The Cornered Cat
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Safety rules for dummy guns
January 25, 2018

An excerpt from a recent newsletter by John Farnam (by the way, if you are not a regular reader of his, you are missing out — and his name should be near the top of your bucket list for firearms training, too).

Here he is talking about molded-plastic replica guns, sometimes called ‘dummy guns.’ They are solid pieces of plastic with no moving parts whatsoever.

The sentence in bold highlights something I want to talk about today, but it’s worth reading the whole thing — more than once. And thinking about it too.

***

Quote from Farnam’s Quips, 1/23/18:

“I find [Ring’s Blue Guns] useful in showing students, in a classroom, how to grip guns, how to avoid pointing guns in unsafe directions, and general correct gun-handling. Because they’re inert, we can graphically demonstrate to students the ‘wrong way’ of doing things. For that, I find them a wonderfully useful training-aid….

“But, there are those who decree that blue guns be strictly handled exactly the same as functional guns! They insist that blue guns never be ‘pointed’ in ‘unsafe directions.’ They thus don’t allow blue guns in the classroom – but they do allow functional guns.

“This is insanity!

“What are blue guns for?

“Whether or not you like blue guns, functional guns, regardless of their supposed ‘condition,’ should not be handled in the classroom in any event!

” ‘Condition-based training’ with functional guns is inherently defective. When you have ‘safe guns’ and ‘dangerous guns’ in your life, it is just a matter of time before they get mixed-in with each other!

“Functional guns are dangerous, all the time, and we handle them as such. That is why we run ‘hot’ ranges.

“Blue guns are not functional. They are not ‘guns’ at all. It is thus safe, and appropriate, to handle them in the classroom for instructional purposes!”

***

A few thoughts of my own, building on Farnam’s excellent points.

Dummy guns are — by definition — completely inert. They cannot hold a round of ammunition, and could never launch a bullet even if they could. They are utterly harmless in their physical being. Even getting bopped on the head with one isn’t the end of the world, and is relatively painless. 1

This does not mean dummy guns are “safe” in some ultimate sense. It only means that there is little or no physical danger in handling them.

Dummy guns are extremely dangerous in one particular way: they are shaped like a gun, but they can never launch a bullet. This creates a constant and unrelenting pressure to handle them without thought or care. But habits built with dummy guns carry over into habits used around real guns.

That’s why we use them: because they help us build longstanding habits.

It is entirely up to us whether the habits we build with our dummy guns are good habits, or bad ones. And bad habits are dangerous. As I’ve often said, injuries from loaded guns usually arise from longstanding bad habits with unloaded ones. This goes just as strongly for habits built with inert dummy guns.

Good uses for dummy guns

It is perfectly okay — not just acceptable, but downright admirable — to use dummy guns to unlearn bad habits and learn the correct ones. And yes, that does mean that sometimes we will do things with a dummy gun that would be bad and dangerous to do with a functional gun. That’s why the dummy gun exists, after all.

Dummy guns work very well in the classroom when an instructor uses one to demonstrate the “wrong” way to do a thing, and then show students how to correct that error.

They work well for role play and force-on-force exercises. This includes the type of role play where one student (playing the good guy) points a gun at another student (playing the role of attacker). It also includes settings where people practice ways to physically hold onto the gun while entangled with an aggressive attacker.

More than that, it is truly wonderful to use a dummy gun at home for various things including holster practice. I honestly believe that every person who owns a firearm for concealed carry should also own a dummy gun for regular work with the holster. Dummy guns are especially useful when trying on a new holster or exploring a new type of carry method.

Protecting good habits while demonstrating bad ones

Because dummy guns build habits, we should work hard to protect our own good gunhandling habits whenever we use one. We also want to model good gunhandling habits for others. While this is especially true for instructors, it’s also true for anyone who wants their loved ones to handle firearms safely and well. So whenever we handle dummy guns, we do it with deliberate and conscious awareness of the habits we are building for ourselves, and also of the habits we are showing to others.

But how can we do that, if one of the purposes of dummy guns is to allow us to safely show others bad habits to avoid?

