It requires more well-placed shots than you’d expect to stop a determined attacker.

A problem with firearms and self defense topics is there’s a profusion of ‘experts’ but very little factual basis to many of their opinions.

So, wherever possible, we prefer to ‘let the facts do the talking’ rather than listen to ‘experts’.

Here’s a thought provoking story of a police sergeant in Skokie, IL.  One day he unexpectedly found himself going at it, mano a mano, in a shootout with a fleeing felon.  He had no backup, the encounter suddenly started, and lasted 56 seconds, all at very close range (most gunfights are of short duration and at almost ‘bad breath’ distance).

By the end of the encounter, 54 shots had been fired – 21 by the felon, 33 by the police sergeant.  Probably more would have been fired by both participants, but they were each running low on ammo.

The felon missed with all 21 of his shots.  The sergeant did extremely well, getting 17 of his shots on target.  The officer was also a master firearms trainer and a sniper with his local SWAT team, so clearly had firearms skills and experience way above the average police officer.

There are several points that this real life story makes.  See if you picked up on them.

First, note the massive expenditure of rounds by both parties (and remember they’d have shot more if they had more to shoot).  The point here is that it took a highly skilled police sergeant 33 shots to stop his opponent.  If he’d not had this much ammo for his duty weapon, the outcome of the encounter could have been tragically different.

So – how much ammunition do you carry with you?  Are you prepared for a fire-fight where it takes you 33 or more rounds to fight off a single attacker?  What if there are two guys you are defending yourself against?  Do you have more than 66 rounds?

Second, note that the bad guy missed with all 21 of his shots, and the police sergeant ‘only’ got half his on target (which is at least twice as good as the average police officer, and we’ll wager, much better than the average civilian).

This points to the need to be able to shoot both accurately and repeatedly at your opponent(s).  In other words, a five shot snub nosed wheelgun ain’t gonna be much good.

Third, count the number of times the bad guy was hit.  After being hit 14 times, including six hits that are considered fatal, he was still pressing his attack.  It was only after the sergeant got three (not one or two, but three!) head shots did the fight seep out of the bad guy; and even so, the bad guy lived for some time afterwards and only eventually died in hospital.

If you think you just need to get one or perhaps two shots on target when a bad guy is attacking you, think again.  This bad guy soaked up 14 rounds and continued to fight, and only stopped after taking three more shots to the head.

When you’re defending yourself in an extreme situation like this, you don’t have time to pause and judge the effect of each shot you’ve fired.  You need to just keep shooting as rapidly as you can until the other guy ceases to be a threat.

There’s a fourth point that you would be well advised to focus on as well.  Nothing seems to provoke more controversy than the subject of what is the ‘best’ caliber to use with a pistol.  Did you notice the caliber the police sergeant was using – the caliber so puny that it took 17 hits – nine of them ‘fatal’ hits – to get the bad guy out of the fight?

It was the hallowed sainted .45 ACP!  And probably a high quality hollow point type of bullet.  Yes – all you people who brashly boast about how your .45 ACP chambered pistol will solve any problem you might encounter with a single shot, need to think about the implications of this very carefully.  The facts don’t lie, and the bad guy wasn’t on PCP or any other drug that can sometimes give a person more ‘stamina’ when taking fire.  The first 14 hits (six of them theoretically fatal) didn’t stop the bad guy at all.

It is perhaps unsurprising to read, at the end of the story, that the sergeant no longer carries a 13 round Glock 21 in .45 ACP.  Instead he carries a 17 round Glock 17, chambered in 9mm.  The police sergeant now realizes that the caliber of round really doesn’t make any difference at all – surviving and winning a gun fight is all about getting as many good hits on the other guy as possible, no matter what caliber of round you are using.

Oh yes, and the police sergeant will not be caught out a second time with insufficient ammo.  He now carries 145 rounds of 9mm with him.

He actually did two good things by trading his .45 for a 9mm.  Not only can he more conveniently carry more ammo, and shoot more between mag changes, but he now has a compatible primary and backup pistol.  Both are chambered for 9mm, and both can use the same magazines that he has with him.

It took a brush with death for this police sergeant to improve his game.  Save yourself a similar situation, and learn from his experience.

Do we need more accountability when we give government officials powers over us?

