The Cornered Cat
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Face It
November 6, 2013

Yesterday, I sent you over to Rory Miller’s blog to learn a little more about how to explain what happened after a defensive use of force. That leads us straight into today’s subject, because if you’re like most people, the idea of dealing with the legal system after a shooting probably makes you more than a little nervous. How can you explain what you knew, what you saw, what you did? How can you effectively tell your story to the legal system?

If questions like that bother you, I can’t think of a better place to start setting your fears to rest than at the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network. The ACLDN offers excellent information in the form of a regular online newsletter (free even to non-members). The set of DVDs that come with membership provide solid education from well-known experts in the field on a wide range of topics: basic concepts of justified use of force, reading body language and pre-assault indicators, using lower levels of force, physical and physiological reactions to extreme danger, how to deal with law enforcement officers after a shooting, and more.

In addition to the terrific flood of information that comes with membership, ACLDN also provides expert advice and financial resources to help its members weather the aftermath of a shooting. Those financial resources are not insignificant — $10k immediately up front for lawyer fees, with  significantly more available if the case proceeds — but they pale in comparison to the value of having experienced experts in your corner and on your team.

Whether or not you decide to join ACLDN, don’t go through the rest of your life feeling vaguely worried about how you might deal with the aftermath of a self-defense incident. If you carry a gun, you owe it to yourself to learn what to do if you ever need to use it.

Although studying what can happen to you legally after you defend yourself from a criminal might seem scary at first, it’s far scarier to be unprepared and blindsided by unexpected aftereffects. So instead of quietly stuffing your fears down into your guts where they’ll rot and give you ulcers in your sleep, pull them out and examine them with your eyes wide open! Then reach down, pull up your socks, and make plans based on a realistic understanding of how the legal system really works. You’ll be glad you did.

Disclaimer: ACLDN founder Marty Hayes, and his wife Gila Hayes, have been close friends and mentors to me for more than 14 years. I occasionally earn a paycheck from them as an instructor at their school, the Firearms Academy of Seattle. In addition to this, ACLDN advisory board member Massad Ayoob has also been a strong mentor and friend of mine for many years, and so has advisory board member Tom Givens. I know these guys personally and trust them implicitly, and that’s where my bias is.
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How You Say It
November 5, 2013

“It’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.”

Although that might sound like a tired old cliche, it’s actually a vibrant truth in the world of self defense. If you want to stay out of trouble after using force against another person, you must be able to explain what you did and why you did it. Not only this, but your explanation must make sense to the rest of your community.

If your explanation makes sense in a way that good people will understand and support, you’ll probably be in solid legal, financial, and social shape after your use of force. If it doesn’t, you probably won’t.

Over on the Chiron blog, Rory Miller offers his take on articulation after a violent encounter. Take the time to read both posts and think about what he says. They’re very powerful.

After reading those posts, think about where your personal strengths and weaknesses fall in this area. When you spot a weakness, don’t just cover it up or ignore it. Actively make plans to get stronger! Do your research, learn more, and practice what you learn in ways that make sense to you.

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TAE #5: Random Whistle Stop
November 4, 2013

This is the fifth 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.

IMPORTANT SAFETY NOTE!  Start with an empty firearm within the confines of your safe dry fire routine. Check to be sure it is really empty, then choose a safe direction. Never “dry fire” a gun outside of your safe dry fire routine. Before beginning this or any other dry fire drill, ALWAYS check the status of your gun to be sure it is unloaded. Regardless of the gun’s loaded or unloaded status, ALWAYS follow the universal rules of gun safety while you practice.

Exercise #5: Random Whistle Stop

Start with the skills you developed in Exercise #3: Save Your Pennies,  and especially in Exercise #4: the Whistle Stop.

Don't let the penny drop.

Don’t let the penny drop.

Can you keep a penny balanced on your front sight while you press the trigger slowly? Can you keep it there while you press the trigger quickly? Or on a signal? Excellent! Now you’re going to develop that trigger skill just a little further, by keeping the penny on your front sight when the timing of your trigger press is a complete surprise to you.

Here’s how: Just as you did in Exercise #4, you will need a smartphone timer app or some other way to give yourself a repeating “go” signal that you don’t directly control. But for this drill, you need an app that lets you set up a series of timers that will play in sequence.

Set those timers in an infinite loop in a mixed order, with some shorter times and some longer ones. The intervals should take anywhere from 2 seconds up to 6 or 7 seconds between beeps. Mix it up so you’ll never know how long you’ll be waiting for the next signal. This makes each beep a genuine surprise, which challenges your trigger control even more than a predictably-timed beep will do.