Here’s one way. When I teach classes, I have a schtick where I use a dummy gun to show students all of my … ahem… “favorite” … ways people point guns at themselves on the range without realizing it. During this segment of the class, I do the following with a dummy gun:

  • Pretend I’ve just finished shooting the target, and am relieved — so I relax, let the gun drop suddenly toward the ground, pointing it at my knees and feet while it dangles thoughtlessly alongside my leg.
  • Pretend I am irritated with my own shooting, and jerk the gun angrily down toward my own feet.
  • Pretend I am putting the gun into the holster, and reach over to steady the holster with my left hand while holding the gun with my right, thus passing the muzzle of the gun over the top of my left hand before it goes into the holster.
  • Pretend I can’t find the holster mouth, so I’m pointing the gun’s muzzle directly into my body’s core as I use the muzzle to blindly seek for the holster mouth.
  • Pretend I suddenly realize I’ve forgotten my hearing protection, so I slap my hands to my ears … with the gun still in hand.
  • Pretend I am having a hard time racking the slide, so I point the muzzle into my own abdomen while I try to get leverage to get the slide moving.

Pretty soon, the students start making suggestions of their own about bad gunhandling they have personally seen. And they get the point about how easy it is to do, when we aren’t paying attention. Done properly with lots of class interaction, this can be a wonderful teaching aid that always gets everyone laughing and thinking about how they handle guns. But even with all this misbehavior, there’s one very important thing about what I am doing with the dummy gun: every wrong thing they see me do, they see me do deliberately. It is within the context of “things not to do” and we are all very clear on that. And I do each one separately and consciously, with full awareness of what I am doing with the gun-shaped object in my hand. This helps me maintain my own good habits. It also helps students avoid learning bad gunhandling habits, because I have drawn their attention to the fact that these are bad habits.

My ‘bad’ gunhandling with a dummy gun is never unintentional. I want the people around me to be able to tell that I am making a deliberate error in order to show them how to correct that error. Each mistake is made on purpose and for a purpose.

When I am done showing people what that wrong thing is and how to correct it, I get the dummy gun out of my hand by putting it on a desk or in a holster or on the ground. Or I go back to holding it carefully with the muzzle in a known and controlled orientation, consciously keeping my hands still as I talk so that I am again modeling correct behavior until it is time to deliberately model bad behavior.

Thoughtless habits to avoid

Many of us tend to wave our hands around a bit when we talk. That’s natural. So when you keep a dummy gun in your house for practice, don’t get in the habit of waving it around while having a conversation with your spouse. If you have one in the classroom, don’t keep it in your hand while you’re lecturing, especially not if you’re in the habit of talking with your hands.

Talking with your hands is fine, but thoughtlessly waving a gun-shaped object around is Not Okay — that’s a bad habit and it’s poor modeling for others.

Don’t use the muzzle of the dummy gun to scratch an itch, or gesture toward something across the room, or just to fiddle with while you’re watching television. You don’t want to get in the habit of not really noticing the thing in your hand that’s shaped like a gun.

Whenever you handle your dummy gun, make a habit of picking it up properly with a solid grip and do keep track of the muzzle direction as you do it. If you’re holding onto it as you move around the room, remain aware of what’s in front of the muzzle as you move.

If circumstances make it inconvenient to keep the dummy gun in hand with a proper grip as you maintain muzzle awareness, then get it out of your hand or at least change things around so it does not feel like a gun in your hand anymore. For example, you might plunk it into a bag, or pile it onto a stack of other non-gun things to carry — and then you can relax without concern. The goal is to maintain your own good habits for handling firearms, not to get prissy and persnickety about a simple  piece of plastic.

Never thoughtlessly park a finger on the trigger of a dummy gun for no other reason than “because it’s there.” Guard your good habits.

Role play

Pretend guns — dummy guns — are made for playing pretend. And that’s what role play really is. Never use a real gun for role play. Real bullets can get into real guns, and then the gun can really fire and a real person gets hurt or killed. For real.

When you must point a gun-shaped object at someone, that someone should always be an appropriate target for such an action, within the conversation you are having with them.

For example, an instructor might point a dummy gun at a student who is role-playing an attacker, and that’s good. But it’s not good to point a gun-shaped object at that same student just to indicate that it’s their turn to speak during a class discussion. That doesn’t fit the conversation.

