The Cornered Cat
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Two layers of safety
October 15, 2012

Depressing story in the news this week, which you can read here. Seems a dad kept his firearm in a holster under the bed in his bedroom, usually with the bedroom door locked. You know where this is going, don’t you? Yeah. The kid, 3 years old, is in the hospital after taking a bullet to his face. The dad is possibly facing charges.

Why’d the kid shoot himself in the face? It’s the most common pattern for little kid “accidental” shootings. Basically, the kid starts exploring the gun and looks down the barrel — sometimes trying to get more leverage to get the trigger to move at the same time. Tragic, horrible results.

So what’s the lesson? Two things.

1) If you have a firearm at home and it is not under the conscious control of a responsible adult, it needs to be locked up. Not “hidden out of sight,” not “up high where the kids can’t get it,” but locked up. Ideally, the lock should be secure enough to defeat an adult thief. You should use this lock every single stinking time you take the gun off your body, with no exceptions whatsoever. And yes, this includes the gun inside your purse. If there’s a gun inside your purse, you can never just set the purse down even at home. It needs to be behind a locked door or inside a locked safe! Every time.

2) Because adults can make mistakes, you need to gunproof your children as soon as possible. Disarming your child’s curiousity about firearms doesn’t have to look scary. It can fit very neatly into all the other things you teach and do with your children. When do you start? As soon as the child is old enough to talk, they’re old enough to start learning the Eddie Eagle rules (“If you see a gun, STOP! Don’t touch. Leave the area. Tell an adult.”). When the kids are old enough to ask questions about what you’re doing, it’s time to show them how the gun works and de-fang their dangerous curiousity about guns.

It’s tempting to think that simply keeping the guns locked up will always be enough. But even responsible adults make mistakes sometimes. When there’s an unplanned failure in your lock-it-up system, the lessons you’ve taught your children can help avoid a tragedy.

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Armed at home
October 13, 2012

Less than a week after a four-person home invasion ended in the death of one of the intruders, an Indiana prosecutor cleared the homeowner of any wrongdoing. (Read the full story here.)

The 54-year-old male homeowner lives alone, and apparently heard a noise downstairs while he was napping in the middle of the afternoon. According to the news reports, investigators said the homeowner found the intruders had armed themselves with knives from the homeowner’s own kitchen, and that he responded appropriately to the lethal threat. When the shooting stopped, one of the intruders was dead; one was injured; and two had run away to be caught later.

It is tempting to think that criminal danger happens only at night, only in bad parts of town, and never at home. Reality is otherwise. Thank God this man was prepared to defend himself even during broad daylight in his own home.

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The Dirty Little Secret
October 12, 2012

Three data points, all anecdotes:

  • Some time back, I was reviewing an article, which was a profile of a concealed carry person. The writer asked the interviewee how long he had been carrying a firearm. “As far as the government knows, three years,” the man replied. Why three years? “That was when the shall-issue concealed carry law passed in my state and made an honest man out of me.” It turned out that the man had carried a concealed handgun every day for nearly 40 years before the law allowed it. Nobody else ever knew, not even his wife.
  • A few weeks ago, I came across a news story (you can read it here) that talked about a young woman who went on the news because she wanted to put a face on the people who value concealed carry rights at the university campus in Colorado. “It doesn’t look like James Holmes. It looks like professional students that just want to exercise the right to defend themselves,” the woman told reporters. She explained to them that she was speaking up because retaining the right to carry was important to her.
  • Last week, I received an email from a Cornered Cat fan. “Should I get a concealed carry permit?” the letter writer asked, going on to explain that she was worried about the application process because she didn’t want to get her “name on a list” of gun owners. She didn’t want anyone else to find out that she owned firearms, and she did not want her local authorities to know she existed. The funny thing is, I used to get that question all the time … seven or eight years ago. As I read this one, I suddenly realized that it had been a long time since I last needed to answer it. People have almost stopped asking this once-common question.

What do these anecdotes mean?

Just this: gun owners are braver than we used to be. And that’s a good thing. If you’re one of the new crowd of gun owners who isn’t afraid to speak up and defend your rights, good for you! If you’re one of those who regularly invites other people to the range and who isn’t afraid to let your friends know that you care about your right to own guns, awesome!

