How Important is Accuracy in a Self Defense Situation?

 Firearms, Home Protection, Outside the Home Protection, Personal Protection, Training  No Responses »
Dec 092012
 

Getting your rounds closely on target is essential, but so too is being able to do so in a speedy manner.

Any time you visit a range for some practice, you probably notice two types of shooters.

One type has tiny bulls-eye targets way down range at the 25 yard line or somewhere similarly distant, and are taking very slow deliberate aimed shots at the target – and often hitting dead center with truly impressive accuracy.

These types of people are generally considered to be ‘competition shooters’.

Then there are other people who are shooting at big silhouette targets up really close – no more than 10 to 20 ft.  And if you watch carefully, you might notice that some of them are either shooting as fast as the range rules will allow them to shoot, or they are shooting from ‘strange’ positions.  Off-handed, strange stances and positions, and so on.  Their rounds may land all around the target, but they seem pleased about that, even though the target shooters look at them with derision.

These types of people are generally considered to be ‘combat shooters’.

Which is the better approach for you when training to be able to respond to a self-defense situation that calls for the use of deadly force?

Somehow, many people seem to think that being a combat shooter is a more ‘macho’ (or simply a more fun) thing to be, and it also has the benefit of allowing a person to shoot relatively poorly and not be embarrassed.

Now, we’re all in favor of having fun and enjoying our practice and our training, but for it to be of value, it also needs to give us real-world skills we can benefit from.

Some people have a mental picture of a concealed carry gun only being used when a bad guy is standing straight on to you, and at ‘bad breath’ distance.  In such a case you’ll draw your pistol from wherever it was concealed, and probably start shooting as soon as the pistol has cleared its concealment/holster, and rapidly fire multiple unsighted shots into the center of mass of the bad guy.  Your shots may be plus or minus a foot in accuracy, but it won’t matter so much at that range.  This is the main type of scenario the combat shooter trains for.

Other people have a mental picture of a hostage situation where they’ll need to draw their concealed weapon and take out a bad guy sheltering behind a hostage, with only a thin sliver of the bad guy visible, and the risk that a missed shot will hit/kill the hostage instead.  In such a case, accuracy becomes essential.  This is closer to the type of scenario a target shooter trains for.

While both these scenarios are possible, there are also many other scenarios in the middle between these two extremes.  Indeed, don’t just take our word for it – have a look at the video of this self-defense shootout, where an armed citizen fired between four and six shots, and registered perhaps two hits, neither of which stopped the two attackers (although for sure, it did cause them to run away!).

Don’t you think that a bit more accuracy on the part of the citizen in this case might have saved him the need to spray so many bullets around a densely populated area, and if the two attackers had taken cover and returned fire rather than turning tail and running away, don’t you think that accuracy in the ensuring exchange of shots would have been a major issue?

So, don’t sell the need for accuracy short.  There’s never a downside to being ‘too accurate’, but there’s often a downside to being not accurate enough.  For example, read this account of how two NY policemen fired sixteen rounds at a person outside the Empire State Building, and managed to hit nine innocent bystanders while doing so.  Not prominently mentioned in the linked report, but subsequently revealed, was that perhaps the police didn’t need to open fire in the first place, something that the nine innocent but injured bystanders would doubtless have appreciated greatly.

What Distance to Train At

Same as us, the police sometimes need to shoot at bad guys in self-defense, ie to save themselves personally.  But sometimes they also need to aggressively shoot at bad guys just because the guy is bad and they need to take him down before he does harm to others.  In that latter case, they will shoot from any distance at all where they feel they have a reasonable chance of making the shot.

But you are (probably) not a police officer, and you will almost never be justified in taking down a bad guy to save others.  Okay, there are exceptions to this, but in general, we urge you not to become a ‘vigilante’ but to limit your involvement in deadly situations to only those cases where you have no choice in the matter.

So you should only ever be shooting at a bad guy when he poses a credible immediate threat of doing grave harm to you or your loved ones.  What sort of distance is that likely to be?  That depends on many things, and in particular, on the weapon he has.  If he is fielding a scoped sniper rifle, then he could pose a credible threat, even half a mile or more away (on the other hand, at that range, there’s no way you can do anything in response with a handgun!).  But if all he has is ‘only’ a knife or baseball bat, at what point does he become a deadly threat?

The answer to that question depends on several factors, but let’s just say that anyone who is within seven yards/21 ft of you is a deadly threat and you better have your handgun in your hand and pointed at them, ready to fire.  If you don’t, then no matter where or how your pistol is holstered, they can be on top of you before you can draw, present and fire it at them.  This has been enshrined in the phrase and concept known as ‘the Tueller Drill‘.

As a very rough rule of thumb, if someone is within 21 ft of you, they may be a deadly threat, armed or not, so if the circumstances force you to do so, it is time to start shooting.  On the other hand, if they are further away than that, then unless they have a gun pointed at you, they are not yet a threat, and you should attempt to avoid rather than resolve a confrontation.

With this in mind, it would seem that the best distance to train at would be to have life-sized targets in the 12 – 21 ft sort of range.  Any closer than 12 ft and the need for aimed fire diminishes, and any further than 21 ft and the justification for shooting diminishes (plus, the greater the distance, the more opportunities you have to escape/evade rather than to stand and fight, and escaping/evading is almost always preferable to standing and fighting).

In theory, you could also practice with smaller sized targets closer to you (the smaller target size compensates for the shorter distance), but we would recommend against that.  Practice as realistically as you can, and by having ‘real’ distances, that helps you get an instinctive feel on the street for when people are getting too close and when you have to start to think about urgent solutions to pressing problems.

Now, how about practicing at longer ranges, too?  Surely there’s no such thing as being ‘too accurate’?

Well, that is indeed true, but we’d suggest that instead of shooting at bulls-eye targets at long ranges, a more practical type of practice would still involve life-size targets at the ‘real’ ranges you’d be shooting at.  But practice for aimed head shots rather than not-so-aimed center of mass shots.  Or  use different silhouettes with people side on to you (much smaller target area) or with arms in front of their chest (once termed ‘the poor man’s armor’), or poking out from behind a wall, or in some other way presenting smaller targets.

