Another entangled fight with weapons – in this case a handgun wielded by the bad guy – and private citizens. Without grappling, there is a good chance the clerk may have been killed.
Further, grappling resolved the situation without ANYONE being killed, which makes the post incident life for the good guy much, much more pleasant and peaceful. Which most likely would not have been the case if he had shot the bad guy.
Many people in the firearms training community have heard of the Teuller Principle. Some of them can give a general outline of it, even if said outline is light on depth. Of course, some others misunderstand the principle, but that is par for the course.
The issue that I have found though is that few people think much of the implications of what Sgt. Dennis Tueller discovered. Their understanding tends to be very surface oriented. In other words, their thoughts about it end at the simplistic “21 foot rule” (which does not exist and has nothing to do with Tueller’s work).
I am going to do two short articles looking at two aspects that are rarely thought about, but are crucially important for self-defense.
Today, let’s talk about the basic concept that Tueller discovered : that the average person can cover seven yards in one and a half seconds.
Not only did Sgt. Tueller prove this in his initial tests, but it has been subsequently proven in thousands of follow up tests by others, including Masaad Ayoob who duplicates the drill with all of his students in his MAG80 courses. From this, we get the surface fallacy of the “21 foot rule”, as if we can magically keep everyone away from us at 7 yards at all times, and that if they are inside of that, we can just shoot them down. None of that is true, or has any bearing on the real world.
What does have bearing is that people can close distance really, really fast. What we need to realize is that the above statement is an AVERAGE person can cover seven yards in 1.5 seconds. There will be many who are slower, but there will also be many who are substantially faster. In other words, they may be able to cover those seven yards in 1.3, 1.1, or even under one second.
But the real nightmare is that we have no idea which of those three categories the violent criminal actor who is threatening us falls into. If you think he is on the average, but he is not, how does that affect your reaction?
The other part that gets overlooked is how far away seven yards is. While we often shoot targets on the range at that distance, it is somewhat a nebulous matter. In my Close Contact Handgun class (as well as the block I teach at the Pat Rogers Memorial Revolver Round Up), I actually have the students stand at that distance facing another person so they get a true sense of how far away too close actually is. I would advise every reader to stake out that distance and repeat this so you see and feel for yourself that the edge you have when someone is closing on you may not be what you think it is.
https://www.google.com/collections/s/list/RI1qDQ3HAcSk1ar7WRLFpV97urxFxQ/2i8bX2tXl_E
Really interesting article on how effective the Republic of Korea (South Korea) Marines were when they fought in the Vietnam War.
I had heard about them back circa 1980 when one of my martial art instructors had served in Vietnam and had worked with the ROKs, and even later spent a few years in Korea training Tae Kwon Do alongside sone veterans there, and it infused his perspective on real fighting. IT had a profound affect on my 16 year old brain.
Check this out:
The entangled fight can look many different ways. It can be a pure empty hand situation where the good guy may use grappling controls to subdue a bad guy with no injuries to either side. It may be a good guy using specific techniques to stop an attacker like the Daniel Penny subway incident. It may involve a lot of striking, or it may involve weapons, on either the good guy, bad guy or both parts.
One often overlooked area is being attacked where you either don’t have a weapon or are not able to access it in time, and you have to deal with the bad guy’s weapon.
Having a skillset where you can prevent the weapon from being used and even taking it away and using it yourself can be categorized as a good thing. Here is a wonderful case in point:
https://www.wdsu.com/article/louisiana-sex-offender-stabbed-killed-laundromat/60078646
Entangled Fight With Weapons 2/12/25
Another interesting fight involving a private citizen, weapons, and grappling.
Once again, we see the bad guy move into contact range to impose his will on the good guy, even though he has a handgun. The good guy fights back – without a gun of his own – and using grappling and striking not only survives the attack, he also turns the table on the bad guy.
Even if the good guy had a gun of his own, trying to get his own out under those circumstances and paling High Noon would most certainly have led to getting shot or even killed. His only chance was grappling against a drawn gun.
And I hope to god no one brings up “head on a swivel” to try to justify why they would not have let the bad guy get that close. We are uni-taskers. True multitasking is available for about 1% of the population. We all would have been mentally dealing with the retail situation in front of us, not dancing around “not letting anyone get lose to us”.
