The Cornered Cat
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Hard Work
April 29, 2013

Learning to effectively use a handgun for self-defense is hard work, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Although anyone can learn to point the gun in the general direction of an assailant and yank the trigger, there’s a lot more to this discipline than simply being able to make a loud noise when you feel threatened.

First, there’s the process of getting the knowledge you need about the legal aspects of owning, carrying, and using a deadly weapon. None of this stuff is intuitive. The rules for owning and carrying guns are different in different jurisdictions, and those rules change all too often. The rules for using the gun to protect yourself tend to be more stable, but that does not make them either simple or intuitive. Getting a good, basic handle on those legal questions takes some effort and some skull sweat. (Incidentally, if you’re not a reader, an excellent place to start your learning process is with the seven DVDs that come free with an ACLDN membership. These DVDs discuss the basic rules of the road for using firearms in self-defense, along with providing clear, compelling discussions of the legal and social aftereffects of using deadly force to protect yourself and your loved ones.)

Then there’s the emotional hard work of sorting out your own beliefs about killing. When do you think it is right to kill another living, breathing, feeling, thinking human being? When is it absolutely wrong? Those are the easy questions. Here’s the hard one: Am I myself able to pull the trigger if that is what it takes to survive? Under what circumstances am I willing to do that? Am I willing to do it if it is a young person, such as a drug-addicted teenager who has lived next door to me since he or she was a small child? Am I willing to do it if it is someone I once cared about, such as a violent ex-boyfriend or ex-husband? Am I absolutely sure I want to go down that road? Am I able to face those choices without flinching or freezing?

After dealing with the legal and emotional/ethical questions, we come to the social issues. What will my mother say about my decision to carry a firearm, if she finds out? How will my friends react, if they find out? Am I willing to deal with the social fallout if my children’s friends’ parents learn that we own and use guns? Thinking through those questions may seem trivial to some people, but many of us have a very difficult time coming to grips with those social concerns.

Then there’s the question of criminal behavior and psychology. Criminals attack their victims in some predictable ways, but it’s emotionally draining to learn about how violent crime happens so we’re better able to avoid it. We do it anyway, because that knowledge helps us stay safe. We need to know how assailants choose their victims. We must study how violent attacks happen and learn how survivors have defended themselves. Along with that, we must begin training ourselves to notice the things going on around us so we can learn how to avoid dangerous situations before they develop. That’s hard work, too.

All of that pales when we think about the sheer physical effort it takes to master the use of a firearm. Again, anyone can pick up a gun and yank the trigger, with the bullet flying who-knows-where. But acquiring the skill to handle the firearm with confidence, understand how it works, understand how to keep it working even if something goes wrong and it doesn’t go bang when we press the trigger – that’s hard. Getting to the point where we can handle the gun with the same casual confidence we feel in the driver’s seat of a car, with the same almost-unconscious ability to manipulate the machine’s controls while thinking about other, more important, things – that’s hard. Learning to hit the target reliably every time, regardless of time or stress constraints – that’s hard. Learning to draw the gun with smooth efficiency, building the good safe habits that will see you through a tough time – that’s hard. Learning how to use cover or concealment while shooting, learning how to move while shooting, learning how to reliably hit your target even if it’s dark, even if you don’t have much time, even if your vision is compromised because your glasses got knocked off – that’s hard.

After we’ve learned those physical skills, we need to maintain them. That’s also hard. Finding the time to practice isn’t easy, and finding a place to practice some of the most important skills can be very challenging indeed. Standing on the range for hours while we develop the skills under the tutoring of a qualified instructor is hard enough, but having the personal discipline to force ourselves to practice the un-fun stuff as much as we practice the fun stuff when there’s no one standing there encouraging us to try it anyway – that’s hard.

Sometimes I talk to people who feel stupid because they don’t understand all of this intuitively, or because they can’t just pick up a gun and use it as effectively as the magical people do on TV, or because they have to struggle to master fundamental gun handling skills. If you’re in that boat, please let me give you a ray of hope here: you’re normal. It’s actually normal to find this stuff hard work. It does not mean there’s something wrong with you. It simply means you are doing the work it takes to learn something challenging.

We do that work because it’s worth it. Being prepared to defend ourselves is worth it. Being able to protect the people we love? Worth it! Having the confidence that makes would-be Trouble take one look at you and head the other direction – totally worth it.  Life is precious, and your life is worth defending.