Certainly, as you get better at speed and ‘combat accuracy’ (ie being able to reliably and quickly get shots into the target center of mass) you then want to move the targets out closer to the 21 ft point, and you want to then start shooting not just for center of mass, but for specific locations within the target blob.

There is also one exception to when a person is a risk only within 21 ft.  That is if they are inside your home, and are headed towards where your children or other family members are located, or have already challenged you and exchanged fire with you.  In such a situation (happily unlikely but not impossible) then you’ll be trading shots with them any time you have a clear sight picture.  What are the typical maximum distances that apply within your house or apartment?  Probably these distances will be less than 21 ft, but why not go around and measure.

Furthermore, in such cases, they might be sheltering behind some cover, so you’ll not have full body shot opportunities (indeed, in the real world, you seldom or never do).  You want to get reasonably accurate at hitting smaller targets at those sorts of distances, and at ‘snap shots’ because they won’t stick their head out and hold it still for you to slowly shoot at.

Speed vs Accuracy

Which brings up the tradeoff between speed and accuracy.

For most of us, we have to choose between speed and accuracy when shooting.  Sure, we can try to make like a wild west fast draw gunslinger, yank our gun from its holster, and get that trigger pulled very quickly, but if the shot goes wild, have you actually achieved anything (except probably causing some damage to someone’s property, and possibly even wounding or killing an innocent bystander, unseen/unnoticed by you, a block or two away, and/or inside a nearby house.

Surprisingly, the answer to this question is actually as much ‘yes’ as it is ‘no’.  If you get the first shot off, then you have the initiative and you are – sort of – controlling the situation.  The bad guy is now forced to respond to your actions rather than able to pick and choose his own gambit.

As we saw in the video example above, the ability of the armed citizen to surprise the bad guy and open fire first caused the bad guy to give up the fight and run away.  In this case, surprise and initiative won the day.

In the military, troops are taught about the benefit of suppressive fire.  Very little battlefield shooting is actually carefully aimed shooting – much of it is semi-random, fired in the general direction of the bad guys, in the desperate hope that maybe some rounds might land on their targets, and in a desire to keep the bad guy from shooting back.  While the bad guy is keeping his head down, he isn’t able to shoot back, and he probably also can’t respond to your side maneuvering into a more advantageous tactical position (either to better press the attack, or simply to, ahem, run away yourselves).

But in the military, the troops seldom have to worry about the consequences of where their rounds end up, and usually a conflict has multiple good guys working together in a trained manner, all with plenty of ammunition and fully auto weapons.

Things couldn’t be more different in real life.  As the saying goes, ‘every bullet has an attorney’s name on it’.  You need to be careful and sparing of your ammunition and where you are shooting (unless, alas, you are members of the NYPD it seems).

There’s one more important difference between a military conflict and a self-defense situation.  The bad guys aren’t being paid or tasked with killing you.  Whereas enemy soldiers are being paid to do that, and in a firefight, both sides are supposed to hold their ground and advance on the enemy if at all possible, and to accept some casualties in return for winning the battle, that is not the case with you against the local bad guys.

We don’t know the exact statistics, but we’ll guess that more often than not, if the bad guy simply sees you draw your weapon in a determined and authoritative manner, he’s going to flee the scene as fast as he can (especially if he is alone).  A very very few may choose to ‘call your bluff’ – more likely if there are two or more of them and only one of you (and also more likely if you look panicked and irresolute); not only because they have the benefit of numbers, but also because their social/peer pressure makes them each unwilling to be the first person to be ‘a coward’ and run away.  In those cases, you’ll need to shoot the most threatening person, and the chances are that as soon as they hear the gun shot, the whole group of them will run off.

Why would they not?  Surely it is better for them to run away, safely, and to exercise more care in picking a defenseless ‘soft’ target for their next act of violent crime!  They understand that perfectly clearly.  They are lazy and don’t want to risk their lives; they want safe easy soft targets and will do all they can to avoid people who don’t have ‘victim’ stamped invisibly on their foreheads.

So from this point of view, speed is important and beneficial.

On the other hand, don’t sell accuracy short.  A recent FBI study into the ‘best’ handgun calibers and cartridges concluded that all caliber/cartridge combinations were remarkably similar in effect (in terms of stopping power and lethality), and the most important factor in the outcome of any gun fight was not the caliber/cartridges being used, but rather the accuracy of the shots.

Quickly getting ten rounds out of your pistol, and hitting the bad guy once or twice in non-vital areas will do nothing more than empty your gun and cause damage/destruction all around you.  On the other hand, a single aimed shot into a vital zone will end the fight instantly, and just as surely if you’re firing a .22LR round out of a target pistol or if you’re firing .44 Magnum rounds from Dirty Harry’s famous Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver.

So, the real issue here isn’t whether you should focus on speed or on accuracy.  Sorry – you need to get good at both.  You want to get the first round off fast, and have it land where you want it to go.

Accuracy and Ammo

An upside to being accurate is that you are less likely to run out of ammunition.

The police average about one hit on target every four or five shots, so to get two shots onto a bad guy requires 8 – 10 rounds of ammo, (and the time it takes to shoot that many rounds).  If your pistol only has six rounds in it, which is better?  Needing to pause half-way through to reload, or shooting accurately and only requiring (perhaps) four shots for two hits?

At the risk of making an unfair comment, it could be observed that the police response to this solution was to trade in their older six round revolvers and seven/eight round 1911s, and replace them with higher capacity 13 – 17 round semi-autos.  That’s for sure one ‘solution’, but it is not the best solution for a private citizen.  Not only is a full size semi-auto larger and heavier to carry, and more difficult to do so concealed, but you don’t have the city/county/state/federal government standing behind you and sparing you the civil and criminal liability risks that each ill-aimed round you shoot may create.

As a private citizen and with a smaller sized concealed carry pistol, for all reasons you need to optimize your effectiveness and accuracy with your chosen pistol.

The chances are that you’ll be carrying (concealed) a pistol with only a limited supply of ammunition in its magazine – probably no more than ten, and possibly as few as six or seven.  And the chances sadly are that if you get into a situation where deadly force is warranted, then as likely as not, it will involve two or more aggressors, and will be in low/bad/no light.

