Welcome to your Hump Day Reading List!
This is your refuge from the impersonal Google and FaceBook algorithms that seem to run our lives these days. Instead of a machine deciding what you’ll see, I personally go out and look for great articles that have value to the quest for greater personal and family safety.
From all of the articles that I ...
Continue Reading →Posted by:
(From The Management: This post was supposed to appear on Friday, but a technical glitch on the site prevented it from going live. My apologies! — GC)
Getting started in preparedness, whether the entry point is in self defense or in disaster survival, can seem daunting. Even moving from one area of preparedness to another, particularly if they’re unrelated, can be intimidating.
Unfortunately, sometimes the people ...
Continue Reading →Posted by:
Welcome to the Hump Day Reading List! Here are what I believe to be the three most important articles you can read this week to enhance your personal and family safety:
I’ve been fortunate enough to have been intimately involved in three completely different business sectors in my life (the jewelry/watch industry, the ...
Continue Reading →Posted by:
Welcome to the Hump Day Reading List! Here are what I believe to be the three most important articles you can read this week to enhance your personal and family safety:
It’s a provocative title, to be sure, but in this article Ralph Mroz makes the point that drawing and firing a handgun is ...
Continue Reading →Posted by:
If, by “expert”, you mean someone with a significant amount of first-hand experience in the activity (i.e., shooting people who attacked them) .
Here’s the dirty little secret no one in this business will admit to: none of us have enough — in most cases any — shooting experience defending ourselves against a criminal attacker, sufficient to derive lessons worth teaching.
No one you’ll find ...
Continue Reading →Posted by:
Welcome to the Hump Day Reading List! Here are what I believe to be the three most important articles you can read this week to enhance your personal and family safety:
About a decade ago, I started talking publicly about the idea of context: the condition or environment in which something can be understood ...
Continue Reading →
Welcome to the Hump Day Reading List! Here are what I believe to be the three most important articles for you to read this week.
This is, in many ways, a companion article to last week’s entry, which talked about the need to use verbal commands in the early stages of a ...
Continue Reading →Posted by:
In my job I get some wonderful emails from people who’ve read one of my books or taken one of my classes. I also get awful emails, usually from people who’ve done neither of those things.
There is a special class of email, though, that I really dislike getting. It’s the “but what if…” question about something I’ve said or written regarding the use of ...
Continue Reading →
A couple of decades back I started to talk to my defensive shooting students about the likelihood of being attacked and needing to use their firearm to defend themselves. It seemed to me that some people, based on their lifestyle and habits, were more likely to need to use lethal force than others.
It also seemed to me that, even when the defensive firearm was ...
Continue Reading →
A couple of weeks ago I talked about how the “I won’t go anywhere I can’t carry a gun” attitude affects the lives of those who pretend to put it into practice.
The people who say things like that also have a tendency to insist that everyone can carry all the time, and fail to understand that some people really, truly can’t. It just isn’t ...
Continue Reading →
Today I’m proud to announce my latest book, one which I’ve wanted to write for some time — Protecting Your Homestead: Using a Rifle to Defend Life on Your Property!
This book is an outgrowth of my Perimeter Defense Rifle course, which looks at using a rifle in defense of life beyond what is normally considered handgun range. ...
Continue Reading →Posted by:
It must be said that I’m not really a travel bug. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no hermit, but I don’t have the intense wanderlust many people do. I can appreciate it, even envy it to an extent, but I’ve never had it.
So it was something of an oddity for me to be reading an interview with globetrotter Anthony Bourdain titled “All the Things ...
Continue Reading →
Last week I talked about the mistaken notion of seeing self defense and personal safety as a battle to be won, because such a mindset can lead to bad decisions. Today let’s look at a related topic: your view of the place for your concealed carry gun might be affected by some mistaken training notions.
Shortly after I wrote last week’s article someone sent me ...
Continue Reading →
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 ...
Continue Reading →Posted by:
Daughter, 22, shot by dad who says he mistook her for intruder
Hardly a week goes by that I don’t see an article like this cross my electronic desk, and they bother me. Quite a lot, actually. Why?
Because I don’t think we in the firearms world are doing enough to truly educate people. We do a pretty good job of teaching folks how to pull ...
Continue Reading →
When we talk about self defense (and particularly when gun people talk about self defense), the topic of measurement will eventually come up. In the gun world we love to measure things, and we can measure just about anything. The problem is that the measurements we make may not be important.
I use the term “meaningless increments of precision” to refer to those measurements which don’t add to our self protection knowledge or to our ability to defend ourselves. The measurement ...
Continue Reading →
An interesting question came up in a class I taught recently. It had to do with defensive carry firearm recommendations in states which restrict the models available for sale (such as in Massachusetts and California.) How is someone to pick the best of the worst options?
When picking a defensive firearm, particularly one which is to be carried for personal defense, I always recommend that the gun:
1) Be reliable above all else; the gun needs ...
