The Cornered Cat
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Oops
February 23, 2013

Made a mistake on the radio last night. I was talking with Michael Dukes, who does an awesome drive time show every weekday evening in Fairbanks, AK. During the interview, Mike asked how I got the Cornered Cat website started. I gave him a little of the history.

For those who don’t know, Cornered Cat the website dates back to late 2003 or early 2004. (The book came later.) What prompted me to get the site started was … well, loneliness. When I first started learning to shoot in 1999 and early 2000, I looked around the web and found exactly nothing for women interested in concealed carry. Oh, wait. That’s not literally true, but almost. I found one site, now defunct, that was pretty good. It was a single long page of “this is how I did it” from a woman much like myself. There were a few books. There were a handful of female firearms instructors worth that title. You could get a subscription to Women & Guns Magazine, which also used to have a little discussion board of its own. But other than those few resources, the web was a wasteland as far as women’s concealed carry was concerned.

So I set out to fix that with the Cornered Cat website. The first version of this site was over-the-top feminine, the old fashioned type of feminine with pink lace everywhere. It was deliberately pink: I wanted anyone who landed on any page of the site toimmediately know that this page was for women, by a woman, and would take women’s needs into account. I wanted to “kick the stupid” out of that old ugly stereotype about gun owners, that all gun owners are middle-aged redneck males. So the site was pink and frilly and pretty much screamed, “Hey! Girl here!”

That was where I left the story on the radio. We drifted off to talk about other things, and — here’s the oops that has me cringing this morning — I never corrected the impression I left the audience with, that Cornered Cat is the only women-friendly firearms website out there! D’oh…

Things online have changed so much in the past 10 years. It’s really not the same place at all. It used to be that when you ran a search that included the terms “women” and “guns” in the same search string, all you would find would be near-nekkid chicks doing stupid things, with muzzles pointed in stupid directions and fingers always on the trigger.

That’s not true any more.

Yes, the nekkid-chicks-with-guns genre is alive and well. As are the “Hey! Look! I’m a GIRL! With a GUN!” sites run by women who haven’t yet learned anything else about firearms, and who maybe don’t intend to learn. But those are no longer the only women talking about firearms on the web. It’s not just the Dancing Bears. There are excellent female gunbloggers (I started to link, then realized there were a million, and see my sidebar…). There are many more resources for women who want to learn about concealed carry. And there are a lot of sites that offer decent gear designed for women.

Take a look at my sidebar links today if you have time. Visit some of those places. Many of them are run by competent, knowledgeable women who love guns as much as we do.

That’s worth celebrating.

 

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What does a murderer look like?

What does a murderer look like? That question has been on my mind the past few days, especially because of all the blog brouhaha over those “No Hesitation” targets.

After some of the emotion has died down a little, I might have something useful to say about those.

Meanwhile, though, I owe a vote of thanks to Tamara for pointing her readers toward an amazing writer named Chris Hernandez. The link that follows is not for the squeamish. It’s harsh and hard to think about and very, very real. It also illustrates, in a way only a true story could, how law enforcement officers need to be prepared for almost anything. Not all killers fit some idealized stereotype.

Again, graphic warning. Here’s the link.

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“Reasonable” Restrictions
February 22, 2013

Recently received an email from someone who is in favor of “reasonable” restrictions on the right to buy, own, and carry firearms. The person wanted to know if I would support these restrictions, too, or if I would be as “dogmatic and inflexible” as others in the pro-rights movement have been. Here’s how I answered.

***

I’m afraid you would find me on the “dogmatic and inflexible” side of the aisle. Why? Because I believe self defense is a human right — the most basic of all human rights, in fact. This means I am not in favor of any government program that has a chilling effect on an ordinary person’s ability to exercise the basic human right to effective self defense.

