Category: Real World Lessons

Another Serious Mistake

Another avoidable tragedy.

Take Instructor Gun Recommendations with a Tactical Grain of Salt

If you go to any shooting classes at big named schools, you will likely hear a lot of chatter about guns and gear. The instructor will usually tell the students that they need at least X caliber with Y capacity and prefer you get Z brand. They will shake their heads at you if you carry your gun in a briefcase, or use a small J-frame or autoloader in a pocket holster. Many students will take this to heart and then help spread the word all over the internet. This is how the little training cults grow and spread.

A J-frame and a speed strip reload may be the definition of an optimist in a gunfight, but it might be the only thing most people are able to carry.

The next time an instructor or internet forum member tells you you’re an idiot for carrying a snubbie or mousegun every day, consider the source.

I’ve noticed a trend in the careers of those who are most ardent about how much gun/gear you should carry and constantly spout about how easy it is to carry a full sized guns if you ‘do it right’. Here’s the list:

  1. Tactical/Shooting Instructor
  2. Police/Retired Police
  3. Current Military
  4. Youtube personality/ Gun Industry person
  5. IT professional/Desk jockey
  6. Self Employed/Work from home
  7. Rural Job (Farming, etc)

Do you see a trend in those careers? What similarities do you see? The answer is they work in careers where there is NO PENALTY for (or no chance to be discovered for) having “enough” gun. Most of the folks in group 1 originated in groups 2 and 3. Minimal human contact and/or no penalty for being ‘made’ carrying a gun rounds out the rest of the list.

Edit: It was pointed out to me that since IT folks have a lot more access to computers, they are more inclined to be active on forums. This makes sense. They also interact with clients often.

These guys will say that they have home lives and when they go out with their families, they carry all the stuff they suggest to you carry. Sorry, still not good enough. Getting made at Mama Mia’s Italian Bistro doesn’t hold the same penalty as getting found out at your office.

They are ignorant to the realities that normal people working 9 to 5 in office buildings in urban/suburban settings face. Even if they can imagine what it’s like and tell you to ‘make it work’ anyway, they still have no real experience of being under constant visual scrutiny at the job that pays your bills and feeds your family. If they do have that experience, they probably didn’t have to wear tucked shirts or suits at that job. Also, they  have no skin in your game. They themselves face zero penalty if you get caught. It’s your choice, and your job and livelihood.

Photo: balloongoesup.com/

“The gun just disappears!” Discussing how concealable a gun is with a few staged photos showing lack of printing holds ZERO water against a few weeks of moving, bending, giving presentations, interacting with people, and generally doing your job.

So is it wrong to carry a tiny gun, if anything larger could get you fired and arrested? No. Are your instructors wrong to suggest that you carry a duty gun and 2 spare magazines, a blow out kit, and a 700 lumen flashlight? No, they’re not wrong, either. The instructor is setting you up for success based on their experience and if you get killed for not having enough gun, they can rest easy because they told you so. Being MIL or LEO puts you face to face with violence regularly. They know how bad it can be, and how quickly it can get that way. It benefits everyone to keep their risk profile, as well as penalty for being discovered, in mind when selecting carry guns and gear.

Don’t view this as a cop-out or an excuse to carry a small gun. I also think that most people could get away with more gun than they think they can.

While sub-service caliber guns aren’t always good enough in ballistics gelatin, they seem to work over and over in real encounters. 

What does having a sub-par gun as your primary mean? It simply means you need to get really really good with your little gun. You need to attempt to be able to use it as well as you can shoot a full sized gun. Use it in classes, compete with it, and generally hold your skill-set to a high standard.
Go to ex-MIL, ex-LEO instructors to learn tactics and how to shoot well against other humans, but take gear recommendations with a tactical grain of salt and think long and hard about those things for yourself. Learn from them what works, take it home, adapt it, and make it your own. The life (and job) you save could be your own.

DD

10 Rules for Being a Safe Gun-Owning Parent

Rebecca Bahret of SheKnows.com contacted me recently about compiling a list of the top X-number of safety tips for gun storage when kids are present. I was flattered she thought enough of the blog to ask me. I obliged, obviously, and thought of ten items. With word-count limits, deadlines, and so forth, it was trimmed down a good bit.

It was even worthy of an infographic! Legit.

Image: Terese Condella/SheKnows

Here is her final article. It’s a great article for her target audience.

