Sweet Nothings…

I have written various posts on guns, (use the search me function) and discussed why ultimately in a real life situation, (with handguns) a LOT of the discussions about calibre, specific gun etc are, at best a kind of salad dressing.

The recent post I did for Tarcisius on what guns to get for a guy starting out made me consider a bit more in general terms the important points about personal safety and so on.

I have a tendency to skip over what to me are the obvious aspects of a thing, because I tend to assume most people will already know this. The last 4 years have demonstrated that most people are, regardless of their personal ethics, comparatively, a bunch of morons, and in fact a lot less capable and intellectually aware than even I, in my most misanthropic levels of disgust at humanity in general, could have conceived.

So, while thinking what is the baseline advice, I tried to look at the most obvious aspects of it and then tried to think how do I transmit something that for me is not even second nature, but first nature, to the average guy who has had a completely different life?

I can’t be sure, but here it goes.

The smartest, more certain thing you can do in terms of personal safety is to be situationally aware at every level of resolution.

So what I mean by that is that if you decide to go on holiday in Gaza right now, you are screwing up at the global/big picture level. If you decide to walk through a favela with a Rolex on your wrist, you are screwing up at the individual level.

For the average person, thinking as happens naturally for me, is, I am told, akin to being a psychopathic paranoid person who jumps at shadows.

While this might be the perception for the average person, I assure you it is wrong. I am not stressed by my way of seeing things. In fact, when I have been involved in dangerous, violent situations, my natural approach to it has been such that my heart rate did not change and that invariably helps make the best of the situation.

While I notice everything and I take note of the possible potential threats even while I am in the supermarket doing a weekly shop, whether alone or with my wife and kids, I am not in a state of alert. I am merely observing and noting. As I would note where the milk is and when they move the location, as they do from time to time, I note that too. And when two giant Africans talking loud, fit, and thirty years my juniors appear in the isle I am in with my teenage daughter, I automatically consider how I would take care of them if I need to. And because of my peculiar psychological makeup, and at my current level of physical fitness (which is still far from ideal) there is no requirement for me to avoid being in that isle.

A wiser man, might avoid that isle, because my natural reaction if I have to suddenly protect one of my children tends to be of the “consequences to me will/may/do happen after THESE consequences to them, so, no worries.” Which, I am the first to admit is not necessarily wise, but it is a conscious choice and how I decide to live.

The point of paying attention should be two or three times more important if you are NOT armed. If you are licensed to carry, your primary concern should be your personal weapon being retained and concealed if not in actual use. Your training in drawing and firing from concealed, with complete awareness of your backstop, should basically be the air you breathe. When I carried all the time, and coming across a bunch of potentially feral thugs, I used to cross the street if I had to, not to avoid them, but because from that angle they had solid brick walls behind them.

If I had to go through them or near them I would again angle myself to give myself the best opportunity, which generally would be to fall into a crouch, back to a wall and fire at an upward angle in very rapid succession. the bullets would fly roughly up at an angle and hopefully fall outside of general city limits or land on a roof and not some unlucky guy’s head. And I could stand to avoid a few kicks and stomps, because I trained regularly in such type of scenarios and could pretty much empty my revolver while firing it close enough to my own body I might get stippling from it but the other guy would get that plus the .357 magnum round with it.

Anyway, the point is that such thoughts, such training, such movements and practice with drawing and firing were things I did daily. And my thoughts would flow accordingly. At least on a couple or three occasions, this level of awareness certainly saved if not my life that of possibly others and certainly prevented a firefight from actually taking place thanks to the fact that I was ahead of the game of the other guy/s.

It gets a little tiring to keep telling my daughters things, like don’t walk on that side of the pavement, it’s closer to where cars drive past, notice x, y or z, because generally, women, are oblivious to their surroundings, and my daughters, though I hope to correct that over time, are still women at the end of the day, and with a few notable exceptions, everything reverts to the mean. My son, is already well-versed naturally and he pays attention to what I say in the long term too, so I am not concerned about him. and of course, everyone can have a lapse of attention, but generally speaking, if you pay attention to the world around you, you will first of all exercise a brain muscle almost no one else does today, giving you an automatic advantage and secondly, you will begin to notice all sorts of things about people, your surroundings and so on, and it actually makes your life more alive and interesting. Thirdly, it absolutely increases your chances of being in the right place at the right time, or conversely, of not being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Developing this skill is, without a doubt, at least ten times, minimum, more important than how fast or how accurate you can draw and fire from concealed. At minimum ten times. Minimum, I am not exaggerating. That is a minimum number. Got it? Minimum.

so, I would say, before getting all caught up in whether you should have fancy gun number 1 or number 73, and special grips X or Y, and super red dot bingo-laser or pink-dot-matrix, or whatever, learnt o read a room. A street. A parking lot. An underground garage. Your front door when you get home tired from work, and so on and so forth.