Counter Ambush Concepts: Preparing Your Response Session 5: Preparing Your Plan

Knowing what you know. The most likely event. The things you're most likely going to need to face. If you need to defend yourself or others. The plausibility principle, the empirical data about how fights happen and what people actually do when they need to defend themselves armed or unarmed especially in terms of that armed defensive moment.

What do you know about the physics of the gun? What you know about the physiology of the person who's trying to hurt you, the anatomy, what you're trying to do with the gun to stop them, to keep them from hurting you or someone else. What are you gonna do with your training resources? How are you gonna allocate your time, your budget your energy, what training model are you gonna use? How are you going to develop a counter ambush training?

We have some more things we need to define. We still need to talk about a couple of things to make sure that we're aiming for the right goal, right? You could try to set up a training model and do really, really well at achieving your goal and then find out you were trying to achieve the wrong goal. So let's make sure that we avoid that. We have a kind of graphic representation of what exactly it is we're trying to do.

What are we trying to do with our training model? So we're about danger and control. And on this model, control is maximized right here and danger is minimized. So this is when you're at your safest you're in the most control and the least amount of danger. And if we look at just something in regard to defensive shooting just in terms of shooting in general, the need to use a gun or in this case, just the desire to use a gun you want to go shooting.

If you go out in the property that you own and you wanna shoot your guns you have an incredible amount of control and you are in very little danger, right? As long as the gun works properly, the ammunition was loaded properly, you're shooting into a safe backstop for you and everyone else you're incredibly safe and you can pretty much do whatever you want, right? If you go to a public range you give up a little control. But again, if the gears working properly if people are following the rules, if you're shooting into a safe backstop, you're not increasing the likelihood that you're gonna get hurt. If you go to a formal defensive shooting course you give up even more control.

Now, the instructors telling you what to do when to do it giving your commands to fire, dictating what kind of targets you use, telling you patterns of shooting, whatever else. But again, everybody follows the rules the instructor controls the class appropriately, we're not increasing the likelihood that you're gonna get hurt. You go to a competition, you give up even more control, you gotta use specific gear, you gotta take your turn you gotta shoot a course of fire exactly this way you're gonna be scored and timed. More control, taken away, no extra danger. You go into a live fire simulation, a shoot house it's a lot like the competition except they don't tell you what's gonna happen.

You don't get that stage briefing. You don't have any anticipation. You're going through the house. You don't know where the bad guy is and then you see the target then you need to respond and apply your skills. But again, if the shoot house is run safely if you've been trained and prepped appropriately before going into that simulation your danger levels shouldn't rise above what it is in any other shooting environment.

This area over here, all of this this is the training environment. This is recreational shooting. This is competition. This could be hunting, right? Hunting is even less control.

Now you're just sitting there hoping the animal shows up, right? So you've got even less control but there's no extra danger because you're out hunting. When you cross this line, let's put this imaginary line in here. Once you cross that line, here's what changes significantly on this chart. What changes significantly on this chart is that when we cross this line, somebody wants you to get hurt.

In fact, let's go right to a lethal threat. Somebody wants to kill you. It may not be a very serious threat, but if some 82-Year old woman is really mad at you because you stole her parking spot and she comes out of her house with her walker and she's very upset with you and completely irrational. And you notice her and you say, "Hey, look, I'm sorry but I got to get in there "I'm leaving my car here. "I'm sorry I stole your parking spot." And as you turn you slip 'cause you weren't paying attention you weren't focused on what you were doing and you slipped on an icy spot or you lose your footing and you fall down and hit your head on the ground and get a little dazed and confused maybe knocked all the way out and she walkers over and crushes your throat with her Walker.

You got killed by an 82-year old irrational woman. Low-level threat but you were out of control enough and enough mistakes were made that that person killed you. Drunk guy at a bar, angry man on the side of the road, after a crack accident with a baseball bat. Drunk messed out, cokehead whatever, mugger with a knife. Armed robber that loses control of a situation and panics.

Two guys with rifles intent on killing everyone at the mall. Whatever the situation is we can go all the way up to this worst-case scenario that we refer to generically as the ambush. This imaginary scenario where you have minimum control and maximum danger. That's what we're training for. Maximum danger, minimum control.

That's what we're supposed to be designing our training model for. If I wanna go out in my backyard, in my shooting environment, my safe shooting environment and I want to have a reload technique that is to feel slide lock, pull the gun back in towards my body and invert it. Push the magazine release in, pull the magazine out with my teeth, Grab a fresh magazine with my strong hands, stick it in the gun, flip the gun back over and use my middle finger to depress the slide lock lever and then get back into a shooting position. That works, right? Guns, reloaded that were a real bullet, it would fire right now and my technique worked that technique was effective.

