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.
There is a very famous saying in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and it’s attributed to Carlson Gracie Sr. What he said decades ago was ” take a black belt, punch him in the face and he becomes a brown belt. Punch him in the face again and he becomes a purple belt “
For those who don’t know Carlson Sr. was essentially the second champion in the Gracie family. After his Uncle Helio got a bit older into his mid to late 40s and was no longer able to fight the challenge matches that he had the previous 25 years, Carlson took over and was the family Champion through most of the 60s and into the early 70s. He also was instrumental in bringing modern training concepts into the traditional world of valle tudo ( in other words traditional Brazilian MMA). Carlson built one of the first teams both to compete in Jujitsu and to compete in MMA, so he understood a Jujitsu player getting punched in the face and what can happen.
Essentially his point was that you needed to train in the situation of getting punched otherwise if it was your first time your skill goes out the window. He was an early advocate of cross training to some level and to do all your traditional Jiu-Jitsu stuff while punching or getting punched. and he and his team were incredibly successful at doing so.
What Carlson was pointing out that you could have an awesome game plan and awesome skill to pull it off, but if you have not gotten rid of the novelty of incoming violence – including Getting punched or getting struck in the face over and over again – then there is a good chance your game plan and your skill goes out the window. And this is true across the board in all areas of self-preservation and self-defense, to include shooting.
Shooters need to understand this concept almost more than anybody else, mostly because it is not part of almost any shooting training course. The single most overriding reason being that in almost all shooting training there is no oppositional pressure. There is no one putting direct physical pressure on your ability to shoot. Unfortunately, in the real world the bad guy is always doing exactly that, and his oppositional pressure may very well include hitting you in the face over and over and over and over again. What you will quickly find is that your sub second draw suddenly after a punch in the face becomes a two+ second draw. Get punched again and now you’re probably not even finishing the draw and there’s a very good chance that your gun that you brought to the fight is now up for grabs to whoever can control it.
Of course, there is someone out there reading this and going “I never let anyone get that close to me. I will shoot them long before they can punch.” Stop living your self-indulgent and mastubatory John Wick fantasies. This is impossible in the real world. Please try to shout “Get back from me! I am in fear for my life!” while you are in line at the grocery store. Or the bank. Or TSA. Uniformed people will very quickly get VERY close to you and you will have lots of ‘splaining to do.
If you think you can maintain distance at all times, it is very easy to prove. Get a video out, some safetly equipment, and try it out on someone who has incentive to get close. I have spenbt 20+ years working this problem, and have seen a lot of people try to do it. I know how it will go 90% of the time.
So take some time to make sure your draw – or whatever self-defense tactics you prefer – can withstand a punch in the face.
There is an old myth that used to be very prevalent in the gun community, and it still raises its head every now and then.
That myth was that Revolvers never failed. This was usually contrasted with the semi-autos of the day – the 1911, P35, S&W 35/59, etc. – where those were referred to as “jam-o-matics”. The latter part had a kernel of truth to it because in those early days (pre-70’s), we really were not sure what the best practices were to keep pistols running. The early days of hollow points were very problematic. I remember reading issues of “Combat Handguns” magazine in 1979 or 1980 when I was in high school, and it was accepted that as soon as you bought any semi-auto for self-defense, you needed to immediately get it to a gunsmith to get it “throated” to feed HPs. As well, the magazines typically available – especially for the 1911 – were rarely perfectly made. Cheap MilSurp was the order of the day. It was not until well into the 1980’s that most factory produced pistols were reliable enough out of the box to feed the common self-defense ammo of the day.
Revolvers had very little to go wrong. As long as the ammo was good, and the guns were maintained like all machines should be, it was a good bet that the wheelgun would fire. Hence the reputation that “revolvers never failed”. Well, they did at times. The majority of time those failures were ammo caused (and which would have rendered any semi-auto useless as well), but not always. Any mechanical thing built by man can fail.
This was countered pretty effectively by the understanding of EVERYONE who carried a gun that cleaning and maintenance were a regular affair and not to be neglected.
Post 9/11, and the GWOT, something happened. It was fueled in part by the fact that most LE agencies by that point had transitioned to pistols, and most of those tools (like Glocks) were extremely reliable and rugged, and more trainers were out there teaching people how to effectively shoot and defend themselves with a handgun. Because of modern mass manufacturing, guns were being made that were incredibly rugged, and some instructors recognized this and started seeing exactly how rugged. My friend Todd Green was the most visible who did this. He became famous for his “2,000 round tests” on various guns. He helped put the idea into people’s heads that a gun needed to be able to go 10,000 rounds without cleaning or much maintenance. In reality, this is NOT what he said or wrote, but it is how most people took it.