Like you, I want safer families and safer communities. Like you, I think it is appalling when bad people use firearms to do bad things. And like you, I want to see lower rates of violent crime and higher rates of good people staying safe. That is why I am a strong supporter of liberal laws in the area of concealed carry, and it’s why I am in favor of laws that improve the ability of ordinary people to protect themselves wherever they go. It’s also why I support the freedom to purchase and own firearms without a lot of bureaucratic tangles. Because I want good people to be safer, I support laws that make it easy for good people to protect themselves from violent crime.

To get an idea how the two factors in the above paragraph might be connected, I suggest visiting two types of sources to do your own research. (Don’t just take my word for it; I might be mistaken or untruthfully biased).

The first type of information you might seek out would be how concealed-carry laws have changed over the past two or three decades. There’s a wonderful visual about that at http://www.gun-nuttery.com/rtc.php, where a little poking around the site will reveal the creator’s data sources so you can judge their quality for yourself. Of course you can find the dry numbers from other places as well, including government sources. You might also look for information that would tell you the number and percentage of gun-owning families in America over the past several decades, and whether there are more guns, more widely available, than there were before. Again, you can get this type of information from pro-gun sources, from anti-gun sources, or from mostly-neutral sources. Although interpretations will differ based on the type of source you use, the hard numbers in all cases will show that there are a lot of guns in circulation and that there has been a huge increase in firearms purchases over the past few years.

The second type of information you might look for would be a record of what violent crime has been doing over the same years. You can find those numbers on the FBI or DOJ websites, including the Uniform Crime Reports (UCRs) from the FBI. As you will discover, violent crime rates have gone down sharply at the same time concealed-carry laws have become more liberal.

Taken together, these two factors — the rise in the number of gun owners with carry permits, and the drop in violent crime — mean that more people carrying firearms in more places has been closely correlated with lower crime and fewer deaths. A short spike in high-profile, negative events does not change this reality.

Like you, I want to see safer communities. Thus, I am not a fan of strict licensing laws or more restrictions on how one may purchase firearms or where one may carry them. This is not because I want guns in the hands of criminals. I don’t. Instead, it is because I do not want bureaucratic bottlenecks through which basic human rights must squeeze.

Do you know that the wait for permission simply to own a firearm takes over one and a half years in some counties in New York state? Do you know that some of the recent proposals to encourage “responsible gun ownership” will cost each gun owner thousands of dollars every year? It is easy to say, “Well, yes, but we should regulate x or control y, without creating bad results like that.” But the reality on the ground says otherwise. All too often, restrictions on gun purchases simply mean that people of the right color and socio-economic class may buy guns, while people outside those categories may not. It happens often that people with good political connections (such as celebrities) may get them, while people without connections have a harder time.

In some areas, ordinary people of the wrong color, people who live in the wrong neighborhood and have the wrong kind of job — well, those folks are out of luck, and cannot legally own effective tools they might use to protect themselves and their families. They are priced out of the concealed carry market by abuses of “may issue” laws, or by the cost and difficulty of meeting the law’s training requirements, or by high bureaucratic fees. A fee that seems reasonable to a middle-class individual often falls far outside the reach of someone below the poverty line. A training requirement that can be easily met by someone with a high-status, 9 to 5 weekday job might be utterly impossible for a single parent working erratic hours at a low-status job. To put it bluntly, I oppose “reasonable” restrictions in this area because every law that increases the regulatory burden on good people, also creates unavoidable racist and classist effects in actual use.

The unfortunate reality is that there is no way to guarantee complete safety in a free society. Crimes will continue to happen, no matter what we do. Violent crime will happen, and sometimes good people will die as a result of that. That stinks. But here’s the kicker: making our society less free is one way to feel safer while reducing our actual safety. When we create laws that make it harder for good people to protect themselves from violent crime, more good people will die as a result of violent crime.

“Reasonable” restrictions on basic human rights often have the effect of making our families and our communities less safe. That is why I oppose all such restrictions.

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Tears
February 21, 2013

Her hands were shaking and her breathing ragged, rapid. Her voice came out half-an-octave above her usual pitch. I stood next to her, spoke calming words. She fired her first shot and burst into tears.