Now simply follow the same directions as in Trigger Awareness Exercise #4. Remember to press the trigger immediately when you hear the beep, and try to finish your trigger press before the beep stops. Press the trigger immediately and press it quickly, but don’t let the penny fall!

Lather, rinse, repeat.

(Watch this blog. More exercises to come!)

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TAE #4: Whistle Stop
November 2, 2013

This is the fourth drill 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.

IMPORTANT SAFETY NOTE!  Start with an empty firearm within the confines of your safe dry fire routine. Check to be sure it is really empty, then choose a safe direction. Never “dry fire” a gun outside of your safe dry fire routine. Before beginning this or any other dry fire drill, ALWAYS check the status of your gun to be sure it is unloaded. Regardless of the gun’s loaded or unloaded status, ALWAYS follow the universal rules of gun safety while you practice.

Exercise #4: Whistle Stop

Remember your practice drill in TAE #3, the one with the penny? We’re going to ramp that drill up and stand it on its head. This is an advanced drill, so be patient with yourself if you have a hard time making it work at first. With repeated practice, you’ll find success!

Place the penny on your front sight ...

Place the penny on your front sight …

For this exercise, you need a smartphone stopwatch app or some other way to give yourself a repeating “go” signal that you don’t directly control. For example, on my Droid, I installed a simple timer app that allows me to set it on an infinite loop. Your signal should beep every five seconds or so — long enough that you have time to settle down once the penny is on your sights, but short enough that you won’t need to wait too long until it’s time to press the trigger.

(If you don’t have a smartphone, grab a smart friend to give you a start signal instead.)

  • Start your infinite loop timer. Prepare to ignore it a few times while you get set up.
  • Place the penny on your front sight. Carefully (so you don’t disturb the penny) get into your perfect shooting stance, including putting your eyeball correctly behind your sights with the sight on your chosen target. Yep, that means you’re looking through the rear sights, at the front sight which will be underneath the balanced penny.

    ... then get a good sight picture with your finger on the trigger.

    … then get a good sight picture with your finger on the trigger.

  • Place your finger on the trigger and settle down with your eyes on your front sight.
  • Wait for the next beep. Immediately, as soon as that next beep sounds, press the trigger. Your goal is to start your trigger press immediately when you hear the beep – not a moment later. Try to finish your trigger press before the beep shuts off, too.
  • Now ignore the next few beeps while you reset the gun and put the penny back on the front sight to do everything again. Get into your stance, settle down with your eye on the front sight, put your finger on the trigger, and press the trigger  immediately when you hear the next beep.

What are we practicing here? We’re practicing a sudden, quick compression of the trigger without jerking the gun off target. If the penny falls when you press the trigger, you aren’t pressing the trigger smoothly enough. If it stays there throughout your entire trigger press, you did it right — as long as you pressed the trigger immediately when you heard the beep start!

This skill translates directly into being able to get good hits with a good speed.

Try again. And again…

(Watch this blog. More exercises to come!)

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All Hallow’s Eve
October 31, 2013

Completely off topic, but as much as I’m enjoying being a mom to  young adults, this time of year I really do miss having small children in the house. This video, for example, just about killed me:

When my children were little, Halloween was one of my favorite holidays. Our family tradition requires absolutely no store-bought, off-the-shelves costumes — the outfits had to be handmade, using things we could find around the house or scrounge from free or near-free sources. Also, I’m not a seamstress, and even if I had been, I wasn’t willing buy fabric for something that would last exactly one night. So coming up with costumes for all five kids always took a little … creative thinking.

Not as tough as it sounds, really. At least, not once we got the hang of it.

One year, our two youngest children wanted to be firefighters. Easy peasy — they already had bright-red rain slickers and rubber boots, and our garden hose had recently died. I chopped off two feet of hose per kid, then ran down to the dollar store and picked up two firefighter hats. Mission accomplished. Total cost per kid: $1.

The year after that, one of the kids got into the Christmas decorations and pulled out a garland. And a string of battery-powered mini LED lights. You could almost see the wheels spinning: Hmmmm… what can I do with these? A short time later, he came into the house and asked if he could take the old round laundry basket that I was going to throw out. He flipped it upside down, ran the garland around it, decorated it with LED lights and tinsel … and thus was born the walking Christmas tree. Good plan. Total cost: one fresh 9 volt battery.

Another year, nobody had any really strong ideas of their own, so I told ’em I was taking charge. Then I scrounged up five square-ish cardboard boxes, painted them white and slapped some black circles on each side of each box. Cut holes for arms and head, and … hey presto! All five of them had a hoot telling anyone who asked, “Oh, we’re a Yahtzee game. Our parents rolled a full house.” Total cost for all five kids: one can of spray paint and a roll of contact paper for the circles.

