The Cornered Cat
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For the joy of it
September 2, 2015

Yesterday, I told an untruth. It wasn’t deliberate, but it was an untruth. Here it is: “Doing things that are hard and even unpleasant is the only way we improve as humans.”

The mistake was using the word and. Should have used or instead, for clarity’s sake. 1 That’s because hard things aren’t necessarily unpleasant things. Sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not; and that was the sense I meant to convey by using the word even. Doing hard things is a given. Finding them unpleasant is often a choice.

But there’s more.

Doing hard things is not pleasant in the same sense that lying in a shaded hammock on a summer day is pleasant, but we can still feel a very strong sense of joy in doing them or in having done them. Hence the popularity of near-cultish, abusively exhausting exercise programs. The high that follows such hard work feels very enjoyable, and worth the effort it takes to get there. More than that, the effort itself, even before the successful conclusion of the work, can feel amazingly pleasant to those who have the right mindset.

Try mowing a full acre of lawn on a hot summer day with a push mower. It’s hard work and you sweat and you itch and the sun beats down on you and maybe you’d rather be lounging on the deck with a cold glass of your favorite beverage. It’s easy to quit, because there are other ways to get the reward of having a good-looking lawn. You might hire a neighbor’s kid, for example. But as you strain with the effort of pushing the mower around the yard in the hot sunshine for hours on end, you might find a fierce joy in it, and find the pleasure of doing it yourself just as rewarding as your final goal of having a manicured lawn.

In fact, the harder the work, the more pleasurable it can be in that sense. If you’ve been cooped up all winter and spring with a painful joint injury, being able to do such work brings a joy all on its own. That’s a particular flavor of joy that can never be felt by someone who hasn’t faced a similar injury. For the rest of us, even if muscles and joints ache with effort, being able to move them effortfully can be a pleasure of its own. That’s the root of the old saying: “Hard work is its own reward.”

Another little side trip here, the point of my message yesterday: sometimes, we might not feel like getting out of the lounge chair and firing up the old lawnmower, but the work still needs to be done, one way or another. We grow as humans when we force ourselves to do the work that needs to be done, when it needs to be done. Joy often comes while putting in the effort, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an effort. And that’s a type of joy that can only be felt by someone who got out of the shade and went to work.

Just keep swimming.

We can’t ever learn to stay afloat until we take the risk of sinking.

There’s something else here, something big that I’ve been struggling to articulate for awhile now. Will take a longer stab at this sometime soon, but meanwhile: it’s easy to gain a little bit of skill at most things without any real struggle, without pushing your own limits, without any discomfort at all. But as far as I can tell, it’s impossible to get truly good at something without doing the hard things – which is sometimes unpleasant and always takes you outside your existing comfort zones. That’s why I said that we improve as humans only by doing the hard things. We can take a few baby steps down any given pathway without much effort, but the road always turns uphill at some point. To refuse the uphill climb is to refuse to grow in that area.

Think of the adorable little guys splashing around in the kiddie pool. They are having fun. Many of them are hollering to their moms: “Mommy! Mommy! Look at me! Watch me swim!!!” They demonstrate their swimming prowess by lying on their tummies in three inches of water, splashing all fours as their bellies and knees hold them above the waterline.

Can those kidlets really swim? Or do they just think they can?

Can they ever become more skilled at staying above water, unless they first let go of the bottom of the pool?

Can anyone become a good swimmer without getting out of the kiddie pool?

Notes:

  1. Some people took issue with the word only, but I’ll stand by that one even though any editor will say that sentences with always in them are always wrong, that only is the only word we should not use, and that an unqualified never is never correct. Phooey! ↩
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Growth
September 1, 2015

This past weekend, I did something that was hard for me to do. Doesn’t matter too much what it was, at least not for our purposes here – the point is, I did it. Even though it was hard. And even though I knew that on Monday, my body would have to pay for the weekend adrenalin rush.

Doing things that are hard and even unpleasant is the only way we improve as humans.

Want to grow stronger? You’ll have to pick up things that are slightly too heavy for you to lift with ease right now. You have to do that repeatedly while your muscles and lungs complain about doing the work. Afterward, you’ll have to cope with achy muscles as they recover from the work you made them do. Worse, you can’t push your limits just one time and then brag about how well you did, mission accomplished. Nope! In order to get stronger, you have to make a habit of going through this uncomfortable process on a regular basis. You have to push your limits over, and over, and over again.

