Sensei Jeff gets you shot in the face, again.

In today’s final installment in Lessons from Sensei Jeff, my favorite TDK black belt shows you how to not only get shot in the face, but mildly irritate your attacker as well so that if you are lucky enough to take their gun away, they will now beat you to death with their bare hands.  As usual, here’s our time index commentary.

  • 0:35 – This technique apparently only works if the bad guy already has his finger on the trigger.  Now, I’m no TKD black belt (oh wait, yes I am) but I’m pretty sure that I can’t react faster with my entire body than he can suck that arm in and start shooting me.  Also, do you really want to bet your life on a technique that only works if the bad guy is already about to shoot you?
  • 1:17 – why is that guy bowing every time Sensei Jeff hands his gun back?  “Thank you for muzzling yourself with this gun that has a magazine in it?”
  • 1:35 – Back to the booby-trapped weapon!  Seriously, does this happen?  Ever?  Maybe I missed that this was a common occurrence.
  • 1:40 – Dude, seriously.  The slide is on top of the gun.  The thing that you’re “packing” is called the magazine.
  • 1:49 – MOST.  EPIC.  FAIL.  YET.  He has now performed a tap-rack drill, and is now pointed a cocked firearm that may or may not have a round in the chamber with the safety off and his finger on the trigger at one of his own students.  Can you say “I want my money back”?

If you’re going to train gun takeaways, buy a Blue Gun.  They’re cheap, they’re safe, and it is completely impossible to have an ND with a blue gun.

This concludes our lessons from Sensei Jeff.  I think this video is by far the worst in terms of the technique being presented and the ridiculously unnecessary safety violations in the video.  Now, we’ve all had a pretty good laugh about this, but there are some very serious issues that I’d like to address.

First off, the safety issues.  Don’t train with live guns like that.  It’s incredibly dangerous and it’s how people get killed.  I wasn’t joking about buying a blue gun for training purposes; it’s impossible for a live round to sneak in to the chamber of a solid block of plastic.  Even in dry fire I’m a little OCD about press-checking my guns, because I don’t want the magical bullet gremlins to sneak one in the chamber.  Don’t do that what Sensei Jeff does.  I cannot stress enough that training with a live gun like that is just so dangerous and stupid that I run out of adjectives to describe how dangerous it is.

Now about the techniques themselves.  Gun takeaways are generally a last ditch effort and are going to require a lot of strength and coordination.  Sensei Jeff has a slightly different technique for every situation, which is great way to put your brain in to vapor lock when the balloon goes up, as you can’t remember which complicated, finesse intensive move you’re going to need to do.  Hence why I’m a big of “punch him in the throat” followed with “stomp his guts out” as options to “fine joint manipulation”.  The body tends to break down under stress, and the more complicated an action is, the less likely you’ll be able to actually pull it off.

I believe that marital arts training can be valuable for the CCW holder.  Most fights don’t occur on brightly lit indoor ranges or sunny days in outdoor bays, and learning to fight with your body is useful.  But remember that not all instruction is created equal; and in a lot of cases the martial arts community is more fraught with shysters and “mall ninjas” than the firearms community.  Investigate your trainers – a guy like Sensei Jeff probably isn’t the best choice for learning to fight.

15 Comments

  1. Caleb, that technique was not great. IT does take a lot of fine motor skills. However, your suggestion to punch him in the throat and then stomp him is, IMAO, no better. You leave him with a deadly weapon that he can use from a long distance, and with a second to recover a tenth of his wits he has a gun and you are trying to punch him. He will shoot you every time. You MUST try to take his weapon, or get away and out of his range with the gun.

    No gun disarm is a high-percentage technique; they are all “get killed less often” options. Plus, these are better for those who have more martial arts training, whose margins for error are larger.

    I still think that they are useful. Because of your posts, I went back (with a blue gun, thanks for the reminder for everyone!) and thought through disarms again. Some work well, some are dicey. Most depend on striking at the moment your aggressor is not on high alert or distracted by something else. They CAN work though.

