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.

The Dangers of Returning Home

 Home Protection, Personal Protection, Training  2 Responses »
May 012012
 

Suburban paradise and safety? Read how an occupied house close to these three was attacked by four youths.

So there you are – returning home after a tiring day at the office, or maybe after an equally tiring time at the mall or supermarket.  Perhaps you have your hands full with shopping bags and other stuff you’re bringing in from the car, trying to bring it all with you in a single trip from the car.

Most of all – now that you’re returning back to your home – your place of greatest comfort, safety and refuge – you’re already starting to relax, to unwind, and you’ve already dropped down the color code of mental alertness from your usual outside the house level of yellow to the semi-sleepwalking condition known as white.  (Read about the color code here if you’re unfamiliar with it.)

What happens next?  Perhaps you’re just a few steps into your house when – all of a sudden – three armed robbers who had already broken in while you were away jump you.  The next few seconds could go either way, from a sudden and very bad outcome to you, to a still not good outcome.

How likely is this?  More likely than you might think.  Here’s a terrifying list of statistics that suggests, among other things, that a home invasion occurs somewhere in the US once every 15 seconds, and that 47% of home invasions result in severe injuries for people at home.

But let’s look not at the abstract statistics, but at a specific reality.  Please read this Seattle Times article about what happened in the decidedly upmarket and supposedly ‘good’ and ‘safe’ neighborhood in the 9800 block of Marine View Drive, Mukilteo WA 98275 (click the link for a Google map and choose the streetview option).

This was a story with a happy ending.  The sudden return of apparently at least four other people caused the home invaders to abandon whatever they had been doing; but it could have gone the other way and resulted in a much more serious tragedy.

Lessons From This Real-world Example

This is a very useful example of a real world situation.  Although the article is brief, we can learn several lessons from it.

First, although the neighborhood this happened in is definitely upmarket, the four youths who carried out the home invasion/robbery were not locals.  They came from Kent, which is 45+ miles away.  There’s no way they’d end up on Marine View Drive in Mukilteo (the town is off the major arterials and the road is not really a through road at all and there’s not a lot of local night-life to attract out-of-town youths) unless they’d deliberately gone looking for places to burgle.

Yes, these days the bad guys also have to put up with long commutes on their way to and from ‘work’.  Living in a good neighborhood is no certain guarantee of safety.

Second, there were a lot of bad guys.  Three of them invaded the house, with at least one gun, and apparently unconcerned by the fact that an adult man was currently at home.  Remember to always plan for encountering multiple adversaries.  ‘Rats hunt in packs’.

Third, not only were there three bad guys in the house, there was a fourth guy outside the house, in their getaway car.  Remember that just because you can’t see additional bad guys doesn’t mean they’re not somewhere close by.

Fourth, the girls returning home probably saw lights on, knew that Dad would be home, and never thought for a moment that just because their father was home, their house wasn’t therefore guaranteed to be safe.  Not all burglars only attack empty houses.  The most dangerous ones happily commit ‘home invasions’ and break into occupied houses.

Fifth – and we’ll write more on this another time – note how the four youths shot back at the home occupants when driving off.  Normally you’d consider an assailant to no longer be a threat when they are running away from you.  This is just one of many examples that contradict that assumption.  Remain behind cover and/or continue the fight until they are safely out of range.

So, how do we apply these lessons and include them into our daily routines.  Here are some semi-rhetorical questions for you :

  • Do you ever stop to check your house security before entering it after returning from somewhere?  Almost certainly not because the only thorough way of doing this would be to walk the entire perimeter, checking all doors and windows for signs of forcible entry.
  • Do you enter defensively and quickly scout the house for signs of any current or recently departed intruders?  Probably not, and we’re not necessarily suggesting you should, every time you come home.
  • Do you have a weapon with you and ready to quickly deploy as you enter your home?  Hopefully yes – hopefully you always – including at home – have a weapon close at hand.

Bottom line – you should always be alert when entering your home after an absence (short or long) and aware that arriving home does not necessarily mean you’ve finally arrived at your safest place and you can relax.

Sometimes it might be quite the opposite.  You’ve placed yourself out of sight and earshot of the outside world, and until you are certain there are no threats inside your house, rather than being a place of safety, it is a place of possible danger.  In addition, just because there are other family members in the house does not mean they’ve not been joined by home invaders too.

There’s no reason to become paranoid upon returning home every day.  But two simple things will help reduce your vulnerability at this time.

All Clear Code Word with People in the House

First, have a system arranged with your family members, so that whenever someone enters the house after an absence, they call out some sort of phrase, and the other people in the house respond with a specific safe-word reply.  It doesn’t matter so much what the greeting is that the returning home person calls out, but the response must be exactly the ‘all clear’ response, and anything else that is said instead is a signal for danger.

For example, you get home and call out ‘Honey, I’m home’.  If your spouse calls out ‘Welcome home’ maybe that is the safe-word signal.  But if your spouse calls out ‘Welcome back’ or ‘I’m in the kitchen, dear’ or anything else, that means there is a problem.

In such a case, you should immediately run away, out of the house and take up a safe position where you can watch the house from a distance.  As soon as you are safe, call the police and tell them the situation.  If you stay in the house, you risk becoming a part of the classic tv/movie cliché of the bad guy confronting you with a gun pointed at your spouse’s head and demanding that you too surrender.  Leave the hostage rescue (a very difficult task) to the experts.

If you call out your greeting and get no reply, that might mean the people you expect to be in the house didn’t hear you, or maybe they’ve gone outside, or maybe they are under duress and can’t call out.

If there’s no reply to your greeting, stop where you are, look around you and listen.  Call out again loudly.  If no reply, evacuate the house, take up a safe position, and phone your spouse or whoever else you expected to be in the house, either on the home/landline or on their personal cell phone.  Ask them where they are and why they didn’t hear you.  Have a code word/phrase that means ‘all safe’ or perhaps use the same code word/phrase as if you were exchanging phrases in the house.

If you can’t reach whoever you expected to be home by phone, and if this is unusual (ie your spouse is usually 99% of the time always with their cell phone and it never runs out of battery, etc), then you have to decide what to do next.  Call the police, perhaps.  Wait a while and try phoning again, perhaps.

There’s no point in sneaking around your house looking for any external signs of forced entry, because if someone was at home, what could have happened is the home invaders simply walked up to the front door and rang the door bell, and your spouse or whoever opened the door for them.  That procedure would leave no sign of any forcible entry at all.

A Simple Check Upon Returning Home

If you return home in a situation where you do not expect anyone else to be home, then clearly there’s no point in calling out to announce your return, because there shouldn’t be anyone answering.

Instead, as you approach your house, first be aware of any unusual vehicles parked on the street reasonably close to your residence (easier to do if you live in a single family dwelling than if you live in a block of condos/apartments of course).  Then, as you get closer, do a quick visual inspection of the door frames and windows of your residence.  If all looks normal, you can proceed to cautiously enter.

Now, once you get into your home, move away from the doorway slightly (this is a ‘fatal funnel’ – a point where bad guys would be expecting you to transit through and so may be ready to attack you there) then pause and strain all your senses to see if anything seems out-of-order.