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Growth and respect
April 23, 2013

“I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.” – Susan B. Anthony

Over the past few years, I’ve grown to really appreciate the strong women who have come into my life. From my mentor Gila Hayes, I’ve learned to pay attention to the human details that matter. From my friends and assistants Diane Walls and Jennie VanTuyl, I’ve learned to respect the differences between people, and especially the different paths people take on their way to living an armed lifestyle. From women who have organized the classes that I teach — people such as Annette Evans, Jenna Meeks, Karen Berghauser and others — I’ve learned to communicate early and often with people I care about. From students, I’ve learned the value of positive feedback and constructive criticism. From friends and contacts throughout the industry — women such as Lisa Looper, Kitty Richards, Julianna Crowder, and many others — I’ve learned that women can do amazing things when they set their minds to it and don’t let anything stand in their way. These women are an inspiration!

This past weekend in Nebraska, I found myself watching the students with a sense of awe as they improved their skills and gained confidence. It’s an amazing privilege to be trusted to help women grow in such a personal area of their lives, and I feel profound respect that my students have trusted me to help them grow in that way.

Being a defensive handgun instructor isn’t always easy. There are challenges with travel: two weeks in a row this month, I spent an unexpected night in Minneapolis when flights were delayed. There are challenges with weather: it’s often unexpectedly cold, or unexpectedly hot, or unexpectedly wet and rainy. There are challenges with ranges and facilities, conflicting schedules, and the endless balancing act between time and energy that every small business owner feels. Those things can be tough, but they don’t matter — not compared to the deep joy of watching a student gain confidence and competence, improving both her skill and her comfort level with the firearm.

An interviewer asked me this week, “Have you ever had a student call to say she’d defended herself with a firearm after taking your class?” I suppose most instructors privately hope to get a call like that, but I really don’t. The idea that drives me forward isn’t that. It’s the email from a woman who tells me that she learned to be more aware and more alert in my class, so she’s better able to avoid potential victimhood. It’s the one who tells me she used something I taught to stay out of danger, or to get away from trouble before it started. It’s the crime that never happened because the intended victim … wasn’t. It’s the call from a woman who says she’s gained the confidence to jump in and do other things she’s been afraid to do — to face her fears and grow. It’s watching women become competent gun handlers and good shots, and seeing that increased confidence spill over into other areas of their lives. Those are the things that motivate me.

That’s why I do what I do, and that’s what keeps me going. Every woman has a birthright of being strong, confident, and prepared to protect herself and the people she cares about — and I love helping people claim that birthright for themselves.

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New article
April 20, 2013

So I’ve neglected the blog shamefully this week, but I haven’t been slacking. There’s actually a new article on Cornered Cat. The subject is: Superpowers!

Go read it. You can leave  your comments here, and it makes me happy when you do.

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Practice when ammo supplies are short
April 17, 2013

The question came up the other day: “How can I practice when ammunition supplies are so short?” Here are my ideas for improving your skills even without running through a lot of rounds.

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Dry fire to practice better trigger control. Invest in a laser system for more interactive dry fire.

Invest in a Training Barrel (from Blade Tech) or a barrel blocker (from Train Safe) to disable your gun so you can safely do more dynamic things during your dry practice.

Practice your drawstroke — concealed and unconcealed — from every holster and holster type you own. Ditto for different types of clothing & outfits, which do change the dynamics. Go for efficiency and smoothness of motion, gradually increasing speed as you go.

Figure out your safest direction of fire from inside your bedroom, children’s bedrooms, and two indoor locations within sight of each outside door to your home. Rearrange your furniture to provide safer backstops for likely directions of fire in the unlikely event of a home invasion.

Find a place where you can get behind cover or concealment while still watching the door from inside your bedroom and your children’s bedrooms. Do the same for each outside door to your home. Practice using them using your barrel-blocked firearm or a dummy gun.

After you have done both the above: with a friend , using dummy guns or disabled guns, role play a home invasion. Then do a debrief. What worked? What didn’t? Was there anything you should have considered beforehand that made a difference during your role play?

Do the same thing with airsoft guns. (Don’t forget to wear eye protection etc.)

Train your brain: read books about self-defense or shooting skills. Remember you cannot learn the actual physical skills from reading! However, you can learn which skills may be needed, and why. You can also learn a lot about criminal behavior and psychology, pre-assault cues, useful tactics, etc.

Train your brain: watch videos from qualified people (not just youtube phenoms) about subjects that interest you. Take notes for further research and do the research yourself.

Practice moving smoothly while holding a dummy gun or barrel-blocked unloaded firearm.

