The Cornered Cat
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Walls

Just a quick reminder: walls do not stop bullets.

From a tragic story in the news today: a married woman in Texas was sitting in her hotel room watching television when a bullet suddenly struck her in the chest. That sudden bullet that apparently came out of nowhere killed her stone cold dead in front of her husband and teenage son.

Where did the bullet come from?

The police investigators found that a man in the next room of the hotel had been “working on” a gun when he unintentionally fired it. The bullet left the gun and traveled through the hotel room wall, eventually lodging itself deep inside the woman’s chest. Because walls do not stop bullets, and because he did not take time to find or create a safe backstop before he handled his gun inside a building, the man killed an innocent woman.

From the article: “After talking with the pair at the Irving Police Department, officials said they believe the shooting was accidental but that it still carried a consequence.  Gray was charged with criminally negligent homicide and, if convicted, he’ll face up to 2 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.”

Do you think that’s a just and fair consequence, if the facts in the case are substantially as the news reports say? I do. It won’t bring this woman back to life or undo the heartbreak felt by her family and friends, but the severe legal consequences and the publicity that follows them might-just-might prevent another casually thoughtless death down the road.

Also, this underscores one more reason why I say it is a violation of the fundamental rules of safe gun handling to be passing an “unloaded” gun around inside a building, even inside a gun education classroom, no matter how many people have checked it. Unless built of bricks or reinforced in some way, walls do not stop bullets. There are  no safe directions inside most classrooms, and that makes passing the gun around inside one a dangerously bad idea.

If you want your students to handle an unloaded gun inside a classroom setting, you must build a safe backstop for your students and you must enforce its use at all times. Anything else is negligent — and it might just, under the wrong set of circumstances, be found criminally negligent.

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“But I Unloaded It!”

A few more thoughts about yesterday’s post.

Some schools of thought hate Rule One, and have thrown it out. As long as you’ve checked the gun, these folks say, you can use an unloaded gun for an in-class demonstration. You can pass it around inside a crowded classroom with the gun pointed willy-nilly as newcomers handle it, or you can allow students to point it at each other during role play, or you can handle it at the front of the room without worrying about whether the classroom walls would provide a safe backstop should the gun fire. It’s perfectly safe to do such things with a functional gun, these people believe, just as long as the person handling the gun unloads it first. Or as long as more than one person checks the gun to be sure it’s really unloaded.

Right…

Please watch the following video. I’m sure you’ve seen it before – everyone in the gun world has, by now – but watch it again. Pay special attention to the fact that the person at the front of the room checks the gun himself and has another person check it too. You can see that happen as he walks off screen, saying to an assistant, “Empty weapon, right? Empty weapon.” The person he’s talking to apparently agrees, and you see him re-enter the field of view. Then he proceeds to shoot himself in the foot in a most professional manner.

This man destroyed his career just to show us all that checking the gun is not enough to absolutely guarantee the gun is unloaded, nor are multiple checks enough to make humans infallible. Even when you’ve checked the gun yourself and had a friend check it too, you should still treat the gun with the same cautious respect you’d give it if you knew for sure it was loaded. Why? Because humans make mistakes.

That’s the point. The rules overlap and provide redundant levels of safety. These multiple, overlapping safety layers provide our best opportunity to stay safe. We do ourselves no favors when we casually throw away safety rules just because someone “checked” the gun.

Stay safe.

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Old Story, New Shirt

The names change, but the story stays the same.

Ate lunch with a friend a few days ago. My friend let me know she’d had a falling out with an instructor at her local club.

“What happened?” I asked.

The story she told me was hardly new. We’ve all heard the story, or one like it, over the past few years. It seems my friend was in another instructor’s class – inside the classroom, not on the range – while the instructor was demonstrating something with a revolver. In the course of the demonstration, the instructor pointed the gun at my friend and at other students sitting in that same area of the room. My friend objected, and said, “I’m going to go stand over here, on the other side of the classroom, because I don’t like you pointing that gun at me.”