Was this woman working through some deep trauma? Maybe, maybe not. She had definitely experienced an intense adrenaline dump, which sometimes includes unexpected tears. I helped her set the gun down safely, then asked gently if she wanted to continue. She did, so I watched her place another round in the magazine and load the gun. Eventually, her physical responses settled down. The target looked good when we were done.

At the end of the class, she came up and asked, “What was that all about?” Taking care not to assume anything, I asked if she had brought some emotional baggage with her to class. Had something bad happened in her background, something related to crime or guns? It had not. She had never handled a gun before, but she hadn’t consciously been afraid of them either. That’s why she was puzzled.

Just a physical reaction, then. It happens sometimes. I explained that she had felt a normal, though somewhat uncommon, variant of adrenal response. Most people have a physical reaction to firing a powerful handgun for the first time. Some feel that response in unexpected ways: they feel sick to their stomachs, or their eyes start to water, or their voices wobble. Often their hands shake. All of these things are simple physical reactions to adrenaline. Human bodies produce adrenaline in response to a new experience. These physical responses don’t mean anything is wrong. They simply mean, that’s how your personal body reacts to that type of stimulus.

She wanted to know if it would happen again the next time she went to the range. Probably not, I told her. Most people seem to feel the most extreme response the first time they shoot. After that, they feel a slightly lower adrenal response every time, because it’s no longer a new sensation. She could safely visit the range again, confident that her reaction to gunfire would be less overwhelming the next time out.

In fact, I told her, there’s something surprising about target shooting. Although the first trip to the range often causes a strong adrenaline rush, that changes over time. Experienced shooters usually find that shooting helps them calm their nerves and find their center in the same way yoga or other types of meditation can do.

But that’s a different story.

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Web Walk
February 20, 2013

Jennifer noticed that when she had bruises on her face, some people thought she was an easy mark. She writes, “Guess who looks like the easiest person in the room to victimize?  If you guessed the one that looks like they’ve been vicitimized before, you win!” It happened over a year ago, but the post is still good and worth reading again. Good lessons there.

Heels and Handguns points out that some media outlets are biased against gun owners. People who have been paying attention knew that already, but it’s a little surprising to see how dramatically the hard numbers stack up.

That Texas Lady posted pictures on her blog of how the Marilyn holster (from Flashbang) worked for her. Good, clear pictures of how to use this holster. Oh, and here’s a tip: there’s at least one YouTube video that shows this holster being used in an impractical and unsafe way.

Here’s a picture of me demonstrating a draw from a shoulder holster, which is essentially the same draw you should use for the Marilyn. When you draw from a shoulder holster or any shoulder holster variant, always lift your non-dominant elbow nice and high so you don’t sweep your own brachial artery. Notice how I criss-crossed my arms a little bit while drawing? This does more than get your brachial artery out of the way — it also makes the reach across your chest a lot shorter. That criss-cross drawing motion makes it much easier for chesty women to use this type of holster.

Bookworm had a dilemma: her son came home from school and told her that his English teacher was handing out anti-gun opinion columns in class, without providing anything from the pro-freedom side at all. Her post explains what she did about that, and why. Food for thought. 1

Arma Borealis cautions us not to take tactical or legal advice from a politician: “Do not follow VP Biden’s use of force suggestions. His suggested course of action is a felony in all 50 states.  You will likely go to jail if you shoot wildly into the darkness at suspicious noises. Get good training from someone who knows what they are talking about.”

Good point.

Colorado Rep. Joe Salazar has a message for you: Don’t carry a gun to protect yourself from violent stranger rape. “It’s why we have call boxes, it’s why we have safe zones, it’s why we have the whistles. Because you just don’t know who you’re gonna be shooting at. And you don’t know if you feel like you’re gonna be raped, or if you feel like someone’s been following you around or if you feel like you’re in trouble when you may actually not be, that you pop out that gun and you pop … pop around at somebody.”

Remember that bit about not taking advice from politicians? This would be a good place to remember it.

On a different note, whenever I encounter a man who is afraid that women might use firearms to effectively fight back against rapists and sexual abusers, it makes me wonder about both his past history and his future plans.

