The truth about violent encounters

The latest posts on carry guns and so on have prompted some comments (not on the blog) that have made me realise (once again) that as usual, most people’s experience with things like actual streetfights or worse is mostly theoretical.

Which is all well and good, and probably as it should be as long as one is aware of it.

Less ok are those who assume they know something because they thought about it, or watched a few videos on it or took a few classes on it. And so they think they are now “mostly ok”. While in reality they may be worse off than an untrained person.

When violence happens and is directed at you it almost never happens with much warning. In many cases you’re lucky if you get any warning at all. So, the very first and most important thing is situational awareness, but even that, on its own is really not enough. Firstly because situational awareness is something you need to develop and work on and as such it is almost never learnt and trained in isolation. Meaning that right next to situational awareness should be your reaction.

Training your reaction to be appropriate is extremely difficult. Too jumpy and you’re likely to flatten the little old lady that bumps into you from behind when you had let your hypervigilance down that “one time”. Too anxious and you will over-react or underperform. Too relaxed (forced relaxed) and you may be too slow off the mark. In short, appropriate reaction is usually the result of thousands of hours of training and being in serious or uncomfortable situations enough times that your nervous system gets used to it enough to react appropriately to it. You can’t learn this in a book. Mental attitude of this sort comes only with very realistic training and at least a few real life incidents.

In practical terms this means for most people their reaction will be far from ideal AND they may often be completely surprised by the initial attack.

At this point, the only things that may save you to one extent or other are:

• Blind Luck – not a good idea to rely on this
• Instinctual and unconscious reaction (somewhat related to blind luck because it can go badly wrong nearly as often as work out positively for you, and almost always not enough against a hardened criminal)
• Trained response – this is the only one you can create for yourself conscioulsy, by having dedicated time to it for long enough to engrain muscle memory into your reaction. The problem with this is that it is limited in scope unless you have spent years as a martial artist in some capacity. The up side is that if you train just a few specific things, they can be “good enough” for the vast majority of scenarios while not requiring you to invest in becoming a full time mystic ninja.

There are essentially two categories of violence you can encounter, unarmed and armed. Armed can then involved melee or ranged weapons.

The primary thing to consider is that as a general rule you should always assume the attackers will be armed and there will be more than one of them. Thugs, muggers and so on hang around in packs for the most part. The exception might be rapists, but even then, it’s not a sure thing and is in any case cold comfort at best!

The main point of any violent attack is to survive it. Losing your wallet, your car, and your pride, can be a real pain and sting, sure. But being dead in an alley because you didn’t want to cancel 6 cards and re-apply for your driver’s licence, is a very bad cost/benefit analysis outcome.

So, avoid, escape, and prevent the violence from happening to you in the first place, or at least avoid as much of it as possible. Running away screaming for help like a jilted gay lover high on cocaine still beats getting stabbed in the lung for trying to be the brave hero. Remember the cardinal rule of a real violent attack against you is simply this: win.

Escaping and avoiding it is a win. Getting away with minimal or even no damage is absolutely a win. Failing that, the only other winning option is that you get the better of your assailant.

And here we come to where training is effective. Assuming you’re a standard human, hard-wired muscle memory only comes as a result of repetition under as many stressful and diverse conditions as you can muster. Start gradually by using correct movement above anything else and then work your way up to doing the correct movement under increasingly difficult conditions. In essence this is all that martial arts is.

If you are a woman or weak generally, for unarmed combat focus on evasion and escape.

This generally applies also to armed melee combat for both men and women. The last thing I want to be in is a knife fight. And remember that escape can mean an offensive action meant to cripple or distract. If I was pumping gas and got approached by knife wielding people I’d happily spray them with petrol before running off to look for a match or lighter if I didn’t have one on me. Anything not nailed down can become a missile. And due to my size and training, any hard surface (including the ground) can become something to bounce your head off of.

