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If the individual is violent, its most likely before that person even first discovered mma.

NO! I do mma and i never fight outside of tournaments, i mean if someone straight up attacks me i will defend myseld but i dont start street/school fights or agree to fight someone cuz they hate me or something

Through my job and in life I’ve met many MMA practitioners. Some truly do deserve respect and are quite commendable in their ability to fight, not just for sport. Another factor is at play with this, but their experience coming from an MMA gym has helped them. These guys are my friends.

Then there are the complete idiotic morons who know nothing about actual combat but think that they do. These are the guys who pump my gas in the morning on my way to work. The difference is night and day.

I think it’s just the person and their up-growing that really makes that call.

Yes, absolutely. MMA is lacking the spiritual part of the development of the fighters.

No

its not about the art is about the figther you can aPly this setence to this too

if you are a dush and you train mma you are going to become a biger dush,but if you are a nice Person if you train mma you are still going to be a nice Person

best of luck

I don’t think classical martial arts even provide moral and spiritual development.

I know that most MMA places I’ve been to have a family atmosphere. People try to help one another grow and develop as martial artists. I think that, due to a looser ranking structure, there’s less of a chance for an air of superiority to be developed.

I don’t think you’ll find any studies showing even a correlation between MMA gyms opening up or MMA being legalized in a state, and an increase in violence. And MMA by itself does not encourage youth to fight any more than classical martial arts do.

What you may get is people (often younger, more athletic people) who will seek violence regardless of what martial art they take. The difference between MMA and many classical martial arts is that MMA will tell you up front that it’ll teach you how to fight while many classical martial arts have tried to downplay the violence they can enable by talking up things like discipline, respect, etc. that can be found in any physical activity (MMA, kayaking, baseball), but the over played mystique of the Eastern arts makes this more appealing to some people. So the guys you get in an Aikido class might be big into Zen or Anime or other cultural Japanese trappings as opposed to looking primarily for a physically rough outlet for their energy.

To think that classical martial arts automatically make someone less prone to violence or somehow morally or spiritually superior is erroneous, however. How many big egos have caused splits within different styles or organizations? How many black belts get into needless fights to prove how macho they are? How many instructors are arrested every year for molesting children? The numbers might surprise you. And remember how, before there was MMA, the tough guys would go into TKD, karate, Judo, or Kung Fu. In different eras, these were all advertised as giving its practitioners supreme fighting skills. In that respect, MMA is just the flavor of the month. Ten years from now it’ll be something else (maybe Krav Maga or, because of its exposure in the Batman films, maybe KFM).

Jerks are going to be jerks regardless of what they train. Nice guys (competitive MMA fighters like Randy Couture, Jon Jones, Rodrigo Nogueira, Rich Franklin, Genki Sudo, GSP, Joe Stevenson, etc) are going to be nice guys. Martial arts don’t change your personality, they reveal it.

Your question touches on several different aspects and in my opinion MMA does contribute to violence among young people. However this was occurring long before MMA came along due to other things outside of martial arts. You can probably add to the list single parent households or households where both parents work and are to tired or busy to keep an eye on their kids and whats going on with them. You can also add movies and some television programs and video games to contributing to violence as well I think.

You can see it in some of the questions that young people ask in this forum even when asking about how to choke someone out at school who they are going to fight or what are some good techniques to use to aid them in winning a fight.

I do know that there are some coaches that see and realize this also and rise to the occasion and encourage their younger students to avoid problems and physical altercations but I also know some who don’t care at all. This coupled with the fact that some of the things being taught are dangerous and they will usually lack the knowledge and empathy to understand this complicates this all that much more also. In traditional martial arts if I can’t trust a young student to learn about and use certain things responsibly then I am not going to teach him or continue to teach him. Chokes are a good example and I won’t teach or promote a student that exhibits overly aggressive behavior in or outside of my school. Why make them more dangerous to themselves and others? You can usually tell this before they reach the high intermediate or advanced levels where things of this nature are usually taught and weed such students out though.

MMA has no rank structure and so you have young people learning such things almost right away. This is way to early to know what type of person they tend to be whereas in TMA I have a student for close to three years before they get into learning such techniques.

Along with this there is what I call the bad parent factor. I have actually heard on more than one occasion a father say that he wants his kid to learn MMA. Some think it would be cool for their kid to be able to kick all the other kids butts in the neighborhood and in general be a tough kid. Parents that make statements like that you have to wonder about what kind of a person they are and then they put their kid in MMA really puts that kid on the wrong path maybe. Wouldn’t it be better to say I want my kid to be a good kid and go to school and become a doctor and discover the cure for cancer?

As I stated earlier there are a number of social and cultural factors here to consider and it is one of the reasons why I am involved in MMA. I struggled with becoming involved with it quite a lot but realized I could be more of a factor and influence in some positive ways by accepting and embracing it. At the same time I have been very successful in helping to bridge the gap between TMA and MMA and teaching fighters and MMA practitioners about TMA aspects and how they are used and applied in the cage thereby giving them more appreciation for TMA and at the same time trying to instill some good values .

Sticking my head in the sand or just outright not accepting it is not going to stem the tide of MMA or make it go away. Advocating respect and empathy for others and influencing those in it to take the right approach to things is much easier to influence by being part of them rather than against them.