“Scatter-Gun” Street Tactics by Mark Hatmaker

We’ll be talking three little targeted aspects of street/reality work that we will loosely label “Scatter-Gun” tactics. 


First, that name. In my ongoing historical research, I have come across a few instances of phrases along the lines of “Scatter ‘em!” or “Don’t forget your scatter-gun” also “shotgun” has been used here and there in the same context, as in “He got shotgunned all to hell.”


What was initially puzzling to me is that often these references were in incidents where no weapon was pulled. 


Finally, the key came together when realizing that we are hearing archaic slang for targets along the periphery, that is, forgoing, or at least, adding to the usual targets of head, limb, and body.


We hear echoes of this euphemism in old prison slang. The most current usage I can find of it is in “Paul Wade’s” Convict Conditioning 2 where he refers to training the neck, grip, and calves as “shotgun muscle.” He explains it thusly:

“These groups were often called shotgun muscles by the old-time prison athletes, because they ride shotgun with the bigger movers.”


In the original Rough ‘n’ Tumble usage scatter-gun or shotgun is not in reference to the muscle group but to the targeted areas of: Hands, feet, and neck.


Let’s address these one at a time.


THE FEET


Stomping of the feet is so ubiquitous in old accounts it almost remarkable when one does not encounter it. Stomping, grinding, grating, heeling, “chopping”, was seemingly everywhere. 


It was so common in lumber camps it picked up the name “caulking” [pronounced “corking”] named for the metal tread-grips called “caulks” that lumberjacks attached to their boots. 


This common practice also led to another wild bit of slang called “Lumberjack’s Smallpox” which referred to facial scars bore by any jack who has had his face stomped in some past melee. The commonplace of this slang let’s us know, that just because someone was down, niceties were not offered.


We see in Dempsey’s Falling Step the remnants of “caulking” as part and parcel of a punch. 


We see in “foot-tapping” in trade-knife work that same remnant and awareness of foot-stomps as part and parcel of the game.


The historical record shows us foot-stomping in a variety of ways was not some rare event, as with Marco Ruas’s wise use of the tactic in the early days of The Ultimate Fighting Championship.


THE NECK


Another scatter-gun target was the neck. The neck is prime rib to the grappler. It is the source of chokes, strangles, jugulations, cranks, and other such mayhem but…to the early Rough ‘n’ Tumblers it was also a prime striking target.


Throat punches, neck chops, rabbit-shots [of an astonishing variety and surprising angles] were all coveted tactics. Let’s face it, the soft tissue of that which holds up the head is far kinder on the bare hands than the vastly harder and meaner surfaced human skull.


We could go on and on with refences to “neck-punching” in early bare-knuckle matches. Whether accidental or intentional the neck-punch ended more than a few bouts or led the way to the end.


If we see how useful jabbing and slicing to the neck was in the sportive version of mayhem, we can only imagine how much more so in a rough ‘n’ tumble scrum for all the marbles.


THE HANDS


Busting hands, popping fingers, knuckle-busting, ripping digits was also a very large part of the inventory of viciousness.


The strikers valued knuckle-busting and “attacking bucklers” and other such tactics. 


The grapplers in the clinch or on the grass put a premium on de-commissioning the hands. You can class this as grappling at the “tail-ends,” or below-the-wrist-ripping. There was/is a class of “submissions” that were street ready prompts from the old days where you fished small-to-large and made the transition to the “big holds” move like greased-lightning. 


These small actions are not the period on a submission sentence, meaning the snapping of a finger was not the be-all-end-all, they are accent marks along the way. Bottle-openers, splitters, hitchers, milkers, knuckle-cutters were all devilishly small details that spurred bigger moves.


These bigger moves seen in isolation often have the appearance of “show-holds” or co-operative choreography. To be truthful, in many instances today they are just that.


But if they are preceded by the “tail-end” approach this small violence portends even worse things above the phalanges, carpals, and meta-carpals.


A scatter-gun does not ignore the big targets. What a scatter-gun does is to make sure we don’t tunnel on the big targets. We know we may be aiming at center-of-mass for a sure drop, but nothing insures that “sure drop” like a blast from a shotgun that brings in collateral damage at the periphery.


[For techniques, tactics, and strategies of Rough and Tumble Combat & Indigenous Ability culled from the historical record see the RAW Subscription Service.]