Is there value in competitive shooting?

Much has been written about (and many arguments started over) the value of competitive shooting for the person who owns or carries a firearm for personal defense. There are generally two polarized views in this manufactured controversy. The first states that a defensive shooting is always a competition and that only competitive shooters can […]

Posted by Grant Cunningham
On July 12, 2019

Luck happens, but sometimes it happens to someone else.

This is a sobering tale, and I share it for a lesson that’s not immediately obvious. Concealed Carrier vs. Armed Robber The story is relatively simple: Mr. Miller was at his son’s house looking at a plumbing problem. His son was not home at the time, but was on the phone with his father. […]

Posted by Grant Cunningham
On June 21, 2019

This guy got lucky. You might not.

One of my big peeves in this business is the number of bad lessons that are presented in the context of “he had it coming!” In these stories there’s usually a petty criminal (these are almost always minor property crimes) who is caught “red handed” by a virtuous (and obviously very manly) gun owner. The […]

Posted by Grant Cunningham
On May 31, 2019

The “long game” of self defense

It’s easy to think of self defense as a thing you do in response to a bad guy. After all, that’s what most self defense courses focus on: bad guy appears and you perform the indicated response. So neat. So tidy. So precise. And so misleading. Self defense doesn’t start when the bad guy appears, […]

Posted by Grant Cunningham
On September 17, 2018

Safe storage and self defense aren’t incompatible

I recently shared to my social media accounts a story of an attempt by a local government to impose storage restrictions on gun owners in their city. The ordinance specified that firearms had to be locked up, except when they were “in use” (whatever that means). Of course this drew the ire of many people, […]

Posted by Grant Cunningham
On August 6, 2018

Self defense, quantum physics, and negative outcomes

The great physicist Werner Heisenberg is responsible for describing a very interesting phenomenon in quantum physics: our observations effect the behavior of quanta (quantum particles). In other words, by simply observing an experiment, it’s possible that we inadvertently change the outcome. Quantum physics gets really weird after that, but this is as far we need […]

Posted by Grant Cunningham
On July 23, 2018