Because imagination and visualization exercises require active participation, always make sure other people (students, friends, family members) expect and consent to this type of role play before pointing a gun-shaped object in their direction.

Real or Pretend?

Some instructors like to “designate” a safe direction for classroom use. Used in this sense, “designate” is a jargon-ish word that means, “This direction isn’t really safe but we’re going to pretend it is.”

It is okay to pretend that’s a safe direction as long as we are using a pretend firearm, which is what a dummy gun really is.

But the moment the gun becomes real, the safe direction had better become just as real. 

 

Notes:

  1. This is very much unlike the aluminum castings used as dummy guns for role play in an earlier era… don’t ask me how I know this. Trust me: I know this. ↩
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Unpopular Observation
January 24, 2018

As a follow up to the post titled Dress Around the Gun, there’s this:

If you think you won’t have to change anything at all about your clothing choices, comfort, and lifestyle in order to carry a gun on a regular basis — you’re wrong. You will have to change some things.

What type of changes might you have to make in order to fit concealed carry into your life? That depends on you. Maybe you’ll have to start wearing pants with belt loops. (Horrors!) Maybe you’ll have to switch over to wearing your shirts a bit looser than you prefer right now, or add an extra underlayer for your sensitive skin. Maybe you’ll need to change your habits when you realize that your formerly-favorite restaurant has a legally-binding NO GUNS ALLOWED sign, or when you discover that you would rather enjoy the comfort of being armed even if it means saying ‘no thanks’ when someone offers you a beer.

To think that nothing has to change is as foolish as it is to think that everything does.

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Rule Sets
January 22, 2018

Newsflash: within the firearms world, people often use different safety rulesets.

The most common and most widely-trusted rules come from Gunsite in the form of the Four Rules.

Gunsite Four Rules: 1) All guns are always loaded. 2) Never let the muzzle cover anything which you are not willing to destroy. 3) Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on target. 4) Always be sure of your target.

Many people have taken the Four Rules and adapted them in different ways. We quibble, endlessly, over the wording. Should it say “cover”, or “point at”? Should we keep the finger “off the trigger” or “off the trigger and high on the frame” or simply “indexed high on the frame”?

Even when we accept the wording as given, we argue. What does it mean to be “sure” of your target? Try asking that in a discussion forum or anywhere on social media where gun nerds gather, and watch the sparks fly. For even more trollish fun, try asking an even more basic question, such as “How do you define a ‘gun’ for safety-rule purposes?” 1

And those are just about the wording variants within the most commonly accepted ruleset. That’s controversy enough! But of course there are other rulesets. The NRA Rules come to mind: Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction, Always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot, Always keep the gun unloaded until ready to use. That’s probably the most well-known ruleset among people who have not grown up on the self defense side of the shooting world. This ruleset is widely preferred by people who use guns as ballistic golf clubs — weekend toys rather than working tools.

No matter which ruleset is ostensibly in use, some people have a very limited understanding of what the safety rules really mean. For example, far too many people act as if the Other Three Rules (or any of the NRA ‘always’ rules) actually only apply to guns known to be loaded. This is incorrect, but common. How many times have you heard someone say, with feeling, “… but it’s unloaded!” as a defense when someone ducks away from their wandering muzzle or suggests they should keep their finger off the trigger?

Others may talk a good game about the gunhandling rules and protocols, but then be willing to throw one or more of the bedrock rules right out the window when an important-enough goal comes along. This seems to happen particularly often to people who have not had a deep grounding in how to really think about the different rule sets and gunhandling paradigms in different situations. Even though memorizing the rules can be important, it is often not enough to simply memorize a checklist. That’s simply where it starts.

Can you recite — from memory — the Four Rules, or the NRA Rules, or the preferred ruleset from your nearest professional firearms training school? Good! That’s a start. But it is most emphatically not the end of the story.

Those rules, in whatever form you prefer and use, are not complete. Each rule is like the chapter heading in a book. They tell a person what’s inside the chapter, and when well-worded they may sum up the most important ideas, but they do not give a person all the information they will need about the subject. They simply give us a place to start and a way to organize what we need to know about handling deadly weapons.