Listen for any strange sounds.  Smell for any strange smells.  Look for anything unusually out-of-place.  It is amazing the type of unconscious clues which you might pick up.  You might hear an unusually loud sound from outside, suggesting there is a door or window open somewhere else in the house.  You might notice something out-of-place.  You might sense the slightest whiff of an odor that you’re not familiar with.  The house might be unusually hot or cold.  A light might be on that you didn’t expect to see on.

You might pick up on one of these clues without even consciously realizing it – you might simply sense that something is wrong.

What do you do if something feels somehow wrong?  Do you urgently bolt out of the house and call the police.  You can guess how that conversation would go :  ‘Hello, 911?  I just got home and, I don’t know, but something felt wrong, so I ran away and I’m calling you – would you send a team of officers over to check my house please, just in case there’s a burglar inside?  No, I didn’t see any signs of a break-in or anything.  It just feels wrong to me.’

That’s a request that might get you a low priority response some time later (depending on your police department), but if you were to repeatedly call on that basis, you’d soon end up with zero response or worse, a request to stop wasting the police’s time.

Instead, we suggest you stay doing exactly what you were doing.  Stand still, using your senses as best you can, and particularly now your sense of hearing.  If there is someone in your house, either they know you’ve just returned home or they don’t know this.  If they don’t know, you’ll hear them moving before too long.  If they do know, and if they are hiding somewhere, time is on your side, not theirs.  You are in your home.  They are out-of-place.  Before too long, they’ll start to wonder what you are doing, and start to worry about what else might be happening.  Standing perfectly still and silent will spook them.

Of course, as part of this, you’ll adopt a defensive posture and position, you’ll make sure no-one can creep up from behind you, and you’ll get ready with your self-defense pistol.

If nothing happens in a short while, you’re probably okay.  If you’re still a bit concerned, leave the house and patrol around the perimeter, looking for signs of break-ins.

A Quiet Word About Silence

Note – at the risk of stating the obvious, it is best, when you leave your house, not to have any televisions or other sound generating sources operating.

Noise can mask what intruders are doing.  You ideally should return to a totally silent home so any unusual noises are immediately obvious.

On the other hand, some people like to leave a radio playing or television on when they go out, so as to portray an impression of the house being occupied in the hope this would dissuade burglars.  There’s nothing wrong with doing that, but if you do, make sure you have some type of way of turning off the sound source before you enter the house.  Maybe there’s an app on your phone for doing this, or maybe you simply have an X-10 type remote control that can turn off the power to the radio or television.

Summary

Our homes can be safe places, but their usual safety can lull us into a false sense of security.

When we leave our residence, anything can and might happen in our absence, and we need to take some prudent simple precautions upon returning home to ensure it remains safe for us before and as we enter it.

Updates :

1.  Please see our subsequent article ‘When Going to Help Your Elderly Husband is the Wrong Thing to Do‘ for another example of a home invasion/attack and where a codeword signal could have helped save an 84 yr old woman from being raped.

2.  Please also see our subsequent article ‘Being Politically Correct Can Be Dangerous‘ for an example of the danger that is also present between when you exit your vehicle and enter your residence.

General Note About the Limitations of Training Techniques and Tactics

 Training  No Responses »
Apr 222012
 

In theory, your training should prepare you with the exact skills you need for a real life situation. In reality, that is usually not the case.

There is a problem associated with almost all training that you’ll receive on the subject of self-defense.  Your training will not comprehensively cover all situations in which you might need to deploy the skills you are supposedly being taught.

This is in part because each person is different, and each situation/scenario is different, and so the correct techniques and tactics should also be different for every person and every situation/scenario.

Okay, so sometimes those differences mightn’t be significant, but sometimes they are huge.  They can make the difference between, for example, shooting and not shooting.  These differences might not only be starkly at odds with each other, but the outcomes you create, depending on which set of responses you adopt, can also be about as hugely different as is ever possible – your unharmed survival or your death; the need to shoot attackers or not, and so on.

Whereas there is presumably only one correct way to – well, I was trying to come up with an example of how there is obviously and only one way to do something, but I couldn’t.  Maybe all actions have alternatives of varying degrees of adequacy, but choosing one method or another of putting your trousers on in the morning (eg do you put your left leg in first or your right leg, or do you sit on a chair and put both in simultaneously) is hardly likely to have life changing outcomes.  On the other hand, choosing the wrong method to respond to a life threatening situation quite likely may have life changing outcomes.

Training Limitations

When it comes to self-defense and firearms training, you have two challenges.

The first challenge is that if you’re in a typical training class, the instructor will necessarily and unavoidably be teaching a ‘dumbed down’ set of average actions that work acceptably well for most people, most of the time.  He only has you for four or eight hours, or maybe even for only forty or even eighty hours, and he has to divide his teaching time among all the people in the class.

There’s no way he can give you the hundreds or thousands of hours of one on one tuition that you’d need to end up with a reasonably comprehensive understanding of what to do in varying scenarios.

The second challenge is that, unless he is unusually expert and experienced, he is also going to have an unavoidable set of biases that will cause him to focus on teaching you two sets of skills – the first set being those which he’s found, in the past, are easiest to explain to students, and the second set being those which he’s found have worked best for him.

Needless to say, what works best for him, and what is easiest for other students to grasp may not also be the best thing for you, or for any given situation you subsequently find yourself in.

Other training limitations exist as well.

For example, you might find yourself in a class where the instructor requires you to use a revolver, even though you don’t own a revolver and have no wish to shoot one.  What is the point of learning to shoot a slightly different type of gun, experiencing a different type of recoil sensation, and developing a slightly different grip, and of course, having to learn a completely different approach to reloading and gun management, if it is a gun you know you’ll never own or use?

Instructors who do such things have lots of justification for why it makes sense, and maybe it does, for some people, some of the time, but it doesn’t do a lot of good to you if you’re not one of those people.

Ego and Marketing Issues

There are other issues at play as well.  A particular school may have made a name for itself with a particular style of tactics, and this is their focus and all they teach.  They’re not interested in considering other approaches, because that is not their part of the marketplace.  It is like going to a Ford dealer and trying to buy a Toyota.

This is also true of big name instructors.  There are three ways to become a ‘famous’ instructor.  One is to have a distinctive twist or technique that you teach, the second is to be a shameless self-promoter, and the third is to be brilliant at teaching skills.

The sad truth is that most of the big name instructors are big names not because they are brilliant at teaching basic or even advanced level self-defense skills, but instead, due to some mix of the first two elements, and indeed, each feeds off the other.  If you aggressively promote yourself, you need some distinctive thing to feature about yourself, which leads into the first aspect of how to ‘succeed’ as an instructor – having a distinctive twist.

Official Methodologies

Even if you’re at a school which is reasonably open-minded, they will still have some rules, procedures, and limits for simplicity and good order.

One example of this is the basic shooting stance they teach.  It is rare to go to a school which does not have a standard shooting stance that is its ‘official’ stance.  Some will mandate you adopt a form of (modified) Weaver stance, others a form of (modified) Isosceles stance.

