Response with an Unarmed Associate

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. In a public environment, you're going to have to deal with lots of different types of people. And of course, the person that you're with may or may not be someone that's trained with you or someone that you perceive as being capable of defending themselves. Let's take a look at what happens when Jeremiah is involved in a critical incident, in a public environment and he's with someone that he does not perceive as being able to take care of themselves. Give me all your money!

No, get lost. I'll kill y'all. As I recognize the threat, I'm gonna move to the gun. I see he's an articulable threat, he's gonna kill everybody, he's hit somebody with the gun so I'm gonna go what I deem is necessary. Get down, drop the gun.

As he recognized me, he's an articulable threat. Bang! Now, as the situation develops further, let's take a look at what happens when someone else enters into the situation who is capable of taking care of themselves. When we see a person in a public environment with a firearm who is obviously able to defend themselves, it doesn't automatically mean they're a threat. One of the things you have to take into account with multiple person tactics is that you may never have met the person that's gonna be involved in the incident, you may never have trained with them but you need to be aware of how to use the three Cs to make sure that everything stays safe for everybody involved or at least as safe as possible as it can be in the middle of a critical incident in a public environment.

Drop the gun, drop the gun! Relax, I've got a concealed carry permit, I saw everything, I'm gonna put the gun away. At this point, John puts his gun away, he's seen everything that happened. He saw the threat come in, he saw the threat go down so he puts the gun away, he's safe with me having a gun. I had no idea that he was just a guy with a concealed carry permit, I was fixated on the threat.

Now let's look at another situation where the communication is gonna be more complicated. Drop the gun. Gun, he's still has a gun in play! I can't see, what? He stills has a gun.

Drop the gun. You on the floor drop the gun. He dropped the gun, he's good I got it, call 911. Got it. So after the incident, after John took control I called 911.

So as you can see, communication is a very important aspect in two person team tactics. Obviously there's communication with the person that you know, that's the coordination, communication, cooperation, there's communication with people you don't know have a gun, right? Just because you see a gun, doesn't mean that you can shoot. A lot of the threat targets that you shoot at in a normal scenario house, a normal shoot house have guns and knives, just because you have a gun or a knife in somebody's hand, doesn't necessarily mean that they are a threat. Look at this last situation, he had a concealed carry permit, I had a concealed carry permit, he had a gun pointed, I had a gun pointed.

Now you need to keep that in mind and in your training that the communication is what's gonna overcome that fratricide or that good guy shooting good guy. More and more people are carrying concealed guns whether that's the off duty police officer or the private civilian who wants to defend themselves. So it's becoming more and more likely that you're gonna run into a situation where you do not know if the person with the gun is just a concealed carry permit holder or if it's a bad guy. That's why it's important to recognize not only the weapon but the intentions of the person with the weapon, is the gun pointed at you? Is the gun in a ready position?

It depends on where the person's looking, are they looking at you about to swing the gun like you saw in the scenario earlier? There's a lot of things that you need to recognize before you can actually use the gun in self-defense. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.