People who teach this stuff need to have a much wider understanding than most do. They must move beyond a rote recital of their preferred ruleset. They have to understand the bedrock principles that tie together the different rulesets. And — like everyone who handles guns! — they have to be able to apply those principles in many different situations.

Here’s a clue: when you meet an instructor who ‘hates’ one of the rulesets so much that they cannot even explain that ruleset and what it means, that is someone who does not yet grok the bedrock principles that the most common rulesets all share. (And that’s an instructor to avoid, natch.) Once a person does grok those principles, they can use any of the common rulesets to explain them. And even though they may have a preferred ruleset, they won’t have a problem explaining the same principles using different words. And they will follow the same core principles of safe gunhandling no matter what is going on around them and no matter which set of words they prefer.

Does this matter to you, as an ordinary gun owner or person interested in self defense? Of course it does!

If you are a consumer of gun-related information (as you are, since you are reading this blog), you are at risk for absorbing bad ideas and poor modeling from sources you should be able to trust.

Some instructors will take rather extreme risks for benefits that could be achieved without that risk. This might happen because they don’t have enough imagination to figure out how to follow the bedrock safety principles and reach their stated instructional goal, or because they don’t really understand the basic rules and their function, or for some other reason. For you as the student, this matters. As a savvy consumer of firearms-related information, you must understand the issues at hand well enough to choose between good and bad sources of that information.

In any case: not every person who calls themselves an instructor will follow the most basic principles of good gunhandling with their students. This is something we don’t explain enough to beginning students, even though we really should. Not every instructor can be trusted to model responsible gunhandling in their classes, no matter which set of rules they preach.

This makes it very, very important that students shop carefully for their instructors. Definitely a case of buyer beware.

For example, I personally would never say to a group of students, “We’ve unloaded all these guns, so none of the other rules matter anymore…” That’s not an acceptable risk because it would be tragic if someone made a mistake about their gun’s status in that situation. It’s a violation of a bedrock principle for safe gunhandling.

And yet, I have been in a class where that was essentially what happened as the instructor passed out ‘unloaded’ loaner guns to students while we were all facing each other around a round table at the back of the range. In that instructor’s mind, that was a quick and relatively simple way to pass out the loaner guns, and he ‘knew’ the loaner guns were unloaded, so… good gunhandling habits went out the window in the interests of convenience.

Fortunately, there are other convenient ways to loan guns to students, and nearly all of those ways also stay within the bedrock principles of gun safety. This is also true with nearly every other goal a person might name as a would-be ‘justification’ for ignoring the safety rules: dry fire, role play, gun cleaning, whatever. The goals, whatever they are, can be reached within the rules — as long as someone thinks about both the goals and the safety issues at the same time, and does not treat them as separate issues that have no bearing on each other.

Another example: When we need to handle real guns for dryfire, inside or outside a classroom, we can use a real backstop instead of an imaginary one. The rule is, always use a real backstop with real guns. Save the imaginary backstops — “designated” safe directions rather than genuine ones — for use with imaginary guns (such as blue plastic dummy guns and AirSoft guns). The instructional and practical goals for dry fire can be reached within the Four Rules, within the NRA Rules, and within the principles shared by all common gunhandling rulesets.

As I’ve said many times before, checking the gun’s chamber does not erase the consequences of getting it wrong when you handle the gun. Unless you’re fully prepared to accept the consequences of making a mistake about the gun’s loaded or unloaded status (a dead student? a bullet going through a neighbor’s house?), never rely on simply checking the gun, or even double or triple checking it. That’s why the “target/backstop” aka “safe direction” rule exists.

No matter which ruleset you prefer to use, be aware that other people often get … religiously … wrapped around the axle with their preferred wording. Keep a flexibly open mind about your own wording when necessary, but utterly refuse to compromise on the bedrock principles.

Stay safe!

Notes:

  1. Many of the people who get most infuriated by this type of question have literally never thought about the rules before. They get cranky at this type of question because it transforms the rules from trite little truisms into something more real that they have to really think about. ↩
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Escalate the violence?
January 20, 2018

“If you use a gun, that will just escalate the violence” presupposes two things. (At least two things.)

One, it presupposes that using the gun is not effective, or that you’ll use it in an ineffective way. Because if the gun were used effectively, the violence would not ‘escalate’ when you used the gun. The violence would stop.