If you’ve ever wondered ‘How can this perfectly sensible group of instructors all claim that a Weaver variant is the only way to go, while this other perfectly sensible group of instructors all claim that an Isosceles variant is the solution?’ then that’s a very fair question, the answer to which is the theme of this article.  There is almost nothing

Would you like another example?  How about something as simple as reloading your semi-auto pistol.  Most instructors teach you to index the fresh magazine into the pistol’s magazine well at an angle against the rear of the magazine well.  But some teach you instead to do this at an angle to the side of the magazine well.

Is one better than the other?  Clearly some people think so, but which is the better solution, and why don’t all instructors agree on this.

Do you want another example.  Here’s one that has nothing to do with the mechanics of shooting, but rather the tactics of shooting.  Probably most instructors advocate you should do a ‘tactical reload’ any time the opportunity presents itself in a gunfight.  But some instructors disagree, and say you should run your gun until it is empty and only then do an emergency reload.

There are arguments in favor of both approaches, but how often will you hear an instructor tell you ‘There are two ways to manage your gun’s ammo inventory during a gunfight, I’ll explain them both to you and you can then choose whichever you prefer’?

These issues don’t only apply to skill at arms.  How many different types of unarmed self-defense are there out there?  From long-standing methodologies such as Judo and Aikido through to modern systems such as Krav Maga, there are probably a dozen or more different approaches to unarmed combat, each claiming to be better than the others.

Safety on the Range Sacrifices Safety in Real Life

Let’s look at another challenge that interferes with what in theory should be taught to you.  Range safety.  And here’s a strange contradiction.  Instructors will chant the mantra ‘You must train how you’ll fight’ and quote great examples of how people have been killed in confrontations due to inappropriately but automatically/instinctively performing their range training routines rather than the combat routines (things like carefully saving their spent brass while reloading, for example).

But then these same instructors turn around and modify the actions you must take in a gun fight due to range safety issues.

Here’s a very clear example.  There are many different ways to hold a pistol when you’re not actively sighted in on a target and shooting.  One way is called ‘low ready’ where your arms are reasonably outstretched but angled down, with the pistol pointing ahead and towards the ground at about a 45° angle.  Another is called ‘retention ready’ where your arms are close to your chest, with your pistol pointing straight ahead, parallel to rather than angled down to the ground.

There are pro’s and con’s to both ready positions, and there are different scenarios where each might be the better position to hold your pistol.  But the same instructor who has, just a short while earlier, been going over the four gun safety rules, including Rule 2 about never pointing your gun at anything you’re not willing to destroy, and Rule 4 about being aware of what is in front, behind, and to either side of whatever you are pointing your gun at; may forbid you from using a low ready position on the range, requiring you to always use the retention ready position.

The thing is, a retention ready position has your gun pointing straight out, and in most environments, somewhere in the mile or so of danger range the gun has, there will probably be something your gun is pointing at that you truly don’t want to shoot.

A low ready position means that any accidental discharge of your gun is going to go relatively harmlessly into the ground a short distance in front of you, but the retention ready position means the bullet you didn’t mean to fire is going to go somewhere you didn’t mean to hit – a gross violation of gun safety.

So why do instructors forbid you to use low ready when training on the range?

Because, on a range, the safest place to point your gun is straight ahead – ie, towards the backstop at the far end of the range.  Pointing the gun at and accidentally shooting the floor might do a very very small bit of damage to the floor, which of course the range owner doesn’t want to happen, even though he has (or, at least, should have) built the range to be bullet proof in all directions and angles from where you are standing.

In other words, the safest direction on a range is the exact opposite of the safest direction in real life.  So, in most cases, what is most convenient for the range owner takes precedence over what is best for you to learn and safest for the people and things around you in the real world.

One more example of range training compromises.  In real life, your ‘after action drills’ involve you doing a complete 360° scan all around you; indeed, in real life, you should be as focused on what is behind you as what is in front of you.  Unseen bad guys are as likely to creep up from behind as they to jump out in front of you with a good-natured shout of ‘Surprise!’.

But on the range, instructors – with obvious and good reason – get extremely nervous any time you shift your attention and posture from facing more or less directly straight ahead.  There’s no way you can turn 360° without muzzling other students, and the instructor(s) too.  So you are taught to restrict your after action scanning to just a narrow band a little each side of straight ahead.  You are training in a way that is safe for other people on the range, but which would be dangerous for you in real life.

What to Do – How to Get Effective Instruction

Yes, there’s little that is black and white in self-defense.  But, just to make things more challenging, you may also notice that a common characteristic of many instructors is to be apparently close minded and very insistent that their suggested procedures are the best method to adopt, and that all other procedures are inferior.

So, here’s the unfortunate bottom line.  You have to put what you’re being taught in context, and you have to see past your instructor’s forceful advocacy of what he is teaching you, and you have to decide what will be best for you.

To make it even more difficult, sometimes the ‘best for you’ thing is not the same as the ‘easiest for you’ thing.  Sometimes you’ll have to force yourself not to take shortcuts and to train to do a more complicated and difficult thing.

We have several concrete suggestions for you as well.

First, test your instructor to see how rigid and closed-minded he may be.  For example, ask him why he is teaching a Weaver or Isosceles stance – ‘But don’t a lot of schools teach the other stance instead?  Are they equally good?’

What you’re looking for is an admission that his preferred methodology is much the same as other methodologies, or only very slightly subtly better, and a willingness to consider and discuss other approaches.  You want an instructor who not only admits to shades of grey, but who is willing to discuss and debate these shades of grey.

You also should separate your training into different categories.  The first category is to master basic skills – the ability to shoot well from a standing position at a static target, and the ability to ‘run your gun’ – to keep it fed with ammo, and to diagnose and clear any malfunctions as and when they may occur.

But once you’ve achieved a level of competency at these basic fundamental skills, you then need to start your ‘real life’ training – training that starts to add movement and realistic constraints and requirements on what you do and how you do it.  These skills – sometimes named ‘combat’ skills although that’s an aggressive term that sounds bad when portrayed as such to a jury – are the skills that will give you the edge and help you to both survive and succeed in any encounter where you’re required to use deadly force.

Developing these skills may require more costly instruction by a truly competent instructor, and in small group sizes (or even one on one).  Mass market classes are too restricted by all the factors mentioned above to truly teach you the full survival skills you’ll need in a real life encounter.

Prepare for Multiple Intruders/Assailants

 Firearms, Home Protection, Outside the Home Protection, Personal Protection, Training  No Responses »
Apr 062012
 

It is alarmingly common for bad guys to work in groups rather than alone. You need to plan and prepare for this.

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.

Lasers are Lovely, but Limited

 Firearms, Training  No Responses »
Apr 032012
 

 

A laser shows you where your gun is pointing, but when you pull the trigger, the gun may move

I was in a basic handgun class recently and we were explaining sight options.  One of the students suddenly and excitedly started talking about laser sights.  ‘You just need to shine the laser at the target, and whatever the laser is pointing at (assuming it is correctly sighted in) your bullets will hit’, he enthusiastically assured us.  He’d seen a video on a laser sight supplier’s website and so ‘knew’ this to be true.

I wish I could say that is the only time I’ve come across such a misperception.  I’ve had plenty of people come into the gun store and want to buy laser sights for their pistols to improve their accuracy.

Alas, this is all completely wrong.  It is easy to understand how the misperception arises – there is no way to misunderstand where a laser dot is located, and so surely it makes aiming a gun a simplistic and impossible to get wrong thing.

