Thanks Garland. my post was not meant to scare people off of weapons training. In fact, very much the contrary. Weapons can take a pretty horrible toll, and since they are prevalent in attacks in today's society, we should learn as much as we can about them. You cannot protect yourself from the unknown, and no amount of moralizing will keep you alive if you find yourself staring down a gun barrel. You flat out need to know what to do. However, I really advocate realistic and responsible training, as I do with everything else martial. That means dealing in the reality that there are consequences to what we do, and to what we allow to occupy our mind, body and soul during training. Accepting that we are working with life and death subject matter, it is unrealistic in the extreme to deny the true nature of what that means. That's true even if it's just done to make the training less grim. Making a knife thrust to someone's heart and slashing out their guys is unsavory business, and a "reality based" martial artist ought not try to make it less so in order to sell attendance to class. There's the moral issue for me.
Again, though, even with the personal experiences I have (to a large degree because of them) I choose to carry, and I choose to acknowledge the real-world consequences of the decision to use what I carry. I know that if I fail in a life or death situation, it's my carcass on that E.R. slab. I know that it's my family parading past my body in tears because I didn't have the will or fortitude to save myself. The flip side is that I recognize what it means to draw a weapon and go to work on someone with it, and that single factor has kept me out of more fights than anything else. As a moral consideration, I am not willing to take on that kind of karma unless it really is me or him. The reality of the situation and the gravity of the consequences has a sobering effect on the ego, and I think it should. Only once ego is removed can you really decide what your own morals will allow.
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