Violent Criminal Actors - Training for Defensive Violence

So knowing that the situation may go from 0 to 60, what are the steps we should take in training for what is really violence? Violence isn't always bad. Sometimes there's justified violence and there's defensive violence. How do we train for defensive violence? Part of it is reclaiming the sense of violence as a value neutral word.

When we think about violence, we almost always think of criminal violence, and that's certainly not all violence. I like to start with the most basic steps first. What is your level of commitment to violence against other people? And that sounds like a strange question to someone who might be carrying guns for self-defense or interested in going to classes and maybe even taking a martial arts course or knife fighting. But those are abstractions; those are things that I might do in the future.

And so what is your commitment to injuring and killing someone, lawfully, in the right, required to, justified by circumstances, and are you willing to use as much violence as is necessary to match the circumstance brought to you by someone else, by the violent criminal actor? Starting there, and can you articulate why or why not? And at that point, I don't think it's wrong of us as a community to say that that's the part where some people should probably get off of the process and think I'm not gonna be safely engaged in lethal force options. I just don't see myself being able to do that. And that would make sense to allocate resources, allocate time, allocate training, allocate preparation to doing other defensive measures, and you can still do things to improve your safety.

But to degrade, bully rag that sort of person, I think is a real mistake in the community. But most importantly is moral certainty with the action. Many folks have a problem with the notion that they would have to take a life, and so they start looking at non-lethal measures, not because they're more effective, but because they can't contemplate using lethal measures. So I always advocate starting there. I call that the big picture first.

So you've made the commitment, you at least believe you've made the commitment and you're ready. I think it's probably something that we don't know until that moment comes, that we can make a decision, an informed decision, that we're ready to do that. Then what? Once you've reached that moral certainty we talked about, I think it starts with a self-assessment, a real dispassionate review of your knowledge, skills and attributes. Do you have a knowledge base?

Do you have a skillset? Do you have physical attributes? And a very dispassionate one. It's tough to be dispassionate about ourselves and our level of readiness because we tend to round off the corners and fudge. "I could pretty much handle that." If you don't have any demonstrable training history or performance history, you're basically presuming that you're okay, and so training with other people is important, and committing to work on the weak spots until they're not weak spots.

We've all heard that drum beat over and over again. If you work on something that's a weakness until it's a strength, pretty soon you run out of weaknesses. But also comparing in your self assessment, comparing your knowledge, skills and attributes to your risk profile, what do you do on a daily basis? If what you do is in relatively safe environments, okay, your risk profile changes. Do you carry large amounts of cash on a daily basis for your job?

Your risk profile has changed quite a bit. And so I think a knowledge, skills and attributes self assessment done very dispassionately and an assessment of your individual risk profile, but you also have to include the risk profile if you're assuming risk for others, children or other loved ones, and only then can you know where to start the process of training and development. During that assessment, you were talking about being dispassionate and looking for weaknesses. Obviously, primarily as a firearms instructor, I think people have a really easy time, at least intellectually, emotionally there may be some rough spots, but at least intellectually applying that within a discipline. So I'll have someone come out to the gun range and they'll tell me this is my third course this year, I've been to five courses in the last eight years, I shoot a thousand rounds a month, and I'm really working on X, Y, or Z.

And they'll get on the range and be one of the best shooters in the class. And then they'll come to me during a break. How do you think I'm doing on, whatever this tiny, tiny piece of their shooting skill development is. And my response quite often is your shooting's good. I know you're paying money to be here in the shooting class, but you're one of the better shooters I've seen this year.

How about losing 20 pounds? How much weight can you lift? How fast can you run? How are your unarmed skills? How's your driving skills?

How much home security do you have for all this money you're spending on ammo? How do you address the people who apply focusing on their weaknesses, but only in their preferred area? I think that's an excellent point because what you've got is someone who's picked a rewarding slice of the pie, and it's rewarding to shoot that much because you can get better at it. You can see weaknesses and you can work on them until they're not weaknesses. But only seeing shooting as the game to be broken down that way.

If you took that same approach and applied it to unarmed combative skills or medical training or home security, it'd be a very impressive and a very resilient person. But we tend to do things that are rewarding to us, and once we are at a level of high performance, it's difficult to do other things we're less skilled at because our performance is nowhere near as rewarding. When you go to a boxing class for the first time and get punched in the face over and over again, it's nowhere near as rewarding as going to the range where you can succeed, and it can become an inverse allocation of resources where the most time and most money is spent on something you're already good at. It's very difficult for you as a firearm trainer to challenge that person to push them into their failure zone, either you calling upon them to exceed their skills on the range. Even in an area they're strong, you can make up drills that will challenge anyone.

But it takes a lot of work, and in the end, it's re-honing the same blade over and over and over again. It's difficult to push back against folks feeling of competency or agency when they can do something well that gets repeated. And putting them in an arena where they don't do well and saying climb that mountain again until you feel good is a hard sell. It really is, but it's incredibly important. But skill training, as we always say, has gotta be recent, relevant, realistic, and a lot of firearms training tends to be so technical that it isn't particularly realistic.

