start a fight and there's no way out of it you should always hit them first.

In a sane society this would be a good idea but unfortunately we live in a society in which the commentariat and chattering middle classes have mostly never been in a fight, and so insist on asserting that people should be held to an unreasonable standard of behaviour when in life threating situations. This wouldn't be so bad except these are the people that write the columns and vilify people in the press. Journalism grads that think that when someone is trying to smash your face in, you have the time to remember and analyse in a split second every nuance of the geneva convention before deciding to grab the nearest object and smash your attacker over the head with it. Then they'll send you to prison because you used a weapon to defend yourself whereas your attacker only used a fist.

If you did decide to pre-emptively defend yourself you would likely be faced with a bunch of self righteous middle class moralists telling you that you should have just "called the police". People like that don't understand what it is like to be in an actual dangerous situation where someone is about to attack you and where it is impossible to escape.

This sort of mentality is commonplace. Look at how children are told "you should have told a teacher" if they act in self defence against a bully. As if telling a teacher that someone is trying to beat you up is a viable option when they are 200 yards away on the other side of the playground. That happened to me at school, I ended up getting suspended because I punched a guy in self defence. I was given the whole "why didn't you tell a teacher?" shtick. It was around that time that I realized that these middle class types have simply never been in a position of having to defend themselves and thus are not capable of empathizing with someone who has.

We can see this across the pond in the US where we have the left talking about how Darren Wilson should be indicted because it is never justified to shoot an "unarmed" person. These people have no idea what it is like to be hit in the face by a man's fist coming at you at speed. They've got no idea just how much damage that can do.