Before we get too cocky about our own bravery, though, we should all turn around and say thank you to one of the rare, brave souls who took the risk of speaking up back in the days, twenty or thirty years ago, when there was almost no social support for concealed carry. Back when gun owners were demonized everywhere in the media and in real life. Back when the human right to own and use the tools of effective self defense was under attack everywhere, and when gun owners lost battle after battle in the courts and ballot boxes. The rare people who spoke up back then almost singlehandedly brought us to where we are today, and we all owe them a great debt because of it.

Come to think of it, maybe we’re not braver. Maybe we’ve just come to understand that there are more of us than we ever knew, back in the days when concealed carry was a dirty little secret never discussed in polite company.

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QOTD
October 11, 2012

“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than it be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.” – Jack London

Yup, I’m busy. That’s a good thing.

Years ago, when my children were little, going to the grocery store was always an adventure. At one point, my husband and I had five children under five years old, so you can easily imagine the chaos that a trip to the store might bring.

Picture this: a young mom wearing a newborn in a frontpack, with four babies and toddlers perched in and around the groceries in the cart. I always pushed the cart up the very center of the aisle, because veering to either side was courting disaster (“Put that back! I don’t need six cans of olives today…”)  It was kind of like pushing a hungry, easily distracted, hyperactive octopus through the store.

Anyway. I remember one specific day as we finished up our shopping and I stepped wearily into the checkout line, a very nice older woman offered to give me a hand getting the groceries onto the counter. “You sure have your hands full,” she remarked. I thought, Oh, you think?! — but before I could voice my sarcastic impulse, she went on to say with a wistful note in her voice, “Thank God they’re not empty.”

Edit: Fixed a mangled sentence.

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Do you know how to use a purse?
October 10, 2012

A word of advice to would-be firearms instructors: If you have never carried a gun in a purse, or drawn and fired from such a purse at the range, you almost certainly do not have the experience to teach or express opinions about purse-related skillsets to other people. This limits your ability to teach women the skills they need.

To fix this lack,  Continue reading →

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Pressure tests
October 9, 2012

Right now, there’s a current blowing through the training community where we are hearing that students need to “learn under stress” in order to be able to protect themselves during a stressful event. There are a few instructors who think they need to yell or even scream at their students while the student is trying to learn something new. I don’t think that’s an effective teaching technique. There’s a place for that type of pressure, but I think that pressure should be applied after the student has already learned the techique and become reasonably proficient in it.

For most adult students, learning something new provides its own kind of stress, and that type of stress is enough during the learning process. Once the skillset is learned, and with the student’s permission, you can apply more stress so they know well they can perform under pressure. But you have to give them time to learn the skill first—otherwise, you produce dangerous, fumbly behavior with very little retention in learning.

Teach first, give them time to learn and practice the skillset, then get permission and pressure test.

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Pretty is as pretty does…
October 8, 2012

Look what landed on my doorstep!

Soteria Leather holster with engraved Cornered Cat logo

It came from Cerisse Wilson of Soteria Leather. I love the way this holster looks (how could I not?) but more than that, I truly love its quality. The leather is thick and rich, stiff enough to prevent premature holster collapse. The smooth, even finish looks amazing in person, even more beautiful than a photograph can show. Every gorgeous  purple stitch lands where it should, without a stutter or a missed stitch anywhere. The gun snugs into place with exactly the right amount of pre-use tension that one would expect from a quality leather holster. (As with all good leather holsters, this one will need to be broken in before use, because leather stretches a little bit over time.) The belt loops fit my belt exactly and the heavy-duty snaps hold the holster securely in place. Everything about this holster is rock solid.

To say I am pleased would be an understatement.

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Holsters in history
October 7, 2012

I’ve always had an interest in history—not in the bland, boring recital of dates and disconnected facts, but in the living stories of how people lived, the things they owned and the way they thought.

Awhile back, I picked up a copy of a book titled, Triggernometry: A Gallery of Gunfighters. It was written by Eugene Cunningham and originally published in 1934 (although my edition is a paperback from 1996 or so). In this book, Cunningham tells the stories of dozens of different fighting men from the cowboy era. His stories that have an immediacy to them because the people he wrote about, or at least their friends and family members, were still alive at the time he wrote the book and because he had personally interviewed many of the people involved. Given the relative dates, this would be like someone today penning stories about the civil rights marches of the 1960s, using personal interviews of the people who were there. If you were such a writer, you’d know you had to get it right because if you didn’t, plenty of eyewitnesses would step forward to set the record straight.  Continue reading →

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