If I choose to use that as my reload technique it would work in my backyard. I would cover that much surface area and that level of danger with that much control. I could do that reload technique. If I go to a public range, I'm probably gonna be asked to leave. If I try to do that reload technique that's not even gonna cover any more than like that square centimeter of surface area on this model, right?

If I want to use a reloading model that is to feel slide lock and drop the gun down here shake it until the magazine comes out, turn it upside down, insert the magazine firmly flip it back over, take my middle finger pull back on the breech face and get ready to shoot, that would work. That's probably not gonna get me kicked off a range, right? I'm probably okay up to here now. I go to a training course and I tell the instructor like, Hey, I got it, check this out. Probably gonna be told to knock it off.

Probably not gonna work. Of course, I go to cite some training courses maybe that would be. If I cater my reload to a game, a shooting competition, I say, okay I am never gonna reach slide lock. That's my plan because of my score reloading takes a long time. I don't wanna reload, reloading takes forever.

That is crazy talk. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna count my rounds, I got a stage reefing I'm gonna shoot that target twice, that target twice, that target twice, that target twice and I'm gonna run over here around the corner and shoot that other target twice and five more. So if I go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. And as I'm running, I just put in a new magazine.

I don't take any time at all to do my reload 'cause I had to take that time to run anyway. If I do that, I'm gonna get a better score. So by choreographing my reload technique to this environment in the competition, I'm gonna get a better score. And that'll still, I can do that at somebody's course. I can just never hit slide lock and after a few rounds, I can drop the mag out and stick a new one in, I can do that at the public range.

And I can do that in my backyard and I can use that technique. Now, the first couple ones were pretty I was being facetious, right? They were kind of silly, but that last one, there's a lot of people that do that. Go Google fastest reload ever you're gonna see people using that kind of a technique. These four reloads in one second videos that went around a lot like a couple of months ago in the competition world.

That's what they were right. You didn't see people firing rounds and getting the slide lock what you saw was people dropping a magazine, inserting the magazine, dropping a magazine, inserting a magazine, dropping a magazine, inserting the magazine, dropping a magazine inserting magazine and saying they were reloading, that's not reloading it's dropping a magazine, insert your magazine, right? To me, this is what starts a reload. So if I'm not getting that, I don't get the stimulus to reload it's just a mechanical thing, but it's not reloading a gun 'cause the gun wasn't in there still around in the chamber the gun's not empty. So I don't consider that what some people do but sure enough, there are some people who stop at choreographed reloads specific for their competition game.

And then they tell themselves they're really good at reloads and they're capable of defending themselves and essentially they're hoping that with less control and in more danger, their reload technique will work. Well what's something else that we talked about earlier that that caters itself to a competition environment. We've repositioned, if I know that I'm gonna be shooting only two shots I don't have to worry a lot about recoil management, right? Bang, bang, the double tap and the Weaver position work really well in the competition environment, right? Bang, bang, swing bang, bang, swing bang, bang, swing bang, bang.

But out here I might need three shots to stop that person. Two shots might not be enough I might need seven shots. And this doesn't work well with what the body does naturally. The body position, arm position, double tapping doesn't work well for if I'm shooting at that same pace faster than I can actually shoot and control recoil in this position, six shots. I may be off the target by the third or fourth or fifth shot because I was only training to double-tap.

So if my technique is only catered to this one particular controlled environment, I'm only covering so much surface area on this chart. If I say, okay, well, I'm gonna train for this scenario. And if a guy comes at me with a bat, well, I'm gonna I'm going to train that a lot and I'm gonna see it coming and I'm gonna duck under the bat and then I'm gonna underhook him and I'm a sweep his leg and take them to the ground and elbow him in the face a lot. Okay, well that works against drunk guys with bats. That are going to rage on the side of the road.

But that's not gonna help you with this stabby guy or the Shooty guys or whatever this thing was this flaming unicorn that attacked you at the food court whatever it was, right? So we can cover a certain amount of surface area with choreograph techniques. If we wanna cover all of this surface area that's represented by minimum control, maximum danger, we need to understand the concept of efficiency. If we wanna be ready for the widest plausible set of circumstances that we could be faced with, we need to understand efficiency. And we need to understand that just because something is effective, doesn't mean it's valuable, doesn't mean it's good and doesn't mean it's what we should do.

And this comes back to that first silly spin the gun upside down, pull the magazine out with my teeth, stick a magazine in thing I showed you at the beginning. Remember that it was effective. It got the job done. When we talk about effectiveness, I say merely effective. There are a lot of different ways to be merely effective when it comes to reloading a gun.

