The student stands on one foot, with one leg nervously twisted around the other, waiting to hear my verdict. Is she? Or isn’t she?
She’s just finished telling me how she likes to pay attention to the world around her, and how she always has a plan to cope if something goes wrong. In restaurants, she prefers to sit where she can see the door; while stopped at a red light while driving, she always keeps her eyes on the world outside her car; at home, she locks her doors before she relaxes and she has a clear plan for what she would do if an intruder broke in.
She’s not the only person who’s ever asked that question.
The question comes up from time to time — sometimes in my email box, sometimes on Facebook, sometimes in a class. And the worry behind it is real. It’s often sparked by judgemental attitudes from friends and family who don’t always understand what’s happening when a person begins her own journey into an armed lifestyle, a lifestyle that includes personal alertness.
Feeling judged by someone outside herself, a new traveler on this road often seeks absolution from someone outside herself. She needs to hear someone — someone outside her own head — tell her that she’s not alone, not an outcast, not a weirdo.
So I do.
“No, you’re not paranoid,” I say. “You’re prepared.”
It’s what’s on the inside that counts
But … the value and meaning of our awareness depends far more on who we are and how we see it, from inside, than it does on what our friends might think about what we’re doing. My opinion isn’t the one that matters, here. Neither is the opinion of anyone’s friends.
All that matters is what’s on the inside. How does the world look from where we live?
Ugly people often have ugly suspicions about what our awareness might mean, but we don’t have to live out those suspicions. If our friends sometimes think it’s ugly or scary for us to notice things or be prepared to cope with all that life has to offer, that doesn’t say a thing about us.
That’s just sad for them.
While we live, let us live!
Personally, I think a lifestyle of awareness isn’t about fear. Not in any way. It’s about being fully alive. It’s about smelling the roses, cherishing the daffodils, and never stepping on the bee that’s hiding in the clover. Being prepared to notice that bee and sidestep it isn’t about the bee. Avoiding that stinger is just a very useful side effect of noticing the bee in the first place.
A lifestyle of awareness lets us be fully present, fully alive, fully aware of every golden moment of every day.
Sure, some of us might always look around because we’re living in fear or because we truly believe there’s a bogeyman hiding behind every blade of grass. We might even do it because we’re a miserable person living in a horrible world.
But more likely, that’s not what’s going on at all. It certainly isn’t for me, and I hope it isn’t for you.
Joyful awareness
Once we get started on seeing the world around us as it really is, we do it for joy. We do it because we think people make the most fascinating show in the universe. We do it because we can no longer imagine living any other way.
When we commit ourselves to see what’s happening around us, something wonderful happens: we see what’s happening around us!
When our eyes are open and our senses alert, we see what people do near the door of a restaurant. We see the young mom admonishing her little ones as she shepherds them into the building (“Now remember, guys, inside voices only…”). We see the old man hold the door for his wife, and then pat his wife’s fanny when he thinks no one is looking as she passes through it. We see the nervous young guy swipe his hands on his pants before he comes inside to meet his date.
Those moments are pure gold, and nobody sees them except the people who watch for them.
That’s not all we see, though. We also see the group discussion happening just outside the door; apparently, they’re trying to decide whether to come inside or go somewhere else. We see the couple who were having a heated argument — in whispers! — before the hostess greeted them. We see the thoughtfully appraising look a single guy throws at the receptionist’s backside as she shows him to his table. Good, bad, or indifferent, we notice.
When we pay attention, we see and cherish the moments of joy that happen all around us every day of our lives, and we’re better prepared to avoid trouble because we’re more likely to see it coming.
We notice what’s happening outside our cars when we’re stuck in traffic. We see the young guy lip-syncing to the radio (and is that an air guitar?) as he rocks out behind the wheel in the car next to us. We notice the young couple holding hands as they wait to cross the street. We see businesspeople and shoppers and street hustlers and homeless people, too — and we might even see the too-casual loiterer who’s waiting to make a sale, or the streetwalker he’s looking after on the opposite corner. Hmmm…
We see.
What did you see?