To understand where the error in the logic of this misperception creeps in, we need to look at a broader picture of what constitutes accurate shooting.  There are many different factors that go into good marksmanship, and a laser sight only addresses two of them.

Stance, grip, posture, breath control and all sorts of other factors are minor contributors to accurate marksmanship, and if you want to become a competition shooter and winner, you’ll obsess over every last factor that goes into improving your accuracy.  But in a ‘combat accuracy’ self defense scenario, where you’ll be under time pressure and general extreme stress, there are only three factors that matter to getting rounds acceptably on target.

The three key factors are sight alignment, sight picture, and trigger control.  And guess which of these three factors is the most important?  Yes, trigger control.

At typical self-defense distances (ie anywhere from ‘bad breath’ distance out to perhaps 21 ft) and when shooting for ‘center of mass’ (ie not a small bullseye but instead a relatively large space about 8″ wide and 12″ high) you can have your sights only very approximately on the center of mass and still score hits within that zone.  You don’t need and don’t have time for extreme precision with your aiming.

But what you must make time for, and what you do need, is good trigger control.  To put it in the most simple terms, you need to be able to squeeze the trigger without jerking it or moving the gun as part of the trigger squeeze.  This sounds easy in theory, but it is difficult in practice, particularly when you add some hard-to-control flinching into the process.

Here’s a video we created, using a SIRT training pistol, that demonstrates the challenge.

As you can see from the video, it is relatively easy to get the laser dot pointed at the center of the bullseye target.  The challenge is keeping the pistol aligned at the center of the bullseye when you pull the trigger.  The two big problems are not gently squeezing the trigger to get the ‘surprise break’ when the gun eventually goes ‘bang’, and flinching/jerking/anticipating the gun’s recoil and moving the entire pistol and its aiming point in the process.

Laser sights help you with the easiest part of good marksmanship – sight alignment and sight picture.  But this is the part you least need help with.  Unfortunately, they don’t help you at all with the hardest part – good trigger control.

To improve your trigger control, you need to practice extensively with dry firing, and then on the range, with your gun loaded with a random selection of blanks and live rounds (or empty chambers in a revolver) so that you never know, each time you pull the trigger, if the gun will go ‘bang’ or ‘click’.  This exercise will clearly show you how much flinch/jerk you are putting into your trigger movements.

Is a Small Underpowered Pistol Better than Nothing?

 Firearms, Training  No Responses »
Feb 052012
 

Clint Eastwood’s character Dirty Harry was famous for his use of a .44 magnum revolver. While that is probably inconvenient overkill for most of us, how small can we go before we’ve gone too far?

We interact with gun owners all the time, and from time to time we encounter groupings of misapprehensions in some strange manner whereby a series of people who don’t know each other will separately each tell us the same thing.  For months, the issue might never be raised, then all of a sudden, we hear it from multiple people in the space of just a few days.

Over the last week or so, we’ve had a number of people all proudly show us their self-defense/carry pistol, and they have all been woefully under-powered.  They have been chambered for .22LR or .25ACP rounds (did you realize that the .25ACP round – even though it is ostensibly larger and is center fire, is actually less powerful than the .22LR rimfire round – size isn’t always the ultimate measure of effectiveness).

The people with such pistols generally justify them by saying something like

Well, yes, I know it isn’t a very powerful caliber, but it is convenient and small, and  I figure it is better than nothing.  Surely the size of the gun doesn’t matter as much as simply having any gun at all – just having a gun of any size will save you from an attack.  After all, what kind of crazy person wants to be shot by anything?  It would surely hurt like hell!

Hmmmm – where to start in an analysis and rebuttal of such a statement?  Perhaps one could point out that, almost by definition, people who choose to attack you are crazy, so when you say ‘what kind of crazy person’ the answer is ‘the kind that is staring you down on the street’ – in other words, the very sort of person you need to plan to encounter and to ensure you can respond positively to.

Can we all accept that a tiny pistol chambered for .22LR or .25ACP is indeed an inadequate type of gun for most situations, and focus in on the issue of whether such a pistol is better than nothing.

On the face of it, you’d probably agree that any pistol is better than no pistol.  The excellent Front Sight training school has a slogan ‘Any gun will do, if you will do’ which is very true (although I think the minimum caliber they allow people to train with is 9mm, which rather makes a nonsense of their slogan!).

You may have also heard the saying ‘It isn’t the size of the dog in the fight, it is the size of the fight in the dog’ and that too is very true.

But the problem with trying to answer a question such as ‘is any gun better than no gun at all’ is that we restrict our thinking by accepting the premise in the question, without examining the premise to start with.  In this case, the implied premise is that a person has only two choices – a tiny ‘mouse gun’ or no gun at all.  That’s not correct.  We all have multiple choices – we can choose to carry any size pistol we want, and for that matter, we can choose to carry two or three guns if we feel it prudent, too.

So we rather object to the question itself – it is a bit like the question ‘Have you stopped beating your wife yet?’.  We have never beaten our wives, and we have never had the situation where we had to choose between a woefully underpowered pistol or none at all.

As a senior instructor said when discussing this topic :

I see pocket guns as an extreme concession to concealment issues that may not be necessary or real.  Additionally, the kitschy value of such concealment makes some feel more prepared….this is absolutely lost upon me as EDC [Every Day Carry] of a handgun should call for a clothing compromise long before a caliber compromise.

In other words, if you feel you need to accept a tiny small pistol so as to have better concealment, change your dress style instead.  Or, for that matter, if there’s no way around size issues (maybe you need to wear a suit or formal wear to a wedding or some other special event) consider one of the amazing slim and small pistols in .380 that are out there these days such as the Ruger LCP.

We’d recommend you consider attending our How Best to Concealed Carry class to learn about all the different ways you can successfully and discreetly carry a pistol, most of the time allowing you to have a larger sized pistol with you, no matter what your clothing choices/requirements may be.

So, to more fully answer the opening question – is an underpowered pistol better than no pistol at all – the answer is ‘Of course it is, but you should try to avoid having to end up with only an underpowered pistol in the first place’.

Let’s also consider how helpful an underpowered pistol may actually be.

Guns can solve problems in one of two different ways.  Their most valuable service is when the simple presentation of a pistol is sufficient to cause a would-be attacker to break off their attack and to either surrender or run away.

When you show your pistol to a potential attacker, you should be conveying two messages.  The first message is that shown by the pistol itself – ‘I have the means to resist your attack and to cause you potentially lethal harm in the process’.  The second message is one conveyed by your body language – your posture and demeanor, and the way you are presenting the pistol and speaking to the attacker.  This message hopefully says ‘I have the ability and the will to use my pistol to successfully fight you off’.

For sure, a tiny little ‘mouse gun’ isn’t going to broadcast the same type of positive message that would be conveyed by pulling out a Dirty Harry style long-barreled .44 Magnum revolver.  Which makes the second part of your message all the more important – that conveyed by your attitude and bearing.

If you can maintain a confident non-victim posture, and if you can present your tiny gun authoritatively and assertively, your demeanor and bearing will magnify the perceived threat of a small pistol.  But if your body language betrays fear and incipient submission, even the biggest gun will struggle to compensate for the non-verbal messages of failure and defeat you are broadcasting to the other guy(s).

