sell. From what I saw, the student who originally tried to rescue the stabber did not appear to be at risk of being seriously hurt or killer by the attacker’s ineffective blows.
If you have an opportunity to get away from something like this, do it.
Student in black takes the fight to the attacker rather than escaping.
Stabbing someone takes a considerable time to work depending on the size of the blade and the bodypart being stabbed. When I watched the video, I counted at least eight strikes with the knife. The victim here didn’t know he was being stabbed for some time.
The stabbing lasted for about 10 seconds before the victim turned and began to run away. That’s a long time in a fight. Don’t expect an instant stop in a situation like this.
The knife worked, eventually.
Instead of randomly stabbing any target available, I prefer to exercise a little bit more target discrimination, trying to hit targets that have major blood vessels close to the surface of the skin or large muscle/tendon targets that will impede the attacker’s mobility to facilitate escape. “Caveman” style stabbing is a good way to kill someone, but doesn’t usually stop the attack quickly. Do you want to kill the guy or stop his attack? Tailor your chosen technique to match your desired outcome.
If you want to learn how to use a knife more optimally for self protection, I’d love to see you at one of my upcoming classes.