It will also be at close range, so if you haven’t managed to do something to solve the problem in the first couple of seconds, the bad guys will probably be physically on top of you and you’ll lose control of your pistol.  So you need speed to get shooting quickly, and you need accuracy so that the shots are effective.

Although you should always carry at least one spare loaded magazine, the chances are that when the brown stuff hits the fan, you’re not going to have time to reload in the middle of what goes down.  You need to solve your problem with only the bullets in your gun at the start of the situation, and so you can’t afford the high rate of misses that even well-trained police officers experience.

Movement

One more thing.  On a typical ‘square range’ (ie a line of shooters at one end, a line of stationary targets at the other end) neither you nor your target(s) is/are moving.  But out there on the street, there’s a good chance that your attacker is moving, and you should be too.

Indeed, studies show that one of the key survival skills when in a gun fight is the ability to be moving yourself – to be moving between shots, and, if the situation and your competence allows it – to be moving while shooting, too.

This adds a massive extra level of complexity and skill development required in order to become truly competent at defending yourself with your handgun, and with few ranges allowing for shooters to be moving, and with few ranges offering moving targets, it is difficult to acquire the extra skills needed.  Joining a shooting club and participating in IDPA or IPSC type matches is probably a very good way to acquire familiarity with movement – both yours and your targets.

Summary

Accuracy is very important in any situation.  Even if your attacker is terrifyingly close to you – at ‘can’t miss’ range – you might still find in the stress of the moment you do miss if you are untrained and unfamiliar with your pistol.

In addition, due to the woeful inadequacy of any and all caliber/cartridge combinations in terms of being able to give you instant single shot stops, even at very close range, you want to be able to land your shots not just blindly and anywhere in the attacker’s torso, but as effectively aimed to vital areas as possible.

Your accuracy needs to be balanced with your speed.  Typically there is a trade-off – you can be accurate or you can be fast; training will help you to become both faster and more accurate.

Why You MUST Be Sure Of What/Who You are Shooting At

 Home Protection, Personal Protection, Training  No Responses »
Oct 162012
 

Friend or foe? You need to identify the shadowy figure before shooting.

Something that happens all too often is a justifiable/lawful shooting/killing, but of an innocent person.  Now you might be wondering, how can anyone ever lawfully shoot and kill an innocent person?  Let’s hope you never get to find out in person.

The most common scenario relates to a person at home hearing an intruder, going to investigate, and then shooting the intruder.  But, as subsequently found out, after the shooting, the intruder was someone with a bona fide and/or innocent reason for being in the house.

Typical examples include family members who came home unexpectedly, or sometimes neighbors in the wrong home, or friends of family members (particularly a teenage daughter’s boyfriend, it seems!) who were not expected to be in the house.

Here’s the most recent example of someone being shot due to mis-identification.

What can you do to prevent such a tragedy occurring in your home?

Firstly, you should not go looking if you hear an intruder in your house.  If you are sure there is an intruder, call the police.  If you are not sure, listen very carefully and intently, maybe turn security lights on and off, maybe even call out.  But don’t leave your (hopefully safe and optimized for security) bedroom.  If you have no contact with the intruder, there’s no way you’ll accidentally shoot them, right?

Unfortunately, there are occasions when you’ll need to leave the safety of your bedroom.  Maybe you have other people in other bedrooms (which raises a warning flag – the noise you hear could be them) who you need to protect.  Or maybe, as happened in the linked case above, your power goes off and you need to go to the fusebox.

We can certainly understand you being on a ‘hair trigger’ and, upon confronting an unknown person, in your house in a situation where they have not been invited by you and you’re not expecting them, you’re probably going to be quick – and understandably so – to assume they are not there as a precursor to throwing you a happy making surprise party.

However, you know what they say about assuming, don’t you.  You must avoid, if at all possible, shooting at dark shadowy figures prior to either identifying and or challenging them.  Even if you know there is an intruder in your home who intends you grave harm, maybe someone else is also in the house, present to help you against the intruder.  Always identify your target.

You mightn’t want to give up the element of surprise by calling out to people that you’re coming to get them, but you could at least say ‘Who’s there?’ in a loud voice that carries through the house, even from the safety of your bedroom.  If you can hear their stealthy movements, they can surely hear you calling out to them.  A challenge from your bedroom doesn’t compromise you so much if you then have to leave the bedroom, although clearly the people in the house now know you are awake and alert.

If you are out there, moving around, then if/when you encounter a stranger, you should shine a flashlight on their face to identify them.

It is common these days for people to want to buy the most powerful flashlight out there, and these days with the latest in LED technology, there are some amazingly powerful flashlights out there, with hundreds if not thousands of lumens of light output, tightly focused in a small circle.  This power is great if you are using your light as a weapon, or if you’re trying to see who is lurking behind the trash cans on the far side of your house, but is not so great if you are wanting to use it to identify people in a dark house at short-range.  Your own eyesight will be dazzled by a sudden bright light and you may not recognize the person you’re lighting up.

You should use a moderate power flashlight for around-the-house work; bright enough to illuminate anything in the shadows at typical at-home distances, but not so bright as to dazzle you from the light reflected off the intruder’s face.

We like the Harries technique for holding a flashlight together with a pistol.  It gives you a convenient way to control the flashlight and keeps it pointing in the same direction as your pistol.  Note that this must to be done with great care.  Your pistol will now be sweeping the room and pointing at unidentified targets, violating one of the four firearm safety rules in the process.  It is even more important you follow all four of these rules in a time of stress and pending action than when you’re calm and relaxed on the range.  Don’t fall into the trap of thinking they are optional procedures that don’t apply in real-world emergencies.  They apply even more strongly when you’re off the range and in a ‘for real’ situation.

In particular, be sure to keep your finger off the trigger and completely outside the trigger housing, until you’ve identified your target and made a conscious decision to shoot.  That way, if you are startled, and have an involuntary tightening of your trigger finger, it won’t result in you firing a shot, whether you intend to or not.

To summarize – avoid confrontations with unknown people in your home (and anywhere/everywhere else).  If you are forced to confront someone, then you must follow the four firearm safety rules to ensure you only shoot at identified/confirmed threats, not unknown shadowy figures.

Which Would You Prefer – A Cell Phone or a Firearm?