Notes:

  1. I owe a hat tip to someone for this one, because Bookworm isn’t one of my usual haunts so I know I caught the link from another blog. But I opened and closed a bajillion tabs while writing this post, got lost a little bit, and have no idea which direction to nod. If you know, please do throw a note in the comments. I love saying ‘thanks’ to people who bring good stuff to the rest of us. ↩
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Freeze
February 19, 2013

To quote Rory Miller, different people glitch on different things. And very few people have the innate self-awareness to know where their hesitations are. Most of muddle through with misplaced confidence until something unexpected brings us up short.

Years ago, right around the time I learned to shoot, a man driving his pickup truck hit my van from behind while I was pulling into my driveway. It was a hard hit, and it crunched the front end of his rig pretty badly, so my first thought was that he might be hurt. I quickly climbed out of the van and started walking toward his truck when he boiled up out of his driver’s seat, fighting mad. Red face, hands clenching and unclenching, shouting nasty things through spittle-flecked lips. The works.

I was so taken by surprise that I just stood there with my mouth flapping open and shut. I didn’t get back into my van. I didn’t run to the house. I didn’t move toward him and I didn’t move away from him. I wasn’t consciously frightened, but I didn’t move. I just stood there, staring.

That’s a freeze.

Fortunately, what I lack in brains and quick reflexes, I make up for in good friends. My teenaged babysitter, who’d been in the van along with me and two of my children, took one quick look at what was happening. Then she snatched both babies out of their carseats, tucked them under her arms, and scurried into the house where she locked the door behind her and called 911. Yup – she abandoned me. No hesitation at all. It was the right thing to do and I’ve loved her for it ever since.

My husband and his buddy were working in the garage behind the house. Husband didn’t hear the commotion (he was in the attic) but buddy did, and came running. He got in the guy’s space and talked him down from ready-to-fight, through an ugly but quiet rage and (eventually) all the way down to sullen annoyance.

Me? While all this was happening, I just kept imitating a large mouthed bass. It took a long time before I realized I should move. Heck, it took a long time before I even realized I should shut my mouth!

It wouldn’t happen that way today. I know it would not, because I found what caused that freeze and I have dealt with it. I might freeze on something else, but not on that one. That glitch was the big target, the easy one, the gimme that every person gets to face when they come to self defense skills late in life: the sudden realization that yes, on a normal sunshine-bright day on an ordinary street in the midst of your ordinary life, violence can happen … to you. It takes a few moments to process an epiphany like that, and not everyone gets that time. I did, mostly because the threat was almost entirely an empty show and because friends were around to keep it from going nuclear.

Here are some things I could have done in advance to make a freeze like that less likely. Note that none of these things absolutely guarantees that I wouldn’t freeze. But dealing with some things in advance do make a freeze less likely. These are things I could have done before it happened:

  • I could have thought about the important question: “Can violence happen — to me?”
  • I could have paid more attention to how many news stories involve people being angry or highly adrenalized after a car accident, and anticipated that the other driver might be angry.
  • I could have visualized a specific action in response to that general type of situation. For example, I could have pictured myself climbing back into my vehicle and locking the door if anyone ever threatened me while I was standing near my car. That way, my mind would have had a road map for what to do when the unexpected happened.

Because I hadn’t ever done any of those things, that type of freeze was more likely to happen to me. And it did.

But there are other places, other reasons, and  other ways to freeze.

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Overwhelmed
February 18, 2013

Everyone feels overwhelmed about something. Some of us live in a constant state of overwhelm—knowing we need to do more, but so paralyzed by the thought of not doing it perfectly that we do nothing at all.

Disaster preparedness experts talk about doing just a little over time, rather than grabbing one expensive, overwhelming off-the-shelf kit and trying to make it work. This makes sense to me. For example, instead of buying a big kit of weird foods someone else put together, why not just add one or two extra items to your grocery cart every time you shop? Instead of filling your garage with complicated gadgets you don’t know how to use, think about finding one handy item you could enjoy using.

