The Cornered Cat
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Big Gains in Personal Safety
August 8, 2013

Here’s a dirty little secret of the defensive handgun training industry: All the biggest gains in personal safety don’t happen on the firing range. They actually happen inside your own mind.

The big gains come from realizing that your life is beautiful, and worth defending. They come from making the decision to fight back if you’re attacked, and from doing the hard personal work it takes to make sure you really mean that decision. They come from factors such as awareness and avoidance, de-escalation and deterrence. They come from being willing to do whatever it takes to get to safety. Once you have made that decision, you are more likely to avoid trouble, more likely to see trouble coming, and less likely to be chosen as the target in the first place. If you are targeted, the mindset that leads you to take quick and decisive action – no matter how fundamentally unskilled – will likely result in the criminal running for the hills. The big gains are all in your mind.

But here’s the caveat, and it’s a biggie: Without getting the physical skills it takes to back up your mindset decisions, you really haven’t gotten the mindset yet either. At most, you’ve got something I think of as willing-to-be-willing. That’s an excellent (and necessary!) place to start, but it isn’t the end of your journey. Not yet. The next step is getting the skills. Without physical skills you really trust, you can only mimic true confidence. 1 But once you develop your skills, your confidence blooms into something new, something almost tangible. It’s the difference between the little dog yapping at the scary bad thing, or the big dog just watching it silently with one lip curled. Both dogs feel the emotion of confidence on the inside, but which one has the type of confidence that gets respect and caution from the intruder?

After working on physical skills, it’s time to go back and re-assess your mindset. Your improved skills make it much easier for you to maintain your mindset in a healthy way, with much less strain on your emotions, with lower levels of negative emotions such as fear and much higher levels of positive emotions such as confidence, assurance, boldness. Worry gets replaced by the fierce protectiveness a good woman feels toward the weak; dread turns into audacious dedication to doing whatever it takes. Why is this? It’s because when confidence comes from actual ability, you no longer have to pretend to confidence you don’t yet have. Further, it’s a lot easier to muster the willingness to act. Who would want to do anything, if we weren’t confident of our ability to do the things we set out to do? Immediate, decisive action comes most easily to those who know they can carry it off.

In this sense, our bodies teach our minds. And that’s where the big gains really are.

Notes:

  1. I absolutely am not downplaying the importance of mimicking confidence. See the Wonder Woman post for more about that. ↩
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Wonder Woman
August 7, 2013

One thing I’ve been studying lately: body language. Since  I don’t have a lot of natural aptitude for reading people, I’ve had to study and work hard to understand the nonverbal signals people send. The way this type of communication works fascinates me, and it’s important too, since the core of my job is communication with students. For all these reasons, when a friend pointed me to this TED Talk, I dropped everything to watch it.

I explained why I was interested in that video, but are you wondering why I asked you to watch it? It’s because our body language is a key aspect of avoiding violent crime; or, more precisely, it’s a key aspect of violent criminals avoiding us.

Successful criminals have mastered the art of choosing compliant victims.  They do this by watching the non-verbal signals people send. Is that potential victim fearful, aware, distracted, alert, clueless, confident…? All of those possibilities exist within every single one of us, every minute of every day.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you deliberately send dominance or power signals when you’re accosted. Nope. I’m suggesting that you start your day with the exercise the video suggests, and refresh it in private whenever you’re feeling unsure of yourself. As the lecturer says, it’s a small life hack that can help your life unfold in some amazing and unexpected ways. As you become more certain of yourself, more confident in your place in the world, your improved confidence can also help criminals make informed choices about who not to attack.

Plus, we now have an answer to the age-old question: “Why does Wonder Woman stand like that?”

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Blame
August 5, 2013

cause-of-rape

Here’s a poster that expresses an important point of view — one that we need to understand when we talk to other women about protecting themselves from violent crime. Awhile back, one of my friends shared it inside a private group on Facebook, and asked the question: “Is this an overly simplistic approach, or a brutal truth?” 1

My thought about this idea is that it’s very simplistic. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It is true, just not complete.

