Immediate Action Combatives

Striking vs Grappling in the Real World

This is an interesting video. I'm not gonna comment on the law-enforcement Context, I'm not gonna comment on how they arrived in the situation that they're in, and I am not actually going to make any points about what I think as an inexperienced non-law-enforcement professional what these officers should've done. But I am going to point out an issue that often gets overlooked in the self preservation training community.

Watch the video and notice what the female officer does while her partner is wrestling with the suspect over the gun. She is frantically hitting the bad guy as hard as she possibly can. And we clearly see the results. And said results add up to Zero. .

Further, that Female officer looked to be pretty good shape. She looks to be fit and looks to be the kind of officer that you would hope would show up to deal with stuff. Certainly you could make comments about how her striking could be better directed and the mechanics might be improved, but what she was doing was not really wrong.

What was wrong was that it was completely useless. And here is why. The female officer is not that big. Hard to tell from the video but she looks fairly average size for a female of her age. Again, obviously seems to be in pretty decent shape, but not super muscular nor super large. And that is the major issue with striking that far too many subject matter experts overlook when they bleat endlessly about how grappling will get you killed and what you have to do instead is hit the other person.

That sounds really great if you are a 200 pound person hitting somebody your size or smaller. Probably a decent and effective strategy. .However what is overlooked - whether through willful ignorance or flat out stupidity - Is that physics matters.There is a reason that every striking combat sport has weight classes.You can be the best 135 pound Striker on the planet, but if you go to punch somebody who outweighs you by 100 pounds, it's not going to do a whole lot. Roberto Duran was one of the greatest boxers of all time and his nickname was Hands of Stone, so that lets us know that he could hit really hard. He was lightweight through middleweight champion in the 70s and early 80s. But you know what title he never won, what title he never fought for? Heavyweight. Why is that? Because the worst top 20 heavyweight boxer on the planet would have destroyed him and maybe even killed him. There's almost no boxing commission in the world that would've sanctioned a fight between Roberto Duran and some heavyweight. Because physics matters. So if someone like a Duran would have a hard time hurting someone 80 pounds heavier, what chance does that middle age guy, who has never fought or trained H2H before, and has a short weekend course on it going to be able to accomplish?

You can have all the technical skill on your side. You can be an abnormally proficient striker. But hitting somebody 50, 80 or 100 pounds heavier than you negates most of that and anybody who tries to argue that is lying or they're an idiot. And anyone who tries to say “well, that's why you strike to specific points” has never fought anybody for real. The best we can do is hit general targets as often and as fast and as hard as we possibly can. And if you are substantially smaller than somebody else, that is not going to be super effective as the video here so ably illustrates.

What we know does work from decades and decades of jujutsu and MMA is that you can be a smaller person and win at grappling against a bigger person. That is not a debatable point. I can point out an incredibly dense amount of empirical data to prove that. It's easier for a smaller person to win through grappling than it is through striking.

Am I saying that striking sucks? Obviously not. I have spent an inordinate amount of my own personal training time working striking. But we have to be conscious of the limitations of striking. It absolutely has its place, but it is almost never a more superior tactic than grappling in the real world.

PoliceActivity 18K likes, 8.9K comments. "Suspect Tries to Take Officer’s Gun During Struggle in Portland"

Another “Rare” Entangled Fight with a Private Citizen and Weapons 4/7/2026

While many online commentators keep bleating about how these things are rare, we have another one that just happened in Oklahoma. Take a look : A high school principal tackles an attempted school shooter with a gun. Not only was it entangled, but it went to the ground, where the fight was ended successfully.

‘Saved lives’: Video shows principal tackling gunman at Oklahoma high school Surveillance footage from a high school in Oklahoma appears to show a gunman getting tackled by the school’s principal.

It continues to amuse me that people in the fi****ms training community still try to deny obvious evidence. I posted yet another “rare” entangled fight with weapons and private citizens, and even wrote how that the Flat Earthers use ambiguous language and terms, and I even had commentators on my post still use that language without even a bit of self-awareness.

So I am going to do it again. The following incident just happened and it was reported by a major news source, the New York Times on March 15th. A private citizen stopping a potential mass shooting by not only going to an entanglement, but actually and purposefully taking the bad guy to the ground. No lives lost, good guy wins by using grappling against a handgun. I must be living in Princess Bride land when I hear certain people use the term “rare”.

“"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Armed Man with 100 Rounds of Ammo Tackled in Texas Church The New York Post is reporting new details on a March 15, 2026, incident in which an armed man was tackled in Eden Church in Houston, Texas.