Earlier I mentioned the idea that I could drive this gun out, upside down, close an eye align the sights and pull the trigger with my pinkie and get hits on a target, that's effective. Not going to manage recoil real well where my hand is right now, the gun's not even gonna be reliable 'cause it's going to hit my base of my thumb and the guns ain't going to cycle properly. If I get up here, I'm really not gonna manage recoil well, the gun may or may not be reliable. It's gonna be really hard to fire a multiple shots string. And this isn't even a convenient way to hold a gun.

If I have to reload, I have to change everything now to get to the magazine release. I mean, it's completely ludicrous to think that anybody's gonna learn to shoot a gun defensively this way. But if I were just worried about target shooting, it's effective. When I get students on the line and they wanna show me how they can do something or how some other guy taught them to do something this is where we have this discussion. What's your goal, because if your goal is just to put holes in paper, you're right, that can work.

If your goal is just to get the gun reloaded in a choreographed controlled environment, you're right, that'll work. If you're a special secret Ninja move is only gonna stop guys with bats that are swinging wildly overhead when you see them coming cool, you're gonna be really good at that fight. But if you're worried about this, this thing that you can't imagine specifics on that you can't choreograph, that's going to be surprising, that's going to be dynamic we need more than just effectiveness. We need to find the thing that is efficient. And we define efficiency as achieving a goal with as little time, effort or energy as possible in the intended context of use, right?

'Cause it's one thing to just perform the skill over here in the training recreational competition hunting environment. But if we wanna be able to apply the skill when we're out of control and in danger, we really need to emphasize efficiency, less time, less energy, less effort, go back to all of our body's natural reactions. Less fine motor skill, less visual component, less visual processing, not standing up straight, working well with our body in a compressed position with as little time, effort and energy as possible. How do we do that? That's where your training model needs to be aimed.

Becoming as efficient as possible under the widest plausible set of circumstances. And remember what happens when we're untrained? When we're trained, we have O three R, right. We observe, we react, we recognize and we respond. What happens when we're untrained?

We observe, we recognize, and then we improvise. If you don't recognize what's going on, if you observe and react, and then we improvise if you don't recognize what's going on and you have to make something up, or if you choose because you have the cognitive analytical awareness to do something other than what you trained I don't want it to be out here. I don't want you to have trained for this, find yourself in a harder situation to deal with and have to make something up. I want you to do train for being out of control for not having visual reference information. For not having fine motor skill control like you do in a training environment.

And if you find yourself in a situation that doesn't scare you all that much and you aren't caught off guard and you see the pre-contact cues and you see the guy wearing the heavy coat in July with his hands in his pockets, looking around nervously. If you see all that and you're ahead of the curve and you're in more control and less danger and you wanna make something up, you see two guys coming at you down the alley and one guy looks the other guy and nods and they both pull out knives and you see them coming and they're 10 degrees apart and you are pinned in and you make the conscious decision to say I have no option here, I'm gonna draw and shoot one and then shoot the other guy. And that's what I'm gonna do. And you make that decision and you plan that out and you choreograph it, you predict it you shoot three shots and you swing and you shoot three shots and it works, cool, send me an email, we'll high five over the email. But what I don't want you to do is think here now that you you need to plan on shooting three times, swinging the other target shoot three times.

And that that's gonna help you up here when you didn't even know there was another guy and you don't know how many shots it's gonna take and who knows what's gonna happen. I want you to train in a counter-ambush model, knowing that if you need to improvise, or if you choose to improvise and do something other than what you trained for, it's because you're in more control or less danger, right? Remember we say in the CFS program this is a shooting program. We don't teach deescalation, we don't teach avoidance, we don't teach awareness, we don't teach pre-contact cues. It's two days of what to do when you realize you need to shoot.

There's a whole bunch of other important stuff out there you need to learn, but that's not what that class is. That class is the worst case scenario stuff. You're going to carry a gun and tell yourself you're capable of using it when you need to, then let's work on that. And then let's hope you don't need to. And yes, absolutely, you should take all the steps that you can when we teach home defense tactics, when we talk about concealed carry tactics we talk about public safety, talk about taking care of your family, talk about corporate security, we talk about law enforcement officers, survival stuff.

That's where we talk about how to avoid, how to deescalate how to read pre-contact cues, how to make smart decisions so you don't have to shoot. But in the shooting course, we talk about shooting. And if you have to deviate from the mechanical skills we're teaching, hopefully it's only because you chose not to go from the holster and drive out but to stop and give them a verbal warning because you were in more control and less danger, right? That's what we're looking for. So this is called the chart of doom.

It's what we call it. Chart of doom. We want you to prepare for as much doom as possible. Don't just train for your backyard. Don't just choose techniques because they work.

Choose techniques because they are as efficient as possible and they work over the widest plausible set of circumstances.