Since I’m not obligated to any word count limits, here’s what I sent her. I hope it makes a good complement to her article:

  1. This whole list will share a common theme. I teach it as the *Fifth* fundamental firearms safety rule. Here’s the first four. The rule is, “Prevent access to your firearms by unauthorized people”. Children are on that list of people we don’t want having free access to our firearms. If you take this rule as seriously as the other four, the rest falls into place.
  2. Leaving a firearm with an empty chamber on a shelf, or with a magazine nearby is not enough to guarantee they won’t be able to figure out how to load and fire it. Even if by accident. Just like enough monkeys with typewriters will eventually type the complete works of Shakespeare, so too will your child eventually figure out how to make your pistol go bang if so inclined.
  3. If you carry off-body (purse, briefcase, etc), keep complete control of your purse. Do NOT leave it in the shopping cart while you reach for the cereal. Kids move quickly.
  4. Demystify firearms as soon as possible. Make the gun a part of your everyday life, and introduce your child to it early. Tell them they can handle it (don’t use the words “Play”) whenever they want, as along as you are there with them. Let them watch you clean it, dry fire, so on. Removing the mystery early is key.
  5. If you are not in direct control of the firearm, it needs to be locked away. On top of a shelf or under a sofa doesn’t count. Think your child doesn’t know it’s there and can’t reach it? Think again.
  6. Educate them on what to do if they find a firearm that is unsecured. Ensure they know to tell the nearest adult and that they should stay away from it. This instance shows a positive outcome of a child/gun interaction.
  7. Cost is no excuse to not lock up your pistol. The GunVault NV300 NanoVault with Combination Lock is less than $25.
  8. The easier a gun is to access, the less secure it is. The inverse is also true. For the home, there are quick access safes like the Gunvault SpeedVault SV500.  but I feel the best solution is to just wear your pistol in the house when you can. I carry a small framed auto in the house. It’s my underwear gun. When you decide to put the gun down for the day, lock it up.
  9. Use Nerf and Airsoft to introduce your children to safe firearms handling. Make them obey the safety rules.
  10. Your children will learn from TV and Media about guns unless you step in and educate them first. Don’t let them think it’s a game or that guns are to be taken lightly.

Seek further training to get more ideas. The NRA has a great program on this topic. https://eddieeagle.nra.org/

Stay Safe and Protect the Brood,

Mark

Zen and the Art of Not Shooting

How often are you practicing not shooting your gun?

Before you close this article because “I practice not shooting all the time except when I’m at the range, hurr durr”, hear me out. We like to shoot. We spend lots of money and time on getting faster, competing, and shooting defense oriented drills. We want to draw fast and get that fast first hit. We practice rapid strings of fire to make sure we can rapidly stop a threat. We understand that the only time the gun should come out is when we will likely have to use it. But…

But life happens in the blink of an eye, and a situation can change in the time it takes to clear leather and drop the hammer. If all we’ve ever done in our shooting career is draw and shoot a known ‘threat’ target after a positive ID, and we realize we are creatures of habit, why should we expect to be able to halt the shot cycle before that round is fired? The VAST majority of defensive gun uses require no shooting. The introduction of a gun by the good guy and the apparent will to use it are enough to stop most criminal assaults.

This could also be the counterpoint to having to practice this. Since we are hesitant to actually shoot when it might be justified, maybe the problem will just take care of itself. I personally think practice is warranted, even if it is a very small portion of your practice.

If I’m ever asked in court, “Well, Mr. Mark, in all your years of gun training, have you ever practiced NOT shooting when gun comes out?” I’d like to be able to answer yes.

There are enough situations and real world examples that require the ability to be able to short-circuit the shooting cycle, either before the shooting starts, or after several shots.

When might we need to abort the shot, or shooting?

  • A sudden change of intent/ability/opportunity(jeopardy) by the bad guy upon seeing the gun presented. Verbalization and a show of force will probably solve most issues. But we shouldn’t assume this is the case. If we present the gun, we should only do so if we are certain we will need it. We have to consider several kinds of draws, too. A preemptive draw where you hear a bump in the night, or you draw to a low ready with a vehicle between you and the possible-shoot as you issue a verbal challenge. Or an emergency draw stroke, where there is an immediate need to shoot. All could require halting the shoot cycle or not shooting at different times, and for various reasons.
  • The foreground or background suddenly changes. If you realize your backstop is a playground, it would make sense to not shoot and change your orientation before shooting.
  • You have a righteous shoot, but then follow the injured bad guy and put one in his head for good measure. Then a good shoot becomes murder.



Examples:

Pharmacist Convicted of first degree murder. This was a good shoot, until it was time to stop shooting. Ersland took it from defense to murder, and now pays the price.

The pharmacist, 59-year-old Jerome Ersland, fired a weapon after two young men entered his pharmacy, one of them waving a gun, in May 2009. Mr. Ersland’s bullet hit 16-year-old Antwun Parker in the head, Oklahoma County prosecutors alleged.

Moments later, Mr. Ersland shot Mr. Parker five more times as he lay unconscious on the ground, say prosecutors who had a security surveillance video to bolster their case.

I’ve found several anecdotes from Police officers and private Citizens who were able to abort their shot in light of a changing situation, and seemed quite relieved that they didn’t have to take a life, though they were fully prepared to. Here’s one.

