Have a Plan at Home

Remember back during grade school, when you would have fire drills, or maybe tornado drills if you live in an area like Ohio that is subject to tornadoes?  Or maybe earthquake drills if you live along a fault line.  Or any number of other drills for some sort of disaster.  Looking back you make look at such drills at pointless, or maybe at the time you were just happy because a fire drill meant you had 5 less minutes of class.  There was actually a very good reason for having such drills, and that is because the human mind sometimes has trouble thinking coherently when confronted with a situation outside the normal circumstances, full of unknowns.

The purpose of such drills is it helps to build a known routine that your body and mind can revert to in case of such a situation.  I remember one time during grade school there were funnel clouds in the area, and when the sirens went off, every student knew exactly what to do.  I can only imagine the chaos that would have occurred had we never done a tornado drill.  There is a reason that military and law enforcement constantly train for a wide variety of scenarios.  In the military you have months or years of training before you are deployed to a combat area, and there is a very good reason for that.  Because it helps your body adapt to adverse situations.

Similarly, creating a defense plan could be a good idea for you and your family, and is something you should consider, especially if you have others living in your home.  That way it will take some of the unknown out of the situation if you ever have some sort of home invasion occur.  The plan can really be as simple or as detailed as you want, actually, just having a basic plan may be the best, because it is most versatile.

Now, what I am not suggesting is that you hear a bump in the night, and the try to be Rambo and clear your entire home.  That is actually the last thing I would suggest, unless you have extensive house clearing training and experience, and a team of people with similar training to do it with you.  Clearing a structure by yourself is an extremely dangerous, and practically impossible thing to do.  There are a lot of techniques that you need to know how to do, and unless you are trained in the proper ways to do it, I would strongly, strongly suggest not to do so.

A much better plan would be preparing your home and supplies in such a manner that they aid you in the defense of your home.  Make sure you have good locks on doors and windows, motion lights, possibly a security system, and other physical deterrents that will help keep out all but the most determined attacker.  You can never make a structure completely impenetrable, even the mightiest castles in history fell to sieges.   But, you can harden the defenses of your home, for minimal fees, that will help make your home more secure.

Aside from changes to the physical structure, have your supplies ready to go, and a plan on how to use them.  If you have others, like children living with you, have a plan to consolidate all of your family members into one room.  I would suggest for children, to have them stay put in a safe spot in their room, until you come get them, so family members are not running around in the dark.  Find a safe way to keep a firearm and ammunition around your sleeping area, just make sure that unauthorized users can not gain access to it.   Three in the morning when something awry has just woken you up is not the time to be loading magazines.  If you have other adults living with you, signing up for some quality team/partner tactics training would be an excellent idea, so that both of you would be on the same page.

Have a good flashlight handy so that you can see in the dark, and learn proper techniques for how to use one in a defensive role.  Have your cell phone or home phone by your bed, so that you can call the proper authorities.

Reinforce the door of whatever your "safe room" is going to be, in order to create a barrier once your entire family is in the room.  One idea that I have heard as well that I like is have a spare key in the safe room attached to a new chem-light.  That way, after you call the police and the dispatcher tells you that have arrived, you can activate the chem-light and throw it out the window to them, so that they can enter your home and find any possible bad guys that may be inside.  If anyone else has any unique ideas that they like, I'd love to hear them.

Just as I think every home should have a plan what to do in case of natural disasters or fire (a fire plan can be as simple as setting a rally point at a place away from the house where all family members should go in case of a fire, so that everyone can be accounted for), every home should have a plan in case of a man-made attack or invasion.  It doesn't need to be elaborate or flashy, but everyone living in the house should know it.  A person's home is their castle, and you should be able to defend it according to the laws of the area in which you live.  Making sure you know your state's "Castle Doctrine" or other home defense law is also of vital importance.  But, make sure you have a plan, its better to spend some time developing the plan and never needing it, than needing a plan and not having one.