The embarrassed instructor didn’t take it well. She told my friend the following:

  • “The gun is unloaded!”
  • “We don’t even allow ammunition in the classroom!”
  • “You’re being unreasonable – do you really think I would shoot you?”
  • “Why are you making such a big deal out of this? The gun is unloaded…”

Let’s do a quick refresher on the Four Rules of Gun Safety, shall we?

  1. All guns are always loaded. Treat them so!
  2. Never point the gun at anything you are not willing to destroy.
  3. Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target (and you have made the decision to shoot).
  4. Be sure of your target and what is beyond it.

Now a quick exercise for those following along at home: Was this instructor following all four of the rules? If not, which one(s) did she break when she carelessly allowed an unloaded gun to point at one of her students as she handled it inside her classroom?

By my count, the broken rules include One, Two, and Four – unless the classroom walls were brick or were reinforced with solid material that would definitely stop a bullet. It might have included Three as well, but we can give the instructor the benefit of the doubt on that one. Surely she would not have put her finger on the trigger to demonstrate how the hammer moved, even with an unloaded gun, inside a classroom full of people where there was no solid backstop. Surely not…!

Oh, but I hear some folks saying, not every franchise follows the Four Rules. Okay, for the sake of peace, I’ll concede this much: not everyone approves of the Four Rules, and not every instructor follows them. So maybe I’m being unfair to expect people who do not use that rule set to follow the ideas underneath that rule set.

So let’s look at this incident within the context of the NRA Three Rules instead. After all, that’s the rule set that my friend’s instructor was using when she pointed the gun at her students while she was speaking.

Here are the Three Fundamental Rules of Safe Gun Handling, according to the NRA:

  1. ALWAYS keep the gun pointed in a safe direction.
  2. ALWAYS keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot.
  3. ALWAYS keep the gun unloaded until ready to use.

In keeping with the NRA’s protocols and preferred style, each rule has the word ALWAYS in full caps. That’s because always means, you know, ALWAYS – no exceptions, no excuses. Each of these rules should be followed all the time, not just some of the time, not just when we feel like it and not just when it’s not too much of a hassle. All the time. That’s the point.

Is there any point at all in having “fundamental” rules we refuse to follow? Or in emphasizing the word ALWAYS when we really mean sometimes?

As I’ve said, this story isn’t a new one. It’s just a minor variant of an old, old story. I’ve left my friend’s name off this post not because she asked for privacy, but simply because her name is legion. She’s not alone! She’s a real person and the story really happened, but I have heard variants of the exact same tale far too many times to count over the past dozen years or so. She’s every woman.

In fact, here’s an illustration of how common the story really is. A few months ago, my friends Jeff and Jenna Meek of Carry On Colorado printed themselves a new company tee shirt for their instructors to wear. They graciously sent one to me. I love it!

not-a-safe-direction

 

4 Comments
Snark du jour

From an online forum I frequent.

Other Person: “I’ve never taken any instruction except what I had to for my CWP course and that guy was a comedian. There are some very ignorant instructors out there that are simply not worth the money and frankly not qualified.”

Me: “I ate at a restaurant once. It was horrible! There are a lot of bad restaurants out there, and it was frankly not worth the money. I will never eat in another restaurant again. If I want to eat out, I can always grab something from the gas station. That’s a lot cheaper.”

Was that too rude?

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What Has She Got in Her Pocketses?

From time to time, people ask me what else I carry with me every day when I leave the house.

Of course there’s the firearm (a Glock 26 in 9mm) in its holster (a straight-drop, single attachment tuckable Kydex holster from Custom Carry Concepts), which I tote in the appendix position  on my belt (a contoured, tapered one from Galco). That part is easy, because I’m fortunate enough that I can wear jeans most days. On days when pants with belt loops aren’t possible, I often opt for a belly band (a PT2 from Pistol Wear). Of course, that’s when I’m not trying out some new holster or carry method so I can tell my students about it.

Everyday stuff.

Everyday stuff.

*yawn*  It’s a gun. I carry it. That’s all good.

But day in and day out? I’m far more often to need or want some other tools to get through the day.