So after 12 articles where I wrote about all things revolver, we come to the end! And I leave the best for last. Where should the person seeking revolver knowledge go to get better informed?
While there are not too many places left to do so, it is not a complete wasteland. The knowledge and experience is still out there. Check out these resources.
There are probably more out there that are good, and I will probably realize that I have forgotten some, but the above are great places to start. If you hear of others, please let me know!
I wrote a long series about certain positives that can surround carrying a revolver for self-preservation. One area where it is impossible to argue that it is a positive, is when it comes to capacity. The wheelgun will have anywhere from 5 – 8 rounds on board, and regardless of methodology or skill, it will take longer to reload than almost any semi-auto.
This is the single biggest aspect of wheelguns that the anti-revolver folks will pounce on and shout “Aha!” Here is where they can spout off endlessly about firepower and how the semi-auto has the ability to continually put more rounds on the bad guy. And it is fairly difficult to argue with them if we stay in the theoretical realm. But when we step firmly onto the real world with actual empirical data, does the theory hold up?
Before we go any further, and just so we do not obfuscate the discussion with points that are irrelevant, let me be clear about this, since the last time I touched on this was in the very first article in the series, the prologue. My focus has been, and will continue to be on what is most logical for the private citizen. For the professional gunbearer like military or law enforcement, there is no doubt that the primary handgun should be a modern semi-auto. These two groups stand a good probability that they may face dedicated multiple attackers who are determined to press the fight even after rounds start getting fired. With that risk, then it stands to reason that a higher capacity on the gun, plus a faster reload capability is a definite plus.
However, I contend that this does not matter for the private citizen. Well, not that it does not matter, but that is very much an extremely low likelihood where dedicated multiple attackers continue to press the attack after the good guy fights back. Here is a perfect example of a recent situation :
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DFk8T2pxy5R
Bad guy car rolls up on good guy who is armed with a revolver. One bad guy gets out with a gun deployed but good guy fights back and shoots bad guy. How many other bad guys are in the car? We don’t know because they got the hell out of there as soon as the good guy started firing. The car could have been full of bad guys but it is a moot point because most bad guys are not interested in well trained fire and maneuver elements as they close on their target. They want to get some form of payment and get away, and they have little interest in getting into some form of John Wick style Gladiatorial Combat.
This scenario plays out time and time again. If bad guys can retreat in the face of good guy fighting back by firing a revolver at them, they will not willingly sacrifice themselves so their partners can succeed. They want to live, and have no problem with running away. A number of firearm Subject Matter Experts over the decades have asked for a real world instance where a good guy private citizen making good hits lost the fight because he ran out of bullets. There are almost no provable data that shows that to be the case.
Am I saying that capacity is meaningless? Not at all. As I wrote in the original prologue (months ago now!), it is not my job to tell you as an individual what you should do. If you make the decision that you want to be covered for the worst case Black Swan scenario, and prefer to not only carry a duty size semi-auto with 15+ rounds onboard, but even have multiple spare magazines available, then that’s awesome! I am merely pointing out that for those who choose to run a revolver as a primary, they are not necessarily doing a dumb thing.
Revolver Epilogue Part 1 – The Entangled Fight
After wrapping up my Revolver Positives series, there are a few other things I wanted to address about the wonderful world of wheelguns, but were not appropriate for the series. There are some items that I would not categorize as “positives”, but are still relevant to the overall discussion.
These items are a) revolvers in an entangled fight, b) capacity concerns, and c) who can actually teach this material correctly and from experience? So let’s start the wrap up!
Today, I want to discuss in brief the idea of using revolvers – especially small short barreled snubs – in an entangled fight.
Many people advocate for just such a role for snubs. They talk about things like the small size of the gun making it easier to access and deploy in a grappling encounter, the shortness of it making it harder for the bad guy to grab onto and take away, and the surety of firing when in contact with a bad guy. All of those sound like positives, so why did I not include this in my overall series?
Because I am staunchly opposed to a hardware solution over a software one. All of the above “positives” can be a positive if the user has the skill set to enable the positives to matter. In other words, he has enough grappling skill to pull it off. If the software – the skill – does not exist, then it is a literal crapshoot if the above positives will even matter.
