Last week we covered a firearms accident that resulted in the death of a young man. This week we are going to look at what training should look like for defensive use of a firearm.
I took a couple of students to the range a few weeks ago. The gentleman had a little experience around firearms, but not much. The lady had essentially zero experience. These two were middle aged, interested in being prepared for self defense and taking their education and training seriously after coming to one of our Free Concealed Carry Classes.
Perfection of skills or preparation in a self defense context is impossible. There are too many variables to account for.
Both of these people struggled with a number of skills throughout our 1 hour together. It seemed obvious to me that they were getting a little discouraged on the range and were feeling like they had failed. Part of this is my fault for not doing a good job setting the expectation before we started of what the actual goal is for the training. Part of this is also the mindset that they brought with them to the range that they were going to have to perform to some kind of standard and that without that performance they were failing.
Aside from their perception of the goal and their performance, both made significant progress in the time we spent together. But progress in what? If I was to set a standard, let’s say consistently shooting 3 rounds in the high center chest at 5 yards in 3 seconds, then they didn’t get anywhere near that. But if I set the goal as progress in essential skills and understanding for how the gun and the body should work together intuitively in a dynamic critical incident, then there was progress. If the goal was for each of them to become better prepared to use a handgun to defend themselves should the need arise, then we accomplished the goal.
Perfection of skills or preparation in a self defense context is impossible. There are too many variables to account for. The more controlled we set up the training, the more likely we can attain a standard. If the training is set up in a way to control for distance, movement, gear, preparation, clothing, etc, then we can set a standard to say, draw from concealment and put one round on a set target in a set amount of time. But there is very little that we can control in the dynamic world of human beings. We are also morally and legally responsible for the consequences of our actions in the real world and training methods that do not make room for decision making do not accurately represent the necessary totality of self defense.
So how do we approach improvement if we don’t have a standard? First is understanding the context of the fight. We can look at objective truths about self defense fights, such as most likely distances, physiological and neurological processes and limitations, ballistics and more. We can use these facts to determine how we train and what we focus on for skill development. Then as we teach these skills in a training environment we put the student in more and more dynamic situations as we make sure the student continues to learn and apply the essential skills.
Back to our couple and their improvement at the range. Both of these people got much better at their gun handling skills. These are essential for using a gun safely in any context. Both improved their full extension of the gun into and parallel with their line of sight, trigger press and use of sight alignment and sight picture for intuitive sighted fire. Neither of them “perfected” anything on the range but again, that’s not the point. The last 10 minutes we spent together I made sure that they understood what the goal of our time together was, what they did well on, where they needed improvement, and how to work on that improvement. Ultimately it will be their responsibility on whether they will continue their practice and training.
The reason all of this is so important is because we are talking about skills and tools for preserving life in a dangerous circumstance. These high stakes necessitate the dedication to the correct approach to learning. This is how we conduct our Free Concealed Carry Classes as well as all of our other training and education.
In our last blog post, we discussed how we get better at the skills necessary for self defense with a handgun. This week we wrap up 2022 with an interesting analysis of instances where civilians used a firearm to intervene in a mass killing attack.
The article linked does a great job of breaking down the data and I will not waste time re summarizing it. But I do want to point out 2 important conclusions.
First is that the rate of success at stopping the attack is EXTREMELY high. In the world of violent encounters, it’s difficult to get consistent results from any data set due to the generally unpredictable nature of violent encounters. These numbers from this data set show that despite what the media tries to tell us, armed intervention is consistently reliable in stopping mass killing events.
Johnny Hurley stopped a mass shooting in Arvada, Colorado in 2021. But he lost his life when a police officer mistook him for the shooter and shot him in the back.
The second point I want to draw your attention to is that in 9% of these documented cases, the armed defender was killed in the fight. In my opinion, pretty much anyone who is willing to put their life on the line to stop a mass killing is a hero. But nearly 1 in 10 events, the defender indeed lost their lives. When you make the decision to be a defender, a protector, you must recognize the real risk. Just because you are armed does not mean you will survive. The high stakes of the fight should be your motivation to train and be as prepared as possible.
This is why we always emphasize these high stakes and realities in our Free Concealed Carry Classes, as well as all of our other training and education.
In our last blog post, we discussed some incredible data about armed citizens stopping mass killers. This week, we have a video for you that defies belief….or does it?
The following video hit the internet a couple weeks ago. A piece of brass that was ejected from a handgun bounces off the barrier and lands on an open box of ammo. The brass hits an exposed primer hard enough to detonate it, causing a small explosion as well as quite a bit of confusion.
