Talisman or tool?

[HeadJunter]

This piece is written in response to Paul Markel's opinion piece, written and posted in Shooting Wire, June 15, 2012. To refer to it, go to http://www.shootingwire.com/features/226067.


It's true that a handgun doesn't look like your Fairy Godmother's Magic Wand or a rabbit's foot. The answer to the question "Which one of these doesn't belong?" is fairly obvious. Despite that, most gunowners don't spend the amount of time training and practicing with their handguns that we of the 'cognoscenti' would like them to.

Still, every year hundreds of thousands of people, who have had no training whatsoever and who seldom practice, successfully defend themselves with firearms, often small ones, from villains intending them harm. Accordingly the statement: "But you need to actually train with said gun and practice often if you expect to save your life with it one day" isn't necessarily true. In fact, there's not much real evidence to back up that kind of statement at all.

The essence of the problem is that those of us who study mortal combat professionally have constructed a fusion of the worst possible law enforcement and military incidents. The resulting amalgamated adversary is an extremely formidable boogeyman who a T-1000 Terminator would have difficulty defeating. Actually finding a criminal who remotely resembles that boogeyman is quite a different matter.

Many, perhaps most, criminals are capable of committing the most unspeakable acts against pliant victims. Once defensive tools come into play, the criminal's motivation tends to flag quite rapidly. Economically based criminals are in the business of victimization not fighting. As soon as a gun comes out, it's an obvious clue that the victimization has gone sour and turned into a fight. Not good from the criminal's point of view. The most common response is to point to their watch - "Oh, look at the time. Have to go now." Actual gunfire makes the souring of the process even more evident.

Another platitude among the 'cognoscenti' is that small guns aren't powerful, are difficult to shoot well, and are less reliable than service pistols. So what! Pocket pistols are portable, concealable in almost all environments, and unintimidating to the user. They are convenient in a way that the best service pistol and holster combination will never be. Hence, they will be there when the service pistol isn't. By the way, without hearing protection, the difference in sound level between a .25 and a .45 is 2 dB http://www.freehearingtest.com/hia_gunfirenoise.shtml ; hardly distinguishable by the human ear. It's a fact that wearing good hearing protection all the time has caused us to forget.

Is the difference in "power", reliability and functional accuracy significant? Especially when most of us admit that the term "powerful handgun" is an oxymoron at best and a dichotomy at worst. When the results of encounters between criminals and private citizens are scrutinized there's not much evidence to support that contention. I have asked the training community to provide me documented examples of incidents where a private citizen was injured after shooting an attacker with a small caliber handgun. To date, the silence has been deafening. The responses all invoke the "Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda" paradigm. To wit: she Shoulda had a bigger gun, because if he Woulda been a more determined attacker, it Coulda turned out differently. That's not a convincing argument when exposed to daylight.

Citations of the exploits of fanatical overseas savages and authority hating criminals resisting the police like cornered rats are also completely non sequitur to the question. If the exploits of fanatical savages overseas were relevant, we'd never leave the house unless wearing a helmet, hard body armor, and carrying a rifle with at least a basic load of ammunition. Preferably, we'd also be accompanied by a platoon of our peers. But I don't see much of that except at fantasy camp training weekends. We certainly wouldn't be going out alone while carrying only a pathetic popgun that can be fired with one hand and a handful of spare ammo.

It's an odd statement coming from someone who makes his living doing firearms training, but, as I see it, the NEED for training and pistols whose caliber begins with 4 is much overblown. And often what is taught is of questionable relevance to the needs of a mainstream person. If we in the community want to see more people get trained, we need to adopt a "less is more" philosophy and make our training relevant to the mainstream's needs and resource constraints.

The training industry has only existed for 30 years or so and people have been successfully defending themselves with handguns for a lot longer than that. Maybe the talisman does work. Or maybe people are just smarter and more capable of taking care of themselves than we give them credit for.

-- Claude Werner

Claude Werner served in Airborne, Ranger, Special Forces and Mechanized Infantry units in the US Army as both an enlisted man and an officer. He eventually became a Special Forces A-Team Commander, Intelligence Officer and Mech Infantry Company Commander. Well known in the shooting community, he was formerly the Chief Instructor of the elite Rogers Shooting School and has won six sanctioned IDPA Championships with snub nose revolvers. In his civilian career, he was Research Director of three commercial real estate firms and was the National Director of Real Estate Research for Deloitte & Touche LLP. He can be reached at [email protected]



Article fromTactical Wire.

 

[GunnerShotz]

So every (law abiding) citizen should own and employ a firearm? But only if they train with it?

