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Opinion
'Killing classes': avoid this moral midget
18 Sep 09
I4S editor Anthony Hildebrand vents his spleen at a ‘combat professional’ who is exploiting people’s fears to line his pockets with filthy lucre.
For a while now we at info4security have been receiving press releases promoting the upcoming visit to the UK of “Las Vegas close combat professional Tim Larkin”.
This American idiot has decided that the best way to combat violent crime is to teach more people how to kill. That’s how to kill humans in four easy moves. In my opinion, it’s possibly the most tasteless, stupid and crass idea I’ve heard in an age. I feel bad even mentioning it because it provides him with more publicity.
But the constant barrage of these offensive emails has annoyed me no end.
“Briton’s [sic] have to take the law into their own hands,“ says Larkin, idiotically.
“Statistically Britain is now the most violent country in Europe. People need to be able to protect themselves and their families.”
So let’s litter the streets with more dead bodies, eh? What a brilliant piece of thinking, you moron. We don’t want to become America – or somewhere even more lawless, you utter tool.
Larkin's latest missive lets us know that he’ll be “training girls as young as 12”. That’s on how to kill people, by the way.
“They see videos of knife crime scenes,” his press release says.
“Larkin however refuses to train teenage boys who he says [sic] as potentially ‘irresponsible with the data’.” I’m not even sure what this barely literate sentence means.
Let’s get this straight, Larkin, you idiot: the last thing we need, violent crime or no violent crime, is someone teaching people the easiest way to kill others. That’s not self-defence. That’s complete and utter stupidity.
I think the future for a civilised society is for there to be fewer murdered people. Perhaps that’s just a crazy notion.
The whole thing is a desparate grab for publicity, so here’s my contribution: don’t attend any event ever organised by Tim Larkin. He is an irresponsible, dimwitted, attention-seeking imbecile, a moral dwarf, using the language of action movies to glorify killing and line his own pockets.
He’s ludicrous and unlikeable. Avoid at all costs.
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Readers' comments
Anthony
Like Brian Sims, you write with great clarity and obvious passion on the topic of security - and on this subject you have struck exactly the right tone. One of utter disgust and dismay.
Why are we allowing someone who claims he can show people how to kill in four moves to spout this rubbish and charge for the privilege?
Larkin suggests that some violent situations require a "kill or be killed" mentality. Does this guy think he's Dirty Harry or what?
Actually, Mr Larkin, we have a police service to cope with "social predators". A police service that is designed to act within the remit of the Law of the Land.
We don't want you here suggesting that it's OK for any Tom, Dick or Harry to venture on to the streets and start 'taking out' people at random merely on the basis that they feel threatened.
Larkin is apparently advocating blows to the neck, chest and groin, and is seemingly relishing the prospect of peoples' windpipes closing over post-attack such that they drown in their own vomit.
What planet is this guy from?
Can you imagine the mayhem that would be caused if even a smattering of the population take Larkin's words at face value?
We don't need vigilantes. We need a robust police force out on the streets in numbers and a justice system that has teeth enough to send proven attackers and murderers to prison for longer than two weeks.
Larkin also believes that his classes "are for average, law-abiding citizens". For your information, Mr Larkin, most law-abiding citizens wouldn't even countenance such behaviour.
Teaching conflict resolution is the best way forward. Companies like Maybo are the purveyors of proper instruction.
I would respectfully suggest that people who are wanting to defend themselves ignore Larkin completely and enrol on recognised training courses.
I've heard that over 100 people have signed up to hear Larkin's words of wisdom when he spouts them in Slough.
None of those individuals are under 18, though. Larkin doesn't let anyone below that age into his classes. It's a maturity issue, you see.
Beggars belief, doesn't it?
If Larkin thinks he's the mature one he's very much mistaken.
I don't see what the problem is. He quite clearly says that the people he is teaching to kill should decide whether the people they are killing deserve to be killed or not.
Rather than self-righteously suggest people should avoid him, maybe you should be suggesting he widens his repetoire.
A class to teach people to stalk people who have it coming, perhaps. Or a torture seminar.
And anyway, the sorts of people who would attend one of his programmes are not the sort who would seek to use these skills nefariously. They sound brill to me.
Why are we letting this moron into the country, I thought our goverment was trying to reduce this sort of behaviour.
"Brill?" "Don't see the problem??"
One of the main problems I can see straight away is you are putting the decision making ability as to whether or not someone deserves to live or die in the hands of a 12 year old, if what you allege is true. That is not 'brill'.
That is the definition of ridiculous.
What if this one 12 year old chicky takes this new found killing machine knowledge back to the estate geezers (which she will) and these instant death techniques are used on others?
Grow a brain and think through this one a little longer. I think you might come to the same conclusion as the rest of us.
You only have to look at the picture really. Blonde, blue eyed, vacuous, as much experience of real life as the last crime novel he read.
In the words of my old Sergeant " I bet he has never dealt with an angry man"
Your editorial is verbally violent and abusive in the extreme. Calling people names is childish. You do yourself no favours at all with this kind of ill considered, uninformed reaction.
Tim Larkin's training is predicated upon an asocial violence versus antisocial aggression paradigm. The distinction drawn between these two allows Larkin's trainees to disengage themselves peacefully from mere antisocial aggression and walk away. So much for your ''moral midget'' accusations.
Asocial violence is defined as the kind of violence where you do not have an option to walk away. Serious violence is going to happen whether you like it or not. In this situation - increasingly common in Britain - the only choice you have is to be the one having the violence done to you or to be the one doing the violence to your attacker(s). This is where Tim Larkin's Target Focused Training comes in.
For your information, Larkin is an ex Navy Seal who graduated at the top of his class. His advisers include present Navy Seals officers and US Marines officers based at the elite Camp Pendelton US base. The FBI has recently signed a contract to have all its officers trained using Larkin's Target Focus Training curriculum.
Now, would you like to write another editorial, this time apologising to Tim Larkin for your previous one?
Or, perhaps, you'd prefer not to print my comments at all? The truth does hurt sometimes.
If this was a moral, ethical self-defence class, why the need to promote it as 'How To Kill'? If that's not the focus of the course, why is it the title? Why were all the press releases sent out to promote it hammering home the point that Larkin would be teaching people 'how to kill'?
If his intentions were good, and non-exploitative, he should not have sought publicity with such dodgy material.
Trying to profit from peoples' fears - and encouraging, however obliquely, additional violence with the aim of killing - not defending, KILLING - others (possibly attackers, who knows - there's nothing to guarantee that) is misguided in the extreme. Advising military and services personnel is no recommendation for training those who are supposed to live their lives within the strictures of the law.