We understand that everyone makes mistakes from time to time, whether they work for the government or not.

That’s unavoidable and okay, if the mistake was sincerely made in the first place rather than a deliberate abuse of authority (and authority is something that government employees tend to have much more of than people working in the private sector) and if the mistake is quickly rectified.

We also understand that some people are not very nice people, and will sometimes vindictively do bad things, just because they can.  That’s not okay, but this also happens in both the private and public sectors.

The key thing here is that the person who acts badly be accountable for their bad actions.  Usually, in the private sector, apart from union-protection issues, people who clearly and deliberately act in appropriately can expect consequences from their actions, including possibly even being fired.  But how often do we think that happens in government departments?

Here’s an appalling example of egregious abuse of authority by a Customs & Border Patrol individual who decided it was easier to impound a guy’s new boat than to correct her paperwork, and who refused to allow the boat-owner to speak to her supervisor or in any other way attempt to get her capricious decision reviewed.

As detailed in a follow-up post, this woman’s decision to impound the boat for no good reason ended up costing over $10,000 in fees to a broker to get the boat back.  The follow-up post is also interesting because it shows two additional things – first, how the woman or her co-workers will self-evidently lie to justify their actions, and secondly, how CBP view us – normal, ordinary, honest, Americans – as the enemy, rather than as the client they are there to serve.

Two questions :  What negative consequence will flow to this woman for what apparently was a wrong act on her part?  (Probable answer – none whatsoever.)

Secondly, will the boat owner and the company who sold it to him get their $10,000 broker fee reimbursed by CBP due to the inappropriate actions of their employee?  (You can probably guess the answer to this, too.)

The more authority we give to government departments and their employees, the more accountable they must become.  Currently, the opposite seems to be the case – we are giving them more and more power and removing their accountability at the same time.

Our government is in danger of becoming out of control, and rather than acting to help us, as was the original intention of progressing from anarchy to government in the first place, it all too often now seems to deliberately make things difficult for us.  There is a growing divide between government employees and the rest of us; an ‘us vs them’ situation which bodes extremely ill for the country as a whole.

Maybe providing free bags isn’t so bad after all.

The Seattle City Council unanimously passed a law last year banning the use of plastic bags in grocery stores, and requiring stores to charge 5c each for paper bags.

In truth, it seems the retailers were quite pleased about this.  They no longer had to give away plastic and paper bags for free, and – even better – could often make a profit by selling the massively marked up reusable shopping bags that it was hoped Seattle’s citizens would switch to.

The law took effect last July.

So what has happened since then?

Local hospitals report a surge in E.coli cases – and even deaths – as a result of people carrying food in unclean bags they were reusing.

Shoplifters delighted in being able to carry bags into the store, fill them, and walk out without paying.

Other shoppers, frustrated at finding they would have to pay to bag their purchases, simply walked off with the store baskets (and maybe/maybe not paid for the contents of the baskets).  Stores responded by not replacing the lost/stolen baskets, but that caused a new raft of customer service problems too.

As for the benefits – well, we’re still waiting for a report on those.  But perhaps the fact that there is no measurable global warming at present might ‘prove’ that Seattle was very wise.  On the other hand, the last time there was any significant global warming was almost a decade ago, so perhaps Seattle was simply late to the party.

More details of Seattle scoring an own-goal here.

Don’t learn your lessons from the movies. Dirty Harry isn’t real. And you’re not a cop.

So there you are.  You’ve surprised three felons about to burglarize your property.  Fortunately, you have your handgun with you, and when you confront them as an armed homeowner, the three felons very sensibly turn tail and flee.

Great.  So far, so good.  Bravo.

But what happens next can completely change your day if you’re not careful.  There you are – heart pounding, blood surging, adrenalin levels off the scale, full of righteous anger, and your gun is in your hand.  Maybe you even have some vague fuzzy perception that it is legal to shoot after felons, perhaps because you are ‘in hot pursuit’ or something like that.

Do you shoot after the bad guys?  Or do you carefully holster your handgun and call the police?

Don’t just answer this question in the calm and comfort of where and how you’re reading this.  Try and really put yourself in the scene, and understand how you’d be thinking and reacting.

Now – the answer.  Would you shoot after the bad guys?

If you answered ‘yes’, go take a cold shower.  Then come back and please continue reading.