 Firearms, Home Protection, Personal Protection  No Responses »
Oct 162012
 

‘When seconds count, the police are only minutes away’. In an emergency, is a phone or firearm most likely to save your life?

It is late at night, and you’ve just heard the unmistakable sound of intruders kicking down your front door and invading your home.  Within minutes – perhaps even within seconds – they’ll be in your bedroom.

Imagine that you have a choice of two items on your nightstand.  One is a cellphone with 911 programmed into its speed-dial.  The other is a loaded pistol.  Which would you reach for as the sound of the intruders’ footsteps approaches your door?

This is actually a somewhat unfair scenario, because the correct answer is ‘both’ and there should never be a real world scenario where we are restricted to a choice of only one of these two essential items.

So let’s reword the question – Would you wish to keep a loaded firearm close at hand in your bedroom, as well as a phone?  Or is a phone all you’ll ever need to guarantee your safety?

We have a follow-up question, too – especially if you feel that all you will ever need is a phone.  How long is the average – and worst case – response time for your local police to arrive at your residence; from the time you first pick up your phone, to the time multiple units have reached your property and the officers in question have worked out a strategy for responding to your home invasion?  Oh – did we not mention?  If you call the police and say ‘There are multiple intruders in my house’ there’s close to no chance that the first car to arrive, with probably only one officer in it, will do anything other than observe.  He’ll wait for more officers, and ideally for a K-9 unit, before even getting out of his cruiser.

Don’t forget also the time it takes to get through to 911, to verify your address and other information, and to persuade the operator that your call is genuine and deserving of a highest priority despatch.  That will eat up a minute or more of time before the police ever start rolling towards your home.

The best case scenario is that you’ll be waiting 5 – 10 minutes before any police response starts to make its presence felt.  Worst case?  You could be still waiting, half an hour later, due to the police being too busy on other priority calls, and you needing to wait your turn, or due to a tragic series of command miss-steps and excessive caution and concern for ‘officer safety’ such as sometimes happens when the police respond to such calls.

In the scenario where intruders are already in your house, you don’t have 10 minutes; you don’t even have 5 minutes.  Your life, and that of your loved ones, could change profoundly in the next 30 seconds if you don’t do something to directly impact on what is about to otherwise happen.

We do agree – it is always best practice to call the police as soon as you are aware of intruders in your house, and to then try to get out of the house and to escape, or failing that, to barricade yourself as best you can in your bedroom or bathroom, and hope the police turn up before the intruders get to you.  You should call out to the intruders telling them to leave, and advising them you’ve called the police and they’re on their way.

But do you want to trust your life to the desperate hope that this will be all you need to do?  Intruders are not necessarily rational people and in a sober state of mind.  They may be high on mind-altering (mind-destroying) drugs, and may not be worried at the thought of the police having been called, and/or they might know how long it will take for the police to arrive and not feel any time pressure at all.

For all these reasons, it is prudent to have a firearm conveniently at hand to use as a last-ditch defense option.

Not everyone agrees with this recommendation.  Read, and weep upon seeing, the assertion boldly made by (thankfully now retired) Supreme Court Justice Stevens, who in recently addressing a group of DC gun haters, suggested (quoted near the bottom of this article)

Stevens also had a recommendation for people who keep a weapon in their homes for self-defense purposes. “Maybe you have some kind of constitutional right to have a cell phone with a pre-dialed 911 in the number at your bedside and that might provide you with a little better protection than a gun which you’re not used to using,” he said to laughter.

Sadly, we suspect the laughter was not at Justice Stevens for uttering such a preposterous nonsense, but with him, at the imagined foolishness of people who seek to have a firearm as well as a phone for their personal protection.

Oh – as for the rest of his opinions that are referred to in the article?  Being as how he was on the losing minority side of both the two Supreme Court cases that dealt with the Second Amendment in 2005 and 2010, there’s little reason to respect his opinions and legal interpretations now as being any more accurate than they were in those two cases.  He is clearly a gun-hater and views the law through that distorted perspective only.

But it for sure is a scary thought that a person who was formerly (and for 35 long years) one of the nine people who hold ultimate say over our ability to own and use firearms, would offer up such imbecilic nonsense as suggesting that we don’t need firearms and that cell phones are all the protection we need.  Has he never heard the oh-so-obviously true adage ‘When seconds count, the police are only minutes away’?

Update, March 2018 :  Justice Stevens again showed his animosity to the Second Amendment and his eagerness to overturn the US Constitution in an “Op-Ed” opinion piece he published in the NY Times, also no great lover of the Second Amendment.  He suggested the Second Amendment should be eliminated.  Thankfully, it isn’t as easy as he might wish it to be to overturn the wisdom of our founders.

Being Politically Correct Can Be Dangerous

 Outside the Home Protection, Personal Protection, Training  1 Response »
Oct 162012
 

These two men robbed a couple returning home. The couple could have prevented the robbery.

Here’s a short report of a Redmond, WA couple who returned home late at night (1.30am) and were robbed at gunpoint when they got out of their car.

Redmond is a suburb of Seattle and is best known for being the home of Microsoft.  It is an up-market and prosperous small city of 52,000, and is generally blessed with very little crime.

We are going to risk being politically incorrect by citing another Redmond statistic.  Only 1.22% of people in Redmond are African-American (source), as were the two robbers in this incident.

We’re not saying that all African-Americans in Redmond are armed robbers, but we are saying that the couple probably would have noticed the two men and recognized them as not being neighbors, and – sorry to say this – as not looking like the sort of people normally found in their nice neighborhood, either.

So here’s the thing.  It is 1.30am, and you’ve just driven home, and are about to park your car outside your residence when you notice two strangers on the street with no apparent reason for being there, and who clearly look as though they are neither local residents nor likely visitors to local residents.  Should you park your car as you normally would, get out, and walk along the sidewalk in close proximity to these two people, go to your residence, unlock the door and let yourself inside?

You are actually creating two vulnerabilities here, and it could be said that this couple suffered the lesser of the two outcomes.

The first vulnerability is clearly the one that occurred – getting robbed on the street.