You need to practice shouting out verbal commands and warnings to a bad guy, and you need to be sure you can competently and quickly draw and present your pistol when the situation requires it.

However, the fact remains that your chances of avoiding the need to use your pistol are reduced if you have a smaller gun.  Let’s now consider just how effective a small gun may be in defending against a determined attacker.

You should read our recent article about Where to Aim and How Often to Shoot an Attacker.  This article was written with the assumption that you’d be using a pistol chambered for at least .38 SPL or 9mm.  But now you’re using a pistol with a bullet weighing little more than one-quarter the weight of the 9mm round, and traveling potentially the same speed or slower.  If it might take four rounds from a 9mm pistol to stop an attacker, how many more rounds will it take of .22LR or .25ACP?

Oh – related question – how many rounds does your little mouse gun hold?  Probably only five, six or seven rounds, and most likely with an inconvenient way of swapping magazines (or reloading a revolver cylinder).  In other words, you’ll probably have to win your fight with only the rounds loaded in your gun at the start of the fight.

Is that possible?  Don’t forget to allow for something over 50% of your shots being misses, and consider also what you’d need to do if you were facing multiple assailants.  All of a sudden, the 15 – 20 rounds in a full size 9mm pistol seem much more comforting than a handful of tiny bullets in your mouse gun, don’t they!

Let’s also consider what might happen if the bad guy has a gun too.  If you’re both staring at similar sized guns, you’ve a bit of a stalemate and either you start shooting or else neither of you shoot and you both back off.  But if he has a full size 9mm or .40S&W with maybe 15 or more rounds in his magazine, and you have a tiny .25ACP with six rounds in your magazine, who do you think is going to prevail in that encounter?  In other words, when he draws his gun, many people will then surrender (this is probably a mistake, but they’ll do it all the same).  All you’ve done is make the situation worse.

One last thought before our closing comment.  Underpowered pistols are more likely to malfunction than more generously powered ones.  There’s less recoil energy when you shoot them for the pistol to utilize to eject the fired cartridge case and to cycle in a new round.

This article has been full of questions already, but we will close with one final question for you :  Are you willing to bet your life that your teeny tiny little popgun will guarantee your winning a deadly encounter with one or multiple attackers?  Because, after all, that truly is what you’re doing, isn’t it.

We’re unwilling to take that bet, and we urge you not to do so either.  Carry the biggest pistol you can manage to carry/conceal, and if you have a problem, it is better to change your dress style rather than downgrade your gun.

Where to Aim And How Often to Shoot an Attacker

 Training  2 Responses »
Jan 252012
 

In a real world encounter, your shots won’t be nearly as accurate as these and you’ll almost surely need to shoot multiple times to stop an attacker

So the worst has come to the worst, and you find yourself in a real life nightmare situation where you have no choice but to use deadly force to save your life and/or the lives of others relying on you for protection and safety.

What do you do?

Should You Fire a Warning Shot?

Do not fire a warning shot.  That bullet is going to go somewhere.  If you fire it down into the ground, it might ricochet off the ground and go in who knows what direction – even maybe directly back at you.  Even if you are shooting into dirt, for all you know, there’s a huge rock half an inch under the dirt.

If you fire it up into the air, well, guess what.  What goes up must come down again, and that bullet is going to plunge to earth at about 300 mph (450 ft/sec) – fast enough to do appreciable damage if it hits a person or property when finally reaching the ground.

Hopefully you have already given a verbal warning/command in a very loud voice (not only so you are sure the bad guy has heard you and realizes you are serious, but also so any other nearby people can testify they heard you warn the bad guy away) such as ‘Stop!’ or ‘Go Away!’, followed by drawing your pistol and a ‘Stop or I Shoot’, followed by sighting in on the person.

At this point, the person has been verbally warned, and also sees you have a gun pointed at them.  If that isn’t enough to make them turn away, a warning shot won’t add any more force to your request.  It might endanger you or some other person, and it pre-occupies you with something that might allow the attacker to close the distance and get into contact with you.

Where to Aim First

Most of the time, your first shots should be aimed into the attacker’s chest.  This is sometimes referred to as their ‘center (of) mass’ – in other words, it is the biggest part of their body such that if you aim into the middle of it, then you can miss by a reasonable margin and still hit them.  For sure, in the stress of the moment, you’re not going to be shooting as accurately as on the range.

Better shooting schools teach you not just to shoot into the center of the person’s torso, but instead into the center of their thoracic cavity, which can be considered as the center of their upper chest – where the lungs and heart are.

Exceptions to Where to Aim First

There are two types of exceptions to shooting first into the center of the thoracic cavity.

The first is when you have only an obscured view of the bad guy.  Maybe there is something obscuring part of his body from you.  In such cases, you should fire into the center of that part of the thoracic cavity which is exposed.

The second is when you have a hostage type situation or some other scenario where it is essential that your first shot will for sure incapacitate the bad guy.  Read on down to the section on ‘Failure to Stop Shooting’ for advice on what to do in those difficult cases.

How Many Shots to the Center of the Thoracic Cavity

Forget everything you’ve ever seen in the movies, and on television.  When you shoot a bad guy with a pistol, almost certainly, there are three things which you expect to happen but which will not happen.

  • The first thing is the person isn’t going to immediately collapse, all movement stopped, instantly dead.  The probabilities suggest that he may likely not react at all to the first shot hitting him.
  • The second thing is the person isn’t going to fly through the air ten feet backwards.  He probably won’t be knocked about much at all – the ‘best case’ scenario is that the bullet is hitting him with no more momentum than the recoil you experienced when you fired your pistol milliseconds before.  The recoil didn’t force you off your feet, and it will have the same or less effect on the person the bullet hits.
  • The third thing is that blood isn’t going to suddenly and dramatically start spurting out of the person every which way.  Indeed, assuming the person is wearing a couple of layers of clothing, you might not notice any evidence of the bullet having hit them at all – no blood, no big hole, nothing.

So put these three things together.  The person doesn’t collapse or move at all, and you don’t even notice a bullet hole or blood after firing your bullet.  Goodbye, Hollywood.  And welcome to the real world!  In other words, you probably can’t tell if you hit the person or not – and even at very short ranges, you’re as likely to miss as hit (there’s a classic situation of a gun fight in an elevator between a law enforcement officer and a bad guy, with over ten rounds fired and neither person being hit by any of the rounds).

The sad truth is that all pistol rounds, no matter what the caliber, what the bullet type, are woefully inadequate and are very unlikely to solve your problem with a single generic hit to the center of the thoracic cavity.

So it is recommended practice that you shoot at least twice into the center of the thoracic cavity.  Maybe one of the two shots missed entirely.  Maybe one was a ‘lucky’ shot (depending on if you are the attacker or defender) and one was not.  Indeed, while you don’t want to consciously shift your point of aim, it is a good thing if the two rounds land into different parts of this zone, spreading the effects over a broader range of body parts.

But what next?  That depends on the bad guy.  Is he still posing a threat – is he still coming towards you?  Or did he collapse, perhaps even out of panic and fear and surprise?  Did he surrender to you?  Did he turn tail and run away?

If the immediate threat has stopped, you must stop shooting.  You no longer have any legal justification to shoot at the person now they are no longer an immediate imminent threat.

