While everyone else is at SHOT Show this week, I’m hard at work bringing you great self defense and preparedness information!
This is a pretty good article that looks at some of the reasons defensive shooting instruction often doesn’t deliver what it promises (or is expected) to deliver. I’m in particular agreement with #3.
In both the self defense and prepping communities, people talk about preparing — training and equipping — for “the worst case scenario”. “We train for the worst case”, schools brag (and their students claim).
What, actually, is the worst case?
If you were to take a little time (or perhaps watch an apocalyptic movie or two) I’m sure you could imagine an absolute ...
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If you saw this announcement earlier, we’ve changed the date to take advantage of the low airfares before Spring Break.
When we checked airline tickets, we discovered that in the week before our original dates the prices dropped by more than half (in many cases)! If you were holding off because of travel costs, delay no longer and get ready to join my in ...
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Let’s be honest: There is a ton of really awful self defense training aimed at women. I’m not sure why that is, but I constantly see bad techniques, bad advice, and bad teaching methods pushed at women — and the offenders are both men and other women.
It doesn’t need to be that way, and on last night’s episode of Training Talk I discuss ...
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Like a bad penny, I just keep turning up — but unlike a bad penny, what I bring you every Wednesday is actually worth something! Here’s another great group of articles to help you keep yourself and your loved ones safe from all sorts of bad things.
Claude Werner is fond of saying that gun ...
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The first Training Talk episode of 2018 was like throwing a lit match into a dynamite factory: Should you use lethal force to protect your property?
My special guest Aaron Israel of Fundamental Defense and I discussed a Christmas Eve incident where a man shot and killed his 22-year-old son, mistakenly believing that he was a car thief stealing the man’s pickup.
It was ...
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Last night was the season finale of Training Talk. 2017 was a great year, and we capped it off by inviting all of the Special Guest Experts back on the show for a self defense roundtable!
Not everyone was able to make it, unfortunately; some were traveling for the holiday, others had family emergencies, but we did manage to ...
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This is the last Hump Day Reading List of 2017. Not to worry, though, because I’ve found some really good articles to end the year on a high note!
While this article is specific to preparedness, it’s also applicable to the narrower subject of self defense training. I’ve heard a lot of excuses from people who won’t prepare ...
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Whether you’re prepping for survival or studying self defense against a criminal, you need to consider the circumstances under which you’d respond — where your tripwires are, the things that will trigger your response. Some people call them “a line in the sand” or “point of no return”, but no matter what the term the function is the same: the circumstances which ...
Continue Reading →It’s getting closer to Christmas, and though we don’t have any snow on the ground at my house that doesn’t mean I don’t have any presents for you — here are a bunch of great articles to stuff your electronic stocking!
Some interesting observations about riots, from someone who’s been there. We’re accustomed to thinking of riots as being somewhat organized, but in reality they’re usually not. The author explains three often misunderstood characteristics of ...
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Christmas is coming, and I’m bringing lots of joy in the form of personal safety and preparedness information!
Most of these self defense myths have disappeared from the mainstream, but they seem to crop up whenever ill-informed relatives gather for a holiday meal. Jim Wilson explains three old saws that your Uncle might bring up over the mashed potatoes, and ...
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November is winding down, but the great information in the Hump Day Reading List never ends!
On Monday I said I was looking to teach in more parts of the country during 2018, and invited you to host one of my classes. I’m sure more than a few people wondered just what that entails and how to ...
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My last classes for the year were held a couple of weeks ago. While 2017 was a good year for teaching, it’s interesting to look back over previous years to see what’s changed — and, perhaps, where the market is going.
Over the last few years my Threat-Centered Revolver course has become the most popular class I ...
Continue Reading →Just in time for Thanksgiving, a buffet of great articles — and not a turkey among them!
Lots of folks are sticking lights on their carry guns these days without a real understanding of their purpose or their use. The light isn’t supposed to facilitate your shooting; it’s to enable you to search and find a threat. That’s not something that’s efficiently (or safely) done with a WML mounted on your pistol. Jeff Gonzales ...
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With the recent attack on a church in Texas, in which 26 people were killed and dozens injured, many people are looking for ways to prevent or respond to such attacks. And there are others ready to prey on that need with bad or incomplete information. Everyone, it seems, is suddenly a “Church Security Consultant”.
As a result you can find lots of misguided articles and ...