Phone

Of course there’s the cell phone. Most of us can’t live without one of those anymore (how did we ever…?)  It can be an indispensable emergency tool – useful for dialing 911, contacting loved ones after an accident, looking up how to stop the bleeding or where to find a good sushi bar.

You almost certainly already know that when you call 911, you always give them your location first, even before telling them why you’re calling. This goes triply-true for calling from a cell phone which might get disconnected at any moment! From a cell phone, you never really know which emergency services department will pick up your call, so you should always tell the dispatcher the town and state along with the basic address.

Speaking of addresses, do you know where you are, right now? Can you recite the street address for your place of business, for your favorite coffee shop, for the grocery store where you always shop? Can you name the major cross streets to the park where you walk with your kids, or to your favorite restaurant? Get in the habit of noticing and remembering such things and you’ll be ahead of the safety game.

Source: Wikipedia

Source: Wikipedia

Cell phones have their downsides for the safety-minded, however. They can distract you, tempting you into ignoring the world around you when you really shouldn’t. You might be slightly more alert than the poor woman who walked into a nest of rattlesnakes while she was on her phone, but you’re probably not. You probably just live somewhere without rattlesnakes – but with cars, sneak thieves, and panhandlers instead. Or homicidal maniacs on public transportation. Hmmmm… Maybe it’s best to save your cell phone use for times and places where it’s truly safe to ignore the world around you.

So that’s the skinny on the cell phone. If I accidentally leave my cell phone on the night stand, I’m turning around to get it – no question. It’s a high priority.

Light

Small pocket, small flashlight. A match made in heaven.

Small pocket, small flashlight. A match made in heaven.

Another high priority item I carry with me: the flashlight. The first time someone told me I should carry a flashlight all the time, I thought they were nuts. Now? I wouldn’t leave home without it. Just like the cell phone, if I unintentionally leave my flashlight behind, I’m headed back to get it.

It turns out that living with a flashlight in your pocket is a lot like getting a microwave oven for your kitchen. Yes… sigh… I just told you how very old I am, because I remember life before microwaves! My mom bought our first microwave oven when I was in fourth grade. I remember my parents talking about it at the dinner table one night, a few weeks before they splurged on the purchase. Neither one of them could picture a real need for it, but eventually they agreed it was a fun enough idea that it was worth trying. We did, and within a few months nobody in the house could imagine life without it anymore. We were hardly alone, either. When was the last time you saw a home without one? An always-with-you flashlight is something like that: unnecessary and slightly ridiculous before you own one, and indispensable once you’ve tried it.

Before I kept a flashlight in my pocket, I used to walk to my car after dark using just the ambient light in the lot – which means that sometimes I’d trip into a pothole even though I could see my car just fine under the streetlight. Walking through a parking garage, or crossing the street after dark, was much riskier too because car drivers couldn’t see me easily. During the day, when something rolled into the shadows behind my desk, I would blindly reach in and poke around without being able to see what I was doing, getting who-knows-what all over my hands in the process. When I woke up in the night while my husband slept nearby, I would either have to turn the light on (waking him) or stumble around in the dark tripping over things (waking him). When I needed to dig something out of the bottom of my gym bag or the back end of the filing cabinet, I’d have to rummage for it without being able to really see what I was doing.

Since then? Having a handy little light that I keep with me all the time has changed all that.

A few weeks ago, I was at the city library with a friend when the power suddenly went out all over the county. We were in the back part of the library, well back in the stacks, and with the power out it was pitch dark even though it was only mid-afternoon. Several people near us sounded on the edge of panic, including one young girl who couldn’t find her mom. So I reached into my pocket, hauled out my flashlight, and lit up the area. The girl found her mom, and all of us walked to the door together. No big deal – but I was happy that I had the tools to make an uncomfortable situation just a little more comfortable for everyone involved including myself.