Thoughts on selecting someone else's gun for them

A question that often comes up during classes is: "What gun is the best for me?"  And my answer to this question is always the same:  "I don't know."  I don't say that answer because I want to be mean, or because I lack knowledge of a variety of different firearms makes and models.  But the truth of the matter is, a shooter has to choose their own gun be it a rifle, pistol, or shotgun.  This is because there are a myriad of factors that go into what makes a firearm a good choice for a particular shooter.  So, just because I may think the pistol on my hip or rifle in my hands is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it may only be that way for me, for someone else it could be a bad choice.

The over-riding factor in the decision making process should be: "What is the intended purpose of this firearm?"  I am not going to use an over-under shotgun for concealed carry, and I am not going to use a pistol to shoot trap or skeet.  This is probably about the only level that I will talk about others with when it comes to selecting their gun.  And then I will only point them in the right direction, offering a variety of options within their price range.  I may point out differences as it applies to how the firearm will fill the desired role, but once a shooter is on the right path, the rest of the selection process is up to them.  Everybody is built differently, so they need to see what points and fits right for them, what feels good in their hands.

One area of the shooting world that I see the phenomenon of someone besides the shooter choosing the gun fairly often is with newer female shooters.  Now, I will say up front that I think women who want to enjoy the shooting sports is a great thing, and should be encouraged.  But, I think that it does a dis-service to newer female shooters, and have seen that is can be very discouraging for them, when someone buys them the gun they think they should be shooting.  The general trend I see in firearms when this happens is that the resulting firearm is a sub-compact type semi-automatic or snub nosed revolver, which almost always have a short grip.

At first glance to an inexperienced shooter in a gun store, this may look like an ideal choice.  It is small, so it should be easy to conceal, and is lightweight, so it is easy to hold.  Many firearms makers also have variations of these models especially tailored to females, though color choices or some other method.  Now the new shooter goes to a class or a range with their new firearm someone told them was the best for them, and really does not enjoy shooting the gun.  They have trouble hitting the target, the trigger pull is very heavy, and the recoil is intense.  So shooting their brand new gun isn't much fun for them, and they don't want to do it much, if any.

There are many reasons why this is the case, but I want to highlight a few of the main points.  The first is that a short barreled pistol is not a firearm for an inexperienced shooter to learn the fundamentals of marksmanship on.  The sight radius is the distance between the front and rear sights, and directly impacts practical accuracy of the firearm.  Notice I said practical accuracy, which is how well a human can shoot from a normal firing position, as opposed to mechanical accuracy, where the pistol is put into a rest, and the only human interaction is the pulling of the trigger.  The shorter the sight radius on a firearm, the more any errors in aiming are magnified while firing a shot.  This is one of the main reasons a rifle, which may have a 20" sight radius, can generally be fired much more accurately than a pistol with a 3-5" sight radius.  Also most of the "pocket pistols" have very rudimentary sights, which make getting proper sight alignment more difficult.

The short grip and lightweight of these pistols also complicate shooting them.  Usually a shooter can not fit their whole hand on the grip, often only two fingers, leaving the pinky finger awkwardly placed compared to shooting a full sized pistol.  It can be very hard to get a consistent grip on a small pistol, and consistency in habits is one of the keys to good marksmanship.  Also, the lack of a full grip means the pistol can move around more in the hand during recoil.  And these pistols generally recoil a lot, because of how lightweight they are.  A .380 ACP or .38 Special can be a potent round, and when you are firing it out of a gun that weighs less than a pound, it can be downright painful.  With a sub-compact 9mm, .357 Magnum, .40 S&W or .45 ACP, it can be even worse.  And if a new shooter thinks a gun is painful to shoot, they aren't going to want to shoot it.   So the fun experience of learning how to shoot is tarnished by a difficult, painful gun to shoot.

I will say that I have seen some newer shooters, male and female, who shoot sub-compacts very well, but in my experience they seem to be the experience instead of the rule.  So, if you are a new shooter looking to buy a gun, or you know someone who you want to get a gun for, do yourself a favor, and let them pick it out.  Go to a gun store, and let them handle a lot of different types, and find the one that feels good to them.  Or even better, come to a class like ours where we have a wide variety of handguns from sub-compacts to full sized that our students can shoot, and find what shoots best for the individual.  But, no one except the shooter can really saw what gun is going to work best for them, so they shouldn't let someone else choose their gun.