Want to grow intellectually? You’ll have to force yourself to follow someone else’s logic, to read books that are slightly too advanced for you, to do mathematical puzzles that make your brain hurt. You have to somehow bring new knowledge into your head and force yourself to remember it. Then you need to tie that information together with the other things you already know, so that you can actually use the stuff you just learned. It’s an uncomfortable process, but there is no other way. And to keep the process going, you have to keep pushing your limits.

Want to become better at interpersonal relationships? You’ll have to put yourself in social situations that are slightly outside your comfort zone, and force yourself to interact with others even when you’d rather not. To get better at small talk, you’ll have to engage in small talk and cope with the inevitable little stumbles and bumbles everyone makes. It’s uncomfortable and it takes work and you have to keep doing it over and over again in order to get better at it.

Want to become better at public speaking? The only way to do it is to take on public speaking assignments that scare you, that have an audience too big for you to feel quite comfortable with, in venues that make you a little nervous. Keep pushing those boundaries and keep honing your skills, and one day someone will accuse you of being a “natural” at public speaking. But you will know exactly how much your expertise cost you, and how hard you worked to learn it, and how uncomfortable it felt to push your limits over, and over, and over again.

So … do you want to be better at protecting yourself and the people you love?

Do you want to be a better shooter?

Do you want to be better at identifying danger? And better at avoiding it?

Do you want to have a more solid understanding of the legal realities of self defense?

How far outside your comfort zone are you willing to move, and how long are you willing to keep pushing through your limitations?

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Top 10 Myths About Self Defense
August 27, 2015
  1. Self defense starts and ends with owning a gun. You don’t have to learn anything about violence dynamics or how criminals work. Simply own a gun, that’s all.
  2. A woman should never carry a gun because it will just get taken away and used against her. A woman should carry less effective tools instead, like silly little keychain doodads, because those lesser tools are so ineffectual that even a bad guy who can beat her to death with his bare hands won’t be able to hurt or kill her with one of those.
  3. Learning anything about the law will just slow you down and make you hesitate when you should be shooting. Nobody ever hesitates because they don’t know what’s legal; they only hesitate because they do.
  4. You will always have enough time and space to use the same type of drawstroke you’ve practiced on the range. You won’t ever need any empty hands skills for any reason: not to clear the way for a draw, not to protect yourself from a physical attack while you create an opportunity to use the gun, not to maintain control of your firearm if someone grabs for it.
  5. If someone tries to take your gun away, all you have to do is shoot them. That always solves the problem immediately, 100% of the time.
  6. Learning how to protect yourself from an attempted gun grab takes a lot of hard, painful work. You can’t learn anything worthwhile about it in any amount of time that’s measured in anything less than “years.”
  7. Never carry a round in the chamber. That’s dangerous.
  8. You can just rack the slide to show the attacker you mean business. The bad guy will run away at the sound.
  9. Situational awareness means you can never be surprised or taken off guard. You will never fail to see something in real time that a different observer believes they definitely would have seen, and says so as they watch the surveillance video in slow motion for clues to the violent crime they already know is about to happen.
  10. Learning better skills with firearms will make you more violent and less able to solve problems without violence.

Just for the record, none of these things are true.

What myths would you add to this list?

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What does training do?
August 23, 2015

John Johnston, of Ballistic Radio, blogs the following:

IN MOST INSTANCES YOU DON’T NEED TRAINING TO SUCCESSFULLY DEFEND YOURSELF WITH A GUN. … You don’t need hundreds of hours of training to survive most self-defense encounters. Untrained people prevail, with varying degrees of success, against bad guys all the time.

The caps and red letters are his. Johnston goes on to say that he believes that the primary value of training is that it makes us “much less likely” to get involved in a shooting in the first place, and more likely to avoid the kind of situations that turn deadly.

I don’t disagree with much of what John said, and want to add one more important point to the discussion. My point … well, it’s a bit like touching the third rail of American gun culture, but I’m gonna do it anyway. It’s about safety. After 15 years of learning and teaching defensive handgun classes at the professional level, it’s my deeply held belief that people who have not had serious defensive handgun training are not as safe with a firearm as they believe they are. 

Yes, this means you.

If you haven’t had at least one serious training class — over and above the state-required permit class — the chances are that your gunhandling isn’t as good as you believe it is. This is especially and particularly true if you grew up in a gun-owning family and have handled firearms throughout your entire life starting from childhood.

vegetabl

“Hey, I grew up around guns!”

