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Notes -
If they start training you on gun disarms early, yeah its completely pointless. Even if you manage a disarm, you still have to fight off the guy who had the gun. So building the basic toolset is utterly necessary to making everything else 'work.' The flashy techniques are there to get attention so people check out the system, the basics are kinda boring but they're what works. Which is what I like about the system. There's no emphasis on any 'mystical' aspects, there's no pure "do it this way or its wrong" in the techniques. Its "DOES THIS WORK and can you actually use it."
I have been running an 'advanced' student class with some of our most experienced practitioners, and we have been training our gun defenses with Nerf guns (i.e. projectiles 1/40th as fast as most real bullets, obviously) to see how often we actually avoid getting shot.
Even the black belts (myself included) can only 'succeed' at our easiest techniques about 4/5 of the time. That means we're eating a bullet 1/5 times. Not amazing odds.
So our official position is that you should comply with the attacker's demands unless there is some clear reason that you shouldn't (do you have kids with you? Spouse? Are they likely to shoot you anyway?)
Yet, we are finding that you can be successful enough to avoid a bullet in the brain and instead only get a grazing hit somewhere less lethal, which allows you to at least fight the guy off once the weapon is neutralized. Its an improvement. But is it an improvement worth training for years to achieve?
Knife defense? BWAHAHAHAHAHAH. Nothing 'works.'. Survival is the only thing you can hope for.
Question to ask is, at what point do you consider a given attack scenario unlikely enough that its just not worth training for? If you just want to build the skill for the sake of building a skill, then just keep learning stuff regardless. It is fun! And obviously cops are significantly more likely to have to deal with a knife or gun attack, so it makes some sense for them to train it.
And of course, a lot of self-defense scenarios can be solved by just carrying a gun yourself. Although we ALSO train how 'simple' it is to deploy a weapon under stress or while tangled with an attacker and it turns out its fucking hard, so once again being proficient at fighting under an adrenaline dump comes in clutch. Learning more won't ever relieve you of the need to keep the basics sharp.
Let me close it out this way: our curriculum is based around training you for the most likely scenarios first and foremost, then get to ever less-likely scenarios the more you train. And we teach situational awareness to avoid bad situations and cardio to ESCAPE bad situations.
If your instructors are playing up the "you'll be able to demolish people instantly with these techniques" aspect of it, you're probably in the wrong place.
That said, of all the techniques we teach, the simple eye-gouge is probably the most effective for 90% of situations you might ever encounter. If only someone can develop the gumption to USE it. As I sometimes say "No matter how big the guy is, he can't train eyelids."
So the biggest challenge for training folks is getting them to overcome whatever mental barriers they have against hurting other humans when the time comes.
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