A friend of mine has a more chilling tale. She was walking to her car after work when a scruffy-looking man started following her. Was he up to no good, or just a worker on his way home after a hard day? Was he a panhandler? A mugger? Just a neighbor walking to his car at the same time she was walking toward hers? She couldn’t tell, but she definitely caught some bad vibes from him as he followed her, watching her with a little too much intensity and coming a little too close to her as they moved through the otherwise empty lot. She already had her flashlight in hand as she walked, so she simply flicked the light on, shined it into his face and said, “Do I know you? Why are you following me?”  He immediately turned around and walked back toward the buildings, cussing the whole way. Problem solved.

Yes, it really is that small.

Yes, it really is that small.

Truthfully, I actually carry two flashlights most of the time: one small enough for the pocket, and a slightly larger and brighter one for my purse. The one in my pocket throws about 30 lumen, which isn’t much. But it’s about the size of a tube of Chapstick and takes a single AAA battery, which makes it a fabulous little tool. That’s a Streamlight Microstream, and it’s been good to me. During the day, I often unscrew the tailcap just slightly so I don’t accidentally bump the light on and run the battery down. Probably an excess of caution on my part, since it has a stiff switch anyway – but my friend Grant Cunningham once set his pocket on fire with an older technology flashlight, and I’ve been cautious about accidental activation of my lights ever since.

To answer one question that often comes up: if I’m walking to my car, the flashlight is prepped and in my hand, not in my pocket or purse where it’s slower to get.

Knife

Then there’s the knife. I carry it with me most days, but it’s frankly a lower priority than the other items. If I accidentally leave it on the nightstand, it’s probably staying there because I’m unlikely to turn around to get it.

The knife has sentimental importance to me: good friends have given me every knife I’ve ever carried, including my current favorites: a Ken Onion-designed Leek or Chive from Kershaw. Most often, I carry the Chive because it’s shorter and women’s pants pockets are annoyingly short. When I have short pockets, the longer knife sometimes jumps out of my pocket when I sit down, so I only carry it when I’m wearing pants with deeper pockets. Both of them are beautiful little tools, and I love the rainbow titanium finish of the ones I’m using these days.

My knife comes in handy fairly often during the day – for opening boxes, cutting string, getting into a package or slicing up a snack while we’re on the road. You’d be surprised how often you need a knife for things like that.

Yes. That’s what I said. Unlike many of my people, I often use my pocket knife as a simple tool and don’t get obsessive about protecting its edge. (Although of course I sharpen it from time to time!) For me, a knife is a functional cutting implement, and I use it for a million things.

Except as an absolute last resort, the knife is not really part of my defensive plans. In part, that’s because I already have a lethal-force option (the gun). People tend to think of knives as lesser weapons, as less-lethal force, but that’s not true. They are per-se deadly weapons in almost every jurisdiction I can think of. Using a knife is using deadly force. Those who have trained in knife defense, and those who have seen the results of knife attacks, know exactly how serious knives can be. Like firearms, they are deadly weapons.

The knife can be an excellent defensive tool for those who have trained with it. However, it’s not a lower level of force than using the gun, so it’s a redundant tool in that department. Not only that, but it requires you to get within close arm’s reach of your attacker, and using it requires a very personal commitment to violence. It’s an extremely messy weapon, and using it means you will definitely expose yourself to any bloodborne pathogens your attacker might carry. Statistically, using a knife for self defense creates a higher risk of injury or death to yourself – a risk you can and should reduce with good training.

My knife functions as a back up to the gun, but it’s not a serious alternative to the gun. It’s simply a potential last-ditch rescue tool if the gun fails for some reason. Speaking of last-ditch rescue tools, I keep a spare knife near my driver’s seat, and another in the glove box. Useful for cutting a seat belt, should it come to that.

What have you got in your pocketses?

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TAE #6: Feel It on the Range

This is the sixth in a series of simple exercises you can do to improve your trigger control. These exercises will help you become more aware of your trigger finger and better able to control its motions. No matter how fast you can draw or how dynamically you can move, you will not be prepared to defend yourself with a firearm until you can hit your target reliably. You cannot hit your target reliably until you develop good trigger control, and that’s what this series is about.

