As Dennis, my client, and I were getting our cups and jockstraps on in the dressing room he said, "Look, brother, this stays here and I don't mean to insinuate anything unethical on your part. But now that we've sparred a few times, I have to tell you, that you remind me of this guy, back in the day, that came to the Academy and gave us a clinic on threat recognition. Now, generally speaking, from my patrol days, guys your size, that are calm, are the element we worry about. Big guys eventually go down. You can squash little guys. But guys in the middle size range that seem at peace with ugly shit—it just gets bad real fast, if you know what I mean and I think you do. So I have to ask you. If its you and me, you know, in a doorway, in the stairwell, on the parking lot, and you have a knife, what kind of fight is that."

JL: "Honestly, I don't care who it is—it could be the UFC heavyweight champ—If I have a knife, and he does not, and I initiate, it is not a fight, it's an execution. People just have no idea how easy it is. If this locker room was packed with twenty guys I'd stab most of them and kill a few in under a minute and I can barely get out of bed. If you gave me some UFC lightweight and had me work with him with a knife for a few hours, you could set him loose in the stands at a ball game and he'd kill ten a minute until someone gunned him down."

Dennis: "That's what I thought. This guy had our respect after the empty hand and close quarter shooting. And he's standing at the front of the room by this table that has a blunt knife on it and he tells us that he could stab the dudes in the third row and there was nothing we could do about it. He was cool about it, told us that if anybody got the knife from him he'd buy them a beer after class. He even tells us he's going to do it and we're laughing at him, like yeah, maybe a couple guys in the front row—and then he's diving over the front row with the knife stabbing guys in the neck, chest, slicing the neck. Fortuantely I'm toward the back—becaseu I was one arrogant mother fucker and would have been eating my words. So, eventually some guys start getting the idea that maybe they ought to grab him because this shit is getting embarrassing and he's slicing hands and wrists and throats and...ball sacks—brother, if that had been a real knife it would have looked like a battlefield after the Vikings left. Well, in any case, that's why I'm here. I figure to be able to beat that guy, you need to be that guy."

As we sparred I kept my hands slow and kept reminding him that I was scoring all of those maims and kills on foot movement, that what makes a guy with a knife so nasty is the fact that every time he is taking a step, jumping, passing, sliding, whatever, he's stabbing and slicing. The thing that makes knife sparring useful for unarmed countermeasures against the knife is the fact that the knife cannot be used to block the knife, therefore you learn your defensive movement and hand checking in a free form contact format. There is a lot of hand work to be done, a lot of aggressive deception with the blade, but it is subordinate to the mobility. This format, aside from being a lot of fun, also helps you train on stopping a man with a knife without killing him with the knife and enables you to work on exiting the combat space, or launching a sacrifice counterattack to permit a non-combatant to exit the combat space.

In 2016, 1 in every 3 aggressive males will be packing a knife. Every gas station and convenience store I enter has tactical knives for sale behind the counter. Taken together with the presence of knives among young men who have no real empty hand combat ability, and the prevalence of mob attacks by emasculated blacks, who no longer possess the fighting ability of their grandfathers and will tend to resort to armed solutions more quickly than their forefathers, the postmodern urban survivor should not ignore the knife as a threat or as a counter measure.

Yes, most knife wielders are not "that guy" Dennis was talking about. But, if you train to deal with "that guy" then—even though he would actually still butcher you in a knife on empty hand encounter—you should do well against lesser foes. Think of the 1991 Gulf War. The U.S. achieved the most lopsided victory in modern war, largely because they took the force that had trained to contest the Soviets and used it to squash the Iraqis. Don't train to fight with the urban American equivalent of the Iraqis. Train to deal with apex aggressors, with lesser foes in mind and taking them as they come.