Transition skills, multiple magazine changes, really incredibly high level skills, but not really applicable. And unfortunately, I think that's one of the things you mentioned earlier, the importance of objective standards and competitions and this and that, and all too often that's what I end up seeing when people start putting scores on things and creating these very elaborate drills that they're gonna run a timer on. So I think that in an individual skill development piece, yes, challenging yourself to go a little faster at something you definitely need to do is important, but too often I see people playing games with the skills themselves or the application of the skills in a very, very choreographed way just so that it is a competition field. It's harder and harder to challenge someone with very high skills in a very narrow area, but the introduction of anything outside of that skillset can cause the whole system to collapse. We don't want rarefied skills.

We want robust skills. If having to draw in an unusual way from an unusual... I was in a class once where we were required to have our feet at different orientation at every draw stroke. Pretty soon, you start to run out of reasonable foot positions and they have to become very obscure. And if that is enough to throw off your shooting, your skill is overly rarefied.

It's not robust at all. You can't guarantee that you're going to be in that nice advantage posture, especially when you're attacked by someone like a violent criminal actor with a very well honed and extremely instantaneously aggressive approach. But training with something to lose is important, and I think even if that's face, but it's hard to convince people to lose face in training. It really is. So you've done the self-assessment, you've hopefully found some places that are weak either within a skillset or then looked for other skillsets that you might need.

What's the next step? I like to think that there's some mental cleaning house you can do. I think, obviously, that commitment to moral violence, to ethical violence, I think is incredibly important, but also to come to think of violence as not an abstraction, certainly in your community, and I think it does help to localize it through the paper, let's say, visualization of things that have happened nearby and to you. But to turn that pyramid upside down away from tool focus, it's no coincidence if you look at the number of posts on any web board, the posts about gear outnumber the other posts combined. Oh, sure.

And so getting people to realize that tool focus is a distraction from the existential reality. If the fight calls upon me to pinned on my back, put my thumb in someone's eyeball, another round of 9 versus 45 is not gonna solve that. And so I think convincing people to deal with things concretely rather than abstractly and think very specifically about... That's a mental habit, coming to think of yourself as, when necessary, a violent person. That's a challenge to a lot of the nice folks.

One of the real struggles is with what we call projection. Projection is just like in the theater, ascribing your values and your sense of the world onto the world itself, onto others in the world. I'm a nice, decent God-fearing people, so are the people that I will come across. They're nice, decent God-fearing people too, except they're not. And presuming that my values of, let's say, fair play, no one would do that to me because it's unfair, no one would do that to me because it's wrong, that's very far from true.

And yet, it's very tough to get people to think of themselves as being subject to things they would never ever do. And that's part of that acceptance of the world is not the way it ought to be, as you say. Exactly. I mean, that is living in yellow. That is acknowledging that the world is not as it ought to be.

And so in order to thrive and succeed in the world, I have to live with the world as it is, not as I wish it were, but moreover not as I pretend that it is. You talked about gear and the fact that people worry way too much about gear and not enough about the training, but I will indulge that conversation because I'd like to get your perspective on how what you just said actually does affect gear selection because the way you want the world to be or the way you choose to train in a very rarefied way, as you say, might wrongly influence the type of gear that you either rationalize or fetishize or choose to carry. A great quote from Jerry Miculek, the world champion shooter. He said, "You have to be able to live with your wobble zone." Discussing long range shooting saying you're always gonna see the sight move, but you have to become comfortable with it. Even though it's wobbling, it's still on target.

And I think at some point we have to figure that our gear is good enough, it's close enough. I'm a fan of high quality gear myself. But if it serves the function, spending time, energy, money, focus, allocating those resources toward that last 1/100 of 1% of improvement, I don't think it's worth it. But the question is can you sell that as an instructor? Can you say that what I want you to do is accept good enough?

And then go lift weights, or go drive a car, or go learn the medicals. Go do something else. And that's something obviously that this is part of. How many people on the shelf at the gun shop are gonna buy the violent criminal actor conversation with a psychologist versus the how to build your own AR and put lots of accessories on a DVD? We hope more and more we'll be interested in this.

We hope. It's hard to get people out of their comfort zone. This is a very uncomfortable topic. I don't enjoy it much myself. Having a framework in my mind for the data helps me and also working with the folks clinically using the skills, any clinical skill, it's not as personally affecting, but the stories themselves are difficult and it's easier not to think about them.

It is easier to think about changing the hammer on my 1911. It is easier to think about a holster with one millimeter less of a cut, and that way I can draw faster. Those things seem concrete and immediate, whereas thinking a lot about violent criminal actors seems hopeless. And I know many people who say, if I ever have to, I'll figure it out, but as Claude Werner, the noted trainer, said once "I'll figure it out when I get there is not a plan." Right. And yet that's where people seem to be leaving the majority of their thinking about interacting with a violent criminal actor.

You would think that we would devote quite a bit of time and attention to that, but we don't. On theory, that's why we're doing it. We're not doing it because we like guns. We're not doing it because we're good at shooting. We're carrying the gun and we're doing the training to protect ourselves from just these people, and they need to be factored into our training.