That’s not a sin, by the way. It’s simply a thing that’s likely to be true. It doesn’t make you a bad person or anything like that. If it’s something that bothers you, it’s also something you can change. No judgment here; everyone lives their own lives and ultimately makes their own choices about their priorities in life. It’s okay.

Oh, and if you have had such training? Don’t get too cocky; people who have had such training tend to behave less safely than they believe they do, too. (Yep, that includes me.) We’re all human. Not being able to see our own blind spots is simply human nature and again, not a sin.

The blind spot problem is why it’s good to have someone outside ourselves watch us handle the gun and help us spot what we’re actually doing, compared to what we think we’re doing, when we handle the gun. But simply going to class, without making a commitment to changing our habits as needed, really isn’t a cure all. By itself, it certainly doesn’t erase the human tendency to overestimate our own skill levels. It isn’t magic. In fact, the not-as-safe-as-we-think-we-are problem may be especially strong for those who have had some training (in classes or from military or law enforcement experience), but who haven’t had that training recently. The work of Professor David Dunning almost certainly applies here:

But education, even when done skillfully, can produce illusory confidence. Here’s a particularly frightful example: Driver’s education courses, particularly those aimed at handling emergency maneuvers, tend to increase, rather than decrease, accident rates. They do so because training people to handle, say, snow and ice leaves them with the lasting impression that they’re permanent experts on the subject. In fact, their skills usually erode rapidly after they leave the course. And so, months or even decades later, they have confidence but little leftover competence when their wheels begin to spin.

Grab a cup of coffee before you follow the link to Prof. Dunning’s article. It’s an excellent article and worth reading. But it’s long enough to make people think, which means most people won’t bother to do more than skim it, if they even do that. Be special and read the whole thing. You’ll enjoy it!

"Childhood play taught me all I need to know about firearms."

“Childhood play taught me all I need to know about firearms.”

Anyway, safety. Let me mention a few statistics that are not widely known nor widely repeated in the firearms training world, though they absolutely should be. The numbers below came from the Centers for Disease Control (WISQARS), and you can check them yourself using the widgets at [this link] and [this link].

In 2013 (the latest year for which these numbers are available) 16, 864 people of all ages presented themselves at hospital emergency departments suffering from unintentional gunshot wounds. This number does not include suicides or deliberate shootings, only mistakes where “the gun just went off” and someone was injured badly enough to need the services of a physician. This adds up to one avoidable, preventable injury happening every 33 minutes, all across the country, all day long, every single day.

During that same year, more than 500 people died from unintentional gunshot wounds. That’s one or two desolate gravesites, one or two devastated families, one or two grieving communities every day of the year.

Do you find yourself marveling at how many unreported unintentional discharges must happen, in order to create this many tragedies? After all, catastrophe doesn’t always follow these potentially-deadly mistakes. Nobody tracks the close calls. We do know that private, unreported mistakes are more common than reportable accidents where someone got hurt or killed by a stray bullet.

Caution: May have unexpected side effects.

Caution: May create unexpected side effects.

This horrendous toll of injuries and deaths does not need to happen. It’s preventable with good education and training, and especially with education and training geared toward teaching people how to defend themselves from violent crime.

People come into defensive handgun classes mostly to learn how to protect themselves using firearms. But there’s a beautiful side effect: learning to live safely with a firearm is an unavoidable side effect of learning to effectively use one for self defense. That’s because, when students are properly motivated in professional defensive firearm training classes, they keep going until several things have happened:

  1. The formerly naïve student consciously understands the things his hands need to do in order to safely manipulate the firearm. He may not yet be able to make his hands do these things every time, but he can describe what he’s trying to do.
  2. The student becomes able to make his hands safely manipulate the firearm – as long as he moves slowly while carefully paying attention to everything he does, and as long as he feels little or no external stress while he handles the gun. By doing each action slowly and repeatedly, with conscious attention to what he’s doing, the student builds neural pathways dedicated to safe gun handling.
  3. The student’s neural pathways become stronger, better organized and more efficient. He can now load and unload the gun, and perform other basic firearm manipulations, without thinking through each individual step along the way. His movement patterns for basic tasks begin to approach automaticity. Now we can add stress and interest to shooting and gunhandling drills: how fast can he draw the gun and get good hits? How quickly can he hit the target, and at what distances? How fast can he reload or clear a malfunction?
  4. As the student handles the firearm safely under the mild stress of time and performance standards, his neural pathways become strongly optimized to maintain good habits even while he thinks about other things. It is at this point that we challenge the student with decision-making drills and realistic scenarios, because we can finally trust that his gunhandling will remain safe despite having a mental focus on other topics. We reasonably believe his gunhandling will remain safe under many different types of stress: performance stress, the fear of failure, time and accuracy standards, etc. We can trust that he will handle the firearm safely and competently as we help him expand his problem-solving abilities through repeated challenges.
  5. The student’s safe and skilled gunhandling finally becomes sturdy enough to stand up to the extreme stress of a life-threatening encounter. This is the point where every student who intends to use a firearm for self defense should strive to reach, and strive to remain. 1

