The Telegraph's Latest Advice - Learn to Defend Yourself

Novel, eh wot?

This week's London Sunday Telegraph has an article on self defense. Here's some of the highlights:

Imagine the worst. It's 3am, you've been woken by a strange noise in the kitchen. Sleepy-eyed and scared, you go downstairs. Before you can reach for the light switch, you come face-to-face with a burglar. What do you do?

"You have to react quickly," warns Martin Beale, a self-defence specialist and home security adviser. "The choices are simple: fight or flight.

"You must know this in advance, to prepare yourself as much as you can. Will you run or will you stand your ground? What if the burglar is armed? Condition your mind to say: 'If this happens, this is what I will do'.

"To disarm an intruder, you need great presence of mind and skill. Even soldiers who are trained to kill cannot always find it within themselves to fire their weapons in anger.

"If you are going to start something, you will have to finish it - you aren't going to get a second chance.

"If he is determined to beat the daylights out of you and you hurt him but only slightly, he will be a wounded animal and who knows what will happen?

"If you are going to go for it, you have to go for it 110 per cent. If you cannot frighten him off, you have to disarm him and hit him until he cannot move."

All good advice. But here's more of that oddly British mindset:

Mr Beale, 45, who is the managing director of Praetorian Associates, a team of former military personnel who provide security services to prominent individuals around the world, and equip international police forces and special forces with body armour, says that there are many ordinary household objects that can serve as defensive weapons.

As opposed to offensive weapons? They're just weapons. How they're used defines the intent.

Perhaps it's just me, but that oddity of defining anything that can be used as a weapon as either "offensive" or "defensive" just weirds me out.

Here's the kicker of the piece, though:

While Mr Beale stressed that knowing how and when to fight back against intruders was important, there was no shame in choosing flight. Fighting back contradicts police advice, which is for householders to escape to a locked room and dial 999. Also, under the current law, which, according to an ICM poll in last week's Sunday Telegraph, 70 per cent of the population view as inadequate, householders who resort to self-defence could find themselves charged with assault and even sued for compensation by their burglars.

To some extent this is true even here, but not carried to the point it has been in British courts. And not in states like Texas where "excessive use of force" against a burglar gets you a pat on the back.

Anyway, go read it. It's pretty good advice no matter where you live.

As to progress on laws making force against home invaders less legally risky? Well Telegraph writer Peter Pindar penned a poem on the upcoming election (ah, alliteration) and here are the pertinent stanzas:

We need more policemen on the beat,
Said Dee, to cut down crime.
Said Dum: We'll put police on the street,
So vote for us next time.

Ask Dum or Dee for laws to boost
Householders' self-defence;
See how they settle down to roost
Securely on the fence.

Yup. Sound and fury, signifying nothing, as one letter to the editor explained:

Do not be fooled into accepting David Blunkett's support for your campaign (Opinion, Nov 7). He is a master of the comforting word and a complete lack of action. When interviewed, he always sympathises and tut-tuts about how bad things are - remember that he was going to "nail" the hooligans who had been freed by a Portuguese court - and nothing ever happens.

Remember that he has been Home Secretary for more than three years therefore he has all the power to make or change the law. The fact is that this Government has condoned if not supported greater rights for the criminal.

I suggest that you ignore him until he proposes what he will do and when. Everything else is hot air. - Michael Ollerenshaw, Bowdon, Cheshire

Another writer had a rather snappish comment about the Chief Constable of Lancashire:

I would like to congratulate Paul Stephenson, the Chief Constable of Lancashire, on probably the most crass remark to emanate from a senior police officer so far this century when he said of your ICM opinion poll: "We will consider the survey to establish how its findings can help us to understand people's fear of crime."

Perhaps someone could point out to him that it is not his job to understand the fear of the victims but to catch the criminals. Better he should spend his time (generously paid for by us) considering how to achieve this end.

Even more disturbing is the fact that he is a spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers. Does that mean he is typical of that august body? Are they all sitting around considering the fear of victims rather than catching criminals? No wonder people are afraid. - John Dawson, Taunton, Somerset

You tell him, John!

That seems to be it on the self-defense front from the Telegraph this week. Ah, well.