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I’m just jumping on an airplane to return home after four full days of teaching in Phoenix, but I wanted to share these articles with you before I left the warm sunshine!
I’m sure some people are getting tired of hearing me say this, but I believe it’s more important to carry a medical kit than almost anything else. Knowing ...
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After the attack on First Baptist Church in Sunderland Springs last week, many houses of worship — and their congregants — are taking a hard look at their security procedures and plans.
This week on PDN Training Talk, I’ll be having an in-depth discussion about security for our religious institutions. My guests, both of whom have experience in consulting and training for worship ...
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Only the best of the information I find goes into the Hump Day Reading List — why would you trust your family’s safety and security to anything less?
I’ve always winced at the notion of teaching children to be fearful of strangers. When I was doing wilderness search-and-rescue I learned that lost children who’d been indoctrinated with the “stranger danger” mindset ...
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Any preparations you’ve made for your safety and protection — whether physical skills, gear and equipment, or storage commodities — need to be maintained to be useful. There is a cost to maintenance, and it’s one we often ignore in our zeal to always acquire more.
That cost may affect your ability to respond efficiently ...
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Someone sent me a an email recently, and I’m sure the answer he got wasn’t the one he was expecting: “Why don’t you make up t-shirts for sale?”, he asked. “You could put quotes from your books on them, some of the cover art, etc. I’ll bet they’d do well.”
Why not, indeed?
I’ll admit it’s an enticing prospect. There are lots of ...
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I didn’t intend for this to be Revolver Week, but I did find several good revolver-related items — plus information on surviving wildfires, con men, shooting out of fear, why some people put off training, and more!
This is the first of two articles I’m sharing about lessons learned from the recent wildfires in California. These fires, pushed along ...
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Following my recent post about the Las Vegas attack, someone sent me an email that said, in effect, the best way to survive such an attack was to not be there in the first place. If one only stayed away from all crowds, such as concerts and sporting events, one would never be the victim of a mass killer. “Bet those people wish ...
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It’s Wednesday, which means a new collection of great information to make your life safer and more secure!
On Monday I suggested that everyone — regardless of whether they carry a gun or not — should always have the ability to treat trauma that causes massive blood loss. There are a number of ways you can carry ...
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As I write this it’s been five days since a man opened fire on a country music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding over 500. While information is still being processed by law enforcement, and there are still many unanswered questions about the motives of the attacker, enough information has come out about the circumstances of the incident that we can ...
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In the aftermath of the horrific and cowardly attack in Las Vegas this week, I put myself on a mandatory commentary blackout. The reason I did so was to prevent idle speculation without solid facts, and if you followed any of the news stories you know how far off the mark the first day or two of reporting was!
I’ve ...
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Be sure to join me tonight at 6:pm PDT/9:pm EDT for PDN Training Talk, the live webcast about self defense: training, equipping, and preparing!
Tonight I’m planning on having an in-depth discussion with Caleb Causey of Lone Star Medics. We’re going to look at the practicalities of immediate medical response in a mass casualty incident, when people are panicking and you might still be “under fire”. What do you need to know, what do you need to do, and how should you practice those ...
Continue Reading →Be sure to join me this Thursday evening at 6:pm PDT/9:pm EDT for PDN Training Talk, the live webcast where you’ll learn about the things you can do to keep you and your family safe!
This week my special guest expert is Caleb Causey of Lone Star Medics. We’re going to look at the practicalities of immediate medical response in a mass casualty incident, when people are panicking and you might still be “under fire”. What do you need to know, what do you need ...
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Last night we did Take Two of Training Talk. Our last show (on the 21st) was “rained out” due to a Google Hangouts crash, so last night we started over. And what a show it turned out to be!
I started off with a rant about holster purses that will probably have some of their manufacturers up in arms. They’re too often ...
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If you tuned into Training Talk last Thursday, you witnessed a technical failure that left me steaming mad!
About 10 minutes in, the Google Hangouts cloud-based software crashed. I saw an error message, was locked out of the video, and then the video itself shut down. The software wouldn’t let me log back into the session and when I finally got logged back in everything was ...
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As I’ve mentioned (and expanded on in Prepping For Life), I’m not usually a fan of the “bugout” concept — at least as it’s typically conceived.
As many people think of it, bugging out is a semi-permanent relocation to a retreat preselected for its defensibility and likely stocked with survival provisions. Others think of bugging out as running to a wilderness area where they ...
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