If you answered ‘no’, congratulations, but don’t relax.  Drill that ‘I must not shoot’ thought hard into your brain, so that when the situation actually occurs and you’re operating more on instinct and emotion, your rational self can still fight away the blood lust and desire for vengeance and correctly guide your actions.

Don’t just take our word for it.  Read this short news item about a homeowner in a scenario pretty much as we just depicted.  He did the wrong thing, and got locked up for it, and now is facing an expensive journey through the legal system, with the only certain thing in his future being tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, many sleepless nights full of worry, and possibly – probably – a criminal conviction on his record and maybe even some prison time.

Two things to remember :

First :  Your state may or may not have a long laundry list of situations in which it might be legal to use lethal force.  But the only one of these which is likely to be unimpeachable is when you or your loved ones are staring certain death or severe injury in the face, and you have absolutely utterly no way to avoid that outcome, other than to use the least amount of deadly force possible.  All the others are less black and white, and you can find yourself trapped in very unpleasant grey.

As soon as you retreat away from that ‘worst case’ scenario, you start to facing a growing subsequent alternate worst case scenario – either criminal and/or civil action against you after your shooting.  Depending on the jurisdiction you live in, your state’s laws on deadly force may be interpreted permissively or restrictively, and concepts such as ‘what would a reasonable man be expected to do in the circumstances’ could be answered – in a court of law – in very different ways.

Remember also that juries are fickle.  You can never guarantee what verdict a jury will reach.  Get a couple of vociferous anti-gun people, a few others who believe that ‘nothing can ever justify taking a human life’, and have the others basically conciliatory and passive, and before you know where you are, you’re guilty of whatever the prosecutor has decided to throw at you.

Maybe the local community is currently experiencing a backlash against some gun tragedy somewhere in the country, and it is just your bad luck to be the recipient of that backlash.  Maybe you are white and shot at black criminals, and the case has been perverted into a cause celebre for ‘black rights’ and you are made to look like a racist rather than an ordinary homeowner.  And so on and so on.

The bottom line :  Any shooting may have extremely unfair criminal and civil consequences.  Avoid the risk of such consequences, by avoiding the need to shoot.

Second :  Go stand in your driveway and imagine yourself doing like the guy in the news story did, shooting at the would-be burglars as they make their getaway.  Now look carefully at what is in the background.  What do you see – and also what are behind the bushes and fences that you can’t see (but which your bullets can reach)?  Houses.  Apartments.  Cars.  And, most of all, people.

In most residential areas, there’s no such thing as a safe direction to shoot in.  Even if your shots hit the bad guys, they might still travel through and on and cause other damage elsewhere.  Police departments regularly average $10,000 and up, for every shot fired by their officers, in terms of the costs they incur repairing the damage from the rounds expended.  You can expect the same, and it will be money out of your own pocket, because your insurance will refuse to cover you.

Here’s the unfair thing (and – get this – everything about these types of situations is unfair, right from the get go).  If you hold your front door open for the burglars and help them carry away all your gear; insurance will reimburse you as per the policy you have.  They see that as an accident or event you have no control over.

But if you protect your property and shoot at the burglars, the insurance company won’t thank you for acting to reduce the amount of loss they have to pay out.  Instead, they say this was a deliberate act on your part, not an accident or random piece of bad luck, and they’ll refuse to reimburse you any of the costs you might incur as a result of where the bullets went and the damage they caused.

Dirty Harry never had to worry about these things.  He was a policeman, more or less acting, on duty, as employed to do.  Sure, the mayor and his superiors would often berate him for the damage he caused, but Harry never had to pay any of that himself.  The city and the police department, and all their attorneys, would run interference for him.

You have none of this behind you.  Instead, it will all be ranged in front of you and against you.

Bottom line?  Don’t shoot, unless you have no choice, and it is the only option open to you, and necessary to save you or your loved ones from imminent and severe harm or death.  And force yourself to stop shooting as soon as the situation changes.

Update :  The citizen who shot at the fleeing burglars ended up agreeing to a plea bargain.  He has given a guilty plea, and is receiving a $700 fine, must take a weapons safety class, and has been required to forfeit his handgun.  Maybe he got off lightly, depending on your perspective.  Add the incarceration, now having an arrest and criminal record, and thousands of dollars in attorney fees, and those two shots truly changed his life.  Details here.