So we are now at a moment where the expectation of a self-defense gun is that you don’t have to take care of it. I can’t even begin to count how many times I have read online or heard someone brag about how long it has been since they cleaned their gun. This is where revolvers in general fall short of semi-autos. There are more moving parts and more intricate interactions in a wheelgun, and anytime you have more complex pieces, there are more potential failure points. So regular maintenance and cleaning is an absolute must when running revolvers.
There is a reason it makes sense for the military and LE to be equipped with semi-autos. They will see more environmental demands, and more heavy wear and tear. Autos can withstand more abuse.
So, while this is a nice thing to know about the durability of pistols, is it relevant to most of us as private citizens needing our gun at the moment? NOT ONE BIT. What matters the most is will our gun fire when we draw it and pull the trigger. My particular gun may not stand up to shooting 25,000 rounds through it, but that is not crucial as long as it goes off in the moment we need it.
What is funny about Todd Green’s 2,000 round challenge was that almost everyone ignores Todd’s recommendations for a carry gun after the test. He always said buy THREE of the identical guns, equip them the exact same way. With one of them, you run enough rounds through it to vet it (if you asked him, Todd usually said something to the effect of 500-1000 rounds with no issues was enough to consider that pistol good to go), and that became your carry gun. After that, you only shot it every now and then. A second gun was the one you ran through training classes and practices. Beat that one up but don’t rely on it for carry because you were putting so much strain on it. The third gun was your backup if the carry gun went down for some reason. Very few people ever followed that part of Todd’s advice because it was a ton of money (especially if you then had to get each gun milled to mount a Red Dot), yet everyone loves to brag about how rugged their gun is. Todd would tell you that you were being foolish if the gun you relied on to protect your life had 20,000+ rounds through it.
So if that is the case, does it really matter that a HK P30 could go 25,000 rounds without a single parts breakage? No, because for your EDC gun, you were not going to fire it that much. So the ability to hold up for that much is a nice intellectual exercise, but that is about it.
The point I am trying to make is that rugged and tough is important for the military and LE, but not so much for the average everyday Earth person. Obviously we need the gun to be dead reliable when we need it, but that does not mean it needs to stand up to being dropped from a helicopter onto concrete, then buried in the mud and then shot.
The question is, can a wheel gun be that reliable when you need it? This is where the myth we talked about above came into play. It was almost unheard of for a revolver to not be able to empty a cylinder in the middle of a life or death situation. Maybe J.H. Fitzgerald did not put 25,000 rounds through his favorite guns, but he never had an issue with them going bang when he wanted it to. There are no accounts of Frank Hamer getting a failure to fire with “Old Lucky” in any of his many gunfights, and while he certainly at times carried a semi-auto, he always turned to a revolver as his most trusted sidearm.
However, these are anecdotes, and the plural of anecdote is NOT proof. So I will leave you with this massive piece of empirical data. In the mid-80’s, when the NYPD was considering transitioning to semi-autos, they did a deep study. They looked at every time an officer went to draw and fire his service revolver, how many times it failed to fire. Keep in mind this was a study that went back decades, and every time an NYPD gun is fired, there is a documented report on it, and that at any given time, there were 20,000-40,000 officers in uniform serving.
So how many times did the study find there was an issue? NOT ONE TIME. Think about that. There was not one instance where an NYPD officer drew his S&W, Colt, or Ruger, went to fire it and it failed to go off. Not once. And remember, the NYPD has never been known as a department with a lot of top gunfighters. For every Jim Cirllio or Pat Rogers, there were 50,000 officers who had never fired a gun before they went through the academy.
As for the question, are revolvers reliable enough to protect the average person, I leave the answer to each and every one of you to decide for yourself, but I think the above study speaks loudly and quite clearly.
Do you want a quick and decisive way to absolutely know you have won a debate? When the other side produces a Straw Man. At that point, they have shown all their cards and they have nothing left to refute your arguments.
Here is the classic definition of the Straw Man Argument :
Straw man fallacy occurs when someone distorts their opponent’s argument by oversimplifying or exaggerating it, for example, and then refutes this “new” version of the argument
It is always fun to watch people desperately throw that out there because they lack the intellectual ability to engage, or they realize their side of the debate is wrong. Rather than come to grips with that, they have to change the argument.