By the time our students have reached this final step, safe gunhandling has been engrained so deeply that it will hold up even when the student is highly focused on a life-threatening problem and accurately fearful that he’s about to die if he doesn’t use the gun immediately.

This creates an obvious corollary: as a result of our efforts to teach skills that remain under life-threatening stress, the student has built safe gunhandling habits that will almost certainly withstand the more mundane danger of everyday distraction in far less stressful situations.

This is why I say that good training can save your life, even if you never become one of the 60,000 to 460,000 people who use the firearm to defend themselves from violent criminals every year. Being prepared to live with the gun is every bit as important as being prepared to live by the gun.

Stay safe.

move-shoot-ccinva13

Notes:

  1. Sadly, all too many students quit at step one or two. Good instructors must motivate students to continue, and help them understand the value of having well-practiced skills that will stand up under severe stress. ↩
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The surprising burden of ignorance
July 27, 2015

The less we know about a subject, the less we think there is to know about it.

That’s why the boss who knows nothing about your specialty will demand impossible time frames on your projects, unless someone speaks up to tell him otherwise.

It’s also why casual, amateur photographers can’t see — literally cannot see — the difference between their badly-done snapshots and a well balanced, properly focused and composed work of photographic art.

And especially, that is why people who have never had serious defensive handgun training think there’s nothing to learn and no reason to invest in it.

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Lesson from an old guy
July 14, 2015

Roughly three or four years after I first began learning to shoot, I met an older gentleman – Jim – who had a profound influence on my shooting development. Jim bounced into the room on the first day of a shooting class I was taking, and he was loudly enthusiastic about another class he’d taken just a week or two before we met. “That class was amazing!” Jim said, and went on to tell the group of us standing there all about that other class: who the instructor was, what he taught and why he taught it, how he’d shown this old guy a new technique he’d never seen before. Jim was very excited about the new technique, and told me that he thought it might save a few lives.

At the time, Jim was 72 years old. He’d also been around guns his entire life, from the time when he was very small. Not only that, he also held several regional and even national titles in competition shooting. He held instructor credentials in several different disciplines, and had worked as a law enforcement trainer for a number of years. During his law enforcement career, he’d been the victor in several gunfights. If anyone could claim they knew so much that taking a class was just a waste of his time and money, Jim would be that guy.

Despite all that, Jim also believed – strongly! – that life was full of new things to learn. So he kept exploring new thoughts, new ways of doing things with a firearm, and kept taking classes from other people right up until his untimely death in a car accident at age 76.

Whenever I hear an old guy saying he doesn’t need to take a class because he “grew up around guns,” I also hear Jim’s voice telling us what he’d learned the week before.

When I meet a newly-minted instructor who simply won’t ask any questions where others might hear because she thinks she’ll lose her students’ respect if she takes the learner’s role, I think of Jim and the great respect his students had for him.

When someone tells me they already know as much as they need to know about using firearms for self-defense, I think of Jim and his eager enthusiasm for learning more or better ways to save innocent lives.

Jim’s last name was Cirillo. It’s safe to say, Jim Cirillo knew a thing or two about guns. And if that man, with his background and at that stage of his life, thought there were still new things he could learn, what does that say about folks who think they already know all that stuff and don’t need anyone else to teach them anything?

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Historical teaching note
June 4, 2015

The soldier should acquire the above by degrees. If the soldier’s attention be at first confined to aiming his piece, he will more readily acquire this than if he were required to aim, and to take a prescribed position at the same time. Having acquired a knowledge of the principles of aiming his piece, and then a prescribed position, he will readily acquire the habit of aiming correctly from this position.

He should now learn the proper manner of pulling the trigger, and, when putting this in practice, to keep his piece steady.

The soldier will next be taught to support the recoil, and become accustomed to the report of his piece, by first using caps, and then blank cartridges.

Such appears to be the natural order of instruction to overcome the difficulties attending the proper use of his arm when firing. …

In the spring of 1856, a company in our service, drilled in a similar manner, improved three hundred per cent. in accuracy of fire in six weeks’ time.