Developing a Defensive Mindset Part 2, the OODA loop

I am going to continue with the trend from my last post and talk again about developing a defense oriented mindset.  In the last post I talked about developing and maintaining situation awareness, using Jeff Cooper's color codes.  As I touched on briefly, the human mind and body is tuned for defense, and has little built in tools that help us survive.  Often these tools aren't even used consciously, but instead are embedded in our genetics and instincts that we are born with.  Which makes sense really, because without the tools, survival would be a lot harder.

One of these tools is the body's  response system and cycle to a stressor, which is referred to as the OODA loop.  Although people had almost certainly noticed the loop before, the person who is credited with really looking at it in depth and developing a theory as to how and why it works was Colonel John Boyd, USAF.  Col. Boyd was one of the best military thinkers and strategists in the second half of the 20th century, and his theories have far reaching effects that go beyond just influencing the battlefield.   He was also a fighter pilot and responsible for helping to develop several of the fighter aircraft of the time, as well as doctrine for them.

The OODA loop is a theory he developed about the human response to an event or stressor.  It stands for:

Observe
Orient
Decide
Act

These are all the steps your body goes through when something unexpected happens.  You use your senses to observe the event, and gain as much information as possible about it in a short amount of time.  You orient the data and information in relation to your perspective.  You then decide what action you are going to take in order to react to the event.  And finally you act based on the results of that decision.  And then the process repeats itself.

While the process may all happen extremely fast, in a quickly evolving and fluid situation, things can change in the middle of your cycle, and then you have to start over again.  I am sure that the application of this theory as it pertains to a fighter pilot is very easy to visualize.  Being in a plane, dog-fighting with an enemy, where the only limit on space is the ground and the flight ceiling of the aircraft, would require a pilot to be able to process the OODA loop very quickly.  If your enemy keeps making decisions that render your decided actions useless, you can never catch up, and never get ahead to gain the advantage.

To use a simple example to illustrate the point of how the OODA loop works.  If someone throws a ball at you, and you try to catch it, you are using the OODA loop.  You observe the ball in flight, orient the data in your mind to calculate what your positioning needs to be to catch it, decide how you are going to catch the ball, and act by catching the ball.  If your OODA loop doesn't process fast enough, the ball hits your or flies past you while you are still trying to figure out how to catch it.

Another simple example of the OODA loop shows how the cycles process, and why it is good to be able to process them faster.  Say you are walking down a sidewalk, and the only other person walking on it is coming straight towards you.  Normal western custom is for both people to veer to their respective right side, so that people don't run into each other.  So, in your first cycle, you observe the individual walking towards you, orient yourself to the data, how far away they are, how long it will take to close the distance between the two of you ect..., decide to veer to the right as is normal custom, and then take a step to the right, to avoid running into the other person.

So, what happens if as you step to the right, the other person steps in the same direction, into your new path?  You now need to run through the loop again, in order to once again avoid a collision.  If they keep running the loop faster than you and stepping in your way, they can block your path.  Now, I am not going to recommend doing this to random individuals on the street, as people usually don't take very kindly to having their path blocked, but this is an experiment that you could do with friends or family.

By now I hope the defensive applications for this theory are becoming apparent.  If you are in a self defense situation, three of the keys to survival are speed, surprise, and violence of action.  I will have a blog post later that covers those keys in more depth later, but the surprise part is where the OODA loop really comes into play.  In the vast majority of self defense scenarios, the victim is already behind the eight-ball when it comes to surprise.  Unless you manage to pick up on visual cues from your attacker through situational awareness, you have no idea someone is going to pose a lethal threat to you.  So after that threat, you need to quickly process all the information while you observe the situation, orient the data to your perspective, decide what action to take (fight or flight), and act.  If you do nothing, you are an easy target.  If you do what the attacker expects, you are an easy target.  If you do something unexpected to defend yourself, you processed your loop faster than the attackers, and re-gained the element of surprise for yourself.  And then as long as you keep processing it faster now that you have the momentum, you can survive, because the attacker can never complete his loop, because you are acting while he is still deciding what to do.  Inaction in the face of force is one of the biggest mistakes a person can make.  And inaction is caused by indecision, which comes from not being able to decide, because you never reach the decision/action steps due to the fluid nature of an event.  So, being able to process the cycle faster is what can give you the upper hand in defending yourself.