98Z28 says:

I will also say that you might be surprised how quickly things can change and what you are capable doing in a short amount of time in a dynamic, dangerous situation. I have made the decision to shoot someone, started pressing the trigger, and wound up not firing a single round. This happened not once, but twice in my short seven years in LE. From talking to other officers, my experience is not unique

What are other trainers and practitioners saying?

Renowned trainer Grant Cunningham wrote a post about this topic as well:

There’s still, however, the need to train in how you actually decide not to shoot and how to use your gun when shooting isn’t (yet) a justified act. That’s what my students were doing: they were learning what to do with their guns when they didn’t need to shoot — and a little about why not shooting but still having their defensive firearm at the ready might be necessary. The stimuli were intentionally confusing, forcing them to think and requiring them to process the information I was giving them and making decisions about what to do based on their interpretation of that information.

Here’s a snip from a great interview of Marc MacYoung:

Then you come to skills. This is assessing the given circumstances. How do you mix steering, accelerating and braking, given the circumstances you are in, whether you are coming around a corner or whether someone is merging into your lane. What is the appropriate response? What is the combo? Those are the skills.

Take that into a shooting situation. As I said, you are not even thinking about pulling the gun. Once you’re there, you’re going, “Do I have to shoot?” So all your brain cells are in “shoot or don’t shoot,” assessing the circumstances.

What is really important about this model is that we think this way all the time. As a situation changes, our reactions change. Let’s go back to driving: You’re processing how to get through the curve as you’re driving, but once you get out of that curve, you have to change your behaviors. You are constantly doing these calculations. So there, you’re pulling your gun, you’re getting ready, and all of a sudden the guy turns around and runs away. What’s the important thing to do right now?

SouthNarc (Craig Douglas of Shivworks) had this to say about pointing guns at people before we are sure we will shoot them:

It’s debatable about whether one should or should not point a gun at someone before they initiate the shooting cycle. In a perfect world the muzzle stays off someone literally until a pistol is driving up or to the target and the round breaks. Real life is not that clean and motor skills are driven by decision making that may be changing quarter second by quarter second.

GJM to answer your specific question ideally we don’t point guns at people before we shoot them and our ready positions support not muzzling people AND give us the ability to see and discriminate information about the person we might be shooting in a split second. Also whatever “ready” positon we use allows us to break a fast and accurate shot on a low probability target. So there are three things that a ready position should accomplish.

Mr_White from Pistol Forum discusses how the legalities in your state might change how you think about this:

This gives rise to an approximation of the old and oversimplified adage ‘don’t draw the gun until you are going to fire immediately.’ There are situations where I might draw the gun and point it toward someone but not yet fire it, however, that span of situations is narrowed compared to what it might be in another state with a different legal situation.

When ready positions are legally weakened, the importance of a fast draw increases, but active awareness, and manipulation of environmental and interactive factors to allow us more time to evaluate the potential threat or give us additional or clearer information with which to evaluate the potential threat, or might even allow the luxury of disengagement, are still the most important (creating distance, using obstacles, adding artificial light, verbal interactive skills, recognition of threat cues, etc.)

It seems the majority of these incidents (either bad shoots or narrowly avoided shoots) are a matter of emotional control and data processing bandwidth (seeing more, and thinking faster) in the brain.

So how can we practice “not shooting”? Here’s a few ideas.

  1. Train Force on Force. This is difficult to arrange, and usually only gets the average guy a few exposures to testing these decision making skills in a given course. The scenarios need to be well thought out, with possible ambiguous outcomes, and experienced role players. This is not easy to find. The more of this we do, the less brain-lock we’ll experience the next time (in training or for real).
  2. Get a partner with a whistle, or a random par timer, and begin shooting a drill of your choice. When the random par timer beeps, halt shooting immediately. You are ceasing the firing sequence in light of new information. This can be done with courses of fire, or simple static range drills (Mr_White on PF described this)
  3. Target Discrimination drills which will allow you to practice taking in auditory and visual information and processing it before shooting.
  4. Threat management drills. These will engage your mind so you have to talk and coordinate the gun and possibly a flashlight, etc.
  5. Incorporate it into dry-fire. It doesn’t have to be any significant portion of your time, but consider getting a full firing grip, issuing a challenge, and aborting. Or presenting the gun, touching the trigger, and then not pressing the trigger. Or present the gun, and depress the muzzle to a low ready. You get the idea.

This post sort of got out of hand in length. I don’t honestly know how much worth this has, but it feels important to me. There are legal and moral repercussions that have to be considered. Sometimes it’s hard being the good guy and having to care about the ramifications of our actions. It’s our burden. I hope I got someone thinking.

Protect the Brood and don’t shoot unless you have to.

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