Let me explain where I’m coming from on this one by first sharing something I wrote in The Cornered Cat: A Woman’s Guide to Concealed Carry. It’s toward the front of the book, because as I thought about the people who would be reading my book, I knew some readers would be people who have suffered from criminal actions in the past.  Here’s what I said:

[I]f you have survived a violent crime, YOU ARE NOT TO BLAME FOR ANY ASPECT OF THAT CRIME. Period, full stop. The criminal—and only the criminal—is to blame. Not you. Not in any way. Not ever.

To some people, any discussion of ways to avoid or limit the damage from a criminal assault just smacks of blaming the victim.  There’s a very fine line indeed between saying, “Avoiding this thing may reduce your risk of being attacked” and saying, “Doing this thing causes criminals to attack.” … Seeing how the entire train of thought so readily runs down the rails to land in Blame-the-Victim Station churns the stomach and creates tremendous, visceral anger. This isn’t an unreasonable reaction to such a painful outcome, but it’s also not helpful for the survivor once she begins looking for ways to increase her own power in the world.

Predators prey. It’s what they do. They find opportunities to attack other people. To help innocent people avoid becoming victims necessarily means discussing the opportunities predators take: how those opportunities happen, when and where they happen, ways to avoid allowing them to happen. Does that mean we’re giving the predator a free pass, or blaming the innocent victim for the crime? Nope. Not at all. All the opportunities in the world won’t cause a good person to turn into a predator. No matter how abundant the opportunities, it is the presence of the predator alone that makes the difference between a crime that happens and a crime that never happens. No matter what the victim did or didn’t do, it is the predator—and only the predator—who chooses whether an opportunity actually becomes a criminal attack. …

[W]e have no control over what choices others (including predators) might make. We can only control our own choices. The predator might attack or walk away without attacking, a choice utterly beyond our control. But that does not mean we have no power at all. We do have power: the power to limit the number of opportunities we offer to the predators among us, and the related choice of how we respond if we are violently attacked.”

 So here we are back at that poster. Rapists — people who decide to rape someone, then carry out that plan — are, in actual fact, the only cause of rape in the world. If nobody ever decided to do that thing, that thing would never be done.  This is true regardless of what choices women make or don’t make. Yes, we can talk about odds and probabilities. But it still boils down to people deciding to prey on other people.

There are many, many women who have been raped or suffered from other types of violence while they were minding their own business, stone cold sober, inside their own homes, with the doors locked, dressed modestly. Those of us who tell others how to reduce the possibility of being attacked need to keep that knowledge constantly in mind. We have absolutely no guarantees to offer anyone here. We simply have possibilities and probabilities — and every possibility we offer is absolutely negated by the choice of criminal to be a criminal and behave in criminal ways.

We can do nothing, absolutely nothing, about the criminal’s choices in the immediate moment. This is why we don’t simply teach avoidance! We don’t just tell people to stay out of bad situations. We also teach response, what to do when you find yourself in a bad place. We do that  because we know that avoidance is imperfect at best.

Our own choices never cause a criminal attack. Ever.

All the same, we can make choices that reduce the opportunities that evil people have to do their thing.

We cannot control what other people do. Ever.

But we can look to our own choices. We can decide that — as much as it lies within our own power — we will avoid letting anyone else’s bad choices destroy us.

Notes:

  1. Although I don’t usually post pictures from unknown sources, I made an exception for this one I found on Facebook. If you know the source, please do let me know so I can give credit where it’s due. Thanks! ↩
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Dum vivimus, vivamus!
August 2, 2013

While we live, let us live.

So many people talk about paying attention to the world around you as if it’s some weird, paranoid, scary, “tactical” thing. It is not! It is making the decision to live consciously. To be fully present in every moment. To listen, and really hear. To look, and really see. To be completely there in the world, every moment of every day.

Situational awareness and the physical skills of protecting yourself are foundational to an attitude that speaks louder than words. It’s not bluff, it’s not posturing, it’s not show. It’s not the frightened little dog yapping with fear and yelping for someone else to come deal with the scary bad thing. It goes beyond all that, right down to something fundamental about yourself.

Awareness and mindset skills do help us protect ourselves from violent crime, no doubt about that. But they are also very basic, very worthwhile skills for living well — living with confidence, living with awareness, living with full knowledge of who you are and what you can do and how you fit into the world.