One year we had a robot (cardboard box, silver spray paint, old dryer duct for arms and legs, and a circuit board from Radio Shack that we’d had for years) — the best part was, the kid had a super short buzzcut that year anyway, so we just slathered silver face paint over his whole scalp and gave him a metal strap headband that we found in the garage. Best looking robot costume I’d ever seen.

Maybe I got a little carried away with the cardboard boxes. We had this brilliant idea that three of them could go as a train: an engine, a coal car, and a caboose. For the engine, we slapped two big boxes together, painted ’em right, and threw an engineer’s hat on the kid. Best part? I found a perfect black trash can from the dollar store, so we fastened it to the top front of the engine as a smoke stack, then sloshed a little water into it and tossed in a chunk of dry ice. Steam! The coal car took a little planning, but it worked out. We gave the kid a big, open box that we piled full of bunch of newspaper “coal” pieces spray painted black. Had him wear an old shirt, smeared a smudge of black makeup on his face, and that was it. The cabboose was nifty, too; we managed to rig up a tiny little “back porch” with an undersized hurricane lamp hanging from it. (Lamp from the dollar store — are you seeing a theme here?)  Seen all together in a train, those three kids looked awesome.

But have you ever tried to get even one refrigerator carton (let alone three!!!) onto a neighbor’s front porch, in the dark, without kicking over any jack’o’lanterns or setting anyone’s costume on fire?

So … how was your Halloween?

(Also, keep watching this space — more Trigger Awareness Exercises on the way!)

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Survey says …?
October 30, 2013

This week, Gallup released a poll taken among American gun owners — or at least, among a limited set of people who own guns and who were willing to answer questions from a stranger on the telelphone.

With results that will surprise nobody who’s been paying attention, a strong majority (60%) of those who answered the question replied that they own guns for personal protection. 1 When the NSSF took a similar poll of gun owners, they reported even higher numbers of people owning guns for self defense, at 73%.

The Gallup pollsters framed both the question and its answers inside the context of gun control and political plans. Fine for them, but I’m thinking about us. You and me. And about the community that we share. Why do you own a gun? Since you’re hanging out on this website, I have to believe it’s because you have at least a tiny little interest in protecting yourself from violent crime. So do I. And so do a strong majority of everyone who owns a gun, no matter which company’s numbers you believe.

But wait, let me throw a few more numbers at you before I say what I mean to say here. Over the past few years, we have seen record numbers of people buying guns. Going by the number of background checks (which isn’t an exact number for a lot of reasons, but gives a better ballpark than any other figures we have), there were almost 20 million guns sold in 2012 alone! Check out the link in the previous sentence, which goes to the FBI’s NICS summary page with numbers going back to 1998. Gun sales performed an astounding jump in the past two or three years, and that was on top of already brisk numbers. But even that doesn’t tell the whole tale.

Check this out. Two years ago, in October 2011, Gallup turned in the highest number of self-reported gun owners in America since 1993. According to that report, almost half (47%) of American households own guns. Not only that, but in that year, 23% of American women reported that they personally own a gun (not just have a gun in the house, but the gun in the house belongs to them personally).

Okay, so what we have here are record numbers of people buying guns, and record numbers of women buying guns. At least 60% and possibly as high as 73% of peope who buy guns do so because they are specifically interested in self-defense.

So why in the world are there so many programs intended for new shooters, and especially those for female new shooters, designed to tiptoe around the idea of using a gun to defend yourself?

How many times have you heard someone say something like this:

  • “We just want to emphasize the fun parts of gun ownership, not drive them away by talking about self-defense.”
  • “Don’t ever say ‘weapon’! That will scare people…”
  • “Remember, this is all about just having fun on the range, so don’t bring up any serious or depressing topics when you’re talking to people…”
  • “We absolutely do not allow human-shaped targets on our range. People just want to hit bullseyes and have fun with friends.”

From where I’m sitting, it sure looks like a lot of new gun owners come into our community looking for self-defense information. So why are so many outreach programs so reluctant to give it it to them?

Discuss, please.

Notes:

  1. For comparison, a little over a third (36%) said they own guns for hunting, and a combined 21% own them for recreation, sport, or target shooting. ↩
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TAE #3: Save Your Pennies
October 29, 2013

This is the third 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.

IMPORTANT SAFETY NOTE!  Start with an empty firearm within the confines of your safe dry fire routine. Check to be sure it is really empty, then choose a safe direction. Never “dry fire” a gun outside of your safe dry fire routine. Before beginning this or any other dry fire drill, ALWAYS check the status of your gun to be sure it is unloaded. Regardless of the gun’s loaded or unloaded status, ALWAYS follow the universal rules of gun safety while you practice.