But if the person is still coming at you, then you need to keep on the job of solving the problem.

More Shots to the Thoracic Cavity?

If the bad guy is still some distance from you (but not too far, of course, or else they may not be sufficiently a threat to justify shooting in the first place unless they have a weapon) then you probably have time to fire a few more shots into their thoracic cavity.

Maybe either or both of your first shots failed to hit him entirely, in which case maybe some additional shots will actually land on target.

Why Thoracic Cavity Hits May Not Immediately Incapacitate

Unless your pistol bullet travels through the thoracic cavity and severs the bad guy’s spine, it will not immediately incapacitate your attacker (note that high velocity rifle rounds more commonly have a very much greater immediate effect).

Even if the bullet goes through the bad guy’s heart, it will take some measurable time for the guy to lose sufficient blood pressure and bleed sufficiently out to cease to be ‘in the fight’.  How long?  Best case scenario – perhaps 30 seconds.  Worst case scenario – many minutes (assuming that he doesn’t survive the encounter completely, even after taking multiple hits).

Some people will however collapse in a type of faint from the shock and surprise of being hit.  This is a ‘false’ collapse – it is mental rather than physical, and when they come to, they might re-enter the fight.  That’s not to say you should shoot someone when they’re on the ground and not moving!  But it is to say you need to watch a person very carefully after they go to the ground.  They might be just pretending to be incapacitated, and might surprise you as soon as they feel it tactically advantageous.

Other people – especially if on drugs – will not be slowed at all, even by hits that will cause their certain death in only a few minutes.  The drugs they are taking have in essence disconnected their brain from their body, and their brain doesn’t even realize they’ve been hit, so their body keeps responding to the brain commands as best it can.

Lastly, and probably the least likely scenario, maybe the bad guy is wearing some type of body armor.  Bullet proof vests can be legally purchased by civilians, and do a very good job of preventing pistol bullets from penetrating through the vest and into the person wearing them.

Don’t forget, of course, that all these reasons why your shots aren’t stopping the bad guy from continuing with his attack are also assuming that your rounds are landing on target.  Chances are some/many/most of them are misses.  That’s why you shoot at least twice into the center of mass.

This amusing yard sign copies the standard Front Sight target that shows the two aiming zones – the center of the thoracic cavity and the cranial ocular cavity.

Failure to Stop Shooting

So, you’ve fired your gun you’re not quite certain how many times at the bad guy, but he continues to press his attack and is getting very close to you.

This is where you have to switch targets.  For whatever reason – and it is irrelevant why – your center of the thoracic cavity shots aren’t stopping the attack.

You now need to switch to head shots.  A bullet in the brain is the most certain way of quickly stopping any attacker – big or small, on drugs or not, and with or without a torso protecting bullet proof vest.

We don’t recommend your first shot(s) should be to the head for the simple and obvious fact that the head is a smaller target than the chest, and is likely to be moving rather than standing conveniently still.  It is also less ‘politically correct’, and as unfortunate as this is, you need to be sensitive to how the police and potentially a jury will respond to the circumstances of your use of deadly force.

But if the body shots didn’t work, and particularly if the person is getting closer, thereby also making their head a larger target, you have no choice but to switch to head shots in what is sometimes referred to as a ‘failure to stop’ drill.

Now when you shoot at the bad guy’s head, you don’t just shoot anywhere on their head.  Much of the head has its own armor plating – the skull and jawbone in particular.  So you want to aim from sort of the eye brows down to the bottom of the nose, and from side to side in line with the outer sides of the eyes – about a 3″ x 5″ card sized target.

Sure, it seems even more distasteful to shoot at a person’s head, but – hey!  You didn’t start this fight, the other guy did, and he refused every possible opportunity to end the confrontation; indeed, by the time you switch to head shots, the guy has even continued his attack notwithstanding you shooting into his chest multiple times.  There’s no time to be squeamish or hesitant, you need to be determined and certain.

How Many Head Shots

How high is up?  How long is a piece of string?  And – oh yes, another question with no certain answer – ‘how many times should I shoot him in the head?’.

The answer should be obvious – until he stops.  Until he ceases to be a threat to you.

The good news is that this is probably going to require only a single shot, but the downside to a head shot is that it is a smaller target, and you might miss, so don’t fire a single shot, then relax and assume the game is over.  Fire a single shot, bring your pistol immediately back on target, and shoot a second time, unless the guy is collapsing in front of you.

Continue repeating until your gun runs dry or the bad guy stops.

Shooting to Incapacitate

One of the great things about the internet is that we now get a chance to see how many people react and respond to news of a shooting.  Many newspaper websites have the ability for readers to post comments alongside the news stories they publish, and for sure, whenever there’s a story of a shooting (usually the police shooting a bad guy) you’ll see plenty of comments (most commonly from ‘armchair experts’ who have never held a gun in their lives) suggesting that the police should have shot the guy in the hand to ‘shoot the gun out of his hand’ or in the foot, ankle, or knee, so as to cause the guy to collapse and no longer be able to move towards the policeman.

Slightly more knowledgeable people will suggest shooting at the person’s pelvic girdle, causing them to fall over.

These are well-intentioned people (who may well become jurors, so it is relevant to understand how uninvolved people react to shooting situations) but their suggestions are dangerously naïve and impractical.

Your desperate struggle will be at a too close range, in a position where you probably do not have any sort of strategic advantage or time buffer up your sleeve, and you are confronting the imminent probability of the bad guy attacking you, grievously wounding you, and possibly killing you.

You don’t have the time to try for some trick circus style feats of marksmanship – target shooting of a level you probably could not achieve on a calm day with no time or situational stress acting on you at a range, let alone in a dark alley late at night with the bad guy rushing towards you.

If the situation has got to the point where you need to use lethal force to stop a threat, and that is a lawful act on your part, then you need to do exactly that.  Your prime concern is stopping the threat and saving yourself.  The only effective way of doing that is shots to the center of mass, possibly followed by shots to the head.

Anything else is giving the bad guy a ‘bonus’ card in the match.  And there’s no law or moral justification for making it easier for him to win and you to lose.

Shooting to Wound

A close cousin of the ‘shoot to incapacitate’ theory is the ‘shoot to wound’ theory.  But follow the ‘logic’ of this thought process through carefully.  ‘The bad guy was frightening me, threatening me, in some way harming me, but he didn’t really deserve to be killed, so I just shot him in the leg/arm/whatever’.

If you say this to the police, you’ll not be hailed as a hero.  You’ll be locked up and charged with unlawful use of deadly force, and your own statement in the preceding paragraph will be the statement that guarantees your conviction and the extended jail term that follows.

Think through what you just said.  To paraphrase, you said ‘The situation did not justify using deadly force, but I used deadly force anyway, albeit in the hope that the deadly force wouldn’t be fatal’.

Guns don’t have dials on them that you can set to ‘mild’, ‘medium’, or ‘full’.  While we were talking before about how the chances are that a single shot won’t kill a person, there is also a chance that a single shot might.  A bullet could hit an artery, sever a nerve cluster, or whatever else.

Even if a single shot doesn’t kill the person, it might grievously incapacitate them for years or the rest of their life, and it might cost millions of dollars in hospital care and ongoing at home care for the rest of their lives (costs that you might end up being liable for).