The decision that your life is worth defending marks an important milestone on the path to living at peace inside your own skin. Most people never consciously decide what’s worth living for, what’s worth fighting for, what’s worth dying for, but you have. It settles your mind in a way that those who have never examined that choice never will know.

The commitment to really see things that are really there — not to turn our eyes away in disgust or fear of the things we don’t understand, not to miss filling our eyes with the fragile moments of beauty, not to skim busily past the humor or the pathos of life around us — that commitment marks a big milestone on the path to full consciousness. Most people go through life half-asleep, and you just made the decision to wake up.

Deciding that you will act means you believe you have agency, that the things you do really matter and make a difference, that you fully own your own power and your own choices. That’s the major milestone on the path to adulthood.

Taking time to master (not just learn, but master) the skills you may need to protect yourself and the people you love — that’s turning away from posturing or posing, and turning toward full responsibility for yourself and your choices. Acquiring the physical skills teaches you something about the limits of those skills and your willingness to use them. It helps you make better and more responsible choices throughout the rest of your life.

All of these things really do make us better prepared to defend our own physical selves. But better than that, they help us fully live.

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“Can I teach that?”
July 31, 2013

One of the most brilliant posts I’ve ever read about training was written by Todd Green several years ago. You can find it [here]. Not to be too cliche or anything, but do go read the whole thing, right now. Then come back to me; I’ll wait.

[Crawl, Walk, Run off a Cliff…]

Done reading? Good!

One of the excellent things Todd wrote there was this:

Knowing how the drill is explained and performed isn’t the same as understanding the drill, the how’s and why’s, the potential pitfalls, the telltale indicators that something is about to go wrong.

I would put that in 87-point font, bolded and in bright flashing lights, if I could. Because I keep coming across new instructors — good people, smart people, people I like and want to encourage in this endeavor — who say things like, “I’ve had two professional firearms training classes now, and I know I can teach that material as well as ____ (famous instructor’s name, not mine).” Again, these are people I like and respect and want to see do wonderful things.

But … after one or two classes, these folks truly are not at that point yet. They feel like they are. But they need to do a lot more homework before they reach that point, if they ever do. Because even though they think they’ll be doing the same thing, they won’t. They’ll only be going through the motions, even though they won’t realize it at the time.

Here’s a story that might illustrate my point. When I was a little girl, one day I asked my daddy if I could steer the car while he drove. Daddy said, “Sure” and pulled me onto his lap. 1 When I got my hands on the wheel, I started wiggling it back and forth, really fast, just a little wiggle but a constant one. Why did I do that? Because I had seen what a driver does with the wheel when they want the car to go straight down the road. As an adult, you are probably thinking, “Wait, what? You don’t do that! You hold the steering wheel straight.” But try looking at it through a kid’s eyes, and you’ll see what I mean. You aren’t actually holding the wheel still. You’re making a constant series of tiny little corrections to your course. I didn’t know that. All I knew was that drivers wiggle the wheel when they’re driving. I imitated what I saw them do, and did not yet have the background to understand what they were really doing.

Just like me as a 6-year-old wiggling a steering wheel, a new instructor who dives in to teach material they aren’t yet qualified to teach is usually doing things they think they’ve seen more experienced instructors doing. But they don’t yet have the background to understand what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it. Maybe their students won’t know any better as long as everything goes right, but everything does not always go right for each individual student. Worse, in firearms instruction, when things go wrong, there’s a potential for them to go terribly, disastrously wrong.

To be clear, although this is about safety, it’s not just about safety. It’s also about basic pedagogy, about teaching skills. Without a really thorough grasp of the material, far more than ever shows up directly inside the course, an unprepared instructor really cannot reliably guide students through potential trouble spots.

Having had one or two exposures to someone else’s material does not make you qualified to teach it. When you’re ready to teach the material, you — like every good teacher — will always know a whole lot more about that material than your students will likely see. You know the principles underneath everything you’re teaching. You know where to present each element of the complete program, and why it needs to be in that order, and when you can make exceptions to those rules. You know six or ten or twelve different ways to articulate the same thing, and are prepared to do so if any of your students need that. You know alternative ways to do things. You know a whole bunch of reasons other people don’t do it the same way you do — and you have solid answers for those reasons, too. You can read your students’ body language and other cues so you know when the students “get it” and fully grasp the concepts behind your material, and you can tell when they don’t. You know when students are most likely to do something stupid and you know a whole bunch of ways to head that off at the pass, before they actually do it.