Huh. Look at that. We just noticed that it’s not the best neighborhood we’re driving through. Better make sure those car doors are locked, and that there’s enough cushion in front of the front bumper so we can easily get the car moving should we need to get away. We’re not looking for trouble.
Sure, keeping your eyes open and your radar on makes you more likely to notice trouble before it starts — but it also helps you love life and live it to the full. We might see trouble, but we’re not looking for it or any of its relatives. We’re looking for joy.
When that’s where your mind and your heart is, who could possibly call you paranoid?
So… are you paranoid?
Is your world negative and ugly, frightening and scary, full of fears and dark thoughts and places you dare not send even your thoughts? Are there people and places you’re so afraid to see that you cannot even admit they exist?
Or is your world full of joy? Do you see and celebrate the world around you? Do you resolutely notice what’s happening, whatever is happening, without denying negative possibilities and without shutting your mind to the existence of bad events? Do you focus on the things that are right and good and true?
Are you happy to see everything good in this world, even while you prepare to avoid (or learn how to cope with) the rare spot of trouble?
Never apologize for really seeing what’s around you, good or bad or indifferent. So many people go through life with their eyes half-closed, and you have made the decision to wake up.
That’s a beautiful thing. Don’t ever let anyone shame you out of it.
Here are two headlines and first sentences from different news stations covering the same event. Story one:
Police: Woman shoots boyfriend during roadway argument
HOUSTON (KTRK) — A man was shot in southwest Houston Wednesday and his girlfriend is accused of firing the gun.
When I glance at the headline of this story, as a reader I make some immediate assumptions about what probably happened: a “roadway argument” sounds like both of them agreed to have a fight with each other. Maybe he was in the wrong. Maybe she was. It’s hard to say, isn’t it? Then I read that the police have “accused” her of firing the gun, so there’s probably something very wrong about what she did.
Any casual reader might conclude that this woman should be arrested and taken to trial. After all, we can’t have people shooting each other just because someone got into an argument with her boyfriend.
That’s story one. Here’s story two:
PD: Woman shoots ex-boyfriend outside SW Houston gas station
HOUSTON (KPRC) – Police said a woman shot her ex-boyfriend in self-defense outside a southwest Houston gas station.
Definitely get a different feeling from reading this one. A woman shot her ex-boyfriend. As a reader, do you have some assumptions or feelings that might go along with the prefix “ex-” in a story like this? I sure do. And then we read that the police said she shot her ex in “self-defense”. That sure puts a different spin on things. Why, it’s almost like it’s an entirely different event.
A casual reader might conclude that the woman made a completely correct choice to defend herself from a violently abusive stalker. Instead of being taken to jail, she should get a medal!
And that’s just with two sentences per story.
What really happened?
Although here on Cornered Cat’s Scratching Post blog, we often discuss things we can learn about self defense from reading news stories or watching surveillance videos, we must always understand that news stories provide a very limited view of what happened and why it happened. Even without bias (and everyone is biased, including the very imperfect person writing these words), a short account can never give us an complex, complete reality.
So we use news stories to spark our own thinking. We use videos to help us picture crime in more realistic ways than the ones Hollywood shows us or the images inside our own heads. But we’re also not very surprised when more information later comes to light, when it turns out that a vigilante on “neighborhood patrol” was actually just a guy on his way to the store, or that the sweet-faced prepubescent he shot turns out to be a very large and angry young man who weighed more than he did.
Those twists and turns in the news accounts are often infuriating for people with a political axe to grind, but they’re not really a surprise to us who closely follow such cases. That’s the nature of self-defense cases that make the news: they are complex, they are often controversial, they are reported upon by people who have opinions, and they are always missing key details that might help others understand what happened and why.
What’s a woman to do?
As a woman who is serious about being able to protect myself and the people I love, I’m very much aware that people who actively defend themselves from violent attacks don’t always get a fair shake in the news. It’s something I’ve thought a lot about, and I hope you have, too.