The Royal Clock Tower Hotel in Mecca (also known as the Abraj Al-Bait Towers).  At 1972 ft and 120 floors, it is the tallest building completed in 2012 and now the second tallest building in the world.

As we move into the new century, it is increasingly obvious that the 21st century belongs not to western civilization, but to other civilizations and regions.

That’s an unpleasant truth and hard for most complacent westerners to appreciate or accept, particularly when they close their eyes to the rest of the world and surround themselves only with those selected snippets of information that encourage their belief in the innate supremacy of the western cultural/social/economic system.

It is hard to measure the decline of the west, particularly when we are part of it ourselves, and surrounded by a version of reality that is unwilling to acknowledge our decline.  But if you travel the world (may I modestly say that I have) and particularly if you visit some of the new prosperous regions of the world, the difference between what we have come to accept and what is happening in the rest of the world is astonishing.  Why aren’t we being told about this in our newspapers and on our television programs?

Well, that’s a question with no answer, isn’t it!

One such measure of the economic winners and losers might be urban construction and development.  Here’s an interesting article that gives us a non-standard measure of the relative economic success and prosperity of cities in the world – skyscraper construction.  It lists the ten tallest skyscrapers built in 2012.

If you don’t want to go through the article page by page, here’s the list :

1.   Mecca, Saudi Arabia
2.   Dubai, UAE
3.   Dubai, UAE
4.   Dubai, UAE
5.   Guangzhou, China
6.   Dubai, UAE
7.   Hanoi, Vietnam
8.   Guangzhou, China
9.   Guangzhou, China
10. Chongching, China

In case you’re wondering, you have to get all the way to number 15 before the west appears (Toronto), and number 23 before the US appears (Oklahoma City).  Then another long gap until Canada reappears at #34 and the US again at #45.

As for Europe, its first appearance is #39 (Milan), followed by Moscow (which may or may not be fairly considered as part of Europe) at #48.

This page lists all ‘tall buildings’ (which it defines as taller than 200 meters, ie 656 ft) completed in 2012.  There were 66 in total, of which 22 were built in China, 18 in Muslim countries, and 11 in other Asian countries, but only four in Canada, two in the US, and one in Europe (plus one in Russia).

That would seem to clearly indicate where all the economic growth is occurring and – alas – where the economic growth is not occurring.

King George V reviewing The Grand Fleet at Spithead in 1914. 98 years later, Queen Elizabeth II had to settle for watching a procession of private launches motoring up the River Thames in London.

Britain is widely regarded by all (except perhaps our ‘Commander-in-Chief’) as being this country’s strongest ally – it is the country we have a ‘special relationship’ with.  They feel the same way about us too, and they’ve not hesitated to support us whenever we’ve needed it.

The strength of Britain as our ally is measured not just in its moral support of our policies and positions on the world stage, but also in its military support too.  Wherever we’ve been fighting in the last several decades, there have been British troops, planes and ships alongside ours.

It is sobering therefore to understand how Britain’s military capabilities have massively imploded in on themselves.  We not only have our President spurning our relationship with Britain while racing around the world apologizing and bowing to our enemies, weakening the strength of the ties that keep us and Britain so closely together, we also have Britain’s disarming of itself to the point of international irrelevance.

This article, in Britain’s leading and somewhat conservative newspaper, The Daily Telegraph, is mainly of little interest to most Americans, inasmuch as it involves Britain’s dispute with Argentina over the Falkland Islands.  But we can’t let that topic pass without point out how sad it is to note the contrast between the short war with Argentina in 1982 when President Reagan fully supported Britain, and the current situation where our President and his team are unable to even say they support Britain, while cozying up to Argentina.

What is most interesting, however, is to look down to the bottom, at the table of Britain’s military strength as between 1982 and 2013.  In case the link has eroded over time, we repeat the information here :

This isn’t just a recent decline over the past 30 years, it has been steady and almost without a break all the way since World War 2.  For example, total personnel in Britain’s armed services in 1972 were 371,000; in 1962 were 434,000; and in 1952 were 872,000.  In sixty years, personnel have reduced five-fold.