Two (and far more interesting on the think-it-through side of things), it assumes that you are using the gun in an unnecessary way and that your life isn’t really at risk. Because if you were using the gun appropriately, you would be using it only to save your own life or the life of another innocent person — not to threaten or bluster or make a point, but simply to survive.

There is no escalation point past “an innocent person is going to die, right here and right now.” Everything from that point on is either acting on exactly the same level, or a de-escalation.

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I am the very model of …
January 19, 2018

I am the very model of a modern gun instructor-er,
I dress around the gun with polo shirt untucked, yessir.
I know the IDPA rules this week, and all the rules historical
From Multi-Gun to Nationals in order categorical.
I’m very well acquainted, too, with matters that are tactical.
I talk about the OODA Loop and Color Code, so simple and so practical.
About defensive theories I’m teeming with a host of ’em,
And if you ask for trainers’ names, it’s true that I know most of ’em.

All:
And if you ask for trainers’ names, it’s true that he knows most of ’em.
And if you ask for trainers’ names, it’s true that he knows most of ’em.
And if you ask for trainers’ names, it’s true that he knows most of ’em.

I can recite four rules, three rules, ten principles and big boy rules
I talk about the shooting drills and standards from a bunch of schools.
I’ve heard about Gunsite, Shootrite, Thunder Ranch, and F-A-S
Rangemaster and Rogers, I-C-E and D-T-I and T-D-I and M-A-G and S-A-F.
I love to talk about incidents dynamical and critical
And I can argue whether crime is rare or if it’s typical.
My students all know what I think about wiring neurological
And how a thing mechanical interfaces with th’ biological.

All:
And how a thing mechanical interfaces with th’ biological.
And how a thing mechanical interfaces with th’ biological.
And how a thing mechanical interfaces with th’ biological.

I talk about low ready, high ready, close ready, and even sul
Though if you ask me to explain my choice I’ll steer you to another school.
And you should know I’m certified in many shooting disciplines
So listen up while I talk about doing things you only wish you can.
My YouTube channel gets a million hits and I’m so proud my tac pants might bust
I love to demo high speed low drag moves while my cameraman rolls in the dust.
Record my shooting from the front — it’s fine ’cause I’m professional
My interest in all types of guns has oft been called obsessional.

All:
His interest in all types of guns has oft been called obsessional.
His interest in all types of guns has oft been called obsessional.
His interest in all types of guns has oft been called obsessional.

Let me explain to you the difference between the plastic and the polymer,
A magazine is not a clip, and inside it has a spring and follower.
When I can tell at sight a Mauser rifle from a javelin,
And talk about the legal stuff that judges use the gavel in,
When I have learnt what progress has been made in modern gunnery,
When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nunnery
In short, when I’ve a smattering of elemental strategy
You’ll say I am the best instructor and you’ll ask for me!

For my self-defensive knowledge, though I’m plucky and adventury,
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century;
But still, in classes where you need a good conductor-er,
I am the very model of a modern gun instructor-er.

All:
He is the very model of a modern gun instructor-er.
He is the very model of a modern gun instructor-er.
He is the very model of a modern gun instructor-er.

 

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Dress around the gun
January 18, 2018

Being told that you may need to dress around the gun sometimes helps when it comes from a person who’s wearing the same type of styles you also wear, especially if they are around your same size and age. Gives you a little incentive and maybe even inspiration: if that person can do it, so can I!

But that same sentence sure can be a deal killer when it comes from Tactical Dude or Dudette wearing pants with more pockets than a kangaroo convention.

And it sounds even less enticing when it comes from an unkempt person wearing a fishing vest over a stained tee shirt.

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Manifesto
January 17, 2018

This is my manifesto: I believe that the things I do have the power to change my world.

I am not a fan of powerlessness. I believe in agency. I believe that the things I do make a difference. I believe that my actions have the power to change my future.

Do you believe that your actions have the power to change your future? If so, which actions? Just the ones that lead very very directly to a definite outcome, as when you push a handle and the door opens? Or can your actions also change your future even when they are slightly more removed from direct cause and effect, such as when you study hard and pass your toughest class, or skip too many classes and then do poorly on the final?