It’s important to think these things through, not because we want to scare ourselves with all the what-if‘s and could-be‘s that might happen in the future, but because thinking these things through really sets them in perspective. It helps us be sure that we’re as mentally prepared as we can be to protect ourselves and our loved ones without hesitation or distracting thoughts.
Of course, we all know that we must be sure that our lives are really in danger whenever we use a deadly weapon such as a gun: are the elements of Ability, Opportunity, and Jeopardy all present? Have we done as much as we could reasonably do to avoid having to shoot? If the answer to all these questions is yes, then we should act immediately to save our lives.
Fears of a nasty headline may slow us down. Wondering what the neighbors will think might cause us to freeze for a critical moment. But when an innocent life is on the line, those factors should fade into the background.
Instead of worrying about headlines or lawsuits, neighbor’s reactions or what the in-laws might say, we must be prepared to act. Because saving an innocent life will always be more important than any of that stuff.
Very excited to announce that on May 30-31, 2015 I’ll be one of the featured trainers teaching at the first-ever Families With Firearms Conference near Des Moines, Iowa. If this is something you might be interested in, I’d urge you to follow the link and get yourself signed up. Seats will probably fill very quickly for this valuable weekend.
One of the things I love about this is that inside the training world, we’re finally beginning to tackle many of the tough questions that are important to women. A lot of these issues really haven’t been addressed before, at least not to the depth they deserve. The fact that more women own firearms for self defense means that we in the training community are beginning to look at a lot of questions that historically, defensive firearm instructors were unable to cover in depth just because there just wasn’t a big enough audience for that type of work.
Helping parents learn how to help their children grow in healthy awareness without fear, learning how to role play with your kids, playing games that help develop child-friendly family preparedness, finding comfortable ways to carry a gun that work safely and well for people who spend a lot of time around young children — all of these are questions that have never really been seriously considered and discussed among the concealed carry community. And they should be!
This is far more than just repeating the Eddie Eagle rules for your children (though that’s really, really, really important!). It’s about finding ways to take your own self-defense plans and turn them into family defense plans. Learning to stay safe for yourself is one thing. Learning how to keep your family safe, and teach your family members how to keep themselves safe — that’s a whole different kettle of fish.
If you’d like to join us, do step over to Melody’s page and sign up. We’d love to have you add your voice to the conversation.
By now, nearly everyone in the competition side of the shooting world has seen the following video, as have many of us within the self-defense and training side of things. It’s disconcerting to watch, and because it’s disconcerting, it’s tempting to react to it in emotional ways — by getting angry rather than thoughtful, by pulling out our virtual pitchforks to storm the castle and burn the heretics at the stake.
There may be a place for emotional reactions, but I’d like to set those things aside here so that we can really think about what happened. We can explore how it happened, and discuss how we — as shooters, as observers, and as instructors — could prevent something similar happening to us on our ranges and in our clubs. Even if you do not play action shooting games, you’ll find something here that you can use to help keep yourself and the people around you safe.
As I’ve said many times in the past, the only thing worse than a bad mistake, is a bad mistake nobody learns anything from. So let’s learn!
As you see on the embedded video, a man ended up downrange and in the line of fire during a match. He was apparently picking up brass — you can see the rakelike tool he was using for that, briefly, on the video at 00:31 — and did not realize that the taping crew and observers had all left the bay in preparation for the next shooter. He was completely focused on his task and may not have noticed when the shooter began his run through the stage.
As the shooter and RO come around the vision barrier, the man cries out.
The shooter did an excellent job of stopping — instantly! — as soon as he realized there was a problem. He took his finger off the trigger and immediately lifted the gun to high ready, with the muzzle as far away from the brass picker as he could reasonably get it. He then turns to the RO and asks, “What’s going on?”
The RO tells the shooter to stop, and the shooter thanks the RO.
Some responses
Many people have suggested that the video should have been kept under wraps. “Way to give the antis more ammo!” wrote one angry commenter in an expletive-filled rant on a private forum. Another, in a calmer venue, wrote, “In my opinion posting it for the whole world to see does a disservice to this organization.”
