Today I received another email from an Urban Warrior student living in the UK. In this email, my student told me all about the increasing violence on British streets. It made for sad reading. Assaults are at an all time high, as are knife and gun crime. Gang mentality and drug warfare is now endemic in every part of England. The threat of serious terrorism is rated as even higher today than it was during the IRA heyday—due to the rise of internal Islamic Fundamentalism and al-Qaeda sympathizers.

Sad reading. Sad, but predictable.

But the story is not over! I have a message for UK readers. It's the message of The Urban Warrior!

You can win through this.

You can learn to stack the odds in your favor. You can master your body and mind in the face of the most punishing and ghastly city environments. You can learn to toughen up and deal with daily violence (in fact, I can teach you to thrive on it). You can learn to vanish—melt away into the background of a world you have learned to fully manipulate.  You can learn to defend yourself against terrorism and find powerful ways to reduce the threats facing you. You can stop being a victim—for good!

In short, you can become an Urban Warrior.

Recent social changes don't alter any of these truths—in fact, they render them essential. You have to get real, now. For your sake and the sake of your family!

Wherever you are, the self-defense principles and ideology outlined in The Urban Warrior's Bible remain valid. Adaptations need to be made however, due to different legal systems. For example, handguns are banned in the UK, as are a great many self-defense weapons (such as TASERS, etc). In Britain even pepper spray is considered an offensive weapon and its use limited to the police force. It's currently illegal to purchase many martial arts weapons. Following a series of recent incidents, it looks like swords (even replicas) and combat knives will also be banned, shortly. (Get what you can, now.)

This attitude never ceases to amaze me. It's as though the UK government deliberately wants to stop the right-minded majority from defending themselves. Obviously, the point of this plethora of anti-weapon laws is to keep weapons out of the hands of people who would use the weaponry for criminal purposes, not legitimate self-defense. But here's newsflash for all you dumbass politicians—criminals don't obey the law. That's why they're called criminals. They'll get their hands on the weapons they want anyway. If this was untrue, there would be no gun crime in Great Britain; anti-gun legislation is tighter and more prolific in the UK than ever, stricter than anywhere else in the world. Yet the stricter the law becomes, the more gun crime statistics increase.

It's all very well to say; "protecting the public is the job of the police force, not individual citizens", but what if you don't happen to have a police officer in your pocket when you get assaulted next to a cashpoint at night?

Wherever you are, you have to balance your self-protection methods with the law of the land. This is something only the individual can do. But what I will say to those of you bound up by local law is: Get creative.

Sure; it's illegal to carry a knife around in your bag. But what about a razor-sharp pair of scissors? Self-defense tools like kubotan and yawara are not illegal in most countries and some will even fit on keyrings. They can be very effective weapons if you learn how to use them. Perhaps you can't carry a quarter-staff around in your car. But what about a baseball bat? (Don't forget a mitt and a couple of baseballs—if anybody asks, you were going to meet friends to ask for a game, right?) Maybe you can't get hold of a firearm for home defense. But what about alternatives like compound bows or crossbows?

Next time somebody breaks into your home because you aren't allowed to defend it where you live, don't forget to have a nailgun by the side of your bed—for property maintenance purposes, of course. The latest kinds are pneumatic, lightweight, powerful, and shoot out forty nails per second at the slightest pull of the palm trigger.

Give the bastard a nail job he'll never forget.