Continue Reading →
Those who don’t spend all their free time in the defensive training world probably don’t realize that there is a lot of infighting — particularly in the defensive shooting segment. There’s intense rivalry between trainers with various backgrounds, each convinced that their own way of doing things (military, law enforcement, or competitive shooting) represents THE way for people in the private sector to train.
Each of them has held varying amounts of influence over the years. At one time, for instance, the ...
Continue Reading →
Every once in a while I see the tired old cliché “we face the same criminals the police do!” It’s usually used to justify some particular type of defensive firearms training, too often centered around the trainer’s police experience.
The idea, of course, is that we need to adopt the attitudes, tactics, and armament of law enforcement. (If you know anything about typical police training, it’s usually substandard — so much so that cops themselves joke about it. With rare exceptions, ...
Continue Reading →
I want you to sit back and think for just a minute: you have 60 seconds to teach someone how to use a gun to defend herself from an imminent attack. What useful defensive shooting fundamentals can you give her in that small amount of time?
This little exercise strips away all of the nonsense, hype, and posturing that often surrounds defensive shooting training. I makes you really focus on the most important parts of teaching someone how to defend themselves ...
Continue Reading →Posted by:
This week we’re going to look at the importance of first aid during a terrorist attack; a man defends himself with a saucepan; some realities your CCW instructor didn’t tell you; why the pistol caliber carbine is a home defense winner; the fallacy behind night sights; understanding flashlights beyond lumens; senior citizens head to the range, for good reasons; why your defensive shooting instruction may not be all that valid; and finally, it’s not just the drug addict on the ...
Continue Reading →
Hoo boy, I heard it again just the other day: “it’s a training issue”. The subject at hand was a discussion about the traditional double action pistol, the kind that has a long and heavy double action first shot and a shorter, lighter single action (DA/SA) for each subsequent shot.
I’m not a fan of the things as a defensive tool in this modern age. They are the most complicated of the autopistols in use, owing to the two different trigger ...
Continue Reading →
No matter what you’re trying to get people to buy — from cars to breakfast cereals to political candidates — you have to make it exciting, because if it’s not folks will just pass it by. (Yes, political candidates. Anyone remember Scott Walker? He was an early entry into this year’s Republican field and widely regarded as being phenomenally boring. He went nowhere. Older people will remember Walter Mondale; nice guy, smart, pleasant — and as boring as getting socks ...
Continue Reading →Posted by:
Last week I got two emails about my front page headline: “You don’t need to be a Navy SEAL just to be safe!” One applauded me for “telling it like it is”, but the other one insisted that I was doing people a big disservice by saying that, because if everyone trained to the level of a SEAL they’d definitely be safer. “It’s a matter of priorities”, the writer concluded.
Sorry, but I really don’t think so.
I believe those of us in ...
Continue Reading →Hump Day brings us more knowledge! This week, we look at kids who’ve protected themselves with firearms; Ian McCollum with a very unique “automatic” pistol; Claude Werner looks at another negative outcome, this time based on unreasonable fear; tips for handloading ammo for your AR-15; why crowds are dangerous, and what to do if you’re in one; Greg Ellifritz has some lessons from a recent series of terrorist attacks; the repercussions of not having a good teacher; and the fallacy ...
Continue Reading →
Techniques, gear, and even concepts can be cool and exciting — but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily important to your self defense. My job, the way I earn my living, is to figure out what’s really important for my students and readers and then how to explain it to them. How and why do I do that?
One of the more interesting comments I hear (and I’m not the only one who gets these) comes in the form ...
Continue Reading →Another great collection of articles for you this week! Rob Pincus shows you how to take your guns with you when flying; Ian McCollum takes apart a Savage .45 pistol; a look at why safety isn’t in the gear you carry; how to recycle range brass for reloading; a detailed explanation of what “going gray” really means; how to keep your defensive handgun in perfect operating condition; and why 100-yard headshots with a pistol don’t make any sense. Read, learn ...
Continue Reading →
I have a confession to make: I once screwed up a lot of people who came to me for advice. Wait, it’s not what you think! It does, however, directly apply to what I do today, and probably why you’re reading this blog. Allow me to relate my short story.
Back in my much-younger days I ran a chain of camera stores and taught photography classes. It was the early 1980s and photography was the fad of the day, spurred mainly ...
Continue Reading →
If you spend any time around the internet, whether on gun forums or social media, sooner or later you’ll see someone defending a sub-optimal choice of defensive firearm by saying “I shoot it well.” Now of course everyone is certainly free to carry what they deem fit, and I don’t want to suggest they’re not, but my job is to present factual information to people so that they can make intelligent decisions. I don’t really have any stake in what ...
Continue Reading →
In the defensive shooting world we talk a lot about carry guns, calibers, holsters, belts, and all manner of accessories from flashlights to scopes. A large reason for this focus on things is because they’re easily understood and readily quantifiable; it’s easy to compare things by numbers, charts and graphs.
We pay comparatively little attention to concepts and ideas. They’re harder to understand, sometimes impossible to quantify, and require thought and reflection to properly understand and apply.
There is a combination of ...
Continue Reading →