The political fear in these posts is palpable. We’re afraid that “they” are going to take our guns away. Or that local clubs will stop hosting action pistol matches. We’re afraid of the social backlash if non-shooters widely believe that shooting sports could be dangerous rather than simply fun.
It’s an understandable fear. It’s also both irrelevant and unreasonable: irrelvant because the video exists, and unreasonable because the only thing that keeps our shooting sports safe is our ongoing community commitment to learn from rare incidents like this.
The only way to learn from a mistake is to first admit that a mistake was made. This may be a painful truth, but it is a truth.
The lessons
There are five roles we can see people playing in this video: the brass picker, the RO, the assistant, the shooter, and the observers. Each of these roles puts us in a position to prevent the kind of danger we see here. Each of the people we see in these roles on the video did some things exactly right and each also made some mistakes. Let’s take them, one at a time, and put ourselves in each person’s role.
Whups… before we do that, let me handle the human issue here: we aren’t burning the heretic at the stake today. We are putting ourselves in each role because at some point, as members of the firearms community, we are likely to find ourselves in exactly these roles. There’s absolutely nothing that happens on this video that any one of us could not do tomorrow. That’s why we should learn from what happened, today.
The Brass Picker
During a match, many people must go into the bay during the lull between shooters. We go downrange to score targets, tape or reset the targets, and to pick up brass. Picking up brass could technically wait until the match is completely over and all shooting has stopped. Unfortunately, waiting that long would mean that some shooters wouldn’t get their brass back for reloading. “No brass picking during the match” is an unpopular rule, and few embrace it.
In order to play the game at all, we do have to score and reset the targets. This means there’s no way to avoid having people walking into the stage at the end of each run, even if we don’t allow brass picking. The challenge is, how do we make sure that those people have left before we start the next shooter?
We’ll talk about the RO’s responsibilities in a moment. But for us, the people who participate in matches, oberve them or assist with them, it’s very simple indeed: it is 100% our responsibility to get out of the way before the shooting starts.
Whether we went downrange to set targets or for any other reason, it’s completely on us to be aware of what other people are doing. When other people start leaving the area, it’s our job to see them leaving and go with them. If someone else has to remind us that the shooting is about to start, we’ve just ducked our own personal responsibility to protect ourselves.
The Range Safety Officer
Many people have observed — rightly, I believe — that the primary fault for this dangerous situation fell into the lap of the RSO. Here’s what the shooting club said about that:
Just like firearms instructors, range officers hold a heavy responsibility to keep their people safe. When the job is done well, shooters and bystanders may not even realize just how much work these folks are putting into that job. But make no mistake: it is work, and it does require our full attention while we’re doing it.
There’s a careful procedure I use whenever I work inside a deep bay like this, whether it’s in the context of a class, at a match, or even just informally shooting with friends. Keeping shooters safe is a high-focus task, and because human attention spans are limited, we have to carefully budget our focus while we’re working to be sure we see the right things. This is how I do it.
Because prevention is far better than cure when it comes to group safety, I’m obsessive about clearing the bay after each shooter. When we go into the deep part of the bay to tape or reset targets, I make a conscious effort to be the one standing closest to the berm while we finish that job, and I try to never step toward the open end of the bay ahead of anyone else. I don’t care who it is, or what they’re doing here; if it’s my job to be sure nobody is downrange when the shooting starts, then whenever someone comes into the bay, I stay either right next to them or between them and the back berm until they leave. That way, I can escort them out and be sure they won’t still be there when the shooting starts.
When we’re done taping or resetting targets, I deliberately look around, glancing behind every target and looking either around or under any vision-blocking props as we leave the bay. This helps me be sure nobody will still be downrange when the shooting starts.
Before I give any commands to the shooter, I quickly count my ducklings — the squad or students — to be sure all are present. If I come up short for any reason, I ask who’s missing and where they went. If the answers are at all nebulous, I walk back into the bay to be sure nobody got left behind in there.
After I have cleared the bay, primary responsibility for the surroundings shifts to the assistant and my focus shifts to the shooter. This has to happen because keeping people safe is a high-focus task and it’s impossible to do it very well when your attention is divided. This is why most matches have both an RO and an assistant RO on every stage. Nobody can see it all!