Recently, I have had this happen to me twice in online discussions. And both times it was hilarious to watch the other side collapse.
The first was earlier this year when some online voices tried to put over the idea that physical fitness did not matter for self-defense. With a large number of real world video examples, I showed how fantastically idiotic that was. Rather than try to continue the debate with intelligence, or admit that they said something profoundly stupid, the other side went right into a Straw Man. Their excuse as to why they said that fitness does not matter, is because they did not want someone out there to think that if they were not fit then they would not be able to defend themselves. And again, they tried to say that is exactly what people like myself originally said about fitness – that if you are not fit, you will fail at any self-defense encounter. But did they produce one single quote to that effect? Or did they point out where someone could go to see those words? Of course not. Because no one ever said them. It is merely a convenient way for someone to not admit they were wrong.
It happened again more recently when internet commentators who have literally zero time with revolvers showed how lacking in knowledge they were by going to the Straw Man because they have no other way to argue. They tried to say that I said a double action trigger on a revolver is a good thing because it makes a revolver immune to negligent discharges.
Which would be a hugely stupid thing to say. But I never said that. I wrote and have said in interviews that it is HARDER to have an ND with a longer, heavier trigger, but it is not impossible. And what is ironic, is that the other side agrees with me. The whole reason they will push that you should only run a striker fired trigger is because IT IS EASIER TO SHOOT. Which means a trigger that has a longer and heavier pull is harder to make it go off. Which, by their own reasoning, means a DA trigger gun is harder to have an ND with!
But, that is somewhat irrelevant to the discussion because I never said or wrote that DA triggers cannot have an ND. And you know how I can prove that? Because the other side did not – and cannot – point you to where I said it. They create the Straw Man and then let you assume that is what was said. Unlike them, I can produce exact evidence to what they wrote or said with their Straw Man. But they cannot do the same, even though I am very public in the things I say or write.
It is a made up Straw Man argument. In other and more simple words, they lied and did so in order to try to appear like they won a debate. But they did not win the debate. They actually lost the war.
One of the most common complaints from non-revolver shooters about using one is that the trigger on the most common and mass manufactured ones made since WW1, have “long, heavy” triggers. This is such a fallacy that whenever I hear it, I shake my head like a dog trying to understand strange sounds. At this point in the information age, it is a bit ridiculous to hear this trope.
Now, I completely understand why it still gets said. Probably the majority of the gun community who regularly engage on social media are not long term enthusiasts. Rather, they are most likely to have only entered the self-preservation centric shooting world fairly recently. This is exacerbated by the voices they listen to online, belonging to those they consider to be “subject matter experts”, who themselves are newcomers!
It may shock many of you to find out that many of these personalities/instructors/”influencers” have only been involved in the self-defense sphere for less than 10-12 years. If you take a look at their resumes, they tend to all start serious work post 2010! Two in particular, one of whom has a podcast and writes for media, and the other a “YouTube Influencer” , neither knew anything about this area (by their own admissions, and yes, I can send you to those actual posts) before 2012.
And unfortunately, it is worsened because these folks love to willfully ignore what came before them. Either due to sheer laziness, or rampaging narcissistic egos, they want to be seen as unique and better than others. God forbid that someone else had a great idea first.
In that environment, all they know about triggers is a striker fired action. So it is no real surprise that their understanding of a double action trigger is on par with the hominids at the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey” looking at the Monolith and having zero understanding.
My guess is that these same people also don’t know how to run a manual transmission in a car.
If they would admit that they didn’t know, that would be fine. But they don’t. Instead, they attack a DA trigger and use terms like heavy, long, hard to shoot. Sure, just as if you don’t know how to drive a car with a manual transmission, it seems daunting and overly complex. But as anyone who grew up with, and learned to drive manual transmission vehicles, they are simple and easily handled.
For those who doubt my words, all you have to do is take a look at the world of PPC (Police Pistol Combat) competitions. Pull the course of fire from any of the matches, and you will see incredibly difficult challenges that puts a tremendous premium on high levels of precision fire. And they have always been shot with double action revolvers. If DA triggers were so hard to shoot, then no one would ever do well on any PPC match. Yes, the highest levels are shot with excessively tuned triggers that are far lighter than a “street trigger”, but so are all the current “practical” matches like USPSA and IDPA. The vast majority of guns used in PPC competitions were either straight off the street, or a close training copy of the user’s duty revolver.
