The Myth of Situational Awareness: Braille Menus

Counter-ambush, very low anticipation of the need to shoot. All right here we're going to do a little reaction time test, all right? Reaction time test with your eyes, all right? Your eyes. So here's what I'm gonna do, I'm going to give you a command.

My command is either going to be, we're going to make it make it easier for you this time. I tried it the other way, guys on Friday you guys are gonna be better. Here we go. If I say left, I'm talking about that screen. I want you to immediately look at that screen.

Everybody. If I say right, for you I want you to immediately look at that screen. All right. Everybody's ready. Everybody kind of go to neutral.

Ready? Look at the podium! All right. Questions Now, anybody not find the podium. Is that okay?

Intellectually that was you, Wasn't confusing? You knew what I meant? You found the podium, right? Everybody looked at the podium. From what I saw everybody looked at the podium probably in about less than a second, but here's my question for you.

How ready were you on a scale of one to 10, to turn your head and look at something just before I said, look at the podium? like scale of one to 10, how ready were you to look at one of those two things that I'd mentioned? pretty high, right? On a scale of one to 10 how ready were you to dart your eyes very quickly to the podium? Probably about a zero, right?

Because that wasn't really an option. But intellectually you were able to figure it out, right? So that's the difference between general readiness and true anticipation of what you're about to do. Does that make sense? So you were 50/50.

If I say, how ready were you? Scale of one to 10 to look at that screen? Five. How ready look at that screen? five, right?

No reason. This, zero. When you go to the pizza shop how ready are you to order a pizza with vegetables on it versus a meat lover's pizza? Right? I don't know it depends on the taste of your family, right?

But you probably aren't going into the pizza shop ready to shoot somebody in the chest a lot or you'd go to a different pizza shop. Right? Now, you have the gun you have the mindset you've been to this lecture. You've read the books. You've done the home study course.

Right? You've gone to the range once a month. You've practiced in some general sense, you're ready. But you don't actually have a true anticipation of needing to perform those actions. When you go into the pizza shop or you just wouldn't go, right?

Does that make sense? So there's a huge difference, this whole the way we've approached situational awareness in the conversations in our community for a long time I think is really flawed. It turns into a safety blanket. It turns into a security blanket, right? How many of you try to sit with your eyes on the door, at the restaurant, right?

With your back up against the wall try to watch the door, right? That's a situational awareness thing, condition yellow, condition orange, all that stuff. How many of you who choose to do that and go out of your way to do that sometimes also order off of a braille menu so that you never have to look down? All right? So there's, like all that it's easy to sit with your back to the wall and watch the door.

But to truly have this idea that I am condition orange at all times, that's not a thing, right? You look like John Belushi running up the steps of the Dean's office all the time. You're not, that's not what we do, right? That's the I go to, you're the people I hang out with right? Like I go to, I go to classes.

I teach classes. I'm on the road 300 days a year, most years the last five or six, seven, eight years. And I'm hanging out with people, taking my classes. We go to dinner and we go to lunch and I see them off the range on the range in the gun shop. During the reload breaks, nobody's doing this.

Nobody's always standing with their back to the wall. None of it, no matter, you could wear the vest and you could have the camouflage and you can have the Molon Labe shirt and all three guns and six flashlights and two cell phones and cash and a map. You can be that guy. You're still looking down at the menu. So there's a moment when that situational awareness thing doesn't really pan out.