As the shooter loads and makes ready, I watch his (her) hands. Not interested in the targets anymore at this point, because I know they’re clear and won’t move. But I’m going to watch the trigger finger to see how it behaves, the muzzle to stay in safe directions within the rules of the game we’re playing, and the shooter’s general body language so that I can anticipate times I may need to step in and grab for a drifting muzzle.
Whenever we do the job of the range safety officer, it is 100% our responsibility to make sure the range is clear before the shooting starts.
The Assistant
The assistant’s primary job is to keep general awareness on the surrounding environment, which includes being sure that the group stays where they were told to stay. It’s the assistant’s responsibility to see and stop morons who walk over the top of the berm to get a good picture, idiots who remove their protective eyewear to scratch an itch, and nincompoops who pull off their ear protection for whatever reason. The assistant will also be running the clipboard, but they’d better not be watching the shooter, except maybe for keeping an eye out for the shooter’s foot faults in cover (if that’s within the game rules).
The RO will very likely not see any of the things the assistant must watch, because the RO’s full attention will focus on the shooter’s hands from the moment the shooter begins handling the firearm. Both the RO and the assistant need to be ready to call CEASEFIRE at any time. But we don’t have the same spheres of responsibility. By dividing our tasks, we’re better prepared to see potential problems before any danger develops.
Whenever we work as an assistant safety officer, it is 100% our responsibility to make sure the range stays clear after the shooting starts.
The Spectator
At shooting events like this, there are always spectators. In this case, one of the spectators had a video camera and that’s why you and I (who weren’t at the match) are aware of what happened.
But what about the people who were at the match? When we are at a match, not shooting and not working as an RO, is there anything we can do to help the people around us stay safe?
There sure is! We should keep our eyes up and speak up if we see something wrong. As much as possible, we should keep our attention focused on what’s happening inside the stage. Not only will this help prevent similiar incidents to the one we see in the video, it also helps us be sure we aren’t caught with our hearing protection down around our necks and our eye protection resting on the brim of our ballcaps when the shooting starts.
As spectators, it is 100% our responsibility to alert range staff and shooters whenever we see an unsafe condition happening, or about to happen, on the range.
The Shooter
In many ways, the shooter was the hero in this piece. If you’ve never played an action shooting game, you may not realize just how many different piece of information bombard the shooters’ brains — all at the same time! — while we’re shooting a stage. Keeping track of all those details takes our full attention, and there’s not a lot of room for unexpected information coming in. We’re also often fully adrenalized, which makes it easier to react and harder to think.
This shooter did very well in how he responded to the unexpected presence of a live person where a person was definitely not supposed to be. He deserves full kudos for that.
Let’s talk about something that could and should have happened before the shooting started, though. Every time we pick up a gun — for any reason whatsoever including just playing a game with our friends — we know that we’ll be held accountable for where our bullets land.
When we shoot a high-focus game, it’s good to have safety officers and squad mates we can trust to do their jobs, but even the most trustworthy associates cannot take full responsibility for where our bullets land when we’re the ones holding the gun. It will be our legal, emotional, and financial nightmare if one of our bullets hits someone. That’s the grim reality and there’s no erasing it.
That’s why, even inside the context of a game or class where we have a supervising safety officer, it’s still important for us as shooters to glance underneath the vision barriers before we step into the shooting box. That quick look can tell us immediately if there are any human legs mixed in among the target stands inside the bay, and can prevent this kind of close call.
When the rules of the game or the setup of the stage don’t allow us to make that quick glance, as shooters we know we’ll be completely at the mercy of the RO and assistant to do their jobs. That makes it even more important that when we’re on deck, we watch the procedures as they clear the range for us. We should be aware of what the other shooters on the squad are doing, and we should notice if anyone in our group wanders off. Focusing on stage strategies shouldn’t stop us from noticing whether everyone has come out of the bay before we begin shooting.
As shooters, it is 100% our responsibility to make sure nobody is standing in the area where we are about to shoot.