DA triggers are not tough to learn to shoot. They just need to be taught by someone who knows how to do so.
And beyond a shadow of a doubt, many revolvers come from the factory with heavy and rough triggers. The typical factory j-frame snubs coming out of S&W for decades were particularly bad. But you know what other guns had bad triggers coming from the factory? Most every striker gun made prior to about 2017 or so. The whole problem of people pinning the trigger while shooting came about because the early Glock triggers were so bad (and unusual!) that the sales reps had to figure out how to get people to be somewhat okay at running them. And there quickly arose in the early days of the internet circa ‘97-98 how to do home trigger jobs to help make the striker action more palatable. It is only the past few years where Factories started making triggers that were cleaner and nicer as they come out of the box (and often circumvented safety is doing so, but that is another story for another article…….).
The general point being that most triggers have the same issues and can be overcome the exact same way – through training and practice.
But the focus of this series is on what are the positives of a revolver, not what makes it the same as other semi-autos, so why do I list a DA trigger as a positive for them? Two areas – safety and threat management.
One of the positives that people will say about Striker Triggers is how easy they are to shoot when you need to do so. The corollary to that is that they are easier to shoot when you do NOT want to. Lighter pull weight plays into that, but more heavily factored in is the shortness of the movement needed to fire. There is a reason that the number of negligent discharges skyrocketed when every LE agency in the country went over to semi-autos as the duty weapon. That is not hyperbole. All you have to do is look at the records. It was much, much less common for a rookie learning to shoot a handgun in the academy to have an ND with a typical DA revolver trigger than it is today.
As a matter of fact, I have three times barely been missed in training classes or on a public shooting range from getting shot when a person pulled a trigger when they did not mean to. One of them was a 1911, but the other two were Glocks. Could it happen with a revolver shooter? Sure, but the chances are astronomically smaller.
The other aspect of that longer trigger pull (and a tad more weight needed to move it back) is that it is easier to stop a firing cycle, or even let off enough to prevent the first shot when the threat is no longer a threat. And in today’s age of the mainstream media and at least half the politicians in this country viewing guns and self-defense in any situation as “evil”, any bit of ammunition we can not give them to hurt us is all to the good.
Tougher to shoot? Maybe, on occasion and in the right context, that is an absolute positive.
When a semi-auto pistol has been properly lubed, has a perfectly working magazine with no glitches, and has well made ammo that hits a minimal level of power generation, and the gun is gripped firmly, it will run all day long and in the worst conditions. However, when just one of those things is off, it can bring down the entire functionality of the pistol.
One of the biggest issues is that of the ammo. If the ammo cannot power the slide, the gun will not work, regardless of any action by the shooter. In some guns in certain situations, a ton of time and effort go into figuring out what ammo will work in a particular pistol. The venerable 1911 is famed for being persnickety with specific types of ammo, and much work can go into figuring out what combination of springs, ammo, and grip will make the gun reliable. Even the Glock in all of its “perfection” has issues at times. The Gen3 .40 caliber guns were notorious, as were the first iterations of the Gen4 models (even in 9mm) in having problems, and a lot of people have found that putting a PMO (pistol mounted optic) on one can make the gun go wonky until the right springs are installed.
Another huge factor can be shooting in odd and compromised positions such as lying sideways, compressed in with someone on top of you, or weak handed shooting when you are not standing perfectly upright. I cannot begin to coin how many times I have seen perfectly reliable pistols go cockeyed in shooting classes when these elements get introduced. If there is any lessening of the support behind the frame of the pistol while the slide reciprocates, bad things can happen.
None of this has EVER applied to any double action revolver produced since WW1. As long as you can pull the trigger, the gun will run. You can be in the most compromised position possible, with a weak grip and l;ittle support behind the gun, and firing the weakest ammo possible, but if you can work the trigger, the gun will go bang. That is a tremendous plus to a wheelgun that cannot be matched by any semi-auto pistol ever made. Bar none.
Where this is particularly useful is when a shooter has physical issues. As an example, let’s look at a gun I ran for over six years on almost a daily basis, a Ruger LCR in .327 magnum. In .327, a Speer Gold Dot gives really nice results with expansion and penetration. It is also accompanied by flash bang level noise and flash, and hand shaking recoil. In a snub, it is not fun and I believe it leads to lessened shooting performance, so I do not carry that ammo in my LCR. Generally I run .32 H&R Magnum ammo. Still exceptionally good results ballistically speaking, but a bit more manageable shooting wise. And going down in power has zero effect on the functional reliability of the gun.