This seems a little impossible to believe, yet here we have the video. But what is interesting is that this is actually the 3rd documented case of this kind of freak accident that I have personally come across.
Several years ago when gun blogs were all the rage, I stumbled across a post where someone said this happened to him. He had several pictures documenting the .45 ACP brass case that had exploded, including pictures of the tray that the ammo was in when it happened. Even with the pictures, readers were skeptical.
In 2021 I encountered another documented case of this happening, again with pictures documenting it. Again, people doubted the circumstances. Now we have evidence on video.
What do we learn from this? For me, I am reminded of the way that we approach safety when it comes to firearms. There is always a balance of risk and benefit. Even in “controlled” settings, we cannot eliminate the risk of something going wrong. Accidents are sometimes hard to prevent because some of them are so incredibly unlikely. This is a reminder that we should always be cognizant of the risks as much as possible, known and unknown.
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On December 13, a 70 year old man had a very pissed off neighbor trying to break through his front door. After firing a warning shot that was ineffective at deterring the threat, the defender fired at least 3 rounds at his attacker, striking him at least once.
Mugshot of the defender, Charles Rickey Wolford
On it’s face, this looks like a pretty clear cut case of home defense. Proving you acted in self defense after someone kicks in your door should seem like a slam dunk.
What we have to understand is that there are no slam dunk cases when it comes to using force against another person. Using a gun to defend yourself is always risky from a legal perspective. Wolford is finding that out the hard way.
From the linked news story, we find out that this situation led to Wolford’s arrest, followed by a bond of $75,000. That bond was adjusted to allow Wolford to leave jail while the defense and prosecutor build their investigations. But Wolford doesn’t get to go home, he is required to live elsewhere due to his residence’s proximity to the ‘victim’. There is also a chance that the charges could be upgraded if the victim does not survive. On top of all that, the man he shot was his own nephew.
Wolford has no criminal history and while that may help with his bond situation, that doesn’t mean the prosecutor is just going to assume that he acted lawfully in self defense.
The usual response from people when they hear a story like Wolford’s is to point out that it’s not fair that you can act in self defense and then be the one to pay the legal price afterwards. The criminal justice system often doesn’t seem fair to us because we are not familiar with it. Unless you have spent time in or near this system, much of the way it works definitely looks unfair to us. We must remember that our perception of this system does not matter at all. Once we interact with this system, we have almost no control over it.
The legal risk of using a gun to defend ourselves should not scare us. But we should have a healthy respect for what is coming should the terrible moment come. The more I learn about this risk, the more it makes sense to me to have a plan for what comes after the shooting. I carry a gun not because I want to get into a shooting, but because if I cannot avoid the moment then I want to be ready. It is for the exact same reason that I am prepared legally by being a member of Firearms Legal Protection, and it is for the exact same reasons that I recommend that you do the same.
Much ink and video has been devoted to the mass shooting and the young man that stopped it on July 17th, 2022 in Greenwood, Indiana. Eli Dicken, a 21 year old man who was carrying a concealed handgun that day was mentally and physically ready to stop an evil, murderous threat, and that is exactly what he did.
While the gun community and many others rightfully hailed his actions, details on exactly what happened were not very well known or understood. What we were initially told was that Eli fired a total of 10 rounds, with 8 hits, at a distance of 40 yards, in about 15 seconds. As is par for the course, overzealous gun owners took this as the whole story and began to analyze the shooting according to these sparse details.
However if you really understood the nature of gun fights, the human body, and other factors in self defense and you look at these details, it should be obvious that these details really couldn’t have been the whole story. Many have been patiently waiting for more details to emerge so that we can better understand what happened and hopefully take the right lessons away from this event.
On December 21st, the Greenwood police and the FBI held a press conference to give their findings in the case and announce that Dicken would not be charged. Dicken’s attorney spoke out about what happened in an interview the same day with WTHR in late December and gave his account of what he saw in the still unreleased surveillance footage from the mall security cameras. What we have now learned is different from the impression most people took from the original details.
Eli was eating dinner in the food court with his girlfriend. At 5:57 pm, the shooter began firing at shoppers on the other side of the food court after emerging from a hallway. He eventually fired a total of 24 rounds from his AR-15, killing 3 people. Eli reacted by pushing his girlfriend to the floor and took up a position of cover behind a pillar. Eli fired his first 2 shots just a few seconds after the gunman started shooting. His first shots were fired from a stabilized position (atop a trash can) and from approximately 40 yards away from the bad guy. Dicken was forced to stop shooting as bystanders ran in front of his muzzle (at 40 yards in a public space, this was a near certainty). He then had an opportunity to fire 2 more shots from that position and distance. Out of those first 4 shots, he scored 2 hits.
