Thoughts on self defense training, Part 6: response "systems".

Monday, October 26, 2009 Filed in: Self defense, Techniques & Training

Last week I mentioned that I'm not a fan of the Cooper Color Codes of Awareness. In fact, I think they're downright silly. Why? Because they serve no purpose, which makes them a distraction from learning something that might actually be useful.

The Cooper Color Code system was popularized by Jeff Cooper, the founder of Gunsite. The four Codes are, as Cooper explained them, "a means of setting one’s mind into the proper condition when exercising lethal violence." They describe "a mental state which enables you to take a difficult psychological step."

Let's start with his explanation: "into the proper condition." Who is to say what the proper mental condition is when facing a threat to one's life? Having talked to a few survivors, and having read the accounts of many more, one's mental state can vary tremendously: some are angry, some scared, some confused. To arrogantly proclaim that there is one mental condition with which to confront an attacker is quite presumptuous, particularly when all of those I've mentioned (and probably more I've not encountered) were sufficient to handle each incident.

I submit to you that the "difficult psychological step", which is the decision/willingness to use lethal force, is made before the attack occurs. In fact, it's one of the first decisions one makes when starting into the armed lifestyle. The sequence for most people looks something like this:

1) You first acknowledge that your life has value to you, and such value is greater than that of the person attacking you.
2) Because of that, you decide that you are willing to use lethal force to protect your own life, and the life of your loved ones.
3) You learn to recognize a threat (stimulus) in such a way that you have time to defend (respond.)
4) You train to perform the proper defense (response) to the threat (stimulus.)

Cooper says that the Codes are "a means of setting one’s mind." This says that they're intended as a guide or a system to achieve a specific result. This requires that one judge any input (the stimulus or threat) against the system (the colored 'conditions'), then adopt the indicated response. Who is really going to do that? "Ooops, I can't go into Condition Red yet, because the situational parameters aren't all in accordance!" Silly, no? Silly, yes!

It also assumes that one is in complete control of one's physiological state. The problem with this line of thinking is that the response activity isn't digital or discrete. It is a continuous spectrum, with many things (including adrenal response and activation of the sympathetic nervous system) completely out of the individual's control. What happens when one component is in one condition, and another is at a different one? Nothing, of course, but a system requires that they must be reconciled - otherwise, of what use is the system?

The Codes are completely arbitrary combinations and ignore the fact that fights are idiosyncratic things, as are the responses of the defenders. The state of mind of the person holding the initiative (say, as a soldier or a law enforcement officer) is quite different than that of the person forced into a reactive response to an attack. Particularly for the latter, the states are quite irrelevant; the only thing that matters is the appropriate response to a specific stimulus at a particular time.

The Codes do nothing in the way of guiding those responses. Cooper himself said that they were not intended to do so, but again: if they are not a guide, of what use are they? If what he says is true, why are there specific response recommendations for each condition - down to whether or not your gun is in its holster? The system, at least according to the originator's own description, is self contradicting.

When faced with a threat a human being performs both instinctive and intuitive actions, the specific combination of which will vary depending on the situation. To try to constrain a person's responses to an arbitrary combination (whether one admits to doing so or not) is the equivalent of forcing everyone to wear size 14 boots regardless of their foot size.

It seems to me that instead of memorizing a bunch of colors, then obsessing about what color you are "in", it is better to spend your mental currency on training appropriate stimulus/response combinations. The Codes sound tacticool as all get-out, but that's about all they do. They serve no real or actual purpose, and in my opinion only obfuscate the situation.

-=[ Grant ]=-

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