You simply Do Not Know any of those things after just one or two exposures to the material as a student. You have to put your butt in the chair and do your homework. You have to think. Then you have to get out of the chair and try it, first as a student, then as an explorer, playing and working and comparing notes with other people at your same level. You thrash it out with likeminded others. You try it. You play with the concepts behind it. Then you go back to your teachers and mentors and coaches, and you tell them what you’ve explored, and you ask them the questions that came up, and you discuss the concerns you might have, and you discuss the consequences of their ideas. You challenge their thinking and your own. And you do this over, and over, and over again until the material you want to teach is yours, even if you learned it from someone else.

This is a process that takes time. It does not happen overnight. But there are no shortcuts to anywhere worth going in life.

Do your homework!

Notes:

  1. Yes, this was a long long time ago, when the world was different and dinosaurs roamed the earth. People did things like that back then. ↩
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Taken Away and Used Against You — NOT!
July 29, 2013

Back in October, I got together with some amazing friends and we worked on gun retentions and disarms. Here’s part of what I wrote at the time:

While we worked—and this will sound familiar to those who have taken one of my classes—we refined the list of reasons why retentions and disarms even matter. To begin with, when someone tries to grab the gun away, our very first, preferred technique is to “pull the felon repulsion lever.”[1] So why not use this simple, intuitive action—of pulling the trigger and shooting the person trying to disarm us—as our only technique for maintaining control of our own firearm?

The short answer is, because pulling the trigger doesn’t always solve the problem by itself. Perhaps the gun jammed when the bad guy grabbed for it, as often happens when other hands are on the gun. Perhaps the bad guy has managed to hold the slide out of battery, or he’s preventing the cylinder from turning, so you can’t fire the gun. Or perhaps his grab successfully blocked your finger from reaching the trigger. Perhaps you fired and missed. Or fired and hit, but that failed to stop the attack; you really only get the one guaranteed shot because jams happen so often in close quarters when you’re rassling over the gun. Maybe the person reaching for the gun isn’t a bad guy at all, and isn’t someone you need to shoot—someone like drunk Uncle Joe who “just wants to see that there gun of yours,” or like a young child who reaches for the gun without permission. Perhaps it isn’t safe to shoot because a loved one would be in the line of fire. For all these reasons, you may need a gun retention skillset that extends beyond simply knowing how to pull the trigger.

What about disarms, the skills we use to get a gun out of the hand of someone else?

At the beginning of the day, Rory told me that he’s skeptical of disarm skills in general, because they can be used only in such very narrow and rare circumstances. For these skills to come into play, the bad guy has to have you at gunpoint. You have to be within close arm’s reach. If he intended to kill you right then, you’d be dead already, so he cannot have decided to kill you yet, which means there’s something he wants from you first. You have to believe that he will kill you whether or not you comply with his demands (otherwise, why not just give him what he wants, like handing him your wallet), and you have to fully commit to fighting back, knowing that a half-hearted response from you may actually trigger the shot you’re trying to prevent.

This list of scenario-based requirements means women, especially young women, are more likely to need these skills than men are. Think about it! Rapists, kidnappers, and serial killers typically find their victims in one place, and move them to another place, often at gunpoint. This would be a scenario where the intended victim is being held at gunpoint, at extremely close ranges, by a criminal who definitely intends to kill her but who does not want to kill her yet. We all know—or we should all know!—that we never, ever, ever let the criminal move us to the “secondary crime scene.” Since we know that, wouldn’t it be good to have the physical skills to effectively resist that move, even if the bad guy already has his gun out and aimed at you? I think so. I think it’s critical, and too rarely taught or learned.

We also discussed techniques for instructors to take control of a student’s gun when needed. If you have a panicky student and there’s an immediate, life-threatening safety concern, how do you get the gun out of that student’s hand with the least amount of danger to yourself or others?