A level of self-knowledge and self-possession really needs to be achieved, for you to be as effective as possible. I am not sure it can be trained, honestly, but it certainly can be improved upon if you have multiple very serious situations happen that you survive. Life and death events can rewire large sections of your neurology if applied consciously to that end. If you just survived a knife attack and got away, most people panic and get some level of PTSD. If you control that extreme stress and focus instead on noticing what you did right and reinforce/praise your body/mind/instinct for it and notice what you did wrong and decide there and then what the better, results oriented (not emotions oriented) reaction should have been and focus on making that a new set of (guided) instinctive response, you will be ahead of the vast majority of the population.

Most normal people do not react this way to life threatening events they survived, but those of us that do, gain enormous benefit from it, so I suggest if it ever comes up for you, take this advice on.

With all of the above in mind, we now come to armed self-defence.

Once again, training is paramount. For me, one of the things I tended to train a lot for was the “backstop”. That is, being aware of where my bullet would travel AFTER it went through the bad guy. It is not something most people under extreme duress are even aware of. And in the heat of the moment will tend to be mostly ignored even by trained professionals. I found that focusing on that quite a lot gave me an added benefit, aside from hopefully never having to worry too much about accidentally killing an innocent bystander, the slight level of “de-focus” from the primary threat added a level of objectivity that reduced emotional or stress-induced reactions and made my decision making and even general movements more accurate and logically correct given the overall context.

At this point, please take a moment to notice that all of the above information, and even training, really comes before the skill described below of actual armed response to a threat. My point here being that a correct trained response to armed conflict involves a LOT more than just going to the range and putting a few boxes of rounds through your preferred firearm.

Understand this point well. It is extremely important, because your level of training will be a reflection of your level of understanding it.

Right. So now you have got all of the above correctly handled (or at least intellectually understood for the time it took you to read up to here and hopefully you will retain a few percentage points of it before returning to binge watching Justified on tv or whatever), what’s the next step?

Assuming concealed carry, the next step is drawing and dry firing while practicing weapon retention.

Again, step by step and gradual escalation is the way.

With empty weapon, draw and dry fire, with different clothing you will actually wear. Do this for hundreds and thousands of repetitions. Do it every chance you get.

Learn and correct errors or imperfections. Guns that snag on clothing. Bad holsters or bad belts. Non ideal carrying positions. Printing (gun visibility when concealed). Safety issues (accidental discharges while drawing are a very real thing). Bad safety on/safety off issue. Quirks of your specific hand/weapon that you need to adjust for or be aware of. For example I loved the ergonomics of the S&W in .40 but the magazine release button was placed so I’d routinely pressed it while firing! So I Chose a different gun as a result. And this was something I only became aware of as a result of firing the gun at a range before buying. Always test fire a weapon before committing to it.

Gun retention means you learn to draw and fire while warding off a physical attack. Practically this means pushing off or holding off the attacker or blocking a strike to your face just long enough that you can draw your weapon and poke holes in your enemy as required with it.

There are MANY things that can go wrong here.

Your weapon can be taken from you and used against you. You can shoot yourself instead of, or alongside with, your attacker. Your weapon can be neutralised because of your position, type of weapon and how it reacts when physically grappled or even just pushed against and so on.

Most semi-autos that have their front slide pushed even just a few millimetres back cannot fire as the firing pin is either disengaged or cannot reach the percussion cap that sets the bullet off. Revolvers do not have this problem but pulling the trigger can be very difficult if someone has a grip on it that keeps the double action hammer down. Alternatively, any firearm with an external hammer can be prevented from firing by having a finger or other obstruction placed between the hammer and the firing pin.

In the heat of the moment you might indeed push off the attacker, draw and fire, all in one smooth motion, and also shoot right through your own warding off hand.

Generally this means learning to draw and fire (using ONLY empty firearms, obviously!) in training with another person. We did this kind of drill regularly when I worked as armed protection. And generally if you use a semi-auto it also means retaining your weapon close in to your body in such a way that firing it does not make the slide ram into your own body or clothing (which will usually result in a jam for the next round) while also ensuring the muzzle has some distance from the attacker’s body/hands/anything so that the firing mechanism is not disengaged.