The second vulnerability is the more serious one.  You unlock and open your front door, and the two men suddenly rush you and get inside your home, where they can then, in private, do whatever they wish to you and your home.  It could be argued that the couple in this case got off lightly – only a mild amount of personal injury and the loss of cash, jewelry and personal items.

So what should you do?

The easiest thing is that if you see people who look out-of-place, and who are present for no obvious purpose; simply keep on driving and come back in five minutes.  If they are still there – ie, loitering, call the police and wait for their arrival before stopping and exiting your car.

And that is where a self-imposed political correctness constraint often comes into play.  Many people feel awkward at calling the police and saying ‘there are two black men hanging around my residence, so I’m scared’.  They don’t want to sound like paranoid racists.

We don’t want to get into the whole causal debate about why it is so, but we will simply cite the statistic that blacks are eight times more likely to commit robberies than people of other races (source).  This statistic varies somewhat depending on how/where/when it is calculated, but whether it is eight times or perhaps a number that may be more or less, and whether it is due to the black robber-to-be coming from an unhappy home life or whatever else, the impossible to ignore fact is there is an elevated risk of being the victim of a violent crime when the potential perpetrator is black rather than white.

The police already know this, although they have to be careful not to ‘profile’, even though many people might think that it makes sense to concentrate the policing on the high risk sectors of society.  So there’s no need to pretend that the issue doesn’t exist.

We’re not saying you should go to a heightened state of alertness just because you see an African-American on the street.  But we are saying that you shouldn’t fight off a feeling of unease just because your sense of political correctness is trying to over-power your street-smarts sense of what feels out-of-place and uncomfortable.

And, more than anything else, we are definitely saying that the best outcome of any confrontation is to avoid the confrontation in the first place.  If anything ever looks out-of-place and makes you feel vaguely uncomfortable, then if at all possible, take evasive action to avoid the possibility of any problem occurring.  Sometimes all it takes is to cross the road.  Sometimes – as in this case – it is better to delay your return home and drive around the block for a while, rather than leave the safety of your vehicle, and potentially expose both yourself and your residence to violent criminals.

Smart 911 – A Great Idea

 Home Protection, Personal Protection  No Responses »
Sep 202012
 

The Smart 911 service is free and very helpful. Recommended.

King County WA has just signed up to participate in the new Smart 911 service.  If you live in King Co, or in any other participating part of the US, you should consider adding your details to this database.

When you call 911 from a phone you have registered with Smart 911, and if the call is answered by a 911 Dispatch Service that participates in the Smart 911 service, they will get all sorts of helpful information appear on their display, in addition to simply your name and phone number and the phone’s registered address.

You can add a lot of information that might make all the difference when fire, paramedics or police are sent to respond to your call for help.  You can include photos of the people who live in your home to aid in identification, and a photo of your house too.

A little considered situation is that if the police respond to a burglary call; when they get there, they don’t know who the burglars are and who the lawful residents are.  It would be helpful if you have your photos in the Smart 911 database, so that when the police find you, they relax a bit and don’t have their finger quite so tightly on the trigger while pointing their guns at you.  It is also helpful, as a ‘best practice’, to keep some photos of yourself somewhere on display so when the police try to work out who is who, you can point them to your pictures.  A picture of you and your other family members smiling in front of your house/apartment is the best confirmation of all.

In my case, I took a picture of my house as it appears from the driveway, and then added an arrow to point to the main doorway too (which was obscured in the photo).  I also provided information on an alternate way to access the property from another street, in case multiple police units respond, making it easier for them to secure the perimeter and to catch any fleeing felons.

You can also add information about medical conditions to help paramedics know what they might need to prepare for or respond to, information about pets, cars, and all sorts of other information.

I’ve had problems with first responders having difficulty finding my place in the past.  This new service is sure to help.  Best of all it is free.  So go and join now.

It might save a minute or two of confusion, and that might literally mean the difference between life and death.

When Going to Help Your Elderly Husband Is the Wrong Thing to Do

 Home Protection, Personal Protection, Training  2 Responses »
Aug 212012
 

Troy Putman was charged with six felonies, after attacking a 93 yr old man and raping his 84 yr old wife.

An 84 yr old lady returned to her home in the early afternoon, and once she got inside the house, she heard moaning coming from her 93 yr old husband who, from the sound of it, was upstairs and in pain.

Imagine this was you (as the 84 yr old woman).  What would you do at this point?

It is a fair bet that most of you will say ‘I’d rush upstairs as fast as I could to see what the problem was and to help him’.

Most of the time, this would be the right answer.  But most of the time isn’t the same as always, as the lady in this real life situation in Kansas City found out, to her profound cost.

Unbeknownst to her, an intruder had broken into the house, started to ransack the house, came across the elderly gent, and attacked him viciously.  When the wife went upstairs to see what the problem was with her husband, the intruder tied her up, robbed her, and raped her too.  More details here.

We touch on this type of scenario in our earlier article, The Dangers of Returning Home.

As we explain in that article, what the woman should have done was called out a codeword/greeting to her husband, allowing him to respond with a codeword ‘all clear’ response, or alternatively, to use a codeword ‘danger’ response that would have allowed her to then flee the house and call the police.

It is a very simple thing to arrange with the other people in your house, and only takes a second and no effort to transact each time a person returns to the house.  You’ll spend much more time and energy locking/unlocking the door than you will calling out a simple code phrase such as ‘Honey, I’m home’ and listening for an equally simple All-clear code phrase in return ‘Welcome back’ or whatever other phrases you agree upon.

We urge you to consider adopting this.  You might be protecting your own life or physical wellbeing, and/or you that of someone else entering the house, and best of all, you might help get help summoned faster and increase the odds of the bad guys getting caught.

Internet Cafe Shootout – Right or Wrong?

 Firearms, Outside the Home Protection, Personal Protection, Training  1 Response »
Jul 182012
 

A 71 yr old armed citizen bravely – and successfully stood up to two armed youths.

Last Friday evening, just before 10pm, an ‘internet cafe’ in Ocala, FL was held up by two armed robbers.  One had what appears to be a baseball bat, the other a pistol.  There were about 30 people inside the cafe.

One of the patrons was lawfully carrying a concealed .380 semi-auto pistol (it looks like a Ruger LCP from the video footage).