  2. Best disarm I’ve seen used is a fast kick to the wrist of the gun hand. Again it’s a last chance desperation move, but if you can kick accurately it will usually send the gun flying and put the perp in alot of pain if not break their shooting hand wrist.
    Steel toe or heavy boots help.

    This is, as most disarms, best done when your attacker is at least slightly distracted. Have your hands up and act like you are surrendering to them. Human instinct is going to be to watch your hands, not your feet, which gives you a slight advantage.
    If you try this and miss however you are soooo screwed…….
    I would only do this if I felt I was about to die anyway, and had no other options left.

    1. Hey Zermoid.

      Not that I have any credibility left around here, but unless that guy is REALLY distracted, a kick takes a lot longer to get there than your hands. I’ve tried it, like I have the others, and get shot more than not with the kick. I assume you mean a crescent kick.

      I must completely agree with you about the distraction thing though, as well as hands up like you’re surrenduring.

      Also about the “last ditch” thing.

      God bless and stay out of trouble.

      mj

  3. I trying to figure out where he learned this crud from? He says “Pack the slide” when he means “tap the mag” so he must have mis-heard/remembered something that was taught wrong in the first place.

    When he says “booby-trapped” he means the chamber is empty. I think a better term would be “set-up” as I have never heard a name for this stuff. Apparently some people will carry a gun “chamber empty” so that if it gets taken, they can beat the crap outta their attacker knowing they won’t get shot.

    I’ve never heard of anyone being stupid enough to try it though.

    I sure if you look hard enough you can find an old, bad, western novel where one character sets up another with an unloaded gun. A trap, maybe, but not really a booby-trap.

    I can only guess that the mall ninja who taught Jeff believed that the Israeli method was about not getting shot with your own weapon. How one can call a “dud” gun booby trapped is beyond me.

    However, just to show how bad it can be…

    I knew a gun store salesman once who told a wonderful story about a former member of the “teams” (but he’s not supposed to talk about it) who insisted in buying guns only(!) is caliber “40 Secret Weapon“!

    When it comes to fools talking about guns, nothing surprises me anymore.

    1. I knew a gun store salesman once who told a wonderful story about a former member of the “teams” (but he’s not supposed to talk about it) who insisted in buying guns only(!) is caliber “40 Secret Weapon“!

      You have got to be kidding me… Please say you’re kidding.

      1. Not kidding.
        I wasn’t there but that is what I was told.

        The salesman said he made a habit of not telling people when they were full of it. Instead he would gently direct them to better info. But in the above case he gave a very loud WTF speech.

  4. “Grasshopper, when I said that if you were attacked by someone you should “f*** them up” it was just an expression. You did know that, right?”

  5. If he weren’t Tae Kwon Do vice Aijido, I would suspect that Sensei Jeff (and since when do Koreans use Japanese titles?) learned his “stuff” watching Steven Segal fliks…

  6. Did anyone look at his knife disarm videos?

    They’re possibly worse as far as technique is concerned. Overall, sloppy and over-complicated. At the end of one, he ends up exposing his groin to the left hand of his attacker so badly that it almost made me wince just looking at it.

    The gun safety violations are by far the worst thing he does in his videos, though. That makes his “how to disarm a gun” videos far more harmful overall. The chances of actually having a gun or knife used against you by a violent criminal are relatively low. The chances of causing a negligent discharge while practicing for such a thing are much higher. I’m just imagining a couple of teenage boys practicing these “techniques” in their backyard and shake my head. “He says to ‘Pack the slide…'”

    1. I can’t help but laugh at this (emphasis added):
      You’ll have an inherent advantage because you’ll know I’m going to try something. A gang banger would not expect that, or at least he wouldn’t think it was likely in most cases.
      I don’t think that there are many people out there that would want to preform such acts upon good ol’ Sensei Jeff, regardless of gun disarm expertise or no.

      Edited to clean up bad tags – Mod

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