Exercise #3: Save Your Pennies

Even though a slight tremor or wobble is entirely normal, it’s still important to press the trigger as smoothly as you can. This exercise helps train you to do that.

Don't let the penny drop.

Don’t let the penny drop.

Take an ordinary penny. Better yet, make sure you have a good handful of pennies within reach, because sometimes the penny will drop unexpectedly. Place the penny, flat, on top of your front sight, so it is balanced near the front of your gun. Now carefully press the trigger as smoothly as you can. Can you press the trigger past its break point without letting the penny fall?

Keep practicing until you can keep the penny balanced there every time you press the trigger. You want it to stay balanced during the entire trigger press, including after the hammer falls.

Now here’s something tricky: once you can do this in a very slow and deliberate manner, try speeding up your trigger press. Can you keep the penny there while pressing the trigger quickly? What stays the same? What changes? Do you find it harder to do?

Whether you are shooting live fire or dry fire, and no matter what speed you are shooting, your trigger press should always be so smooth that it would never knock a balanced penny off your front sight.

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Mentoring Newbies 101
October 28, 2013

The question:

A friend asked me what kind of gun she should get. …Don’t worry: I know not to choose a gun for someone else. That’s not my question today.

My concern is that I know she doesn’t understand the depth of what she’s asking. I’m terrified of her buying a rabbit’s-foot gun (She also said “I don’t want to really kill someone”) and being in more danger from the false sense of security.

But I also don’t want to tell her that she has to study and train until she’s as good as Kathy Jackson before she should consider carrying. At least, I hope she doesn’t: I’m certainly not where I’d like to be yet, but I consider carry to be right for me.

How best to emphasize the serious responsibility of CCW while still encouraging a newbie?

My response: Wow, you just said a mouthful! I started to answer this on Facebook (where it was asked), then realized it was going to take a lot more words than fit easily into the Fb format. So here we are.

There are several issues here, some thornier than others. Listed from easiest to hardest to answer, the questions I see are:

  1. What kind of gun do you recommend to a newbie? (Thanks for letting me off the hook on answering this one – that makes it the easiest question in your note!)  😉
  2. How much training is ‘enough’ for someone who wants to carry a gun?
  3. How can I tell if my friend understands that carrying a gun is a serious decision? And how can I help my friend take that decision seriously, if she doesn’t already?

Skipping over question 1), which you mercifully allowed me to ignore, let’s take a look at the remaining two issues.

How much training is ‘enough’?

Yes, I know you didn’t ask the question in those words. (Thanks for letting me play off your ideas, though!) What you did say was, “But I also don’t want to tell her that she has to study and train until she’s as good as Kathy Jackson before she should consider carrying…”

Here’s a secret: Kathy Jackson wasn’t as good as Kathy Jackson when she first started carrying.  The ugly truth is that I have absolutely no natural talent for physical skills, and shooting is a physical skill. You know that old saw about how women are “naturally” good at fine-motor skills, like pressing the trigger smoothly? You couldn’t prove it by me. In fact, the way I ended up taking any shooting classes at all was because a friend of ours used to build his own homemade target stands and take us out to shoot with him. One day, after several months of him doing everything he could to help me, he finally got fed up with me shooting the legs off his target stands (and the dirt in front of them) and told me I had to go take a class. “I’ve done all I can do for you,” was how he charitably put it.

He was right.

Despite the fact that I was such a bad shooter, I had already begun carrying my pistol by then. Should I have? Well… yes. Make that a qualified yes, because I already had the mindset for it. What I didn’t have were the knowledge and the skills I have now. So carrying the gun at that point was the right decision for me, but it might not be the right decision for someone else.

A gun you have with you works a lot better to defend yourself with than a gun you don’t have with you. Of course, the only criminal problem I could have solved at that point was one where the bad guy got so close to me that I couldn’t possibly miss him. Or (even better) the kind where the bad guy went running away as soon as he saw that I was armed. Since good people defend themselves in exactly that way at least a million times a year in this country, with the bad guy running away without a single shot being fired, I feel comfortable saying that even if you’re a poor shooter, you’re better off defending yourself with a gun than without one.

But.