Even better, for those who have hand strength issues (such as arthritis), you can go down even more to .32 Long. With the right loading such as XXXXXXX 100 grain wadcutter, you have a super accurate round that will absolutely give you the needed penetration, but feels like shooting .22 LR rounds. So even a weaker person can have a load that will give them a solid chance of stopping a bad guy without making it impossible to shoot, and possibly even encourage someone to practice more because it is fun to fire.
None of that is possible with any semi-auto pistol. Putting a lightly loaded round into a Glock is a good recipe for failure, but with a revolver it is non-issue.
Along the same lines, if the good guy defender finds themself in a compressed or compromised position, with a poor grip, the wheelgun will still have the ability to empty the cylinder into the bad guy as long as the shooter can work their finger.
Again, try that with any semi-auto and it is literally a crapshoot whether the gun goes off or not.
And god help you if it does fire once, but then the slide catches on the slightest bit of resistance from cloth or body parts. You have the very definition of a failure to feed.
A lot of people who have taken classes in entangled fighting where Simunition guns are used will bemoan how unreliable those guns are. The truth is they are extremely reliable if you are firing them at arm’s length with a good grip and nothing interfering with the slide. I have never even seen a failure to feed in that situation. The reason they fail in those classes is that none of the above conditions can be met during the actual training evolutions. As soon as less than ideal conditions are introduced, formerly ruggedly reliable guns become jam-o-matics. It is why those of us who teach that material have a specific retention shooting position to minimize the interference as best as possible. With revolvers, those things are less damaging to the shooting cycle of the wheelgun.
To sum up, one of the strongest positives to using a revolver fro self-preservation is that you have far more flexibility in ammo choices, and you have far more flexibility in knowing that the gun will cycle in rough conditions.
I know these things don’t happen, so this news story of a private citizen in an entangled gunfight with a bigger, stronger, younger man must be fake news…..
Yes, that was sarcasm. It is tiresome to hear “SMEs” and YouTube Influencers continue to try to say these thigns don’t happen, just because they can’t/won’t/are too lazy to train this area for themselves, and instead of being honest, they construct a fake narrative.
These things DO HAPPEN. They are not every single weapon encounter, but they are easily proven to be statistically significant by any measure. Saying otherwise is either willfully lying or willfully ignorant. In the last 20+ years of being publicly online, I cannot even count how many of these I have put up for the world to see, and I don’t do every single one I see. This one is just a random one that a student sent me and happened recently. It involves literally everything I and other instrutors like me teach.
There has been a lot of discussion lately in the self-defense training community about the actual use of knives in a defensive context. The current trend with a number of people is to essentially conclude “we are not seeing it happen very much on video” with the follow on strong implication that it is fairly useless to a) carry a knife for self-defense, and b) it is a waste of time to train it. This is a case of misplaced critical thinking. Let’s take a deeper look at the missed points.
Before we go too far though, let’s look at some actual documented incidents of defensive knife use to show that, yes, Virginia, people use knives to protect themselves.
And on, and on, and on. These were all found with a simple google search. So for all the folks crying that we never see it happen, I really have to wonder if they are truly ignorant, or willfully so?
So let’s get to the meat of the matter.
First of all, there is the underlying statement that if we don’t see it on video, then it is not happening. While there are many video clips of incidents of criminal and defensive fight activity (whether empty handed or with weapons) is captured on video, many more are not. How do we know? Take a look at the numbers we know. In a study by the Violence Policy center in 2013, using FBI statistics over a five year period, the estimate is that there are over 67,000 (which is probably on the low ball end of things since the VPC is strongly anti-gun) defensive uses of a gun in a given year. Compare that to how many videos we see. And that is just the US. Add in other countries, and the number will go up considerably. So if we are going by what we “see”, we are missing a ton of actual and factual information. Now, let’s take this further. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in a given year, firearms are used in 40% of violent crimes, meaning that 60% of the time, a gun is NOT present. So we are literally seeing the tiniest tip of the iceberg when it comes to what we see or what is commonly reported when we overly focus on firearms being involved. While we can learn an awful lot of things from real world videos of violence, we need to be very careful in coming away with hard conclusions in all aspects of self-defense.