When the bad guys turned their back on him, he pulled his pistol and started shooting at them, firing between four and six shots as the two would-be robbers turned tail and desperately ran out of the store, twice tripping over themselves in their desperate rush to run away, including a final parting shot out the closing door as the two robbers departed the scene.

Both of the robbers were wounded, and subsequently arrested at a local hospital.

The man is now being hailed as a hero, and won’t be facing any charges.  You can see good video clips from three surveillance cameras on several web pages such as this one here, and you probably should review the video before reading this analysis further.  Here’s a second site which has a different mix of video footage – showing some extra parts but leaving some other parts out, plus mug-shots of the robbers (their race is carefully not mentioned in most accounts), and some extra background to how events unfolded.

Some comments about what 71-year-old Mr Samuel Williams did.

1.  He was very lucky that none of his shots hit anyone (or even anything) else, either in the store or outside on the street.

2.  It is unclear how many times he hit both robbers, and where his shots landed, but as you can see in the video, neither robber was physically impaired by being shot.

This is another reminder that pistols are not imbued with magic properties.  Most times, a single shot will have little effect on the person you are confronting and you should usually not pause to see what happens before continuing your defense.

3.  Almost certainly his first shot or possibly two were justified, but it becomes more difficult to say that the others and in particular his last one or two shots were still justified.

Shooting at fleeing felons who have left the store and are running away as fast as they can is rarely a case where you can claim to be in imminent deadly danger, beside which, shooting out onto a public street massively increases the risk of stray rounds hitting other people or damaging other property.

In particular, one of the two people was armed ‘only’ with a baseball bat and at no time was in an aggressive posture towards Mr Williams.  In some states it would be difficult to suggest this second robber posed a sufficient threat (although for sure a baseball bat can grievously injure), particularly as he almost certainly was in headlong retreat by the time Mr Williams got to shoot him.  If you live in a state that is overwhelmingly anti-self defense and all about ‘offenders rights’ (a nonsense concept but one sadly embraced by some states), this would be a difficult situation to justify.

4.  Mr Williams took a very aggressive approach to defending himself.  He made no use of any cover or concealment.  He was very lucky that the robber with the gun did not shoot back.

Indeed, if you look at the video, you can see the armed robber turns with his gun to point it almost at Mr Williams, but as soon as Mr Williams fires his first shot, the robber loses any thought of fighting and instead starts running away as fast as he can.  Half a second of timing the other way could have seen a very different result, and/or if the bad guy was a more determined assailant, the two of them would have ended up fighting it out with less than 10 ft between them (which incidentally is a typical distance for gunfights to occur).

And – here’s the thing – the bad guy had a buddy.  Mr Williams did not (his wife was in the store too, apparently, but Mr Williams was the only person engaged in confronting the robbers); if he was incapacitated, the ‘game’ would have been over.

On the other hand, Mr Williams displayed an excellent ability to combine movement with shooting.  Most inexperienced shooters end up rooted to the spot.  He did an excellent job of controlling the environment and tactically moving and flushed the bad guys out of the store before they had a chance to regroup and return fire.

The one thing that can most positively impact on your survivability in any gunfight is to keep moving.

5.  Talking about timing, from when the robbers entered the store until their hurried exit spanned a period of only 17 seconds.

The military doctrine of ‘speed and violence of action’ certainly applied in this case.  While we advocate, below, that it is often prudent to quietly sit out and wait and see what happens in such situations, in the hope you won’t need to respond; that is not always the best advice, because the first few seconds of a takeover situation like this are the most fluid, with the two robbers having to somehow focus on 30+ people, spread all around the store.

Mr Williams exploited this to his advantage, by being able to draw his pistol and approach the armed robber unseen; 30 seconds later, with the store more secured by the two robbers, this would have been more difficult to achieve.

6.  One thing Mr Williams did not do – he didn’t reload at the end of the confrontation.

His pistol likely held no more than six or seven rounds, and he probably fired five or six of them.  It needs to be an automatic instinctive reflex, at the apparent end of any confrontation, to reload.  The chances are you won’t have accurately counted the shots you fired, and even if you only fired two or three from a high-capacity magazine, you have no way of knowing what is about to happen next, so give yourself as much benefit as possible by swapping to a more fully loaded magazine.

Oh – one other comment about that.  You do, of course, always carry at least one spare magazine, don’t you?

Analysis and Comments

The good news is that this situation did end with good news.  The good guy won, the bad guys lost.  But we’re troubled by the incident, and don’t think it a good example of an optimum response by an armed citizen.  There could very easily have been a much less positive outcome.

The appropriate response when two robbers burst into a store, one armed with a pistol, depends on many things, including the state you are in at the time, because different states have very different laws on the legal use of deadly force.  It also depends on what you can determine about the gunmen’s state of mind and their declared intentions.

If the robbers merely focus on the cashier at the front, asking him to empty his till, and give no indication whatsoever of any interest in the people in the store at all, you’d be better advised to sit out the confrontation.  You’re not in any immediate danger yourself, you just happen to have the bad fortune to be witnessing a hold-up of someone else, and particularly if you are one of 30 other people, the robbers’ focus on you is at best marginal and diffuse.  Be alert, of course, and ready to defend yourself if the situation deteriorates, but don’t go looking for trouble, because if you go looking for trouble, you run the grave risk of trouble finding you.

It is important to realize that just because you have a concealed weapons permit and happen to be carrying a pistol with you, this does not authorize or obligate you to use your pistol for anything other than essential life-threatening personal protection.  Mr Williams is extraordinarily fortunate not to be facing criminal charges now, and who knows if he might not end up with civil suits being filed against him by the robbers.  He is also extraordinarily fortunate that none of his rounds hit anyone else, or damaged anything valuable.  You shouldn’t automatically assume to have such good luck in any respect.

Apparently in this case, the robbers made clear their intention to rob not just the store but its patrons too (an ‘internet cafe’ in Florida is a polite name for a semi-legal computer gambling facility, apparently, and so there was a reasonable expectation that the customers may have been carrying more cash with them than normal).  This may have been the ‘trigger’ event that caused Mr Williams to feel he needed to actively respond while he still had the possibility of gaining a tactical advantage.