The next step is a lot more dangerous and you need to take responsibility for it YOURSELF if you do it, don’t blame me if you do it and then automatically pull the trigger and set the gun off because you practiced dry firing so much.

This is drawing a weapon that is loaded but DOES NOT HAVE A ROUND IN THE CHAMBER OR A ROUND THAT WOULD GO OFF UNDER THE CYLINDER CHAMBER THAT WOULD ROTATE TO FIRING POSITION IF YOU DID PULL THE TRIGGER.

The weight of a loaded firearm can be quite different, especially for double stack magazine semi-autos. And every difference throws your training a little off.

The next step after that is live round combat training which may or may not be available where you live, but if it is, take it up. It usually includes multiple target engagement while moving and magazine changes. I am not sure what the drawing and firing safety requirements at such places are nowadays because when I did this training it was in South Africa and we could essentially design our own ways of doing things. And while I was never guilty of it myself, I certainly saw people doing this and putting holes in parts of the shooting gallery that should never have holes in them. So, yeah… wherever you are, train safely.

Most gun ranges in SA have a bunch of holes in the sides, top and counter tables of the firing benches you rest your weapons on when not firing or keep your ammo for the next reload and so on and this is in normal indoor gun ranges. So keep that in mind and always, always, always keep your eyes on anyone with a firearm at a range or anywhere else.

I have seen a gunshop owner setting off a client’s loaded gun on his own counter and putting a hole in a computer a couple of feet away from one of his work colleagues. He had left the owner’s gun, which he had unloaded, unattended for a few seconds and the owner had reloaded it and put it back on the counter. The gunshop owner guy did an idiotic, never, ever, ever, to be done stupid thing, which was to return to the gun and ASS-U-ME that it was still unloaded and pulled the trigger on it without checking it.

I literally do not do that even if I am alone at home with all the doors locked. And by “do not do that” I mean:

1. Leave my gun unattended for any length of time at all, no matter what. Any gun I ever owned was either locked away in its proper place, on my person, being cleaned (by me and only me), or within reach at all times. I literally do not even leave my own empty firearm I just cleaned on its own in one room to go say to the toilet even if I am alone at home. The gun comes with me or I put it away first. I was just raised that way and have never, ever had any reason to deviate from that philosophy and a lot of gun accidents would disappear if these basic things were done by others too.

2. Ever, and I mean ever, pull the trigger on a gun I have not specifically checked myself first. Again, even if it is just me alone and I have just say cleaned and reassembled my own empty gun, and placed it on the table in front of me as I finish putting the cleaning kit back in its box next to the gun, and I then pick up my weapon (which has been sitting there, in front of me the whole time within hand’s reach) I do NOT pull the trigger on it without checking that it’s empty. It sounds silly, but I literally do that, and always have.

Now, those of you who follow my farming videos and so on know I am far from a health and safety nut. In fact, in most of my life I am probably a danger to myself for lack of patience, but when it comes to guns, I have literally never cut a corner. The result is that in all the time I have been around firearms I still had one accidental discharge. It’s true I was seven at the time and it was the result of sunlight expanding the metal on what amounted to almost a home made zip gun my dad had got me, but it still happened. And luckily I already had the mentality drilled into me to always have a gun pointing in a safe direction until you mean to shoot the thing you mean to shoot. So it fired harmlessly into the ground a few feet in front of me. And yet… only a couple of feet away from the family dog, which got as big a fright as I and my dad did. So… when it comes to firearms, do NOT fuck around. Do NOT cut a corner. Do NOT take a risk. And if you need a mental image, imagine how you would feel for the rest of your life if your carelessness got a little kid or a total innocent killed because you were too stupid or lazy to take an extra second to behave correctly.

Now, keeping ALL of the above in mind, you might BEGIN to get an idea as to what being properly trained in the context of a gunfight entails.