Second, there are valid reasons why the use of knives in self-defense may be vastly underreported. There is not a good organized large body of proponents of knife self-defense that has the money behind them that the gun industry has, so there are few places that have taken the time to do what people like Professor John Lott, or the National Sports Shooting Foundation or the NRA has done to promote the idea of good guys using guns legally to protect themselves. The money is not there in the knife world like it is in the gun community, and what there is basically goes to promoting either hunting knives or high end custom blades. There is no NRA equivalent for knives, so no one has funded real research. It is a hit or miss affair. And what we tend to forget is that up until the 1980’s, there was no real good documented study or compilation of defensive gun use. This whole aspect is a recent trend, so it is not that much of a surprise to anyone who pays attention that knife use may not be as deeply understood as we would like.
Another point to consider in why defensive knife use is under reported is that many people who arm themselves with knives for defense do so because they cannot afford a gun, and lower socio-economic level people have a tendency to operate outside paperwork. As a glaring example, take a look at statistics on how underreported the population in that community is by the census. People who exist in those communities tend to view all “authorities” with suspicion, and prefer to not interact with officials anymore than they absolutely have to. And any experienced police officer will tell you that a lot of crime and violence in poorer areas are handled amongst themselves and never get reported. So it is not a stretch at all to conclude that the same people who hide from census takers are also not going out of their way to let the po-po know that they had to stab someone who was trying to rape them.
Another obvious area where knife use will go overlooked is in a Non-Permissive Environment (NPE). If you are carrying a knife because it is easier to hide than a firearm in such an environment, you may not want to report it if you end up using it. It may be a case of using it enough for the attacker to break off his attack and the knife user makes an escape. Calling authorities at that point may not be the smartest thing, especially if you are in a locale particularly hostile to self-defense such as NYC, LA, San Francisco, or Washington DC, or even more worrisome, in a foreign country. A case in point is a place like Singapore. While it is a “democratic” country, it is a stunning example of the mommy state that is in charge of every moment of its citizen’s lives. If you throw chewing gum on the sidewalk you go to jail. I felt like it was an Epcot Center designed by Hitler when I spent a week there a few years ago. Can you imagine using a small folding knife to defend yourself as a tourist? At a minimum, you are spending a few days in a jail that is not known for being a welcoming place. I have been to Rio as well and have no interest in testing my survival skills in a Brazilian prison. So it is not hard to imagine that saying knife use in a self-defense context is under reported in places like that is a major understatement.
Now, all those above points are, in my opinion, good and reasonable justifications to suggest that there are far more instances of knife use than we currently are aware of. However, I think there are two more incredibly huge reasons we don’t see more defensive knife use, especially in the US. These two overwhelming issues are 1) that people don’t train to access and deploy a knife under stress and 2) they carry a sub-optimal blade in a bad location.
Now before we get deeper into this, let me give you a bit of background for my reasoning and to show you that I am not making this stuff up out of thin air. I have been training fighting systems that heavily emphasize the knife since 1984. Not just dabbling, but deeply diving into them, to include instructor certifications in multiple Filipino, Indonesian, and modern eclectic methods. I have also been carrying a knife on a daily basis since ’84 when I bought my first Spyderco (a Police model), and have had one on me pretty much everyday since then. I have trained under some of the most famous knife instructors of the last 30 years, and I have devoted quite literally tens of thousands of hours to working and developing knife skills. What is perhaps even more pertinent is that I have been teaching these skills to thousands of people since 1987. So the following is based on a bit of breadth and depth in the subject matter.
Let’s address the first point from above about people not training the knife in an appropriate manner. What I have seen over the past 30 years is tons of people and lots of methodologies working knife fighting, but absolutely ZERO working accessing and deploying the blade under real world conditions. Everyone loves to work the fun bit- using the knife when it is out and ready to go and you are mentally and physically prepared to fight. No one, outside of a very tiny group, works getting a knife into play when they have to deal with the adrenal dump of a sudden and startling threat, and then has to integrate the knife draw with maintaining distance and trying to deploy it effectively. It does not seem like it would be too hard until you actually try to do it, and then everything falls apart, as anyone who has done the work will tell you. Those of us who spend a lot of time here see it over and over again. Run someone through a very basic deployment drill against an attacker standing less than 7 or 8 yards away who can try to grab you as soon as you move, and what will inevitably happen is the knife is jammed up. Even those with a some athleticism, and a bit of training, as well as having the advantage of knowing what is coming in the drill, and you see failure far more often than you see success. So it is no surprise at all that the person on the street who has given zero thought to these issues, and just as likely has not taken any time to develop or practice good situational awareness skills will not get a knife out and into play, even if it is knife they carry all day long.