Over time, these little steps add up.

You may have recently made the decision to carry a concealed handgun, but feel overwhelmed with how much there is to know and do and buy and learn. That’s understandable, but don’t let overwhelm get its nasty little paws on you. Don’t let it stop your progress. Instead of panicking and trying to do everything at once, decide to do one thing. Only one. When that one thing is done and you feel good about it, do the next thing.

Where to start? It does not matter. Start where you are. Start where you want to be. Just start.

  • Start by finding out what groups and classes are offered at your local range. Pick one and go.
  • Start by finding a gun store that rents firearms. Then dedicate yourself to finding a gun you like to shoot by renting guns there for awhile.
  • Start by learning more about holsters. Then pick one holster to try for yourself and order it online.
  • Start by looking up your state law about concealed carry licenses. Then work your way down the list of things you need to do to get one.
  • Start by deciding to carry just around your house until you are comfortable with your new holster. If that’s too big a step, try carrying an empty holster for awhile. Or an empty gun. Get used to the feel and weight of the gun before moving on to the next thing.

The point is, if you want to avoid overwhelm, don’t try to do everything at once. Just start where you are and learn more.

Do something. Then do the next thing. One day at a time. One thing at a time. And keep doing it.

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Confidence and false confidence
February 17, 2013

Start with this: when you want to defend yourself, confidence is a good thing. First, the body language of confidence can deter criminals from choosing you as a victim. If you are chosen, having confidence in what you know and what you can do helps you react more quickly. It helps you protect yourself with decisive speed. 1 That’s important. Even a bad plan can sometimes work for self-defense when it’s done quickly, aggressively, and with confidence.

That’s not all there is to the story.

Several years back, two researchers published a hilariously brilliant paper – so brilliant and hilarious, in fact, that it won an Ig Nobel prize. The title: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” 2

In that paper, the researchers showed that people have to know something about a subject in order to realize they don’t understand it. They have to achieve a certain skill level at something before they realize how much better they could be at that thing. Without that knowledge, unskilled people radically overestimate their own abilities.

The authors wrote:

Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

It’s that last sentence I wanted to focus on. It says that improving the skills of the participants actually caused a drop in their self-confidence levels. When these people began to learn more, the first thing that happened was that they realized how little they knew to begin with. They went from being more confident to being less confident in their abilities.

This has chilling implications for defensive firearm instructors who provide training beyond the state requirements. Why? Because our students almost invariably come to us with frighteningly low skill levels but relatively high confidence levels. They know they need to learn more, of course (otherwise they wouldn’t be in class). But they often lack understanding of what self-defense looks like or how the skills they need relate to the ones they already have.

And as soon as their skills start improving, their confidence level can drop. (It doesn’t always, but it can.) When it does, it drops because they are getting a more accurate picture of what they can or cannot effectively do to defend themselves. It drops because they start measuring themselves against reality, instead of against the fantasy inside their head. Or because they are now shooting alongside better shooters than they were before, so now they’re measuring themselves against a higher level of skill without realizing how far they’ve come. Any of these things can cause confidence levels to go down as actual skill increases.

The problem is, even misplaced confidence helps people avoid being chosen as victims in the first place. Confidence helps people act decisively when decisiveness can save their lives. And, of course, confidence feels good. People want to feel good when they train, which means keeping confidence high may help keep them training and improving.

That leads us to a delicate balancing act. Good instructors must (by definition) improve the students’ skill levels with solid training in useful techniques. We must work with the students to help them understand what they know and what they don’t know. We must be sure they know what they need to learn next and how they can improve their skills from the point they’re at right now. We must keep them grounded in reality, and that means we have to destroy some of the fantasy ideas they might have about what they can do.

But as we’re doing all these things, we should always work to bring their actual abilities into alignment with their confidence – never the other way around.

Because confidence is a good thing.

Notes:

  1. Update: Fixed a mangled sentence here. ↩
  2. Justin Kruger and David Dunning. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1999, Vol. 77, No. 6. ↩
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