– A System of Target Practice. For the Use of Troops When Armed With the Musket, Rifle-Musket, Rifle, or Carbine. By Henry Heth, Captain 10th Regiment US Infantry. Published by Order of the War Department. Philadelphia. 1858

 

Putting this up here as a reminder that firearms training is not a new endeavor.  That is all.  🙂

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Power tools and foolish toys
June 3, 2015

An oldie but goodie from my email box: a note from someone who has a loving family member who really wants them to carry a gun for self defense. The person who sent me the email really isn’t interested in guns, but wants to keep their loved one happy. The question was,

“What gun do you recommend for someone who will probably not practice very often or learn much about it?”

My answer:

I recommend NO GUN for someone like this. Save that money and tell your loved one to stop pressuring you.

Owning a self-defense gun is a heavy responsibility. Although popular right now, it’s not a lighthearted fad or a trend like owning a pet rock. The gun isn’t a magic wand or a rabbit’s foot that will keep you out of trouble all on its own. Using it safely takes work and practice. Using it well takes more work and more practice. Using it in self defense often creates serious, lifelong consequences. It’s okay to count those costs for yourself and walk away if it’s more than you’re willing to pay.

Don’t let anyone pressure you into doing anything with a gun if you’re not ready to accept the responsibility that comes with it. Doesn’t matter who they are or how fond you are of each other; you are the one who must live with the choices you make.

When you are ready to own a gun – really ready, including being willing to learn something about it and practice with it – I’m more than happy to work with you to find the one that’s right for you and help you learn how to use it well. Until then, leave the most serious self defense tools for people who take them seriously.

When I told this tale on a private forum back when it initially came into my mailbox, some people suggested that my correspondent could use less-lethal tools instead, such as a rape whistle, pepper spray, or even a roll of quarters. “No practice needed,” wrote one of them.

I beg to differ!

There’s really no such thing as a self-defense tool that works if you aren’t willing to do the work it takes to learn how to use it effectively. (See Niven’s Law #17 for more on that.) If you’re not willing to do the work it takes to master a handgun, you might be willing to do the work it takes to master some other kind of defense tool. And that’s good — highly recommended, in fact.

But if you’re not willing to learn anything, practice, or do any other type of work at all, there’s really nothing out there that does it for you.

Power tools

Extended analogy follows. For the analogy-impaired, in the story below, “power tools” equal handguns, and “less powerful tools” equal things like rape whistles and pepper spray.

Most people can figure out a hammer without too much effort, but even so, an overconfident hammer-user can easily break their own thumb if they aren’t careful. As our tools become more powerful – think buzz saws, hydraulic presses, and combine harvesters – we need to spend a little more time learning how to safely use them before we’re ready to go to work. The payoff, of course, is that power tools help us get the job done faster and with less effort than we could otherwise do it. That’s why they were invented!

If power tools seem frightening because of their power, choosing a less-powerful tool might feel safer in an abstract sense. That’s especially true when we look only at the tool itself, and not at the job that needs to be done with it. But that doesn’t mean the least-powerful tool is actually a safer choice or a better one.

You may be less likely to accidentally amputate your own arm with a butter knife than you are with a chainsaw, but if you really need to cut down a tree, you’ll probably need a chainsaw.

Not only that, but if you need to cut the tree down right freaking now, a power saw would almost certainly be the safest tool for the job. Once you know how to safely use the power tool, using the power tool would be a lot safer than trying to hack the tree down with an inappropriately weak substitute such as a butter knife.

End of analogy.

Tanstaafl

The rule of thumb is that the less powerful your defensive tools are on their own, the more direct energy you have to put into using them, and the harder you’ll have to work in order to learn how to do that.

Effectively defending yourself with empty hands takes more training than defending yourself with pepper spray. Effectively using a keychain weapon, no matter what it is, requires a lot more training than using a handgun. As our tools become more powerful, they become more risky to use without training, but the same power that produces the risk to an untrained user also reduces the amount of work we must put into mastering them — and greatly reduces the effort it takes to use them effectively.

People often want to hand silly little toys to women for self-defense. Keychain doodads. Illegal ball-bearing dingleberries on a rope. Non-Taser buzzers about as powerful as the gag-gift handshake toy your brother had when you were kids. Whistles you can use to call the dog or that a rapist can use to strangle you.

No matter how tempting it is to think that these toys will erase the need to study and learn defensive skills, there’s still no such thing as a free lunch. And there are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going in this life.

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