Once you understand the OODA loop, it really becomes applicable in much more than just a military or defensive role.  It is used in sports, in verbal debates, in politics, and in business.  And the more you understand it, and the more you use it, the better you become at it.  The better you become at it, the faster you process through the loop while making the right decision.  So, the OODA loop is probably worth a bit more thought and mental development on your part.  Its something you never think about until you learn the theory, but once you learn the theory and understand the OODA loop, it is an invaluable mental tool.  Start with smaller examples, and then you can see how the more complex ones develop, but really, the complex examples get simpler, because you just go through them one loop at a time.

Developing A Defensive Mindset, Part 1

This may sound a bit strange coming from an avid shooter, Marine veteran and firearms instructor, but a firearm is not the most important defensive tool you have at your disposal.  If you are in a bad situation, a firearm may be the only way for you to survive it, however, it is much preferred to avoid the bad situation to begin with, and that is why your brain is the most important self defense tool you have.  


The defensive mindset is something I wish I could talk about more in my classes, but usually the curriculum is  more "hardware" heavy, so I am going to have an ongoing series on this blog, where I talk about some aspects of developing it, and the benefits of doing so.  Now, before I go any further, I am not suggesting that one becomes paranoid, and paranoia is not what I mean when I say "defensive mindset."  According to Dictionary.com, the definition of paranoia is: 

"1. Psychiatry . a mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions and the projection of personal conflicts, which areascribed to the supposed hostility of others, sometimes progressing to disturbances of consciousness and aggressiveacts believed to be performed in self-defense or as amission. 

2. baseless or excessive suspicion of the motives of others."

I am not suggesting that one should become delusional and things that everything is a threat.  If people thought that, then they would stay in their houses all day, except then they would fear the roof would fall on their heads.  If you are genuinely paranoid, you probably should not be carrying a firearm.  

That being said, I think that general awareness of your own surroundings and what is going on around you is a good thing, and really is the first step in developing a defensive mindset.  You can't avoid a situation or defend yourself if you don't know that it is going on.  Thankfully, someone ahead of me took the time to develop a system that makes self awareness easy to understand and learn.  That person was Lt.Col. Jeff Cooper, a Marine officer and veteran of World War 2 and Korea, as well as someone instrumental to the modern use of handguns for defense.  Aside from his "color codes" which I will go over momentarily, he advocated for the scout rifle design, the "Modern Technique" for the pistol, and founded what would eventually become Gunsite Academy in Arizona.  The color codes are published in his book Principals of Personal Defense, which in my opinion is worth reading if you want to work on developing your mindset.  

According to his system there are four colors, or states of awareness, in which people exist.  

The first color is white, which  is also known as "Unaware and Unprepared."  This is, unfortunately, the state of awareness which most people tend to be in most of the time, including while doing tasks such as driving.  While in condition white, you are oblivious to the outside world either through a lack of awareness, or possibly due to task fixation.  But, either way, you have no idea what is going on around you.  If you want to see what people look like in condition white, go sit at an outdoor seating section one night for dinner, and just watch the people who walk by.  Especially with modern portable technology, people can become some fixated that they have no idea what is going on around them.  They can't stop and smell the roses, because they have no idea if the roses are withing 10 feet of them or not.  

White is not a condition you generally want to be in while you are out and about.  Sometimes, it will happen, its human nature.  You may become so fixated on a task that you have no idea what is going on around you.  But you need to be able to know when not to be in condition white, and when you can be in condition white.  If you are walking down an alley at night, or withdrawing a large amount of cash from an ATM by yourself, that is not the time to be in condition white.   To do so means you are not using your brain to avoid potential threats.  

