Thoughts on self defense training, Part 4: fundamental misconceptions.

Monday, October 19, 2009 Filed in: Self defense, Techniques & Training

In the last installment we looked at the idea that most people - due to a lack of training and resulting options - tend to use the gun as a first line of defense. To those owners the gun is a talisman, imbued with the ability to keep its bearer safe and sound simply by its presence. The problem with this line of thinking is that the gun, being a reactive tool, cannot keep you safe. It can only help you deal with that which has made you unsafe.

Let's look at the word 'safe'. It means "not exposed to danger or risk; not likely to be harmed." The implication is clear: to actually be safe, one must avoid violent incidents in the first place. That's not what the gun does.

The gun's function is to extract the user from an incident once it has begun. Massad Ayoob often says that the gun is best thought of as a "rescue tool", in the same functional league as a fire extinguisher or first aid kit. Neither of those items prevents anything, but they do make it possible to survive something. The gun needs to be approached with the same attitude.

Safety in the personal sense requires layers of protection that are operational before the gun is ever needed, (hopefully) precluding the need to even draw the thing. These layers consist of both early warning (to let you know that something is a potential threat) and deterrence (prompting the threat to migrate to another, easier, target.)

It's important that you not think of layers in broad terms; they are individual things that together are stronger than they are alone. One layer might be a thorough understanding of criminal behavior, another could be the manner in which you walk, still another could be a flashlight to illuminate dark corners or a motion sensing alarm system. Think "micro", not "macro".

You can't, for instance, say that one of your protective layers is "awareness." Awareness isn't a thing that you can acquire in an of itself; it's a state that exists as the sum total of a number of observational or data-gathering skills, some of which are instinctive and some of which are intuitive.

Once the proactive/prevention layers have been breached by the criminal, then - and only then - is it time for the reactive or rescue layers to be brought into action. By now you should guess where this is going: most of us spend our training time on the reactive/rescue skills, because it's a lot more fun than the other stuff. The result is that the 'soft' skills are often woefully underdeveloped. The prevention part of the equation is weak, leaving nothing but the reaction part to pick up the slack.

The result is that no matter how nice and tight the groups are, no matter how fast the draw, an increase in shooting skill probably makes one no safer than the person who didn't get that level of training. The quantity of shooting classes and the number of certifications and master ratings is really quite irrelevant, if the gun is being used for relatively low level tasks. Without security layers interposed between the gun carrier and the assailant, that's what happens.

(Be very clear: this doesn't address the personal gratification that one might get from achieving those things, which may be considerable. We're focusing solely on the safety aspects of increased shooting skills.)

That's because you generally can't learn the proactive/prevention stuff at Gun Skool, and next time I'll explain why.

-=[ Grant ]=-

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