The real question is, should I have stayed at that level of skill, where I couldn’t reliably hit a non-moving piece of cardboard from five steps away? Um, no. That would have been a bad plan. For one thing, even though most defensive gun uses end with no shots fired, just with the good guy showing the bad guy that he chose the wrong victim by showing him the gun, that doesn’t mean all defensive gun uses end that way. Quite a lot of them end up with the good guy needing to, you know, actually hit the bad guy with a bullet or six. That being the case, it’s better if you can put the bullet exactly where you intend to put it, and not hit somewhere, something, or someone else.

One more caveat: Carrying a gun when I didn’t have the skills to do much with it yet was the right decision for me, but it may not have been the best decision for my family or anyone else I cared about, because I really didn’t have the skills to help anyone else. Criminals don’t just attack people who are alone. Sometimes they attack people who are with other people, with loved ones and friends. Sometimes they attack the family member across the room from you, and if you don’t have the skills to stop the bad guy without hitting your own husband or child, you’re going to be in a world of hurt.

With all that in mind, having the mindset and skill to stop a single, not-too-smart  attacker at point-blank range is all you need in order to make the decision to start carrying. But it’s not a good place to stop.

(At this point, you’re probably wondering, “Uhhhh, so how much training and knowledge is ‘enough’, then?” That’s actually a trick question. There’s no real answer. That’s because making the decision to protect yourself is a lifestyle change – a journey rather than a destination. Start where you are, learn more as you go along. Be free.)

It’s serious – but does she know that?

Knowing you, I know you’re already doing most of the right things as you talk to your friend. You listen. You ask questions. You give thoughtful answers when she asks questions. All of the things that make pleasant, useful conversations and interactions between people, you’re already doing. Good for you! Those listening and feedback skills are exactly the skills that help you figure out what she needs to know next, and how to help her find it successfully.

So let’s move on to what you really asked: How best to emphasize the serious responsibility of CCW while still encouraging a newbie?

Choosing to carry a gun is serious business. You know this, I know this, and we want everyone who carries a gun to know it too.

The decision to arm yourself with lethal force is not for the squeamish or for the faint of heart. It does require a definite, ongoing commitment to safe behavior around a deadly weapon. It requires some honest soul-searching: are you really willing to use this thing if you have to? You have to face some deeply personal questions about your ethical and moral choices, and know that similar questions will keep coming up for as long as it takes for you to process this lifestyle change. You’re making a decision to learn a little about the law, a little about crime, a little about self-defense, and a lot about human nature including your own. And if you’re smart, you realize that you’ll need to learn how to physically use the firearm, first the fundamentals and then how to apply those fundamentals to different situations, and that you’ll need to keep your learning up to date as time goes on.

None of those are minor things… and they are all absolutely frightening to process all at once. Please don’t drop everything you know about carrying a gun on your friend, all at once, in one big terrifying package. It’s not necessary and it’s not fair. She only needs to take the next step, then decide if that step was the direction she wanted to go, before she takes the one after that. And she gets to decide how big each step will be, or whether she’ll take the next one. Your job is simply to be a friend and offer her opportunities to learn more as she’s ready for them.

One thing you can do, if you haven’t done it already, is to download a copy of Marty Hayes’ excellent booklet What Every Gun Owner Needs to Know About Self-Defense Law. It’s available free from the Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network as their outreach to the defensive firearms community. You can also order the same material as a (free) physical booklet from the same source. This little booklet provides a lot of very good information in a quick, easy-to-read format. There’s just enough there to get a newcomer pointed in the right direction, without scaring them too badly about the whole thing.

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I did write a book about this stuff … and Christmas is coming. If you think your friend is ready for it, you might want to pop on over to Amazon and pick up a copy of The Cornered Cat: A Woman’s Guide to Concealed Carry. The nice thing about it being in book form is that she can put it in her bathroom, or on her nightstand, and just read a tiny little bit whenever she’s ready for it. Or skim through to find the parts she cares about. She doesn’t have to process everything at once, but the book itself can serve as a kind of physical reminder that she can learn more if she wants.

Another idea: if there’s a women’s shooting club in your area, such as the wonderful A Girl and A Gun clubs, you might invite her to join you for a Girl’s Night Out or other events. Within that very supportive and welcoming format, you’ll both make some new friends and will have the chance to learn more about gun ownership in a friendly, low-key kind of way.

If your friend does decide to move ahead with firearms ownership and wants to learn even more, you could invite her to take a class with you. Whether you’ve taken one before or not, it never hurts to refresh the fundamentals for yourself, and it’s always more fun to shoot with a friend. Perhaps you can even get a group of friends together to do the same thing, because after the class you will have a lot to talk about, and it’s wonderfully refreshing to have friends you can process things with who understand exactly where you’re coming from.

Bottom line

Be a good friend. Listen. Ask questions. Offer opportunities. Enjoy the journey.

 

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