Personally, I believe that all of my actions – even the small and indirect ones – have enough power to change my world.

Because I believe in my own personal power, I utterly reject any set of ideas that says my choices don’t matter, that the way I choose to live my life makes no difference in what happens to me, that I am at the mercy of other people’s choices and there’s therefore no point in making choices of my own.

I categorically reject the lie that says I have no power over my world.

When I want to reduce my risk of being harmed, I refuse to wait for unknown other people – or worse, for an entire culture full of other people – to change. I will make myself safer through my own choices. I do not choose to passively wait for someone else to decide that my life and happiness are worth saving.

While it would be wonderful if other people decided to change in order to keep me safer, until that happens I will do what it takes to protect myself.

That’s my story.

***

Apparently, this belief in my own agency, my acceptance of (and insistence on) my personal ability to make meaningful choices that can affect the outcomes I experience – this odd belief that I do in fact have some control over my own life – makes me a victim-blamer, a blind and crabby denier, a rape apologist defending rape culture.

Or, you know … not.

Because the storyline these days seems to be that individual women actually have no power. We are all at the mercy of systemic bias. We are victims of unassailable societal factors. We are the helpless subjects of rape culture.

This mystifies me.

Once upon a time, right-thinking people championed the belief that women do have power and should have power over their own lives, just like men.

But the revised story goes like this: There is no one-to-one correspondence between a victim’s actions and a criminal’s actions, in that many people who have tried to avoid crime still become victims of it. This holds true for all types of crime and not just the sex-based ones, but sexual crimes get inside the victim’s brain in a way that other types of crime do not, and many victims spend years feeling guilty as they spiral down the coulda-woulda-shoulda cesspool. That being the case, it is morally wrong to suggest that any woman might want to think about her specific risks and make choices that she believes will help her stay safer. Because we live in a rape culture, women can’t be expected to choose between safer choices or less-safe ones. It’s all pretty much the same thing, and even when it’s not, suggesting that a potential victim might want to change her behavior in any way is just victimizing her all over again.

To continue that reasoning, since we can never absolutely guarantee that a rapist won’t decide to rape someone who has made careful and crime-aware choices, and since it is so unfair to ask the victim to change, and since criminals should be told they’re wrong (because they are in fact wrong), therefore none of us should ever take any specific action to keep ourselves away from danger or to protect our own bodies. Certainly, we should never suggest that anyone else might want to change her personal choices in response to perceived danger (that’s judgmental). We sure don’t want to talk with other women about strategies for improving their odds of avoiding or surviving a violent crime, because we can’t guarantee that playing the odds will work. No woman has absolute and ultimate power to prevent herself from becoming the target of a crime (whether and who to attack is ultimately the criminal’s choice, not the intended victim’s), so it’s morally wrong to suggest that any woman should exercise the limited power she does have to reduce the likelihood of her being chosen as a target.

Instead, that modern reasoning continues, we should lobby for men to exercise their unlimited social power on our behalf. We should get men to tell rapists and potential rapists to quit raping, because the rapists are the ones in the wrong. 1

Weirdly, inside this mindset it’s perfectly okay to expect women to say no with our words. But it’s not okay to suggest we should ever say no with our actions in situations where the words did not work.

To my way of thinking: In situations where life and health are clearly at risk, it is actively good to say no and mean it! And it is actively good to enforce that boundary with whatever degree of force meets the standard of reasonableness in any given situation.

In the case of a potentially-deadly bodily assault, nothing says no quite so effectively as a 9mm hollowpoint to the chest.

Don’t want to shoot someone, even a violent criminal assailant? Neither do I. Ever.

That’s one of many reasons why I believe that a person who wants to be safer as she goes through her life might want to look at her own behavior patterns compared to the patterns most associated with criminal victimization, and then change whatever she is willing to change in order to stop those patterns from matching up. Because we don’t want to hurt or kill another person, unless we truly have no other choice.

We’re also told that men never feel any measure of fear that they will be chosen as crime victims, especially not of sexual crimes, so men never use crime-avoidance strategies in their daily life. This isn’t true, but it’s the cultural story right now.

At the same time, we’re told that suggesting preventive strategies to any woman (the only people who do feel such fears) is wrong, victim-blaming, disempowering. She shouldn’t have to change, because the criminal is the one in the wrong. We should make the criminal change.