I have seen it countless times in training scenarios, and it is easy to find real world examples as well, where the person is carrying a snub, and it has no bearing on the fight because he was not able to access and deploy the gun. He did not have the skill to do so, and the bad guy kept him from being able to do what the good guy wished to do. The hardware will not solve the problem on its own, more times than not. Anything can happen in combat, and miracles do happen, but do you want to rely on the one in a million shot? Not really the best plan.
Years ago, on the old (and greatly cherished) Total Protection Interactive discussion forum, there was a student who had gone through ECQC with Craig Douglas and did not do well. He asked on TPI for ideas of how to do better the next time. He was inundated with posts about developing some grappling skill, training some striking systems, building his cardio, building strength and some muscle mass, etc. All ideas focused around the core concept of improving the software. After all of that, his solution was to ignore the advice and instead he would just carry a snub revolver AIWB. Flash forward a year and he took ECQC again (which was a tremendous thing, and he was commended for trying again) and does anyone want to guess the results? He got taken to the woodshed in the FoF evolutions again. And once again, he asked for advice, and of course got the same advice as the year before. And, just as the year before, he ignored and decided his new plan was to carry TWO snubs forward of the hips, one of each side of his belly button………..
So do I think the short barreled small revolver has some really good positives in an entangled fight? Absolutely, but only if it is supported by building the functional ability to utilize the positives to the fullest.
The chaos of a life or death struggle, especially at hand-to-hand combat range, can be mentally overwhelming. In a grappling encounter , this chaos level goes up exponentially. The better the skill set, the less this occurs, but what about for that person who is still learning to fight under in-extremis duress?
Keep this checklist in mind, and follow it when you don’t know what the next step is.
Breathe – this sounds like a “duh”, but under stress , most especially in grappling, this is about the first thing that falls apart. Either we stop breathing entirely, or we hyperventilate. Both ways mean we can get the right amount of oxygen into our body the needed way. Focus on forced exhalation. The following inhale tends to follow correctly after a good and powerful exhale.
2) Move Your Hips – You May rightly ask “how”, and the answer is that it does not matter. Moving the core and the main driver of leverage (which are what the hips are) leads to some movement which makes correct movement easier are more likely.
3) Underhook, underhook, underhook – The underhook is everything in grappling, whether standing, on the ground underneath an attacker, or on the ground on top of an attacker, the underhook takes care of so much. Get the underhook and keep the underhook, and a path to winning becomes visible regardless of position.
So far, in the previous seven parts of this series, I kept the talk about revolver positives to a fairly general point. I did not bring up different specific revolvers to talk about differences in them, since up to now, the focus was a generalized approach that would encompass all revolvers.
However, For this installment, I am going to take a look at a subset of wheelguns, the smaller ones. OR, in other words, snubs. A very popular choice for self-defense, and probably the one area of fighting revolvers that still were popular the last couple of decades when Striker Fired Wonder Nines ruled the roost.
There are two areas where even when gun companies were churning out semi-autos like the S&W Shield, G43, P365, etc. , these weapons were at times taking a backseat to the classic snubs like the 642 or the LCR. First, the favorable geometry of the revolver is magnified when you are trying to maximize concealment without sacrificing too much performance. As mentioned in the last part of this series, the curve of the snub makes for an even easier match with the curve of the human body.
The second area will be the main thrust of this article.
Ask any long time and experienced shooter or firearms instructor and they will tell you that while the duty size semi-autos are some of the most rugged and reliable mechanical tools around, something happens when they start to shrink. The alchemy that interacts to make something like a Glock 19 be awesomely dependable, starts to fade a bit as you shrink the machine down. It does not take a ton of time involved to see lots of little things interfere or even choke the operation of a micro nine, ranging from pocket lint, to body parts or clothing getting in the way of the slide, or even the accidental pressing of the mag release.
For whatever reason, those things rarely impact the small snub nose revolver. The shrinking of the mechanism does not seem to change the overall function. The most logical guess is that since a revolver is operated entirely by the pull of the trigger, there is less to go wrong.
It is very difficult to find a real world instance of a snub not working when it was needed to work to save a life. They just work, and along with the ease of concealment, caused the snub wheelgun to still be used by knowledgeable gunfighters even if their main gun was a Wonder Nine.
In sum, small revolvers work exceptionally well, and are a smart choice as a backup gun, or for the non-permissive environment.
