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.