Trigger Awareness Exercise #6 is a live-fire drill, so get yourself to the range and load your gun. Place your target at 4 to 5 yards, close enough that you won’t waste a lot of energy thinking about the target. Today your range time is allllll about the trigger!

Step One: Feel It

Just like you did in Exercise #1: Feel the Trigger and in Exercise #2: Watch the Wobble, you must press the trigger very, very slowly while keeping your front sight as well-aligned as humanly possible. Press that trigger SLOWLY. Do not speed up just because you’re going live. Keep it agonizingly slow so you can feel the trigger as you work.

Line up your sights just as you did in Exercise #2. Keep your eye on your front sight, but don’t worry about the sights right now. Instead, think only about what’s happening underneath your trigger finger.

Press the trigger very slowly and very smoothly. Make it move at exactly the same speed from the beginning of your trigger press all the way back until the shot fires. Don’t speed up toward the end (“the shot should fire … NOW!!”).  Just steadily increase your pressure on the trigger while you concentrate on what you feel with your finger.

As you press the trigger, concentrate on what you feel with your trigger finger. What stays the same as when you dry fired? What feels different? As the trigger moves, can your finger feel any mechanical changes going on inside the gun? Any little crunches or bits of grit? Does the trigger get heavier as you bring it to the rear? Does it feel the same all the way back?

When you were thinking about how the trigger felt under your finger, did the shot going off surprise you? If so, that’s a good sign – and your target probably looked pretty good, too. As long as you concentrate on pressing the trigger smoothly, and on what your finger feels while you’re doing that, you will be far more likely to hit where you intend to hit.

Feel every slight little motion inside the trigger, slowly, at least five more times before moving on to the next step.

Step 2: Slacker

Since you have practiced feeling your trigger so much during these exercises, you may have noticed something we call “trigger slack.” On some guns (not all), the trigger will travel freely and without resistance for a little ways before you can feel the mechanisms inside the gun start doing their work. That extremely light movement, before you can feel any resistance from the trigger, isn’t doing any work inside the gun. It’s just slack.

If your gun has some trigger slack – remember, not every gun does – line your sights up on target and press the trigger just to the point where you begin to feel resistance. Can you feel that point? How far back is it?

Different trainers recommend different ways to deal with slack. At Cornered Cat, I like to see my beginning shooters simply pressing the trigger at the same speed all the way back, regardless of the change in trigger weight as the trigger moves. For more advanced shooters, it can be helpful to remove the slack quickly before you begin your real trigger press. However, removing the slack at a different speed than you perform the rest of the trigger press is an advanced skill that can get in the new shooter’s way. Since I can’t see you shooting right now, I can’t make a personalized recommendation for you.

For now, here’s what I want you to do: If your trigger has slack at the beginning of the press, play around with it a little. Find the spot where the slack stops and the real trigger press begins. Be aware of that point and learn where it is so well that you can’t bring yourself to crash through it without noticing.

Practice finding the slack point enough times that you can do it without thinking about it. You don’t want to be in the habit of ‘crashing through’ the slack into the heavier, real trigger press, and you do want to be able to remove the slack as efficiently as possible when you start shooting. So pay close attention to where the slack ends and teach your finger how to find that point easily,  without having to think about it.

Again: not every trigger will have slack. The above section was only for those who have triggers with slack in them. If you can’t tell whether it applies to you and your gun, it didn’t. Just press your trigger smoothly and don’t worry about it.

Part C: Wobble Reprise

Now that we’re on the range, you’re probably noticing more wobble in your sights than you did at home in dry fire. That’s okay. Everyone wobbles, especially when adrenalin gets involved. Guess what, friends? Shooting a live firearm usually gives us a nice solid dose of adrenalin! So it’s not surprising if you find your hands trembling or shaking, or see your sights wobbling. That’s all normal and perfectly acceptable. Just be sure to stay in control of your own trigger press, and you’ll be fine.

Some people will have a hard time accepting the wobble. If you’re one of them, I want you to do trigger press WRONG for this next step. Yes, really. (What kind of a trainer tells students how to do things wrong? Um, me apparently! Just so you know, I’m telling you how to do it wrong so that you can more easily understand why the other way is better.)