I'm trying to take the 'moral of the story' from both articles here because, quite frankly, I liked them both.... but I'm scratching my head here on what the Real contention is when Both have very good and salient points.

By simply owning and employing a gun, law abiding citizens can (and Have) prevented the worst possible outcomes in scenarios of potential violence. It is most certainly validated though to say that proper training can not only make owning and employing a gun more 'effective' but also (ideally) less open to chance or 'superstition'.... to say the least.

Fundamentally, these articles appear to me as two sides of the same coin; and, in fact, compliment one another. Forgive me if I'm seeing an argument where one doesn't really exist. I'll let others dicker over the fine points.... but fundamentally speaking, I don't see it.

 

[Nushif]

[...] we of the 'cognoscenti' [...]

Really?

 

[F-111 John]

It's an odd statement coming from someone who makes his living doing firearms training, but, as I see it, the NEED for training and pistols whose caliber begins with 4 is much overblown. And often what is taught is of questionable relevance to the needs of a mainstream person. If we in the community want to see more people get trained, we need to adopt a "less is more" philosophy and make our training relevant to the mainstream's needs and resource constraints.

I'll buy this paragraph, and I know I'll get flamed for doing so. The majority of people with CCW licenses do not need to be graduates of an advanced tactical pistol class any more than the average driver needs to be a graduate of the Skip Barber High Performance Driving School. Yes, we all may be better off if everyone did attend an advanced driving class, but it's not required. Safe operation, and knowing the 'rules of the road' are adequate.

 

[Fred Fuller]

Once again, it's a matter of odds and stakes, as far as I'm concerned.

The ODDS are that the average person won't actually need their handgun for defense, and thus their level of training and ability is irrelevant in that regard.

The STAKES are as usual a different matter.

I can see both sides of this issue, having been on both sides personally. What makes the deciding difference for me is having gone the vast majority of my life as an "average person" with no professional training whatsoever, and finding out what a difference professional training has made in my confidence in my own ability to cope with difficult situations, and to effectively use a handgun, carbine or shotgun. I have been challenged personally on many levels by some of the best instructors in the country, and have managed to function safely and reasonably well under a certain degree of pressure. I find that reassuring.

Training has also given me some valuable experiences I wouldn't have had otherwise. A lot of theory sounds really good until the marking rounds impact and you find out the hard way what doesn't work, for example. And I wouldn't take anything for having had the opportunity to meet the people I've gotten to know at various training venues as more than just a name on a computer screen, especially the ones who aren't with us any more.

The other important thing I've learned is more of my own limits as far as interpersonal violence short of firearm involvement is concerned. I'm old, broke down and just plain not as capable as a lot of younger guys who are more into various hand to gland stuff and practice/train in that sort of thing.

To me, training is definitely worth the time, effort and expense. I've 'done without' in the years I had to work for a living and could never manage time off for classes (I went a couple of decades without even a real vacation), and I've 'done with' in the last decade. I'd much rather have training than not, having experienced both sides of the issue.

 

[Kleanbore]

Not sure what the writer is trying to say....

Saying that there are many incidents in which people without training successfully defend themselves is rather like saying that hundreds of thousands of people are never threatened by criminals. What about those who fail? What about those who are victimized? What's the point?

Generalizations about criminals whose "motivation tends to flag" or whose "most common response is to...go now" may describe a lot of the criminal element, but they are not helpful in risk management. They do not describe many of the vicious, unreasoning, and desperate methamphetamine dealers and users that populate large areas of the country. Or even the armed car jackers and burglars who have wreaked havoc in my area in the last couple or three weeks, shooting and kidnapping people. One does not prudently prepare for "the most common".

The other problem here is that this is an area in which actual incidents are relatively rare, there is no system for the collection and analysis of detailed data. When a citizen is shot or mugged, there is no after action report that is submitted to a central clearing house. And there are far too many variables.

Accordingly, statements such as "there's not much real evidence", "I have asked for [and not received]" and "I don't see much of that" do not prove anything. Contrary to common belief today, not everything can be obtained from a search engine, particularly when so much is never recorded in the first place.

So, just how might one test the hypothesis that training is of little value in increasing the likelihood of success in a defensive encounter involving firearms? There is a way. It's called simulation.

One could easily assemble test populations of persons with and without firearms training, equip them with simunitions and appropriate gear, design some different experiments, and evaluate the differences in results based on the difference in only one variable.

That would be a lot more meaningful than subjective conslusions based on what one has never heard, or on what one's preconceived notions happen to be.