To exacerbate this problem, we come to problem number two – the EDC knife is invariably carried in a suboptimal position, and is a suboptimal blade at that. It is an exceedingly rare person who carries a fixed blade knife. The “tactical” folder is far more common. So to get the blade into play, you do not just have to get it out, you then have to get it into the locked position so it does not collapse on you. This is the blade equivalent of carrying a pistol with an empty chamber! And even worse, the folder is almost always, with very little exception, is carried in the pocket. How many people think it is a good idea to carry a pistol in the pocket as your primary and preferred mode of carry? I would venture to say almost no one would believe that, but yet we are supposed to conclude that somehow carrying a folder there is much easier for access and deployment? It just does not make sense. How many of you would voluntarily carry a small pistol like a Smith and Wesson Shield with an empty chamber and in your pocket, and expect to be as good at using it as a Glock 19 in a belt holster with a Gold Dot in the chamber? So don’t be surprised if the incidents of defensive knife use are perceptually low. Until more people train it correctly, and carry a better blade in a better location, it will most likely remain so.
I hope this helps people put things in better perspective. We certainly have much to learn from video footage, and actual documented combat reports. But we need to make sure we take a sound approach to looking at them, and put everything into the proper context.
I realize I have already covered the concept of simplicity of the manual of operations of a revolver being a major positive in the last installment of this series, but I am going to revisit it in a slightly different way.
As I pointed out in the previous entry, the simplicity of working a wheelgun is a great advantage to the non-enthusiast. In the words of Daryl Bolke, it is much more forgiving of mistakes in handling. While we know as dedicated gun users and hobbyists the Cardinal Rules of Gun Safety, people new to this may not have them ingrained in their consciousness. And before someone out there gets on their sanctimonious horse and lectures others about knowing the rules, we all know someone who at some point who should know better violated one or more of them. And look in the mirror, there is a very good chance you did at some point as well. Even if it was only in a small way, and no one got hurt, you still violated them. So let’s not throw rocks in our glass house.
However, there is another aspect to this simplicity that is entirely overlooked, even at times by the pro-revolver crowd. Do you know when simplicity is the most important thing? Where the beauty of it is at it’s highest level? Under stress.
Stress is when we are most likely to make mistakes. Stress is when the brain is shutting down and all the varied physical actions we need to take during it – steering a car safely when hydroplaning, making sure we are in a supported structure during a sudden earthquake, remembering to swim steadily when caught in a powerful riptide, etc. – and the more complex actions we have to take in those moments, the more likely they are to fail. Even heavy amounts of training in those physical actions.
At this point in my 45+ year journey in the world of applied violence, I have been a participant in, an assistant instructor in, or the head instructor in over 10,000 hours of force-on-force training evolutions. I have also been a high level competitor in many different combat sports – from boxing smokers at Top Level Gym in Phoenix, to state level judo tournaments, and international level jiujitsu events – and won a decent share of them. I unfortunately also have been involved in some real world violence. I don’t talk about any of it publicly because it becomes a lot of “he said/she said”, and there is too much of the B.S. in the fighting world, so I choose to not add to it. Suffice it to say I am not an academic when it comes to fighting.
I cannot begin to express how many times I have witnessed experienced and trained people fail miserably at basic physical actions under real or simulated life-and-death stress. Actions that you know for a fact they can do, and have done countless times in practice, then mysteriously disappears under stress. Pointing guns at people when there is no legal justification, touching their fingers to the trigger before there is any shooting cycle available, draw strokes becoming something that looks like casting a fishing pole, and on and on all occur again, and again, and again.
Having seen this countless times, I have become a strong proponent of doing the simplest things possible. Sure, we need to practice them to where there is automaticity (thanks to John Hearne for that great term), but the less the complexity of the actions in the first place, the easier and the sooner we can build automaticity, and the less chance we fumble under stress.
And what is a greater level of stress than trying to engage in a gunfight for your life? Is it not easy to imagine that under that level of pressure, the more complex and varied the actions needed to stay in the gunfight, the greater the risk that something fails? Is it not a good idea that we have as simple and as robust actions as possible?
The best firearms instructors on the planet like Tom Givens will preach and teach endlessly about this very fact, and will do all that they can to impart the most direct process possible to fix stoppages, reload, change hands, draw, re-holster, etc. Every bit of smart instructorship is geared this way.