WRONG: (But do it anyway so you can see it happening.)  Line up your sights. Watch the wobble. When the front sight wobbles across the exact center of your target, yank the trigger back just as fast as you can! Do this at least five times and then mark your target so you know where the shots went.

RIGHT: Line up your sights. Watch the wobble, but don’t worry about it. As your sights wobble a little bit, keep lining them back up with the center of your target while you press the trigger slowly and smoothly. Don’t make the gun fire at any particular time; just press the trigger until it does fire. Do this at least five times and then compare your hits to the others.

Pizza-slice patterns are caused by sudden trigger yanks and by flinch. These are two separate problems with different solutions.

Pizza-slice patterns are caused by sudden trigger yanks and by flinch. These are two separate problems with different solutions.

When you suddenly yank the trigger back, your shots will often go low. For a right handed shooter, the shots will usually hit low left, while for a left handed shooter they will usually hit low right. On the other hand, when you accept the wobble and simply press the trigger at the same speed from start to finish, your shots will usually go exactly where you intended them to go.

Incidentally, this sudden yank isn’t the same thing as a flinch, even though the target will look about the same. (That pizza slice, remember?) A flinch tends to happen when your body reacts ahead of time to the expected recoil. From the inside, a true flinch feels a little bit like when your knee jerks when the doctor checks your reflexes. It’s not a reflex (it’s within your control), but it feels kind of like that. That’s not what we’re talking about here. What we’re talking about here is simply when you choose to suddenly do an uncontrolled yank on the trigger to get ahead of your own wobbly sights.

As you’ve probably surmised, you can have both a trigger-yank problem and a flinch problem. Your work in dry fire will definitely remove the flinch, but the only way to fix the yank is by making a mental shift to accept the wobble while realigning the sights throughout your trigger press.

To finish up your range time, press the trigger the right way, with full concentration on your front sight and a steady trigger press, at least 20 more times.

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Hardy Har Har

Occasionally, like everyone else in this business I suppose, I step over to see what’s going on on YouTube. One thing that really chaps my hide: the number of people who think it’s really funny to post videos of women getting knocked on their rear ends by unexpected recoil. Chuckle, chuckle.

Right.

People, it is not that hard to introduce someone to firearms in a safe and appropriate way. It is not rocket science. All it takes is a few minutes of instruction about how to hold the gun and how to stand. It also takes an appropriately sized firearm, and a little attention to safety. Hardly a big deal.

Here is an example of the sort of “funny” video I am talking about. (Edit: I’m having trouble with the embed function. The link is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXfg5o1ZVq4)

Viewing that video of new shooters with viciously unfunny range friends may help us visualize what went wrong for the woman in this news story.

“Corredor-Rivera died of a single self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Ralls County Sheriff Gerry Dinwiddie tells WGEM-TV that the woman was shooting a .500-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun when the strength of the gun’s recoil caused her to lose control. … The sheriff said the gun spun around in her hand, leading to a second fatal shot.”

Somehow, I cannot bring myself to laugh at such things. Can you?

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Coming Attractions

It’s been a busy few days around here, so the blog’s been a little neglected. Don’t worry, though – your free ice cream machine is still spluttering along. Here’s what’s in the works right now.

First, we still aren’t done with the Trigger Awareness Exercise series. There will be a new one a little later this week, and several more after that. Keep watching this space.

Also coming up soon, a post about a product I hope nobody will buy. And about the ethics of naming names when someone in our community tries to sell something dangerous, stupid, or  dangerously stupid to the rest of us.

Have you ever thought about how very obsessed we often are with how people look? I’ve got one of my patented, rambling, this-all-ties-together-at-the-end posts coming up about that, and about how that affects the way we prepare to defend ourselves from violent crime.

Meanwhile, since we just passed Veteran’s Day, check out this article about the newest Medal of Honor recipient — or watch the video. Courage under fire, in spades.

Stay safe.

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