Personal Responsibility
Shooting sports remain among the safest sports we can play, with an injury record far below that of most of most other competitive outdoor games. The reason this is true is that people within the firearms community, by and large, embrace the concept of personal responsibility for our actions. We know that safety isn’t “everyone’s” job; it is the job of each one of us, individually and personally.
We also know that our community will stay safe as long as each one of us does the job we need to do to help keep our events safe. When one of us fails our own responsibility, we know we have an army of others prepared to step in and take up the slack. This shared commitment to safety is one of the most beautiful things about the firearms community.
That’s why close calls like this are rare, and it’s also why we work so hard to learn from them. Whether it’s at a formal match or class, or simply playing with friends on the range on a sunny afternoon, shooters and spectators must embrace their own personal responsibilities. It’s how we keep each other safe.
A few days ago, Rory Miller posted some thoughts on power. It’ll be fascinating to see where he goes with it; the seeds so far look very promising and you should probably go read his post for yourself.
Because, like my friend Tamara, I hate using good material only at away games, I decided to share with you something I said in Rory’s comments section:
Looking back through my notes from a class I took 7 years ago and (thought I) had long since forgotten, I’d jotted down a verbatim quote from one of the other students in the class. It must have resonated with me at the time because it made it into my notes.
But I don’t remember it.
I have no conscious memory of that segment of the class. No idea who said it, even — just the little squiggle next to the words, that indicated it was a fellow student and not the instructor.
That student had power. He or she changed my life. And I know this, because I’ve been using that idea, in those exact words, for the past two or three years at least, as I’ve taught others.
Lots of weird permutations there. I wonder how much of who I am today, I owe to people I don’t even remember. Every idea I’ve ever had came from somewhere — where?
We have the power to change the world. And most of us don’t even notice when we have.
Thinking about this today in the context of teaching others, because I’ll have many opportunties this year to teach other teachers. There’s the Cornered Cat Instructor Development Class coming up in June here in the Pacific Northwest, which should be a lot of fun and a bit of a challenge for all involved. Before that, I’ll be down in Texas for the AG&AG Conference where I’ll have a chance to work with many of the group leaders and chapter facilitators for that organization. This is in addition to the usual round of working with students (many of whom are also instructors) and with my own assistants and apprentices.
Massad Ayoob speaks of teaching as having an ‘oil stain’ effect — when you plink a single drop of oil into a puddle of water, that oil will spread around and change the nature of everything the water touches. That’s power.
To me, one of the most important components of instructor development is helping new teachers understand their own tremendous power and embrace the responsibility that goes with it. Most of us really aren’t 100% comfortable with having power, with having the ability to change the world for good or bad. So we retreat into denial and reject the responsibility we should be embracing.
“We” means… me. I do that. It’s more comfortable to think “no one listens to me anyway” than it is to measure thoughts, weigh words, think about the potential effects before I throw something out into the world.
What about you? What parts of your own power scare you — and why?
One of the challenges perennially faced by firearms instructors everywhere: convincing family-minded people that investing in professional training classes for themselves is not a selfish use of family resources. In fact, it’s one of the least selfish things you can do.
Learning to protect yourself and the people you love is one of the least selfish things you can do for your family.
It’s a hard sell, because people who teach defensive handgun classes have traditionally emphasized self defense in their advertising. We talk a lot about being prepared to take care of yourself if the need arises. And it’s true that if you ever need to solve a criminal problem, you are the only person that you know for absolute sure-and-certain will be there and on your side.
But that’s not all there is to it.
If you’re anything like me or most people in this world, you have family members, close friends, people you love, people you care about and spend time with. So maybe you won’t be alone when trouble strikes. Maybe there will be other people there with you — a spouse or a significant other, a grown son, a teenage daughter, a best friend or a favorite niece.
Are your skills good enough to protect the people you love?
Is someone you love willing to protect you — but you aren’t sure you would know how to help them do it?
Do your younger loved ones know what to do to help you solve the problem if the unthinkable happens when you are together?
