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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:
This is another thought-provoking post from Greg Ellifritz. A 62-year-old woman is out walking her dog at 9:pm when she’s kidnapped, robbed, ...
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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:
A large percentage of violent incidents start as ordinary interpersonal encounters gone horribly wrong. The term for this is social violence (as ...
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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.
I get a lot of questions regarding concealed carry for hikers, joggers, and other outdoor enthusiasts. There are a number of options, and this article at RECOIL ...
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Welcome to the Hump Day Reading List! Here are what I believe to be the three most important articles to read this week.
Sometimes it’s about bad animals! This news story out of Georgia shows us that dangers don’t always look like our preconceived notions, and sometimes your defensive firearm ...
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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 ...
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It’s Wednesday, and time once again for my hand-picked selection of this week’s best articles to increase your safety, security, and survivability!
One of the things I’m most proud of is my involvement in the design of the Kimber K6s revolver. Getting the opportunity to make the vision of an ideal defensive revolver into an actual product that people ...
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It’s the first Wednesday of 2019, and thus the first Hump Day Reading List of the new year! Sit back and treat yourself to my hand-picked selection of this week’s best articles to increase your safety, security, and survivability!
I’m sharing this article not because I necessarily agree with the base assumptions (or the terminology), but because the exercise described ...
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Today I’m proud to announce the publication of a new book: PRAYING SAFE — The professional approach to protecting faith communities!
This book is all about helping churches, synagogues, temples — religious institutions of all types — protect themselves from a wide range of threats.
This book came about because my co-author, Joshua Gideon, and I have grown annoyed with the superficial and often ...
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It’s Wednesday, and time once again for my hand-picked selection of this week’s best articles to increase your safety, security, and survivability!
It never has been, and it never will be. Self defense is about the resolute refusal to be a victim, and using whatever means you have at hand to enforce that decision. This group of middle-school girls ...
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I unearthed some really good articles for you this week. Read them and increase your safety, security, and survivability!
Whether it’s a criminal attack or a natural disaster, many people — perhaps, even, most people — simply don’t believe it will happen to them. This is an insightful article about why people don’t take threats ...
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It’s the first Wednesday of November, and I’m starting the month off right with some great articles for you!
This article explains what that means, and why it’s important to understand. It’s possible for a violent criminal to appear normal and “safe” until they’re put into the environment where it’s necessary to use violence to ...
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It’s Halloween, and I’ve got some great stories to help you tackle frightening topics!
In the self defense world, many people seem to have comfortable ideas of how things happen in defensive incidents. That was fine back in the days when we didn’t have objective evidence, but today we do — and yet many misconceptions still exist. Cecil ...
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Another Wednesday, another great collection of articles for your enjoyment and enlightenment!
One thing I do before renting a room (or AirBnB) is to check the neighborhood’s crime stats. This used to be a tedious process, but there are new tools out which make it easier.
I know a lot ...
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More great defensive preparedness articles for you this week!
I’ll acknowledge that the author of this article goes a little over the top at times, and that I think his mania for protecting his identity is a little silly in this day and age, but his article has some excellent information and looks at the topic ...
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The ability to judge risk is critical to the long game of self defense. (As it happens, it’s also critical to efficient preparedness, investing your retirement funds wisely, and the choice between flying or driving to your vacation destination.) Yet, despite its importance, it’s very rarely talked about — especially in the self defense community.
While it’s true that ...
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Lately I’ve been allowing myself to do something I caution others to never do: read the comments.
Whenever I’ve come across a news story that has something to do with self defense or disaster preparedness, I read a few of the comments left by others. I’ve noticed something interesting: they often use the word “should”.
Continue Reading →“I should be able to shoot anyone who comes into my ...
Some great articles for the last Wednesday in September!
Jeff Gonzales has some good advice for what to do with your family when you’re in a public space and a violent incident unfolds.
…you’ve got a stock of food, medical supplies, defensive tools, survival kits, generators, and everything else a well-prepared home needs. But what ...
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This story made the rounds of social media last week. For those who haven’t seen it (or the graphic video shot by the girlfriend of the man who was eventually killed in the confrontation), the story boils down to neighbors having an ongoing disagreement over trash between their domiciles.
The argument had apparently escalated over time, to the point that one party showed ...
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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, or when he starts his attack, or when you make the decision to ...
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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, including the NRA.
(Just to be clear, I am a proponent ...
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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 to go. For now.
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No matter what the preparedness focus, be it just self defense or a full-blown disaster, in the back of everyone’s mind is a little voice that wonders if they’re not being just a little silly.
“After all”, the little voice says, “you’re spending a lot of your time, energy, and money on something you don’t know for sure will ever come to pass. What if it ...
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A few weeks back I wrote an article on why I don’t entertain the notion of “what-if” scenarios. If you haven’t read it, you should.
On a somewhat related note, I also don’t entertain the notion of the foregone conclusion scenario. It’s the one that presupposes a specific outcome or a specific event in an effort to support a particular conclusion. For instance, I was going ...
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Why do so many survival kit suggestions have fishing gear in them?
Over the years I’ve noticed that survival/escape/bugout/get-home kit contents always seem to include fishing gear. I don’t mean poles, reels, and aluminum boats with fish-finding radar, but hooks, line, and perhaps some weights.
The idea is that if you’re stranded somewhere you can pull out the hooks, attach them to some line, and drop them ...
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Wednesday the 13th is extra lucky, and I’ll prove it by sharing some really great articles to help keep you and your family safer and more secure!
This article from the Preparedness Advice blog is pure gold. The author looks at five pieces of common preparedness advice and takes each one apart, and I agree with just ...
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Let’s assume, for the moment, that you have a perfect teenager. He or she is always polite, gets schoolwork in on time, excels in extracurricular activities, has above-average SAT scores, and has never been in trouble at school — or anywhere else, for that matter.
This is a kid you can trust, and who has never betrayed that trust. You can rely on him or her ...
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The concept of minimalism intrigues me, because of its emphasis on personal growth rather than the acquisition of things. It forces one to ask “what’s important to me?” and “what do I really need?” rather than “oh, look, free shipping if I spend more money than I originally intended to!”
Sadly, in this case the self defense and firearms media is always working against you.
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I have no witty introduction this week, just a hand-curated assortment of articles that are worth your time to read. And a plug for my PDN show at the end (don’t miss it!)
I cover proper grasp in depth in my Threat-Centered Revolver course, because I believe it to be the single most important step to shooting ...
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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 ...
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April showers have brought…May Hump Day Reading List articles! Don’t miss out on any of these great references for all parts of your protected life!
If you’ve read Prepping For Life, you know that I recommend doing threat assessments for everyone in your family. This is a very interesting article from the Active Response Training Blog, specifically on doing ...
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