Summary

It is difficult to know what type of behavior the two robbers were displaying – whether they were cool, calm and collected, showing a ‘professional’ ability to conduct a businesslike robbery, or if they were wildly unstable and appearing as if they would shoot people for no reason at all.

But their announcement that they intended to rob all the patrons, and of course, their mere presence and their weapons, created sufficient cause for Mr Williams to feel his life was threatened – indeed, the validity of his decision is now being confirmed by the authorities and their decision not to prosecute him.

But this was a decision (by the authorities) which could have gone either way, and in other states, might well have resulted in Mr Williams facing criminal charges – not so much for his first shot or two, but for his last few shots.  There have been other cases where a citizen defending himself was found not guilty of inappropriate use of deadly force for all the shots fired except the last one.

If you do find yourself in a situation where you must use deadly force to protect yourself, don’t let the blood lust take over.  Stop shooting as soon as the threat has been nullified.

Although the distances between Mr Williams and the two robbers were very close, the stress levels were high, the angles were bad, everyone was moving, and the store was full of panicking patrons.  This was a very difficult environment, and he did very well.

Clearly, we all need a high level of training to be able to make the right decisions and then to carry them out appropriately in such situations.

Lastly, it is easy to second-guess someone from the comfort of one’s safe environment, with time to leisurely analyze and consider things that happened in split-seconds of great stress.  Mr Williams did a commendable job from start to finish, and we appreciate his public-spiritedness.

Violent Crime Continues to Decrease; Gun Sales Continue to Increase

 Firearms, Outside the Home Protection, Personal Protection  No Responses »
Jun 302012
 

Gun sales continue to increase every month, and violent crime rates continue to steadily fall.

People who advocate controls on gun ownership generally claim that increased firearms ownership would lead to increased rates of violent crime.  Indeed, that is about the only reason they argue against allowing full free access to firearms – their concern about the misuse of firearms.

The last couple of decades have seen a massive increase in gun ownership, and a massive decrease in firearms related restrictions, primarily in the form of the huge switch from, twenty years ago, nearly every state forbidding concealed (and open) carry of firearms, to the point today where nearly every state allows this.

In 1998, when new legislation required every person buying a firearm to first undergo an instant federal background check, the FBI started tracking statistics for the numbers of background checks being carried out.  While the background checks don’t exactly correspond to actual numbers of new guns being sold each month, there is at least a strong correlation, and so, for the first time, we now have a reasonably accurate way of tracking new gun sales each month.

As you can see from this table here, there has been a steady increase in the rate of new gun sales each month and year since the statistics started to be kept.

It is interesting also to keep in mind that most new guns are not replacing old guns, but rather are adding to the total number of guns ‘out there’.  How long does a gun last before being junked?  Maybe 50 years?  Maybe 100?  We certainly have older guns that we still treasure, and indeed, apart from one gun that has become a ‘project gun’ and has been lying around in parts for some years, we’ve never junked a gun.

So the FBI ‘NICS’ statistics show not only that the total number of guns in the population as a whole are increasing, but also that they are increasing at ever greater rates.  So far in 2012, gun sales (as implied by the NICS statistics) are up 11% on 2011, and the 2011 numbers were, in turn, up 15% on the 2010 figures.

If the gun control advocates are correct, we would have seen a corresponding explosion in violent crime rates over the last some years or decades.

The reality couldn’t be more different.  The FBI has just released their latest annual compilation of violent crime statistics, reporting a 4% reduction in violent crime in 2011 compared to 2010.  Since 1990 – 22 years ago – there have only been two years in which the violent crime rate did not fall, year on year.

Violent crime rates (measured in terms of rates per 100,000 of population) steadily increased from 1960 (the start of the FBI’s modern violent crime database series) through to 1991/2, pretty much in line with the steady increase of more and more gun laws and restrictions.  Violent crime in 1960 was at a level of 161 cases per 100,000 of population, by 1991/2 it had increased nearly five-fold to a level of 758 cases per 100,000 of population.

But an amazing thing happened.  In 1993 the rate dropped, and continued to drop every year subsequently, with only two exceptions.  In 2011, the rate was now down to 384/100,000 – almost exactly half the rate in 1991/2, and the lowest level since 1970.

Is it just a coincidence that rates of violent crime increased to an extraordinary five-fold level in thirty years, at the same time gun control was steadily increased; and then since the rebirth of gun carry freedoms, has already declined by half in a mere 20 years?

It would be interesting to see how the gun control advocates explain this!  We’ll readily concede that many other factors need to be considered as well, but it is certainly persuasive to see the huge swings in violent crime rates and to match them to the massive changes in gun control and ownership trends that have happened in similar time frames.

The Good Samaritan Gets Beaten Up

 Firearms, Outside the Home Protection, Personal Protection  No Responses »
May 212012
 

An innocent stranded motorist is suddenly attacked and beaten up by four assailants.

Bad guys are clever, and disguise their evil intent by adopting familiar and ‘safe’ seeming guises.

In this article, we look at the lessons to be learned in one such case, where what seemed like nothing more than a person begging for change ended up as a brutal beating by four youths.

A motorist’s car broke down not far from where he lived, late one night.  He decided the easiest thing to do was to leave the car where it was, in an upscale residential area in Tampa FL, and walk the short distance home.  As a fit soldier enlisted in the Army, the thought of walking a couple of blocks, in a good neighborhood, was no big deal.

Three youths were walking in the same direction, ahead of him.  One of them turned back to the soldier and asked if he could spare a dollar.  The soldier agreed and reached to get a dollar from his wallet.

So far, so good, right?  Nothing too fearsome about that, and if you were that soldier, the chances are you’d be totally relaxed.  The youth had asked you for a dollar, and you had agreed to give it to him; besides which, the youth wasn’t overwhelmingly physically threatening or anything.  Typically we would not be surprised at a protest or complaint if we refused a panhandler, but don’t we sort of think, when we agree to give them the money they ask for, that there is no reason to be concerned any more?

But then, lightning fast, while the soldier was distracted reaching for his wallet, and without any warning, the youth viciously attacked him, knocking him to the ground.  A second youth quickly joins in, and now the soldier on the ground is being kicked by two youths above him.  You don’t have to have studied strategy and tactics in the Army to understand that this is not a good situation.