Fortunately, there are solutions for all of these problems, solutions that help you maintain control of your own gun or remove the gun from the criminal’s control. Unfortunately, the solutions don’t come intuitively. They need to be taught. More than that, they need to be taught in person—not because they’re secret woo-woo ninja moves, but because (like most physical skills) they require instant, personalized feedback during the learning process. Once you’ve learned the skills, you can practice them on your own with likeminded others and spread the word around. But you can’t grab these skills out of a book or off a video and expect to do well with them, not any more than you could expect to learn how to waterski from watching a video or reading a book.

I’m very excited because the program we were working on then is finally coming to fruition. Cornered Cat will offer a 4-hour handgun retention and disarm class in Castle Rock, CO on August 9. If you’d like to be a part of it, please contact Jenna Meek of Carry On Colorado — she’ll get you signed up for it.

The same weekend, I’m running a 2-day, co-ed Defensive Handgun class in the same town. It’s an awesome opportunity to get some serious training under your belt. Again, contact Jenna at Carry On Colorado if you’d like to join us.

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Home invasion
June 26, 2013

By now, pretty much everyone in America has seen this disturbing video of a home invasion in New Jersey. It happened during broad daylight in a good neighborhood, where a young mom was at home with her two young children.

The video is upsetting, but not graphic. The details are mercifully blurred out so you cannot clearly see the victim or her 3-year-old daughter, who was sitting on the couch throughout the entire ordeal. Even so, watching it is not for the faint of heart.

As others have observed, a situation like this is an argument for being armed at home, even during daylight hours with the doors locked. But it happened in New Jersey, so of course she was not carrying a firearm. Not going to get into the politics of that, but let me point out that the entire reason I personally began carrying a firearm in the first place was so I would never be in such a position in front of my own small children. It hurts my heart to see such an attack against an unarmed and apparently defenseless woman, and even more to see it happen in front of a small child who will undoubtedly carry the memory with her for  a long time.

But as violent and disturbing as the video is, it does not hold a candle to the potential violence that could easily have happened here. That the woman is alive and her children unharmed is nothing short of a miracle, given the privacy of the setting and the violence of the attack. Home invasions offer criminals extreme privacy for extended periods of time, which is not a recipe for a pleasant ending to anyone’s day. Those who would avoid fighting back because “the worst he can do is kill me” have rarely researched the topic.

Along those lines, there’s an exceedingly excellent article from Tim at Gun Nuts about this. Tim writes,

When a criminal kicks in your door you do not have the luxury of assuming they’ll go away and leave you unhurt if you just give them what they want. You don’t have the luxury of waiting for 911 or the alarm company to send help. There are too many examples that prove those strategies as ineffective to have any faith in them. If you don’t have a home defense plan, get one together. If your existing home defense plan doesn’t include the ability to rapidly employ significant force, fix it.

Home defense isn’t about DVD players. It isn’t about jewelry. It’s about protecting the people you love from men like this.

There is not a single word I would disagree with in those paragraphs.

What the law will ask

Now let’s take this in a slightly different direction, and talk about making the decision to shoot a violent home invader. Here are some questions that the criminal justice system might ask after such an encounter.

1) Was the element of Ability present? Did the intruder have the power to kill or cripple this young woman?

Yes. Although this criminal was technically “unarmed,” the young mom’s life is clearly in danger. Regardless of what the intruder had or did not have in his hands — they were apparently empty throughout the savage beating on the video — he could have killed her at any time. Any one of those blows could have killed her. So could being thrown, half-conscious, down a flight of stairs. Any reasonable person could see that.

As we know, the element of Ability does not require the presence of a weapon. It can be represented by a severe imbalance of power between victim and assailant (sometimes called Disparity of Force). In this case, the intruder had a great deal of power: a large, strong, young male attacked a small female who was distracted by the presence of her children. Ability was present.

2) Was the element of Opportunity present? Did circumstances allow the assailant to attack the victim in an effective way?

Yes. As we see on the video, he was able to make physical contact with his intended victim using his bare hands.

