![]() ![]() The new ubiquity of video surveillance could force gun nuts and gun haters alike to confront reality. We harbor illusions about how muggings, gangland slayings, and bar fights go down, and about what we can do to intervene or protect ourselves. ![]() As violence has become rarer, fewer people have had the misfortune of becoming personally acquainted with it. Since then, Correia has watched approximately 13,000 more videos of deadly and near-deadly encounters, in an effort to bring reality to a field distorted by fantasy. “Right now,” he shrugged, “we die.” “I’m the John Madden of on-camera violence,” says Correia, who has seen some 13,000 videos of deadly and near-deadly encounters. “I asked him, ‘What do we do about this?’ ” The sensei, normally hard to stump, didn’t have an answer. A real killer, the surveillance footage suggested, will hook you by the neck with one arm and plunge the knife into you repeatedly with the other, shredding your belly into strips of human bacon and chitterlings. “There was no energy, no resistance, no ill will,” he added. On YouTube, Correia had watched a few real-life stabbings caught on surveillance video, and “they didn’t look like what we were training against.” In the safety of the dojo, Correia and his classmates were practicing for an attacker who would extend his blade with one elegant thrust, like an Olympic fencer. “The way we practiced didn’t seem right,” he told me. “Maybe that’s because they know I’m probably armed.”Ĭorreia’s transformation began when he asked his self-defense teacher how to guard against a knife attack. In deep-red states, people recognize his bearish, jovial figure on the street and greet him. His popularity on YouTube has made him a minor celebrity at gun conventions. If you have never seen a person stabbed, shot, or (in one case) bludgeoned with a fish tank, go watch the 800 videos Correia has edited and analyzed. Then he slows down the video and explains what happened, and how the good guys might have prevailed, or avoided the confrontation altogether. About once a day, he posts a video depicting graphic real-life violence. “I’m the John Madden of on-camera violence,” he says. (He co-wrote a book about the Koine Greek word pistis, or “belief.”) I had come to visit him in Phoenix because in 2016 he was born again, professionally, as YouTube’s top expositor of mayhem, a subject in which I take both personal and professional interest. Until two years ago, Correia, who is 42, was not well known outside Phoenix, where he was raising four kids, tending a conspicuously well-armed flock at West Greenway Bible Church, and teaching part-time at Arizona Christian University. “At the very least I want him to say, ‘He smoked you! He was better than you!’ And I’ll say, ‘Yes, Lord, I got smoked.’ ” “I don’t want Jesus to look at me and go, ‘How come you didn’t test your equipment, dummy?’ ” Better to be shot dead in a fair fight. I treat these mags like babies.” If he drops one and dents it, he never carries it again. “You want to make sure the equipment works. ![]() “You’re only going to draw a gun on the worst day of your life,” Correia told me. That is why he keeps his Heckler & Koch VP9 loaded with a 9-mm magazine in pristine condition. As an ordained pastor, he has thought about how their first conversation will go. ![]()
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