Weapon defense

The other day one of my students asked me why there was an emphasis on weapons? Shouldn't a reality based (or flinched or human reaction based) system be indifferent to if there is a weapon or not?

The idea being that you can't or don't have time to evaluate if the person is wielding a knife or brass knuckle  you only have time to react.

If you look at the movements of a weapon wielding attacker, many of them will remind of unarmed movements. A punch can be a swing of a short club or a knife. An upper cut a gutting from a knife. A straight punch a stabbing of a knife.

So just practicing "one" movement for them all should simplify training and giving time to concentrate on other aspects of self defense. A thought commonly seen, that self defense is just a matter of technique, and that the simplification of technique is the most efficient. But it is more than that.

Self defense can be seen as three time spaces: pre-conflict, the conflict it self and post conflict. Even this can be broken down to different time frames, but for now I'll keep it to these three. In the pre-conflict cues are very important to pick up on. This could be the way somebody walks, holds his hands or keeps dodging with his eyes. And the closer you get to the confrontation(the conflict) these cues might change in form or intensity. But they are also different depending on what is going to happen; if the attacker wants to hit you, he has to pull his hands out of his pockets. If it's a knife, he has to move into consideration on how he's holding the knife.

To put it simple "The scenario dictates", as Coach Tony Blauer says. So even if the technique you're doing is the "same", the situation/scenario will give you so much more information making the whole weapon defense with all phases more nuanced when a weapon is brought in.

Another factor in practicing is the mental fright for weapons. By working with specially with it, you're working on optimizing more mental space for cognitive processing in a situation with a weapon wielding attacker.

So in a sense "you're right, but wrong", we need to train weapons separately because there are other things than just the technique.