I spend a great deal of time teaching people how to defend themselves in an entangled fight with the possibility of weapons being present or involved. These events happen a lot, whether the good guy is armed with a handgun or not, so I will continue to teach the important skills needed to survive these attacks. I have lost count of how many videos or documented stories along these lines I have posted or talked about in the last 20+ years, but I will doubtless keep showing new ones, since they come across my feed on a weekly basis. 

Today’s video is a fascinating one, because it illustrates quite clearly how these events happen. This involves an off duty cop so it is a perfect equivalent of a private citizen encounter. Unlike an uniformed officer whose occupation puts them into situations that a citizen should never have to copy, this video would just as likely happen to a regular person carrying a concealed handgun. 

As you can see, while there is plenty of room to move, the idea of “breaking contact” or “keeping distance” even in an open space is extremely difficult because if you can move freely, so can the bad guy! And they have the initiative when they begin their aggressive drive so it is far easier for them to close on you than it is for you to keep away from them. 

Also note that there are no preparatory motions or actions by the bad guy. As soon as he gets a favorable angle, he rockets into action. Too often we envision that we will have plenty of time to recognize what is happening when the reality is we are more likely to have no time to act preemptively. 

The bad guy purposefully made contact because somehow he knew the good guy had a gun, whether there was a tell of some kind or he got lucky. The point is that he drove in to make the entanglement happen. It did not just occur. 

The good guy made a number of mistakes in her countering skills. If she had ever worked this grappling skill set, it was not a whole lot of time based on her actions. She got lucky because the attacker was less skilled than she was. That is probably not a good plan for future situations. 

One key teaching point (and super positive thing she managed to achieve) that I want to harp on, is an action she did. I can’t be sure if it was intentional or she got lucky and it happened, but she managed to square her hips. That is one of the two key things to do with your hips and it puts you in control of the dance, and this is obvious from seeing it here. She gained massively superior control and won the encounter because of that key movement. It allowed her better access to her gun, and it enabled her to restrict the bad guy’s access. If she had not been able to do this, the chance she would be able to get her gun out and on target would be incredibly remote. 

This had a good outcome, but it was a close run thing. Learn from this. Be prepared and understand how to deal with it.