Practice reloads using dummy magazines and a barrel-blocked unloaded firearm. Go for efficiency and economy of motion, gradually picking up speed without sacrificing smoothness.

Join the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network. When their informative videos arrive in your mailbox, watch all of them. Take notes and do the preparations they suggest.

With a friend, role play a 911 call and the arrival of an officer on scene after a shooting. Practice what you will or will not say.

Take a class that teaches gun retentions and gun disarms. Practice these physical skills until you have confidence in them. Then teach the same skills to a friend so you know you really have the skills down. Play with the skills a little (slowly! safely…) from different start positions and circumstances so you know how they might work in a more dynamic situation.

Take a Rory Miller seminar which includes his material about the logic of violence. If you can’t do that, at least read his books and his blog posts so you begin to get a better grasp on how violence happens and how to survive it.

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All the above can be done without using any rounds whatsoever. The ones below require at least a few rounds.

Take a shooting class from a professional firearms trainer. Yep, that blows through quite a few rounds up front — but it will stop you from wasting rounds the rest of the year, as you will learn more efficient ways to practice the essentials. Most people ingrain poor habits (or at least inefficient ones) because they haven’t made an up-front investment in good training. This is a big mistake! When ammo is at a premium, you really need the advantage of clear instruction from the beginning — it reduces the number of rounds it will take to reach proficiency and stay there.

Practice reloads more: load your gun with only one round. Put only two rounds in each of your magazines. Now you can draw, fire one, reload, fire one, safely holster. (You’ll have one in the chamber when you holster using this method.) That gives you a lot of gun handling practice — drawstroke, accuracy, reloading the gun, accuracy, and holstering — for every shot you fire.

Use dummy rounds to extend your ammunition supply while you practice malfunction clearing and improve your trigger control. Try mixing the dummies randomly throughout your practice ammo. Fill several magazines at one time with varying numbers and patterns for dummy placement. Now scramble the magazines so you don’t know which one has which pattern. (Or have a friend fill your magazines for you.) Every time you come across a dummy, tap the magazine to be sure it’s in place and smoothly rack the slide. Do this immediately every time — don’t just stand there staring at your gun like a duck in thunder. Immediately clear the ‘malfunction’ and take your next shot.

As you use the dummy rounds, you’ll discover whether you have a flinch. If you find your front sight takes a dramatic dive toward the floor every time you come across a dummy, unload the gun and practice at least five (preferably ten) excellent dry fire shots before you go live again.

Shoot tests and standards from the pros. This lets you practice a bunch of different skills from different distances in an efficient way, and it forces you to practice things you aren’t already good at. Look at standards from LFI, Gunsite, Hackathorn, Givens/Rangemaster, FAS, Thunder Ranch, etc — places with good reputations for high quality shooting. Also try the IDPA classifier and track your scores.

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Look to your right
April 16, 2013

This would apparently be a good time to explore the links on the sidebar.  😉

 

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Work worth doing
April 7, 2013

When I was a child, my dad would often spout a bit of homespun wisdom at me: “A job worth doing is worth doing well,” he would say. Sometimes he would even quote a little poem:

If a task is once begun,

Never leave it ‘til it’s done.

Be the labor great or small,

Do it well or not at all.

It is therefore probably my dad’s fault, as much as it is anyone’s, that I chose to take my firearms training seriously. As a new shooter, interested in self defense, I had this gut-level conviction that if a thing was not shameful to do, there was no shame in doing it well. I had an equally strong conviction that if it was worth doing at all, it was worth learning how to do it right.

And underlying all that was a deep, visceral horror at the thought of getting a life-or-death decision wrong – of losing my life to my own lack of foresight, of hurting or killing someone who did not need to be hurt or killed, of making a mistake that would reverberate down the edges of my children’s and grandchildren’s lives forever.

Not everyone feels such things, I understand. Yet for me, the ethics of owning guns of course includes a commitment to using them appropriately, safely, and – if necessary – effectively. This goes back to the idea that things worth doing are worth doing well. If it is worth protecting myself and my family (and it absolutely is!), then it is worth doing the work it will take to become good at it.

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Safe direction
April 6, 2013

One thing that often surprises me about firearms instructors is how much we take for granted. This little business of a “safe direction,” for example. We often teach our students to chant the rule (“Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction,” as the NRA puts it) … without defining what a safe direction really is.