Furthermore — as with most or all home invasions — her circumstances were particularly deadly, because there was no hope whatsoever that anyone else would see what was happening and stop it. There were no bystanders to pull him off the victim or to call for help on her behalf. She was entirely alone in an isolated area, invisible to anyone walking past the house.

3) Was the element of Jeopardy present? Would a reasonable person in her same situation have concluded that the attacker intended to cripple or kill her?

Yes. Given his violent entry (he kicked the door down) and his immediate physical attack against the woman, it would be absolutely unreasonable to come to any other conclusion. He had no scruples about beating her senseless in front of her little girl. Anyone with a lick of sense would agree that he meant to do her harm.

The immediate choice

So those are the questions the courts might ask, after the event. Are they questions you need to ask during the event? Yes and no.

Yes, you have to absolutely know that you’re on the right side of the law when you act. Knowing the law frees you to act quickly, decisively, without hesitation. It frees your mind from entangling concerns and lets you get straight to work.

No. The flip side of the “yes” above is that if you haven’t hammered these core ideas into your brain ahead of time with good training and good visualizations, you won’t have time to laboriously run through a slow, rusty mental checklist when sudden violence happens. To save your life from sudden violence, you must act immediately!

This means your best bet is to do your homework ahead of time. Learn the law. Steel yourself to watch videos like this and to think through their implications. When you have done your homework ahead of time, you won’t need to run through the questions at the time. You will simply know that it is time to act.

More choices

Now some food for thought provoked by watching this event. These aren’t the only questions you could (and should!) ask yourself. They’re just a sampling to get you started. As I’ve said elsewhere, crime videos provide excellent lessons for self defense, when we watch them in the right way.

  • Would you be willing to abandon your child in the same room as an intruder, in order to retrieve your firearm from inside a locked gun safe in another room?
    • Or would you be willing to put up with the inconvenience and discomfort of remaining armed while relaxing at home?
    • Or would you prefer the possibly-illegal risk of hiding an unsecured firearm in every room of your home?
  • Would you be willing to shoot and possibly kill a living human being in front of your 3-year-old child?
  • If you are not willing to be armed with a gun at home, or not willing to shoot an attacker in front of your child, what are you willing to do? Are you willing to spend three or more hours a week learning an effective martial art? Are you willing to learn how to use improvised weapons, such as a vase or a picture frame, to defend yourself? Are you willing to simply surrender to an attacker like this, and hope for the best? What’s your plan?
  • Would you be willing to shoot without hesitation, without giving the intruder time to react, without waiting to see what would happen if you held fire?
  • Would you be just as willing to shoot, and shoot just as quickly, if you knew your every action was caught on camera — and that all your friends and neighbors would probably see what you did?

Bottom line

These are not pleasant choices, but they are the ones such situations present to us. If we want to be prepared to save our own lives, we must unblinkingly confront such questions ahead of time. We must carefully think through what we are willing to do and we must be honest about what we are not willing to do.

Think it through. Make a plan. Be prepared to act without hesitation or doubt when the time comes. Meanwhile, live joyfully and purposefully — because life is good, and worth defending.

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Education, Training, and Practice
June 20, 2013

“How often do you train?”  The question was asked on an internet forum, and a look at the answers revealed that most forum members had muddled the difference between education, training, and practice. These are three different words that mean different things. All three are absolutely necessary for anyone who wants to be truly prepared to protect themselves in violent circumstances.

Definitions

First up, there’s education. Education happens when you learn something in an academic sense. When you read a book or listen to a lecture — that’s education. Education can involve getting your hands dirty, but usually it doesn’t (that comes later). It usually involves planting your butt in a chair and studying.

Then there’s training. Training often includes an educational component, but it doesn’t always. Training is the hands-on part of learning. Driver education, which takes place in a classroom, is followed by driver training, which takes place behind the wheel. A college education is followed by on-the-job training. Training builds physical skills on top of an existing education.

Finally, there’s practice. Practice is something you do on your own. It’s where you take the education you’ve acquired, and the training you’ve received, and make it your own by building it into your habits. Practice is absolutely vital. It’s also pointless, or even counterproductive, unless it is built on a foundation of good education and training.