And on that note, what is more simple than working a revolver? As I noted in the previous installment, the manual of operations of a wheelgun is as simple and as robust as it gets. Outside of a catastrophic mechanical failure or an epic ammo issue, opening the cylinder, dumping out rounds, loading fresh ones and then closing the cylinder takes care of every other issue. The very definition of simplicity. Which is a pretty good idea in a gunfight.
It cannot be argued by anyone that one of the strongest features a revolver has going for it is the simplicity of its manual of operations. Here is the almost 100% totality of it for any modern double action revolver made in the last 70 years :
Press release on side of frame and open cylinder
Put ammo in any open holes in cylinder
Close cylinder
Fire
Repeat any time there is a click instead of a bang
That is it. That takes care of administrative loading, unloading for cleaning or storage, reloading under stress, or taking care of almost all stoppages. The only stoppage of fire these actions won’t fix for the most part are catastrophic mechanical failure or total ammo failure, either of which will put any modern semi-auto pistol out of action just as hard and for about as long.
For the person new to firearms, or the person who understands and accepts the need for a gun for self-defense but is not going to go down the rabbit hole of the typical gun hobbyist, this is an extremely powerful plus in the wheelgun’s favor.
Some people will argue that the operations of a semi-auto pistol, while more complex than any DA revolver, is no more complex than many daily actions almost all of us will have to do in a modern information society. And that argument would be correct. Trying to write an email with multiple attachments, downloading a file from somewhere online and making sure it goes to the correct spot on your computer, or setting up a new tablet or e-book reader can involve more difficult and complex actions than running a Glock.
Here is the fatal flaw in that logic train though: those other things that are more complex? We CHOOSE to devote the metal parking space and the effort to create the space. It is a conscious decision that we make wherein we know that it is worth the extra work to do so, and that we will gain much from it. So it is worthwhile. The person who looks at the gun as a necessary item, but does not want to become a dedicated hobbyist/enthusiast is not going to make that same decision.
Now, I can hear all the gun community people. Who have made a concentrated decision to focus an inordinate amount of their time, life, money, and focus will say that if you don’t copy them, then you are not serious about self-preservation.
This sounds awesome, and makes us feel super cool about our choice to go down the gun rabbit hole. It is also self-serving and massively hypocritical.
Don’t agree with me? Let me present this logically. Anyone who is not a professional gunbearer is far more likely, on a huge order of magnitude, to face many more pressing needs than shooting in self-defense. You are massively more likely to need some kind of medical intervention like CPR, stop the bleed, using an AED machine, or knowing what to do in a drowning situation. Right now, be honest. How many of you can operate an AED machine without fail, cold, on demand? I know how few, because I have asked people. Do you know all the likely signs of a stroke? And how to react if you do recognize it in a loved one? Again, I know most gun people do not because I will ask in person such as at Conferences.
And for those who will ignore this and bleat endlessly about how people should take their safety into their own hands, let me ask this. When was the last time you practiced using a fire extinguisher? Again, like medical, you are so much more likely to need to use a fire extinguisher than you will burn some bad guy down with your wonderblaster.
Darryl Bolke from American Fighting Revolver, the noted instructor and the person who more than any other single person has driven the renewed interest in running a revolver for self-defense has made this point brilliantly about how we pay no attention to fire extinguishers. Who daily checks firefighter Facebook pages? Who constantly posts on Firefighter discussion forums? Who subscribes to multiple firefighter gear sites and buys the latest cool stuff? How many people post videos online showing the fire extinguisher Bill Drill times?
We all know the answer to that with people in the gun community. ZERO. And yet, I can show with numbers and facts that those things are more useful than a subsecond draw. So please don’t trot out the tired line that if you don’t shoot 500 rounds a week, and stay up on the latest gun gear, and have thousands of hours of “gun school” that you are not serious about self-preservation. The majority of gunowners will treat their firearm the exact same way all gun people treat their fire extinguisher – as potentially life saving equipment that we want at hand but are not going to make their lives revolve around it. And there is nothing wrong with that. AS long as they have a basic handle on safety and use, they are on our side and should be celebrated as such. Not insulted.
Revolvers are a godsend to the average Earth person – it allows them the ability to defend themselves without forcing them to go to abnormal lengths to do so. And isn’t that what is most important? The more people buying guns, having them for self-protection, and supporting our right to self-defense, the better. And if wheelguns make that more palatable, then it is a win for everyone.