Now… given all that, try to realise that all the conversations about “one shot stops” and what calibre is better and how many rounds you need and so on are, in context, even in an actual gunfight, statistically about 90 to 95% irrelevant mouth noises made mostly for LARPing self-entertainment. And then consider that an actual gunfight for most people not in an active war zone will never take place within their ability to see, never mind be involved in.

So… all of that training and thinking and practicing is for something that hopefully will never happen and that has a statistically very small chance of happening to you, especially if you are not involved in some kind of activity that is higher risk. Even then, keep in mind that most active police in the USA, where gun crime is higher than in most countries, rarely fire their weapon. This is a typical number of firearm discharges by police in New York and the whole of England and Wales.

So at its height, the total number of police in New York City has never been more than about 35,000 with only about 60,000 for the whole state of New York.

Even taking the highest number of 60 firearm discharges for say 30,000 police officers in a city of over 8 million means that even if your job is literally to police one of the largest cities in the USA, the chances of you being in a situation that requires a gun being shot is about 6 out of 3,000 times in any given year, which reduces to 2 out of a 1,000. And that’s assuming none of those incidents included shooting someone’s poodle only because you can as a cop.

As a civilian your chances of needing to use a firearm are a lot less. So all that training and care is for something that has at most a 0.002 % chance of happening per year, if you are an armed cop. In a 40 year career carrying a gun as a cop that translates to the chance of using your firearm is 0.08%.

That is the reality of things.

So. Given all that, the various discussions about this or that caliber, this or that system, and so on, are not just mostly irrelevant. They are bordering on the ridiculous.

The things you should focus on, if you are determined to be someone that carries a concealed weapon, are:

• Do so legally
• Do so safely
• Do so that it is effectively concealed
• Pick a weapon you can:
  • Carry on you comfortably
  • Draw and fire without it getting snagged on clothing, etc.
  • Hit what you shoot at comfortably, repeatably and above all accurately, and do so even under less than ideal conditions
• And pick a weapon that is reliable, accurate and that you maintain well at all times.

Everything else is pretty much academic theory.

Which is why, ultimately, things like number of rounds in the magazine, caliber used, fancy optics and all the rest of it are really little more than personal opinions driven by either taste or ideas you picked up on you liked for some reason and made your own. Keep in mind that the vast majority of actual gunfights happen at less than ten feet of distance between shooters and that the statistical difference between one shot stop dynamics between a .22 LR and a .44 magnum are less than 30%.

So. The upshot of ALL of the above is that your ability to draw and fire and put your first shots where you intend them to go is far more important than how many rounds you have in your gun after that, what calibre you use, or how expensive or fancy your gun is.

And for really almost ALL situations where a gunfight happens, that means putting two rounds in a roughly head sized area in center mass at ten feet or less. If you can do that while under extreme duress you’re an effective armed person.

Being really good means you can do that at an actual head at up to fifteen feet without fail. And if you want to add another dimension to it, being able to do an aimed shot at up to twenty feet that reliably hits the same spot no more than 2 inches in diameter, within say 3 seconds, possibly while talking. If you can do that, you are also now capable in the extremely rare hostage situation.

If you have taken on board all of the above, you will hopefully have realised that as far as a carry gun goes, your choosing something you personally like (as long as you are effective with it and it meets the other basic criteria of reliability and suitability for fast drawing from concealed) is as good a reason as any.

Yes, this whole long post really was designed to have a sting in the tail for all the “operators” out there, and hopefully getting them to relax a bit. Which paradoxically is more likely to get them to train more and so get better too. Especially since this advice comes from someone that, unlike the vast majority of them, has used a gun to prevent violence being done on my person.

Relax and enjoy your firearm.

PS: For anyone actually in special units that does or has used handguns in combat operations regularly, should they stumble on this post, yes, I am aware you are on a different level, and some of those things that are essentially theoretical issues for 99.99% of armed people may make a meaningful difference for you, but how many people are like you, and how many are there on the planet? And in any case, this post is not addressed to you, as you surely are aware and have noted from the start.

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