Do you know how to help the people you love learn to protect themselves, so that you are all better prepared to take care of each other?
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the gun-owning world and about my place inside that world. I’ve thought about the gun owners I’ve met at the range and the students I’ve met in class. I’ve thought about the people behind the counter at the gun stores and the people you run into at gun shows and shooting events. I’ve thought about the competitors, the trainers, the hunters, and the regular people who just enjoy plinking on a Saturday afternoon. And I’ve thought about what brings all these people together into one subculture.
It turns out, one core principle drives everything I do: I want to change the way we approach gun ownership in America in some very specific ways. Toward that end, today I’m starting a new series of blog posts: the “I have a dream…” series. It’s about gun culture – what’s good and beautiful about it, and what we need to celebrate, and what we need to change to make it even better. I hope you’ll enjoy reading this series as much as I enjoy writing it.
***
Just after Christmas, my friend and fellow firearms trainer Greg Ellifritz posted a wonderful, heart-warming story about a woman he met at the range one evening. Greg writes:
I find out she’s a single mom with two kids. Her house has been broken into three times in the last two months. The last burglary attempt occurred while she was in the house with her kids. She has never shot a gun, but she recognized that she had a duty to protect her family. She went to a gun show and bought a Jimenez Arms JA-9.
… She tells me that she has a bad feeling that the robbers are coming back tonight to get the x-mas presents she bought for her kids. She doesn’t know anything about guns and doesn’t know anyone who can teach her. She’s signed up for a CCW class, but no one teaches classes on the week of Christmas and she can’t find an opening until January. The problem is that she thinks the robbers are coming TONIGHT. A January class isn’t going to help.
… That’s why she was there by herself at the shooting range. It didn’t matter that she was by herself, that she was the only woman in the room, or that she knew nothing about guns. She had babies to protect and was going to figure out how to do it, come hell or high water.
Read the whole thing. Of course Greg stepped in to help her. The challenge: in exactly one hour, show a brand new gun owner how to use her gun so that she is better prepared to deal with an immediate challenge to her safety and her family’s safety. Could you do it?
Thinking about Greg’s story, I have a dream.
I dream that one day, every woman who goes to the gun range in time of need will meet a person there who has both the willingness and the skills to teach her what she immediately need to know, with the expectation that she will in time be prepared to turn around and help spread that knowledge to others.
Right now, we can celebrate that there are so many truly Good Guys (and gals!) at every range, people who’d be happy to help others learn. But right now, most of those Good Guys do not have the skills to get someone else up to speed in the most critical basics for self defense. Those who come in the range in time of crisis won’t often run into someone with that expertise unless we – as ordinary people, as shooters, as formal or informal instructors – work hard to learn what we need to know.
We can be the change we want to see in this world.
Back when I was editing CCM, Karl Rehn wrote an excellent article titled, “Is a Pocket Gun Enough?” In it, he discussed many of the common experiences people have with little guns and some of the concerns people express about them (caliber, accuracy, capacity, shootability). It’s worth reading in its entirety, but one of the more fascinating things he did was that he ran a bunch of people through the same shooting test. Each person took the test twice: once with a full-size gun, and once with a pocket pistol.
He tested three groups of people:
new, inexperienced, and untrained shooters
intermediate shooters who had taken classes
highly skilled shooters
Rehn considers a score of 90 to be a passing grade on this test.
What Rehn found was that shooters who were not highly skilled — this would include long-time shooters who had taken no classes other than the basic carry permit class — gave up a LOT of skill when they moved to smaller guns. He also found that well-trained shooters could move down to the small guns with very little loss of skill.
Here’s the data:
“BUG” means “backup gun.” These would be relatively small guns, appropriate for pocket carry or (in most cases) for wearing in a bra holster.
Note that the trained shooters did twice as well on the skills test as the untrained ones. It wasn’t a minor difference.
Bottom line is, learn to be a good shooter. This includes taking professional training classes that help you build your gunhandling skills to the point of automaticity, and practicing those skills on a regular basis. Then you can choose the most convenient gun to carry without giving up anything on the achievement side of the bargain.
