The Cornered Cat
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Weapon
November 4, 2012

My email box gathers interesting letters sometimes. One of my perennial favorites: the well-meaning note, usually from an older gentleman, telling me that I shouldn’t use the word weapon.

This isn’t unique to me, I’m sure. I guess most people who speak or write about firearms have been chided, at one time or another, for calling a handgun a weapon. We shouldn’t do that, we’re told, because it scares people. It’s all about perception, you see. We can’t go around frightening people. We should use gentler words. People have this idea that weapons are evil. So we shouldn’t refer to our guns as weapons, not even the guns we carry for the express purpose of using as defensive instruments if we are assaulted.  Continue reading →

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Context matters
November 3, 2012

Defensive firearm skills are not learned in a vacuum—or they shouldn’t be. The context where we intend to use the skills really dictates which skills we need, how well we need to learn them, and how we prioritize our time in learning them.

Ordinary people use firearms for self-defense in very different contexts than law enforcement and military people do. That’s because they have different missions, different rules of engagement, and different available resources.  Continue reading →

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Vote by mail
November 1, 2012

My Vote By Mail ballot arrived the other day. If it were up to me, I would go down to the polls and vote in person, but I don’t have that choice anymore. A few years back, my local election clerk decided to save money by requiring everyone to vote by mail, like it or not. When my ballot arrives, it sits on my kitchen table until I get around to filling it out. And every time I see that ballot sitting there, surrounded by election pamphlets and voter-information booklets and chattering family members discussing how we’re going to vote this year, I think about my grandmother.  Continue reading →

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“Round” is a shape
October 30, 2012

Monday morning, I got up early and went down to the gym. I don’t always go into town to exercise—usually I just use the elliptical at home—but I enjoy using the wider variety of equipment there, and especially enjoy the chance to get part of my workout in the swimming pool.

Exercise hasn’t always been part of my life. In fact, up until two years ago, I rarely exercised at all. My motto had always been, “No pain… no pain!” I joked that I would never take up jogging because the Bible was against it (“The wicked flee when no man pursueth”). I told everyone that exercise machines seem fundamentally and philosophically wrong; I mean, here’s this machine whose sole purpose is to extract energy from human beings. For this we invented modern technology? Couldn’t we just, you know, work for a living?  Continue reading →

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Taken away and used against you
October 28, 2012

So a few days ago, I met up with Rory Miller, Don Stahlnecker, and a few mutual friends to discuss handgun retention and disarm techniques. These are the skills that allow you to maintain control of your own firearm or to take control of someone else’s gun. We discussed physical and philosophical answers to questions such as, How do you hold onto your firearm when someone is trying to take it away from you? Why would you need the skills to do so? When wouldn’t you just shoot the dude who was grabbing for your gun? What are the most critical gun-retention skills for people who carry weapons, and what are the most efficient ways to teach those skills?  Continue reading →

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Black gun owners
October 26, 2012

My friend Kenn Blanchard recently penned an excellent article about the social  challenges faced by African American gun owners. Kenn writes: “For many shooters in the black community, gun ownership makes them a pariah.  They deal with gun bigotry, cultural alienation and a lack of support.”

Kenn isn’t talking about discrimination against people of color from gun owners. He’s talking about discrimination against black gun owners from people in their own families. As he says, “Discrimination from your own family hurts.” The more powerful the discrimination, the more painful it can be — but that’s not Kenn’s primary point. He goes on to explain what we, as a community of people who care about human rights and human freedom, can do to support new shooters whose backgrounds aren’t necessarily the same as our own.

Go, read the whole thing. It’s worth it.

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Lawsuits
October 25, 2012

In his excellent book, Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected, Rory Miller talks about “glitches.” Glitches, he says, are the things that cause us to hesitate when we should be moving. A glitch can be caused by an unexpected emotional reaction, an unresolved moral dilemma, or an unanticipated concern we haven’t addressed before the encounter. A glitch can make us freeze rather than fight or flee, and it can cost us our lives in a bad situation.

One common glitch lies in the financial area. I’ve talked to a lot of people over the years who were extremely worried about getting sued by the criminal or by his surviving family if they defended their lives. Some of these folks felt such a strong fear of lawsuits that they were unwilling to carry a firearm.

A fear of lawsuits isn’t unreasonable, because lawsuits do happen. For example, from the news this week, there’s this story about a 90-year-old man who shot an intruder after the intruder had already shot him—and now the criminal, who survived, has sued the old man for negligence. This particular lawsuit will almost certainly go nowhere, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about today. Nope. What I wanted to do here was to ask you a question, one that you may need to think about before you answer. It should help you think through some of your own boundaries and maybe find a glitch you didn’t realize was there.

First, one more piece of background. When the intended victim fought back, he had every reason to believe the criminal was going to kill him, and that his only hope of survival was to shoot the attacker. He chose to survive.

Okay, now the question. It’s a “think it through” question, so don’t just toss off a knee-jerk answer. Think about it. Ready? Here it is:

Which is more important to you—your bank account, or your life? Why?

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Pumpkin carving …
October 24, 2012

… with bullets explosives?

This is just cool. Watch those pumpkin guts fly!

Can’t think of a single practical use for any of it (unless you count “getting more people happily into shooting firearms at greater distances” as a practical use), but it sure looks fun.

Hat tip to Sebastian.

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