And that is true. Deeply and profoundly true. The victim is not the one in the wrong. The criminal is. And the criminal should change.

But when he doesn’t? What then?

It amounts to this: instead of making individual and personal choices to claim our own place in this world, too many modern women want to simply explain the problem to the guys and then wait – patiently, impatiently, loudly, quietly  (does the adverb even matter?) – for the repentance and reform of all potential criminal assailants, which will mean the end of rape culture.

How many more women will suffer and perhaps die, waiting for that?

Notes:

  1. All of this framing completely rejects the sad truth that some women also commit rape and/or sexual assault, and that many men have been victims of rape and/or sexual assault. A subject for another day! But for now, there’s this: we have made sexual violence a gendered issue, by suggesting that only women can ever become victims of sexual violence and by suggesting that women rarely or never commit this type of crime. That’s a dangerous lie. No demographic group is immune to this type of violence, either as victims or as perpetrators. ↩
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Coulda Woulda Shoulda
January 16, 2018

Some time back, there was a news story about a concealed carry person who tried to intervene to stop a public mass murder. He was in a store when he heard yells, screams, and gunfire from the front of the building, and he told his friend he was going to try to stop the attacker. Unfortunately, there wasn’t just one killer, but two — and the second killer shot and killed the would-be good Samaritan as he focused in on the person who appeared to be the only threat.

Rotten outcome, right.

We naturally want to re-tell the story in a way that makes the good people live, the bad people get what’s coming to them, and no permanent harm done to anyone. We want a happy ending.

How do we get that happy outcome? We start fiddling around with the variables: “Well, if he had only …” and “If I were there, I would have…” and “What he should have done was…”

When we start playing the coulda-woulda-shoulda game, it’s usually because we’re looking for some kind of guarantee. We want to say that if only someone in the news had done everything our way, everything would have ended well.

Two problems with that:

1) We don’t know how it would have ended if the good guy had done anything different than what he actually did. Hindsight is not 20/20, no matter what the old proverb might claim. Hindsight only tells us what did happen. It never tells us what would have happened if.

2) We don’t know if he could have come to peace with making with the choice we would have made in the same circumstances. One person’s (hypothetical) choice to walk away from a situation that does not involve them might be something they could easily live with. But that same decision might give another person screaming nightmares or sleepless nights of regret for the entire rest of their life.

So in the story that opened this post, the doomed hero’s choice to run to the sound of the guns may have been a valid choice for him, even in hindsight and even though he ultimately died. Too bad we can’t pull him out of his grave to ask if it was worth it… by his measure and meaning of “worth it.” Because by his standards of action, maybe it was. After all, the attackers didn’t kill anyone else after he got involved. Was giving up his life for that outcome worth it to him? We don’t know.

The horrifying reality is… there really aren’t any guarantees of a good outcome when lives are on the line. To be really prepared to protect yourself and your loved ones means that you have thought about and ultimately accepted many different possible outcomes of acting in self defense, including the awful ones. It means you have looked at both the positive and the negative possibilities, without glossing them over or shoving the bad ones aside in favor of a fantasy where it always only ends well as long as you follow the steps.

Related food for thought: If you’re going to die anyway, what do you want your family’s last memory of you to be? Do you want them to remember you cowering under the furniture and huddling together with other helpless people as you await the final blow? Or do you want your family to remember you bravely facing danger, running toward the sound of the guns, determined to save innocent lives? (Alternately: do you want them to remember you holding hands with the fearful, terrified innocents, comforting them and ultimately sheltering them with your own body? Or do you want your family to remember you abandoning innocent others to rush toward danger in a doomed, foolhardy attempt to be some kind of hero?)

These choices and others like them are the things a well-prepared person looks at and considers for themselves. It’s not a job anyone else can do for us. We have to do on our own, inside our own selves. And it’s good to re-visit our own choices from time to time, whenever we hear another story on the news of people acting to defend themselves and the people around them, whether or not the outcome was one we would cheer for.

That’s hard work. It’s easier to retreat into platitudes and bluster and fantasies that tell us we know how the story will end. More comfortable, certainly.

But it’s better to be prepared.

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