I have personally been involved in three incidents that would be classified as "defensive gun uses". I survived all three unharmed. No shots were fired in any of them, so my complete lack of training (other than range shooting) at the time cannot be taken into account; none of them were reported; and if they had been, the results would almost certainly be inaccessible to researchers. I do not conclude a thing from them, except that I was very luck to have been armed.

 

[conw]

To me this was the salient point:

If we in the community want to see more people get trained, we need to adopt a "less is more" philosophy and make our training relevant to the mainstream's needs and resource constraints.

Claude does walk the walk there, as I can say from having witnessed him train someone close to me in a class and individually. I believe his article was intended to be thought provoking and point out that a middle ground approach for the majority of people could result in more people with appropriate training.

 

[Frank Ettin]

...Still, every year hundreds of thousands of people, who have had no training whatsoever and who seldom practice, successfully defend themselves with firearms, often small ones, from villains intending them harm. Accordingly the statement: "But you need to actually train with said gun and practice often if you expect to save your life with it one day" isn't necessarily true....

The rest of my article is on Tactical Wire.

But of course that sort of begs the question: What does it mean?

It makes a decent case that the RKBA is a valuable right and that access to firearms is worthwhile. But some will see the discussion as supporting the proposition that there's no good reason to seek out training, and I don't think the analysis supports that conclusion.

Let's look at some of the issues:

• You say:

  ...every year hundreds of thousands of people, who have had no training whatsoever and who seldom practice, successfully defend themselves with firearms...

  But exactly what evidence supports that assertion?
  
  We have a number of studies based on survey data (including the Kleck study) suggesting very large numbers of successful defensive gun uses (DGUs). And while the surveys, IIRC, don't capture data on the training of responders, the raw numbers are sufficiently large that at least a very healthy portion of those claiming a successful DGU probably had little training. Serious training has only been available to private citizens for a relatively short time (with Gunsite opening in the mid-1970s), and I can't imaging that the total aggregate output of Gunsite, Thunder Ranch, The Chapman Academy, LFI/MAG, Gabe Suarez, Louis Awerbuck and all the other schools and instructors would come close to the number of DGUs reported in the various studies.
  
  But in looking at some of the criticism of those studies, there does appear to be a question of whether all those incidents reported as successful DGUs were properly characterized by the persons responding to the surveys.
  
  So this must be regarded as something of a soft number. Not insignificant, to be sure, but still soft.
  
  BTW, see this thread for some further discussion of this subject.
  
  
• There are a number of sources for compilations of media accounts of successful DGUs. The "Armed Citizen" column in the NRA magazines is one. Another good source is this website. But those accounts seldom, if ever, include much information about the defender's level of training or experience.
  
  
• There seems to be very little data on defensive failures. But the lack of data doesn't mean that there aren't any. It only means that there not getting reported or not getting reported in ways that cause them to be identified as defensive failures. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb reminds us in his books Fooled by Randomness, the Hidden Role of Chance (Random House, 2004) and The Black Swan, the Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2007), "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
  
  
• In any case, a successful DGU by someone with minimal training only means that he was able solve his particular problems with the skills he had available at the time. If the problem had been different, things might not have worked out so well. In an emergency, we will respond with whatever skills and knowledge we have available. If they are up to the task, we'll prevail. If not, we probably won't.
  
  
• While we may have little data on defensive failures by private citizens, we do know that sometime LEOs fail to successfully defend themselves. And LEOs do have some training.
  
  It's true that LEOs face different sorts of tactical problems compared with private citizens, and LEO training varies. Yet here is a group of trained persons who fail at times. Would less training have produced better results?

So yes, private citizens can, and do, make effective defensive use of guns even when they lack training; and that is a good reason why it's appropriate for firearms to be available to private citizens. But training is a good idea which we should continue to encourage.

You can never know in advance what your problem will be, so yo can never know in advance what you're going to need to be able to do to solve it. But in general, the more you can do and the better you can do it, the more likely you'll be satisfied with the outcome. The better prepared you are, the luckier you will be.

 

[JShirley]

As a note, if you are the author, post the whole thing, not just a few sentences and a link.

If you are not the author of a piece you link or quote, you should make some substantive comment, other than "check this out!" Threads that do not follow these guidelines are subject to closure.

John

 

[qwert65]

I think the point if the article is not that training isn't necessary but that the level of training to survive most encounters is lower then what is normally published.
Example- to survive on the battlefield everyone needs to have infantry training, not be special forces.

Of course the flip side is more training never hurts,
Example- soilders with special forces training survive longer behind enemy lines then regular infantrymen

NOTE- those are examples I came up with, I am not judging any military training