The third youth comes back diffidently, watches for a while, but when we judges that the soldier is no threat at all, he then joins in too.  Now it is three to one.

And – wait – there’s more!  A fourth person comes running up from behind.  But, bad news for the victim.  This fourth person is coming to join in the fun and starts attacking the soldier too.

At some stage the youths tire of their fun, steal the soldier’s wallet and cell phone, and go on their way.

Here’s a video of the encounter, caught on a neighbor’s security camera. You should look at it primarily to see how quickly the initial encounter goes bad.

What lessons can we learn from this, so as to avoid it happening to us, too?  We suggest there are some important learning opportunities here :

1.  There’s No Such Thing as a Safe Neighborhood

As we’ve said before, we’re not the only ones who commute to work each day.  Bad guys commute too, and many times, the places they choose to work are ‘good/safe’ neighborhoods.

While it is true that some neighborhoods are clearly high-risk right from the get-go, the main factor that defines the safety of an area is not the location itself, but the people around you.  That is the thing you need to key in on.  Which leads to :

2.  Keep Strangers At a Distance

Distance is your friend.  Distance = time = safety.  The more distance between you and an unknown person or persons, the more time you have to judge the situation, to anticipate potential threats, to prepare responses, and to control the situation rather than be controlled by events.

How long would it take you to get your gun out of its concealment location and point it at an attacker?  You need to practice drawing your pistol – not from a nice Kydex range holster on your unobstructed hip, but whatever form of concealment holster you use, and while wearing normal ‘street’ clothes.  Get this process as optimized as possible, and have someone time it.  Whatever that time is, add 1/2 a second (or perhaps even 1 second) to that time as the addition reaction time you’ll need from the point at which you detect a threat needing you to grab your gun and the time at which you start reaching for it.

Now, that final time might be 2 seconds (it almost surely won’t be less), and it might be 3 or even 4 seconds.  Whatever it is, now look at the time from another perspective.  How far can a bad guy sprint in that same time period.  Have your friend time you – or, if he/she is faster than you, you time them for that long a sprint and see how far they get.

Take that distance, add another six or more feet, and that is your danger zone.  Anyone inside that zone can get to you before you can pull your gun and shoot them.

If there are two people, your danger zone expands because you have to assess and shoot two people now, which will take longer.  Three people – more expansion.  And so on.

At the risk of stating the obvious, that danger zone is huge, isn’t it!  You might have thought that the danger zone was 10 ft, or maybe even 20 ft.  But we’ll be you’ve ended up measuring a 30 or even 40 foot danger zone just by this one simple experiment.

Any time someone is within your danger zone, you are vulnerable.  As much as is possible in our often crowded society, you need to keep people outside that zone, and you need to be keyed in on who is inside it and what they are doing.

3.  Take Control of the Situation

Are you the puppet or the puppeteer?  Are you making the bad guy change his plan and react/respond to you, or are you unknowingly responding to him and doing what he wants you to do?

You need to use the distance between you and the possible bad guy to create a series of escalating events that hopefully cause the problem to go away.  However, if these escalating events don’t end the problem, they give you the certainty that the person you are facing is indeed a lethal threat and needs to be stopped.

So, starting from the beginning, if you see someone coming towards you who you have concerns about, simply turn and walk in another direction.  Cross the road.  In some way, do something that means your paths will not know cross.

If it was merely an innocent coincidence that you were on intersecting paths before, then you have solved the problem.  He’ll continue on his way, and you will now be going in a different way, keeping the distance open.  When it is safe, you’ll resume proceeding in the direction you wish to travel in.

But if the other guy now changes his path and continues to close on you, he has clearly signaled to you that this is not an innocent encounter.  He wants to get to you.  Your first mental trip-wire has now been sprung, and an alarm is ringing in your head.

The bad guy is relying on you behaving passively like all other victims.  He is relying on you not wanting to cause a fuss or make a scene, allowing him to get into your danger zone and then it is all too late for you.

But there’s no rule that says you have to do what the bad guy wants.  So if this person continues towards you, in a loud assertive voice tell him to stop :  Stop!  Go Away!  Do Not Come Closer!  Back Off!  Say whatever you want, using short simple words that make your meaning clear.  Hold up your support hand (ie not the hand you’ll hold your pistol with) to visually signal him as well.

Keep moving, yourself, to open up the distance (and of course, keep looking for the bad guy’s friends).

If the bad guy keeps coming, no matter what the reason and no matter what sort of excuse he may offer, he has now triggered your second mental alarm.  And, talking about triggers, now is the time to grab your gun and point in at the probable attacker.  Speak to him again (and keep moving and looking for his partners) :  “Stop or I shoot!  Go Away!”  Say this like you mean it, because you really do mean it.

If he continues towards you, and if you have no other easy option (like running away) you’re probably going to have to shoot.  And think about it

(a)  You changed direction to avoid him, he changed direction to get to you

(b)  You told him to stop, to go away, and he kept coming towards you

(c)  You pointed a gun right at him, and told him if he didn’t back off, you’d shoot him – and still he kept coming towards you.

What would you do if you were the other person, and someone warned you off?  If a person tells you to go away and says they’ll shoot you if you don’t, would you continue to approach them?  Not in a million years would you do that.

Only a person with evil intent would continue to approach a total stranger in such a situation.

You need to understand this, so you have the confidence to shoot if necessary (and of course it is always best to simply run away if you can).  You’ve given the person three chances to back off.  They’ve continued to close the distance each time, and are now within your danger zone.  You just know that when they get right up to you, they’re not going to simply shake you by the hand and wish you a happy day.

And Most Important of All

All of the preceding assumes that you have your pistol with you.  Don’t leave home without it.  Even when you know you’ll only be walking around in a ‘good’ neighborhood.  Even when you’ll only be in your own home neighborhood – you hopefully don’t need your gun to protect you from the next door neighbors, but you might need it if you have commuting criminals who have decided to do their day’s work (or, more likely, their night’s work) on your block.

Whether it is innocent/safe seeming surroundings, or innocent/safe seeming people and encounters, nothing is guaranteed safe.  Always be alert and on your guard, and keep as much distance between yourself and strangers as possible.

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