All you have to do

Let’s walk through that last idea a little more completely. Start with this: it’s tempting to believe that when our brains know something, then obviously our hands also know it. But tempting as it is to believe, that’s not true. To illustrate that point, let me give you a story straight out of history, one about Johann Sebastian Bach, the famous composer. When someone commented about his remarkable ability to play the organ with such skill, Bach reportedly replied, “There is nothing remarkable about it. One has only to hit the right notes at the right time, and the instrument plays itself.”

Bach sheet musicWas Bach being flippant, or profound? Musicians have debated that question for many years now. Personally, I think Bach was onto something: you can teach someone anything they need to know about playing a keyboard instrument – a piano, an organ, a harpsichord, whatever – in just a few minutes. How? Like this: “Here is a piece of paper covered with lines and dots. When you see this particular mark in that location, press this key for x amount of time. When you see the same mark in a different location, press that key for the same amount of time.” As soon as you have memorized the different marks and what they mean – which truly can be done in less than a day! – your brain now knows exactly how to play the piano. As Bach said, you just have to hit the right notes at the right time. That’s all.

Wait, you say, that’s not enough? My point exactly! It’s not enough to educate your brain about a physical skill. If you want to play the piano, you also have to train your hands what to do (that training almost always happens under the skilled tutelage of a good teacher). Then you have to practice on your own until your hands always do what they’re told, every time without fail.

Marty Hayes, Director of the Firearms Academy of Seattle, may not realize this, but he often channels the spirit of Bach in his classes. Here’s one of his favorite lines: “There’s only one real secret to accuracy: If your sights are lined up when the hammer falls, you’ll hit the center of the target every time.” Students chuckle, as if they suspect him of being flippant. But that truly is the secret of accurate shooting. There is no other.

Of course, knowing what to do is not quite the same thing as doing it. And that brings us to what happens when we try to do any of these steps – education, training, practice – out of sequence, or without building on the others.

Three guys

Here’s a guy. We’ll call him Joe Shootsalot. Joe wants learn how to shoot. So he goes down to the range and he practices several times a week for a year. But he practices all the wrong things, so he builds some bad habits — including at least one unsafe one that he doesn’t realize he’s doing. At the end of the year, he has burned through thousands of rounds, but he’s shooting only marginally better than he was at first. He might even be shooting worse, because he’s developed a bad flinch he doesn’t know how to shake.

Here’s another guy. We’ll call him Steve Thinksalot. Steve wants to know how to shoot. So he buys a boatload of books, subscribes to six different gun magazines, and hangs out on firearm forums. He reads about shooting for an entire year and he argues about it endlessly online. But he never practices, so he builds no physical habits at all. Worse than that, when he finally does decide to get off the couch and onto the range, he has no patience with working on the basics that form the foundation of all shooting skill. He’s above all that! He can already describe, in great and animated detail, everything about a good trigger press or an ideal draw or a solid reload. And he truly believes he’s doing those things. He’s not. He can’t reliably do any of it, because he hasn’t taken the time to build that knowledge into his muscles through deliberate practice. His hands don’t know what his brain does. When things don’t go as he’d planned, he blames his equipment, or the weather, or the phases of the moon. Never himself. Worse, you can’t teach him anything, because he already knows it all.

Here’s one more guy, Tim Trainsalot. Tim loves to take classes. It’s his favorite thing to do. He has taken dozens of classes, but he never practices anything he learns in class. He never makes it his own. At the end of a year, he’s shooting almost exactly the same as he was before — and the people who see him shoot conclude that training is worthless because it didn’t do anything for Tim. Worse, Tim has a super-high confidence level that’s bolstered by all those certificates in his training notebook. But because he never practices, his high confidence level is not congruent with physical reality.

Bottom line

What Joe, Steve, and Tim — and Jane, Sally, and Tina — need to do is build their skills on a solid foundation. Joe needs to slow down and learn something before he engrains bad habits. Steve needs to get off his rear end and put what he’s learned to the test, before he gets to the point where he knows it all and can’t do a single thing. And Tim needs to find the self-discipline to practice what he’s learned in class, before it fades from memory.

To be well-prepared to protect themselves, shooters need a solid dose of all three components at the right time and in the right order: education, training, and practice.

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