By this time, the bad guy had begun to retreat back into the hallway that he came from. Dicken then moved to close the distance and get into a position to re engage with the now moving threat. At a distance of approximately 20 yards he fired 4 more shots, gaining 4 more hits. Finally Eli closed the distance to about 20 to 25 feet for the last two shots fired as the bad guy stumbled to the ground. At this point the threat was over. The approximate amount of time from when the bad guy started his attack to when the shooting stopped was 15 seconds.
Almost immediately after the shooting stopped and as Eli was assessing the bad guy, a mall security guard made it to the hallway where Eli and the bad guy were. Eli begins to reholster right about the same time the first police officer arrived. In the middle of a mass shooting, having a gun in your hand is a very high risk as law enforcement arrives. It sounds like Eli reholstered as soon as he was sure that the threat was over, but an officer was already arriving. Fortunately the officer quickly assessed that Eli was a good guy and began to control the scene without further endangering Eli.
Let’s look at some of the lessons we can take from this event. Situational awareness during a self defense encounter is critical, and also difficult. Eli apparently did a stellar job of managing his shooting in a crowded, dynamic environment. There was risk in his decision to engage the threat but he managed the risk well and we can clearly see that the benefits of his decision outweighed the risk. This shooting further demonstrates that in a dynamic critical incident, using the “4 universal firearm safety rules” as our approach to safety is absurd. Dicken was actively engaging with the threat and unpredictable bystanders were panicked and running in front of his sight picture. Is it reasonable to expect Eli to “Always keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction” as he is involved in an active gunfight in a crowded area with a bad guy so far away? This is why we teach that our approach to safety must always be to understand and manage risk and benefit, and that our skills must be ready to meet that risk and control it as much as possible.
We also learned that Eli moved toward the threat. Normally this is not possible, nor is it legally or tactically advisable. But absolutes should be avoided in the world of self defense and this is an example of where closing the distance on a threat proved to be the right move. Without knowing how motivated the bad guy was, Eli picked the right tactic of pressing the fight to the threat and definitively ending it. This tactic again carries it’s own physical and legal risk, but the benefit was to put a definitive end to the active killing in this dynamic critical incident.
Dicken fired from a variety of distances at varying speed. His precision under stress was commendable. But unlike the original story, he did not fire all 10 rounds from 40 yards. His last 4 rounds were fired at approximately 7 yards. We should be focusing our training on balancing the speed and precision of our shooting. Our speed will be determined by the situation, the distance to the target and the size of the target. This will always be a dynamic equation and cannot be applied with a training standard. We also got confirmation that two of the four shots taken at the greatest distance missed the target. In hindsight we can say that no one was hurt by those missed rounds. But 50% accuracy when you are firing in a public space is not an ideal to aspire to. We train to pull the trigger when we believe we will get the hit we want. We don’t attach an arbitrary number to our training and call it “good enough”.
We also learned a few details about the legal aftermath. From the Criminal Defense attorney’s perspective, the police acted professionally and even with compassion. In a self defense shooting, we would all hope that this is the case but most of the time it is not. Fortunately for Dicken, he was treated very well. We also learned that even though Dicken’s shooting was on video, he saved countless lives, he hurt no one else and he acted with extreme skill in a high stress environment, his legal aftermath still took 5 months. 5 months before he could say, “It’s over.” 5 months to get his gun back and 5 months to retain expensive legal counsel. This is why Guns For Everyone recommends that you have a legal plan already in place, and we recommend Firearms Legal Protection for that plan because it’s the best plan on the market and it’s the most affordable.
Dicken’s attorney also alluded to the mental and emotional toll that this has taken on Eli. He is being thanked and congratulated constantly but it’s a reminder each time that he was forced to kill someone, as well as accept that three innocent people lost their lives before he was able to act. That is a heavy toll for any normal person to carry.
The next time you hear a story about self defense, take note that the details matter and the less details we have the less we can be sure of what actually happened, no matter what the youtube experts say. Eli Dicken is a hero, and it would be wrong of me to sit in any kind of judgement of his actions if I wasn’t in his shoes. But we can always take lessons from real life examples and we should not be shy about that.
The final lesson is to carry your tools and train your body. Nobody asked the shoppers that day if they were ready. You are either ready, or you are not. But you do not get to pick the time and the place. Eli was ready, and dozens of lives are owed to his decision to be ready.