You never shoot to wound a person – but you also never shoot to kill them.  All you do is you shoot to stop the threat they pose.  Never say ‘I realized I had to kill the guy’, because that’s a faulty realization.  The only thing you realize is that your life is being directly and credibly threatened, and that you have no other way to protect yourself than to use your firearm to stop the threat being presented at you.  That threat will end when the bad guy surrenders, runs away, or falls to the ground.  Living or dying (or wounding or incapacitating) has nothing to do with it.

Summary

When you’ve exhausted all other possibilities and have no choice but to resort to deadly force, shoot at least twice into the center of the attacker’s thoracic cavity.  In the event this fails to stop their attack, switch to head shots into their cranial ocular cavity until they cease being a deadly threat to you.

What to Bring to the Range With You – Tactical Range Checklist

 Training  2 Responses »
Dec 212011
 

When on a ‘tactical’ type range there are extra items and accessories to make your training experience easier and more convenient

We wrote an earlier article about what gear to bring with you to a traditional fixed or ‘square’ range.  By this we mean a range where there is a fixed firing line that you shoot from, and each shooter has their own lane with a single target somewhere down that lane.

There are also tactical type ranges, which can vary from ranges where you can safely shoot in all directions, to ranges that are semi-square ranges, but where there isn’t a fixed firing line as such.

When you’re on some type of tactical range, you’re not quite so limited in terms of the types of training you’re doing, and so you will probably need some extra gear to help you in your activities.  For sure, you’ll want all the same gear as for the square range (so be sure to read through that list), plus possibly – hopefully and happily – some other items too.

Holster

Most square ranges do not allow for presenting your pistol (ie drawing it) from a holster.

But, depending on the Range Master and the course of fire you’re undertaking, you’ll often be allowed – and sometimes necessarily required – to present from a holster when on a tactical range.

Although the general rule is ‘train with what you’ll use in real life’ that is not always possible when it comes to holsters.  When training for rapid and safe presentation from a holster, you need to have a holster that is first and foremost totally safe, and then secondly, one you can rapidly draw from.

Just like the most dangerous part of a flight is the take-off and landing, so too is the most dangerous part of gun handling when you draw it from the holster and when you subsequently re-holster it, so it is essential that you use the safest possible holster for training, particularly when on a range with other people around you.

Many of the holsters we use when carrying concealed are very poor choices for range work, and many of them may violate the essential gun rule of never pointing a gun at something you’re not willing to destroy – either while the gun is in the holster (eg a horizontally carried gun in a shoulder holster that is all the time pointing at people behind you) or while drawing the gun from the holster and pointing it at a target in front of you.

For that reason, most of the time when training you’ll want to have a standard, outside the waist/belt holster that is in close to a completely vertical straight up and down alignment, on your strong/firing side.

This holster should be one that retains its shape while the gun is out of it, so as to make it safer and easier when reholstering.  You should be able to reholster your pistol conveniently, with only one hand, and without needing to look at the holster during the process – this requires the holster to hold its shape for when the gun is returned to it.

Holsters are generally made out of leather, Kydex (a type of plastic) or nylon.  We recommend you don’t use nylon holsters – they are cheap, but not very good and may not hold the pistol firmly and/or may not hold their shape for reholstering.

Leather can be excellent, but generally our recommendation, for a range/training holster, is for a Kydex holster, specially designed and moulded to fit the gun you’ll be carrying in it.  The Kydex holsters allow for rapid removal of the pistol from the holster (important when you’re racing against the clock), and hold their shape making reholstering easy.

Blade Tech is an excellent manufacturer of Kydex holsters and we recommend their products.

If you should get a Blackhawk holster, please note that we do not allow their SERPA holsters in any of our training classes.

Although the SERPA holster in theory can and should be safe and reliable, in practice there are multiple cases of people negligently discharging their firearms as a result of the SERPA retention device design and the person not using the 100% correct method of releasing and drawing their pistol (see this Youtube video for a demonstration of what can go wrong).

Magazine Pouch(es)

Another thing that you probably can not practice on a square range, but which you probably can and will practice on a tactical range, is reloading your pistol – both tactical and emergency type reloads.

You’ll want to have a magazine pouch/holder on your belt so you can rapidly retrieve a magazine for these drills.  While you could get away with a pouch/holder that just holds one magazine, most people use double magazine holders so they can have two spare magazines on their belt.

If you have a 1911 type pistol with only 7 or 8 round magazines, you might even have a quad magazine holder (or two doubles) on your belt.

Just like holsters, you have a choice of material for magazine holders – nylon, leather and Kydex.

We generally like Kydex magazine holders, and are careful to make sure that the friction fit/tension is adjusted so as to hold the magazine firmly in place but not to ‘grab’ it and slow us down when we’re racing against the clock for a fast reload.

Depending on the training scenario, there can be times when you find yourself desperately needing more loaded magazines; you can never have too many loaded magazines, both in training and in real life too.

Extra Magazines

Talking about which, you’ll want to be sure you have plenty of magazines for your gun.  Three is a bare minimum, and four or more is better (we’ve been known to have five or more, even when shooting a double-stack gun with 17 round magazines.  The more magazines you have, the easier it will be working through range drills that require you to be shooting lots of rounds in short periods of time.

If you’ll be doing malfunction type drills, you might want to keep an empty magazine with you too so you don’t have to empty out the magazine you’ve just carefully fully loaded – Murphy’s Law is such that when you’re on a range and need a full magazine, they are all empty, but when you need an empty magazine, it is invariably just seconds after you’ve finished reloading them all.

When you’re buying spare magazines for your guns, get the absolute best that money can buy.  This is usually ‘name brand’ original equipment magazines for most guns, and in the case of all the 1911 clones out there, it is Wilson Combat – typically either their model 47D or 500 (both being eight round rather than seven round magazines).

Loose Ammo Carrier

On a tactical range, your gear is probably behind you somewhere.  You may need to reload magazines from time to time during the course of fire, and so you’ll want to have some ammo (and a speedloader) with you to use for reloading.

Sure, you can just fill your pockets with ammo, but if you’re firing .45 rounds, that will quickly get heavy and you’ll not have many rounds with you.

Some type of ammo pouch – usually made out of nylon – that you can attach to your belt will give you a convenient way of carrying more ammo with you while on the firing line, and will save your pockets in the process.

The same as applies to loaded magazines, you can never have too much ammunition with you; whether training or in real life.

Belt

So you’ve got a holster and gun on one hip, and a bunch of spare magazines on the other hip – maybe four pounds or more of equipment – and even more if you have an ammo pouch too.  You’ll want a sturdy strong belt to hold all this; one that doesn’t have too much ‘give’ or play or flex in it (when you are rapidly drawing your pistol, the first step of this is to explosively ram your open hand onto your pistol – a strong belt is essential for this step).

Don’t choose a fabric or braided nylon belt.  You either want a good thick piece of leather, or else one of the ‘instructor’ type belts that have some type of solid plastic sheeting in the middle of them to make them very firm.  The belt should be at least 1.5″ wide, but probably not wider than 1.75″.

We like the Uncle Mike’s Reinforced Instructor belts, but there are lots of other good belt options too.

