It has been our general experience that most people, when taking training or buying a gun, are doing so to protect themselves against a single attacker. A lone rapist. A solo mugger. An independent burglar. One crazed drug addict. You get the picture.
But this is not necessarily the way it will go down, if/when you end up in a deadly confrontation. You know that if you see one rat somewhere in your house, that usually means there is a whole group of rats making their home in your home. Rats are social creatures, ‘rats hunt in packs’.
This is true not only of rats. It is commonly true with bad guys. They’re also social creatures, and not only do they enjoy each other’s company, many times being a bad guy truly is a two person job. It makes it easier for them to carry televisions out of a house they are burgling; gives them much more dominance and control if mugging a person on the street, gives them mutual encouragement, protection, and all those other good things. It even gives them someone to brag to, and someone to confirm their boasting subsequently when telling other acquaintances about what they did.
So, here’s the thing. If you’ve become aware of one person in a threatening position/demeanor, don’t stop looking and focus in on that single person. You should anticipate that this person has at least one accomplice, and if you can’t see their accomplice, that doesn’t mean they’re not there; it just means you haven’t found them yet.
This is true on the street, and it is also true in your own home. This article is being offered to you now in response to this story of a retired former police officer who was taking an afternoon nap in his home in Puyallup. He woke to find not one, not two, not three, but four intruders in his house, and upon seeing him wake up, one of them rushed at him with a crowbar.
Fortunately, it seems the ex-police officer had read our recent article ‘Where Are You Most Likely to Need a Gun‘. It isn’t clear where he was having his snooze – perhaps in his favorite comfy chair in his living room – but wherever he was, he had his gun with him, and was able to instantly defend himself. He fired multiple shots fatally wounding the crowbar wielding attacker, and the other three ran off.
It is relatively unusual to have to fight off four bad guys, but as the article clearly demonstrates, it is not entirely unheard of.
Are you ready to defend yourself against multiple attackers? There are two things in particular to keep in mind.
First, don’t think the fight is over once you’ve stopped the first attacker. That’s why we teach you after shooting to physically force yourself to break your locked focus on the bad guy you were fighting – we teach you to ‘look and move’.
This reflexive action both physically reminds you of the need to find other bad guys and also gets you started in doing what you need to do to reduce your exposure (moving) and to help you find other potential attackers (looking).
The Problem With Revolvers
Second, just how effective do you think a revolver with five or six rounds in its cylinder will be against two or three or four attackers? If we estimate that you’ll miss half the shots you take, and that you’ll need to place three or four shots on an attacker to stop them, go and do the sums. Each bad guy will need six to eight shots to be taken out of the fight.
You’ve got enough rounds in your revolver for one bad guy – maybe two if you’re lucky. You know that – and so too do the bad guys. Everyone ‘knows’ that a revolver has six rounds (there are exceptions to this, both up and down, but the general belief is that a revolver has six shots) and the bad guys can sense when you’ve probably fired off all six rounds just as well as you can, and they also know that reloading a revolver takes time.
Most people will be out of the fight for somewhere between 5 – 10 seconds while they single-mindedly focus on reloading their revolver; and that’s way too long in an open fight with the bad guys on one side of your lounge and you one the other side.
At least with a modern semi-auto, you’ll hopefully have 15 or more rounds in the pistol, so by the time you’ve shot those 15 rounds off, you’ve probably massively changed the dynamics of the encounter in your favor, and instead of taking 5 – 10 seconds of concentrated effort to reload, you can swap magazines in your semi-auto in as little as 1.5 seconds and without taking your eyes off your surroundings.
Better still, you can do a ‘tactical reload’ at an advantageous lull in the gun fight with a semi-auto (also something you should be able to do in under two seconds with a bit of practice), but doing the same sort of thing with a revolver again takes you out of the fight for 5 – 10 seconds. It is possible to think of situations where you can steal a couple of seconds to swap magazines, but it is hard to think how in an ongoing encounter you’ll be able to safely take yourself and your gun out of the fight for up to 10 seconds.
Don’t get us wrong. We love revolvers, and most of us have one or two of our own. But they are never our primary gun of choice in a ‘real’ deadly encounter. And with sufficient training, it is possible to get stunningly fast at reloading a revolver. But for ordinary people with ordinary levels of training, forget it.
Summary
Bottom line? Plan in advance to anticipate any encounter as involving multiple bad guys. Make sure your tactics and your weapons are appropriate for a one on many situation, and most of all, don’t let your guard down at any point in the encounter – just because you can’t see the other bad guy(s) doesn’t mean they’re not there, and just because they are running away right now doesn’t mean they mightn’t regroup around the corner, circle around, and come back at you.