Recently a student emailed me to ask me some questions. He’s a distant student who is trained with me at some of my seminars and works pretty hard at becoming better. He’s new to this life but he’s trying to fill in the gaps. 

The question he asked was a question I get all the time and have gotten for the past 25 years of me doing this publicly. However this time the question took me aback slightly because of the way it was phrased.

It’s a very common to ask what other things should I be training? When we are new to the multidisciplinary Self preservation training paradigm, It can be somewhat overwhelming when we try to figure out how to work all these disparate skill sets Into a functional and reliable base that we can access under pressure. I totally understand this question and never once have I had an issue in answering it. In fact I try to Go fairly deep when doing so. I’ve also written blog articles and social media posts trying to get the information out to as many people as possible. I feel it’s an obligation as an instructor to do these things.

What took me by surprise was his wording. What he asked was “What secondary skills should I be working?”

I was not quite sure what he was asking as far as what he was considering secondary skills. So to get clarification I asked him “what do you think are the primary skills?” His answer was simply “the gun.”

It took me a moment to wrap my head around what he said. Since he had trained with me a couple times and I knew he read what I wrote online or what I put on my YouTube channel, I felt like a complete failure.That answer was completely antithetical to everything I’ve said or done or taught or wrote.

The problem is not in thinking of the gun as primary. The problem is thinking the gun is the only primary. If you think of everything else as secondary you are wrong. Period. A gun certainly is an important part of the self preservation skill set, but it is no more important than personal health and vitality, pre-fight threat containment, or basic medical skills like CPR, being able to recognize a stroke or heart attack, and knowing what to do when a child is drowning.

All of those are far more likely to be used, on an order of magnitude, and will be used more frequently than the firearm, even for professional gun bearers like law-enforcement. Ask a typical cop who’s been on the job 10+ years how many times have you had to use your gun versus how many times did you have to do medical on somebody, or when you needed your own personal fitness to be at a high level, or how many times did you prevent something going wrong by controlling the situation verbally and physically. These if anything should be considered primary and arguably everything else is secondary. 

I will never diminish the need for a firearm, but there are a number of things far more useful on a daily basis to keep ourselves alive than the gun and that needs to be understood before you take another high speed shooting class.