The next color is yellow, which is a relaxed state of alert.   For someone who has been overseas, this becomes pretty much the natural state.  There isn't a specific threat to you, but you are aware of your surroundings.  You aren't so tied up in sending a text that you bump into a wall.  You know where people are around you, and what they are doing.  You walk into a room and look for emergency exit signs.  You simply pay attention to the world.  You don't treat the world or the people around you as a threat, because they aren't.  To do so would be paranoid.  You don't maintain a 21 foot bubble off solitude around you because you saw a Tueller Drill (more on that in a future post) video once.  But you just notice what is going on around you.  Both security professionals and criminals exist in this condition the vast majority of the time. There is a saying that "the only people who check their 6 o'clock are police and military, or criminals and bad guys."  Which is somewhat true.  Most people don't seem to care who is walking behind them, although that could be a very good piece of information to have.  If you just start to notice what is going on around you more in life, you can develop the ability to maintain this mindset for very long periods of time.  

The third color is orange, which means that there is a specific potential threat.  Something made that little voice in the back of your head say "something is not quite right here."   A side note on that little voice, I am a firm believe in listening to it, and that it is usually right.  I think it probably is a holdover from less civilized time when humans were much easier prey, both for each other and animals, and it was an internal warning system.  Pretty much every time I have had that little voice, or gut feeling tell me something wasn't awry, it was correct.  So I listen to mine, although you can judge if you should listen to yours or not.  But when in condition orange, something doesn't seem right.  Maybe someone is acting in a way that makes you uncomfortable, maybe someone you don't know if following you more than just accidentally.  Maybe a car with multiple people and loud music pulls up when you are at the ATM, and the occupants just sit and watch you.  But whatever doesn't seem right to you starts to become your focus.  You mentally prepare a plan for the scenario you think is likely to unfold.  There still is no defensive action taken, aside from focusing on the threat or planning, but you are more alert than in yellow.  

Condition red is condition in which you are aware of a specific threat, and take necessary actions to stop that threat to you.  That could be running away, that could be defending yourself.  But your body has triggered the fight or flight reaction, and you are following it.  It is preferable not to get to condition red, if possible, when you felt uncomfortable before and went to condition orange, you removed yourself from the situation.  In condition red you are focused on the threat, and your survival.  Your body has dumped a whole lot of adrenaline and endorphins into your bloodstream and now you are taking action.  You lose fine motor skills, get tunnel vision, your mouth goes dry and your palms get all sweaty as your heart rate skyrockets.  Its the same feeling you get when you are certain you are about have a car accident, but somehow avoid it.  Condition red is about surviving that specific threat to you, in whatever manner is appropriate, it is virtually always preferable to not have to go into this mode, and to utilize your condition of awareness to avoid specific threats.  Someone has made a threat, shown a weapon, or done something that shows they intend to do you harm.  

The most important part of having a defensive mindset is using it to avoid potential self defense situations.  Unless you have a job that necessitates going into harms way, then don't go to places that are dangerous if you don't have to.  Just because you carry a gun doesn't mean you are superman, and should go walk through dark alleys by yourself at night.  De-escalation and avoidance of self defense situations are always preferred to having to physically defend one's self.  Your pride may be hurt, or you may be inconvenienced, but that is a lot cheaper financially and mentally than if you get into a defensive shooting you don't need to.  If you are going to take self-defense seriously, the "software side" your brain, attitude and state of awareness are infinitely more important than the "hardware" side, which would be your sidearm, bullets, and gear.  Put some real thought and effort into developing the software side.  A lot of people want to go to the range a couple times a year and call themselves prepared, but your most important training can be done inside your own head.  Think of it this way, which component will you use on a daily basis to keep yourself and your loved ones safe?  The hardware, or the software?  Which one do you think needs more work?  Above, I generally paraphrased the color codes, once again, if you want to learn more about developing a defensive mindset, Lt.Col. Cooper's book is a good place to start