For those who don’t already know this, a safe direction is

  • somewhere that, if shot, would cause only minimal, acceptable property damage; and
  • somewhere that you can absolutely, positively guarantee the bullet won’t keep going after it lands there.

That’s a rather dry definition, but it covers the bases well enough. Unfortunately, many students need these concepts fleshed out a bit more. When presenting this idea, I like to ask my students, “Okay, that’s the basic idea. Everyone, right now, point to the safest direction in this classroom.” Some point without hesitation, and of those, many get it wrong. Others dither, or sit on their hands looking perplexed. That provides us with an excellent opportunity to discuss things that do, or do not, stop bullets.

Unless built of brick or stone, interior and exterior walls do not reliably stop bullets. Bullets zip right through sheetrock and paneling. Insulation barely slows them down. Windows simply shatter. Exterior siding rarely stops them. This means you cannot simply point at an apparently-solid wall and call it a “safe direction.” Yet many people do just that, instinctively thinking of a wall as something that would be safe to point the gun at, so we need to make sure our students understand these factors very clearly.

But what does that leave us with? Are we completely unable to handle our firearms as long as we are inside a building? Not quite, but it’s important to understand what we’re doing and why.

Of course, in your own home you can and should make a safe backstop that you can trust. But it’s a little different when traveling. When you’re on the road, you have to be a little more thoughtful and creative. (Unless you choose to travel with a — recommended! — Safe Direction ballistic containment product of your own.)

On the ground floor of a building, you can usually point the gun at the floor without too much risk. This does not work if you have a basement level underneath you, and of course it does not work if you’re standing on the second floor. Keep in mind, however, that a discharge straight into the floor may send a ricochet straight back up. You’re much safer with the gun pointed at a downward angle of 45 degrees or so — say two feet in front of you — than you are with it pointed straight down.

Some people want to point the gun at the ceiling. This is a very bad idea if you’re on the ground floor of a multi-story building, and almost as bad if you’re on the top level with nothing above you but roof. Roofs and second-story floors do not stop bullets any more reliably than walls do. A certain number of people are killed by falling bullets every year. 1

So what’s the solution? What if you’re in a hotel room, on the second or third floor of a multi-story building, surrounded by other rooms that almost certainly have people in them? Is there a safe direction? How can you safely handle your firearm if you must?

If you have a need to handle your firearm in an environment like that, here’s my advice: visualize yanking all the sheet rock off the walls, so you’re looking at just the bare skeleton of the building around you. You can see 2×4’s every few feet along all the walls. Those might stop bullets, but there’s no way to know exactly where they are with the sheet rock and paint in place.

Support structures come together in the lower, outer corners of the room.

However, still looking at the skeleton of the building, you know that major support beams always come together along the floor at the outer corners of the room. You don’t have to see through walls to know where the outer corners of the room are, or to spot the location where both walls come together and meet the floor. So your safe(r) direction in that environment would be the corner of the floor of the room along an outside wall. Since support beams come together where the corners of the room come together, the corner of the floor on an outside wall is your best bet for hitting a support beam instead of a blank stretch of sheet rock. That makes it your safest  direction in that environment.

Notes:

  1. Yes, I’ve seen the Mythbusters episode. I’ve also seen the obituaries. ↩
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From my email box
April 5, 2013

Dear Cornered Cat:

This morning I put on a delightful cream colored baby-doll top which I have previously found particularly flattering on my figure. After looking in the mirror, I quickly changed into a black T-shirt. Why? My gun and holster were clearly visible under my thin, light colored top. I contemplated my decision all day, as the sun was quite hot on my black t-shirt. Why are guns black? Why not skin-tone?

After discussing this problem with my husband, and a good deal of online searching, I decided to fix the issue myself. I went to the local store and purchased some spray-paint that matched my skin tone. I took my holster apart, disassembled my gun, and laid all the parts out in the back yard. I taped off any moving parts, so that the paint would not cause a problem.

Then I started spray painting. I was nervous at first, but I knew I had securely taped off any parts I did not want painted, or that would be covered by the holster. After three coats, I was satisfied.

I wish I had taken photos of the process, but I was so excited (and nervous!) that I completely forgot. Now my gun is skin-tone, fits in my skin-tone painted holster, and is completely invisible even under a white shirt.

I wanted to share this with you because I think it’s important for women to understand that the standard black or silver the gun comes in does not have to be it’s final color. For a durable finish, I recommend duracoat or similar resurfacing, but for a quick-and-easy refinish for concealed carry, some spray paint works fine!

Thanks,

Kari

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