Knee Pads

You should check to see if your training course will have you doing any kneeling.  Most indoor ranges have unforgivingly hard (and usually very cold) concrete floors, and outdoor ranges have who knows what on the ground; in both cases there may be some unexpected casings lying around as well which can really hurt if you crash a knee into one.

Many people find knee pads to be a great comfort if doing tactical kneeling type activities.

Other Things Too?

Whenever you’re on a range training, always have a look at what other people have with them.  Maybe you’ll discover some great new piece of gear that will make your own training easier and more convenient.

Be sure to let us know if you have suggestions for additional items to add to these two check lists.

What to Bring to the Range With You – Square Range Checklist

 Training  2 Responses »
Dec 212011
 

This article gives you a helpful list of what to wear and bring with you when visiting a typical gun range for shooting practice

We have prepared two lists for you to refer to when going to a range for some shooting practice.  The list that follows, on this page, is if you’re going to a regular ‘square’ range – that is, a range with each shooter having a separate lane with a fixed firing position at one end and a target in front of it.

The second list is a gear checklist for going to a ‘tactical’ range, where there is a more flexible approach to firing positions and activities, and where you might be doing some more extending/demanding type practice.

Baseball style cap

The ‘bill’ in the front of this style of cap will provide some protection against ejected casings flying in your face, and possibly getting caught between your safety glasses and your eyes – a very nasty experience indeed.

Remember that you’re sometimes having to protect not just against your own brass as it flies out of your gun, but also protecting against the brass of the shooter next to you too, so don’t tell yourself ‘there’s no way my gun would eject brass in my face’ because maybe the problem is not with your ejected brass, but from someone else’s brass instead.

High necked shirt

This will help reduce the possibility of ejected casings falling down the front of your shirt or blouse – a particularly unpleasant experience for ladies, but not very nice for men either.

Closed shoes

Sandals with socks would also be acceptable, but you don’t want to have open sandal type shoes and nothing between your feet and shoes – again to protect you against hot brass falling onto your feet and possibly getting trapped between your foot and shoe.

Eye protection

Shooter safety glasses are essential and required on every range we’ve ever visited in the last some years (they used to be optional but now seem to be mandatory).

Most ranges will rent or even loan you safety glasses for free, but we generally recommend you buy your own.  Rental and loaner safety glasses are often scratched and slightly dirty, and while you could argue this adds a useful element of adversity to your training, it is better that you can have a choice of when and if your vision is less than perfect rather than be forced to accept it all the time.

Shooting glasses are available in an amazing rainbow of color choices.  For indoor shooting, most of the time, simply choose clear glasses.  For outdoor shooting in bright light, we recommend polarized glasses.  We don’t think any of the fancy orange and other colors really make any difference at all to your shooting ability.

Make sure the safety glasses have side protection so they wrap around the front of your face.

Hearing Protection

Please see our separate article on how to choose the best hearing protection for your time on the range.

Most ranges will rent or even loan you hearing protection for free.  Typically this will be a set of ear muffs with passive sound blocking, and only an average sound block rating.

We recommend you consider buying your own electronic hearing protection, particularly if you’re going to be shooting as part of a group or needing to clearly hear an instructor.  Some training schools now insist on all students using electronic hearing for that very reason.

Ammunition

Well, so this might seem obvious, but one not quite so obvious thing is to always bring more ammo than you think you’ll need.

The worst that can happen is that some of your ammo gets a free ride to and back from the range.  But maybe while you’re attending your class you get a chance to do a couple of bonus courses of fire, or if you’re just casually plinking, maybe you get into a ‘groove’ and want to keep going more than you planned to.

Just because you have extra ammo in your range bag, you shouldn’t feel compelled to shoot it, but there’s nothing sadder than running out of ammo and either missing out on a valuable ‘bonus’ training opportunity, or having to cut short an enjoyable self paced session, and/or needing to buy some possibly over-priced ammo from the range while you’ve got thousands of bargain priced rounds at home lying around unused.

Speed Loader

Any time you’re going to be loading magazines, you should use a Speed Loader to save yourself the difficulty and hassle of trying to thumb in and squeeze down rounds unaided.

It isn’t quite so bad if you’re loading a low capacity single stack magazine, but if you’re trying to get every last round into your 17 round magazine repeatedly over a day where you’ll be firing several hundred rounds of ammo, you’re going to find the added benefit and leverage of a speed loader invaluable.

There are a couple of different styles of speed loader.  The simplest and smallest are ones that fit over the top of a magazine and you press down on them.  These are simple and easy and great to keep in your pocket.  Sometimes they are included for free when you buy a new gun – Glock and Springfield XD guns usually come with one of these.  The Adco Super Thumb reloaders are available for a wide range of caliber/magazine combinations.

There are also more complicated ones with levers going out to the side which greatly reduce the amount of force you need to apply, but they are bigger and bulkier and can require a bit more dexterity and practice to be able to use them.  However, the time spent in becoming proficient with a speed loader device is definitely time well spent.

HKS and Lula are two good brands of these types of speed loaders.  They come in different configurations for different calibers and magazine times.

Targets and Pasters

If you’re simply going to a regular range to do some regular plinking and practice, you’ll need some sort of targets to shoot at.

The range will of course be happy to sell you targets, ranging from small black and white generic bullseye targets up to huge full color posters of zombies and animals and all sorts of other things.  You can find yourself paying anything from a quarter per target up to $5 each for some of the really fancy targets.

Much of the time, all you really need is a thick nibbed Sharpie type black felt pen marker and a handful of sheets of regular 8.5″ x 11″ copy/printing paper.  Draw some cross-hairs or circles on the sheets of paper to give you some aiming points, and that’s all you need.

If your aim isn’t quite so good, get legal size paper – 8.5″ x 14″, or even double size 11″ x 17″ paper, so you don’t run the risk of having shots go high and hit the target carrier.  Ranges really don’t like that, and will probably charge you for any damage that results.

On the other hand, if you do buy one of the very expensive fancy targets, you’ll probably want it to last as long as possible.  One way to do this is of course to miss the target every time you shoot at it!

But if your shots are landing more or less where they should, you can tape up the holes between courses of fire, using anything from masking tape and up from there.

If it is a photo image color target, you might want to use some clear adhesive plastic squares to stick over the holes and to smooth the paper back together.  But if it is just a regular black and white target, bring a sheet each of black and white round sticky labels and press the stickers over the holes.  Labels that are either 3/4″ or 1″ in diameter are probably about right; depending on the caliber of rounds you are shooting.

This will massively extend the life of your multi-dollar target, at a cost of only pennies for the sticky labels.

Spares

You don’t need to be a walking spare parts warehouse, but think of the equipment you are taking with you and think ahead to what might break or need replacing.

Be sure to have spare batteries for your electronic hearing protectors, for example.  If there is anything else which might sometimes give problems, make sure you can address those challenges.

If you’re going to an outdoor range, consider packing both a set of clear and a set of Polaroid wrap-around shooting/safety glasses.

We generally have a multi-tipped screwdriver and a pair of pliers in our range bags, sometimes extra tools as well, and always one of the tiny but powerful little LED lights.

Extra Equipment for Tactical Ranges

Be sure to read our second article, listing extra equipment to bring with you when visiting a tactical range, too.

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