In part one, we looked at how far away seven yards truly is, and how that impacts our defensive reactions. In part two, we are going to examine how that distance understanding plays into our access, draw, and use of a firearm. 

As we saw in the previous part, it is well established that the average person can cover seven yards in a second and a half, and we can now understand that an average means there will be plenty of people on either side of that mark. So we cannot assume we will always have a full 1.5 seconds even at seven yards. 

Once we know that, we need to match it to what we can do. Do you know what your cold, on demand concealed draw is, while wearing normal day to day clothing, that has not been shifted to a position ahead of time to help facilitate the draw? In other words, what can you do when you are not warmed up and wearing a loose shirt that you have already cheated to start to get it out of the way. That is the only metric that matters. 

Once you truly know what your realistic draw is, then you can look at what you can do against an encroaching attacker. However, it is not quite this simple. There are some mitigating factors that come into play. 

First, Let’s look at the setup of the Tueller test. Good guy seven yards away from bad guy, both waiting for the start signal. Then the bad guy runs at the good guy and attempts to touch him in the torso with his fake knife. So the good guy knows what is coming and all he has to do is go at the buzzer. That has almost nothing to do with the private citizen moving through the real world. You will rarely have equal initiative with the bad guy. I know we like to believe we are walking around like John Wick, but we are not. There will almost certainly be a reactionary mental gap, which tends to be .20 – .25 of a second. So we now need more distance, perhaps as much as a yard. 

Second, the bad guy in the real world is not always coming at you with a knife. He may be rushing at you and all he needs to do to stop your gun use is to grab it. So if he reaches as he closes the distance, he gains up to a yard extra that is covered by his outstretched arms and not his whole body. Which means we need even more distance before we begin. 

Third, all of us in the gun training community tend to default to full extension of the handgun, because that is generally the best way to use it – it gives us a better grip for stabilization and recoil control, and it gets the gun into our eye line for better accuracy. Usually this is a plus, but if the bad guy is rushing at us, we are now giving him up to a yard (our outstretched arms) less distance to cover. Which translates once again to us needing more distance to make sure we can use our gun the way we would like for it to be effective. 

So let’s add this up. If you have a solid cold 1.5 second draw, and you are facing an average bad guy, if he starts at seven yards or less, he will be on you and be able to grab your gun before you can fire the first shot. Realistically, you will need 8-10 yards to be able to get 3-5 rounds into him. If he is faster than average (and remember, we have zero way to know if that will be the case), and if your actual draw is slower, you may need even more distance. 

Am I arguing that all bad guys will rush you every time? Of course not. They may well stand their ground, or move at a slower pace. And our standard range training prepares us well for that event. However, that will not be the case every time, and you will not know ahead of time what the bad guy will do, so perhaps we need to at least entertain the possibility, and maybe do a bit of physical preparation for such a scenario. Dennis Tueller gave us the baseline, so lets not waste his work.

This is a fascinating video. 

https://fb.watch/xYrjXs6k4G

First, it is awesome to watch the sheer “don’t give an eff” attitude from the good guy. He is not going to stress about facing a pointed gun. I would love to know his backstory! 

The other main takeaway is that this video is a great example of how bad guys, even armed with firearms, will continually move into contact or near contact range. Why? They have to in order to impose their will and take what they want. If they want property – a wallet, keys, a phone, etc., they have to physically grab it. It is rare for them to be able to tell a victim to put their goods down and walk away, and then the bad guy has time to move over and pick it up before leaving. That is not just not how crime works.  

So there is no entangled fight here most likely because the citizen has zero idea of how to grapple and therefore decided not to. This is a huge reason we don’t see more entangled fights (and something critics of this never understand or realize), but it does not change the fact that if the good guy had decided to go hands on, it would have happened, because the bad guy, even with a long gun , voluntarily WENT TO CONTACT RANGE. Bad guys get close more often than not, period. 

https://www.breitbart.com/2nd-amendment/2024/12/22/convenience-store-employee-disarms-alleged-armed-robber

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. 

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

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. 

1. American Fighting Revolver (www.americanfightingrevolver.com) – I would argue this is the the premiere spot currently. Run by Darryl Bolke and Bryan Eastridge, this is THE clearinghouse for all things fighting with a wheelgun. Not only do both of them have deep experience with actually running a revolver for real, DB is a historian and collector of the finest order, and Bryan is an accomplished gunsmith with years of working on revolvers. More importantly, they have the ear of many gun manufacturers, and are helping to get some important things done to bring the fighting wheelgun into the 21st Century without losing all the years of what came before. 
2. Revolver Guy (www.revolverguy.com) – A Great website that covers the best of revolver stuff. Mike Wood, the head guy, is also an experienced shooter and instructor (as well as an author). There is no filler on the site. Every article is worthwhile. 
3. Gunsite – not only where modern gunfighting was born, it is the home of the Pat Rogers Memorial Revolver Round Up , the PREMIER place to work with all things wheelgun centric, from history to modern fighting. 
4. Active Response Training – Greg Ellifritz is one of the few guys out there teaching revolver classes. Go find him. 
5. Caleb Giddings – his Youtube channel Mister Revolver is a great video source. Caleb also teaches revolver classes under the Citizen Defense Research group. 
6. Claude Werner www.thetacticalprofessor – Claude was teaching, and writing about small caliber revolvers as viable tools when most people had checked out of that area. He still puts out great stuff.
7. Snub Noir www.snubnoir.com – A fun website with a quarterly online magazine. 

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.