by Rob Morse – SlowFacts

Everyone has an opinion. If you ask them, most people will give you their impression of armed defense. Is it trivially easy or is it impossibly hard? After studying self-defense for most of a decade, I’m beginning to understand what I don’t know. I think we often ask the wrong question about defending ourselves with a firearm.

One view is that armed defenders have to make split-second decisions after evaluating a number of complex legal and tactical factors. In contrast, many new gun owners want to concentrate on firearms handling skills so they can manipulate their gun with “fast hands”. I don’t think that is what most defenders really do.

Almost anyone can learn armed defense if they are simply willing to take instruction and then practice what they were taught. This is what I’ve learned from firearms students and instructors.

The Combatant Model

Most of us don’t face a lethal threat every day. That is great news. For most of us, facing a violent threat could come as a new experience where we will have to think on our feet. In that fateful moment, we have to determine if we face a lethal threat. We have to decide if this is an immediate and unavoidable problem or if we can safely walk away. Then, we have to choose the best course of action to defend ourselves. We might not face a gun problem so a firearm could be the wrong solution.

We’re supposed to make those decisions in seconds.

There are only a few police officers and combat veterans who are so habituated to violence that they can think clearly under stressful situations. I’m not one of them. You probably aren’t either. That makes armed defense sound like a hopeless proposition where all we could do is freeze in place.

Consider for a moment that thousands of armed defenders save themselves and their family every day. They are just like us. Most successful defenders have never taken a concealed carry class. Few armed defenders actually practice with their firearms on a regular basis. That is reality and we don’t want to confuse real-world defense with Hollywood action heroes who always look so calm and confident under fire.

How do defenders know what to do?

The Gunfighter Model

New students like to touch the gun and shoot. When that becomes familiar, many of them want to shoot fast. The simplistic view of armed defense is to out-shoot your attacker; to shoot them before they shoot you. A more refined consideration is that we want to avoid getting shot even if we could shoot first. Good decisions will often give us better outcomes than having fast hands alone.

Practice is valuable. It tells us what we can do in terms of how accurately and how quickly we can deliver shots on our intended target. Practice also tells us what we can’t do. We want to recognize when a shot is too hard or a defensive opportunity is too demanding for us to exploit it successfully.

Successful armed defense is much more than having practiced reflexes. Even if you are extraordinarily fast, how will your speed beat several attackers without you getting shot?

Hint- an experienced defender will admit that he wins every conflict he avoids.

How do armed defenders defeat their attacker so often?

The Student Driver Model

Most of us lack the experience to make rapid and accurate decisions under stress. We don’t have lightning-fast reflexes either. What we can do is learn to defend ourselves the same way we learned to drive.

We expose new drivers to many of the dangers they will experience when they drive. Sure, we want to learn on a sunny day, but we also want to drive at night. We want to drive in the rain and wind while we have an experienced driver sitting next to us. We want to learn what a dangerous situation feels like so we recognize it later on. We want to learn enough as a student driver that we have a menu of solutions to draw upon. We want enough time behind the wheel so that driving is mostly subconscious and our head is looking down the road for problems.

What are real combat veterans doing under stress? What are thousands of our neighbors doing when they hear glass break in the middle of the night?

We want armed defenders to have good habits. That includes situational awareness and recognizing dangerous situations.

We want to get to the point where we’ve already thought about defending ourselves at home. We recognize what we should do if we hear a bump in the night. Like a fire drill, we’ve at least walked through what we want to do in an emergency. As a practical example, we win more attacks in our home if we lock our doors.

It helps a lot if we’re familiar with recent crime in our area. We’ve thought about and practiced what to do if we see a dangerous situation unfold in front of us in public. We know what best practice looks like as we defend our family in familiar places. We can recognize a situation in seconds that would take us minutes of study to evaluate the first time we saw it.

An obvious example is if we step back into the restaurant because we don’t like the crowd waiting in the parking lot. That is what average people do and it doesn’t look anything like a Hollywood super-hero.

One of the great benefits of knowing best practice is that it keeps us from trying something really dangerous that felt like a good idea at the time.

How much gun-handling is enough to be ready to defend yourself or your family with a firearm? We want to be as familiar with our firearm as we are with the steering wheel of our car or with our phone. You are a practiced defender when you can ignore your gun and concentrate on winning the fight. Winning the fight probably doesn’t involve your firearm at all.

We win a violent encounter by ducking down behind the store shelves and running out the back door of the convenience store. We win by waiting until the robber in the convenience store looks away. Millions of us defend ourselves with a firearm every year and it seldom looks like what we see from Hollywood.

We study now so we quickly recognize a dangerous situation later. We avoid every confrontation we can. We fight smarter rather than harder and faster.

If our neighbors have done it day after day, then so can we.