Thank God she had a sword!
Karen Dolley, 43, was sleeping in her bed when she heard the sound of a man’s voice in her house in the middle of the night, the Indiana Star reports. She flipped the lights on a discovered there was a strange man standing in her living room.
But Dolley didn’t cower. Instead, instincts from years of training and conditioning in Medieval combat skills kicked in. She punched the man 10 times and cornered him.
One trains so that in a crisis one falls back on one's training.
She is a trained self-defense 'expert' by now but she got her start......in the Society for Creative Anachronisms, one of the older fantasy play groups and my personal fave. A roomie and singer in an early band was big into this. Made his own chain mail and rattan swords back in the late 70's/early 80s.
I digress:
Dolley owns a gun, but when she went to grab it, she opened the wrong drawer in the chaos of the moment. So she reached for her ninjato — which is a sword used in the Japanese feudal period.
She held the man at sword point until police arrived minutes later.
Obviously I posted this because she experienced what I consider to be another, less-discussed reality of owning a gun for self-protection: in the very nano-second you need it, it's not there. Doesn't matter if it's in a safe, your purse, a briefcase, a cereal box, wherever - when the shit hits the fan you probably aren't going to have it in your hand. I am doing good to keep up with my damned phone.
This lady, again, was trained, she has practiced and she has fought. Your training is always with you. Always. This is why I hawk training and self-defense so much.
Early in her SCA experience she did poorly because she didn't want to hurt anybody and that just allowed her opponents to win. She got over it and now teaches self-defense classes.
And yes, I know, nothing makes any sense to the gun demographic. I don't care.
We don't write for them anymore: we write for the people who want change in gun laws so that this country's public spaces are a bit safer. Gun culture won't 'get it' in large part because they don't want to. They are addicted to that gun and the kaleidoscope of fantasies it provides for them and apparently ANYTHING done to save lives, no matter how small is just intolerable and a slippery slope to somewhere... unsure where.
Oh...she's also deep into roller derby.
You. Go. Girl!