In 1913 Britain’s navy was the most powerful in the world, and by official policy, larger than the next two navies combined.  In time for World War 2 Britain’s navy was still larger than any other single nation, but by the end of the war, the US navy was massively larger, and Britain’s navy has continued to decline ever since.

When Queen Elizabeth was crowned in 1953 the Royal Navy put on a formal ‘review’ at Spithead, with nearly all its fleet lined up in massive rows of warships.  When she observed the 60th anniversary of her ascending to the throne in 2012, the tradition of reviews, dating back to the 1700s, was replaced by a ‘flotilla’ of pleasure launches cruising along the Thames river in London.  The Royal Navy was too embarrassed to admit it no longer had enough ships to be reviewed and hoped people would not notice the difference between private boats motoring along the Thames compared to the former might of the Royal Navy in years past.

The reduction in armed personnel is all the more extreme when plotted against the rise in Britain’s total population.  In other words, the number of armed personnel as a percentage of the total country’s population is declining more rapidly than the simple decline in staffing.  This chart below gives a perspective on numbers from 1950 through 2012 (source).

There are two other issues arising from this, beyond Britain’s simple loss of military power.

The first is that it takes a lot longer to train a soldier, sailor, or airman now than it did 50 years ago.  Everything is much more complicated, and requires much more training.  This means that if Britain had to suddenly respond to a ‘high intensity’ conflict, or to come to our aid in a high intensity conflict of ours, by the time Britain could start deploying newly trained recruits, it would probably be too late.

The second issue is more subtle.  For almost all of Britain’s history, the armed services were a key part of the nation’s social fabric.  Occasional high intensity conflicts, occurring once a generation or so, saw large swathes of the population called up for service (as much as 10% of the population in both World War 1 and 2).  It wasn’t just the small percentage who served in wartime, either – even during peacetime, universal conscription – ‘national service’ saw all young male adults exposed to army training and discipline.  This ended in 1960 with the last intake being November 1963 – 50 years ago.

For the last 70 years, Britain has not had any high intensity conflicts, while the ‘pool’ of ex-servicemen has been dwindling as the old soldiers simply die.  The number of surviving WW2 soldiers is now rapidly reducing and soon there’ll be no more.

Britain is losing touch with its proud past, and is instead willing itself to become weaker and weaker.  Even if Britain wished to strongly support us in the future, it will lack the men and the equipment to do so.

Oh – and as for our own military capabilities?  Don’t ask.  It’s a similar story (but one to be told another time.

Gun-hating Senator Schumer with a hammer. Where is his outrage over hammer murders? What hammer controls does he propose?

The sheep are predictably bleating in response to the Sandy Hook School shooting.  Ban this!  Restrict that!  Outlaw the other thing!

The gun grabbers are leading this chorus with glee, while the sheep rush to sacrifice not just their liberty and freedom but also yours and mine too; all in the naieve ridiculous hope that the bad guys will voluntarily also sacrifice their liberty and their freedom.

Most of the focus seems to be on restoring the useless ban on ‘assault rifles’ (although Senator Feinstein’s definition of ‘assault rifle’ for her ban provision would also include any pistol capable of having a greater than 10 round magazine, which means just about every modern semi-auto pistol).  There’s something about the sight of a modern sporting rifle that creates a knee jerk hate response with gun banners – it seems they wish that only guns that ‘look nice’ with gentle curves and pastel colors should be allowed.

But – let’s stop a minute and smell the roses.  Just how many people are killed by rifles each year?  The answer might surprise you.

As reported here, the FBI uniform crime statistics show that in a typical year, about 300 – 450 murders were committed with a rifle.

But – in the same typical year, more people are killed with hammers than with rifles.  For example, in 2011 (the most recent year for statistics) there were 323 people killed by rifle, and 496 people killed by hammers and clubs.

A typical year shows half as many people again killed by a hammer or club than by a rifle.  And – get this – a typical year also sees twice as many people are murdered with nothing other than the killer’s bare hands (see this table for five years of recent data).

And don’t get us started on the slaughter from knives and cutting instruments – four to five times greater than that from rifles.

So, where is the outrage against hammers and clubs?  Against knives and cutting instruments?  What restrictions are being mooted against a person’s bare hands and feet?  Should there be a ban on hammers weighing more than 1 lb?  What about people with large hands or strong legs?  Should they be required to have surgical alterations?

We urge you to write your representatives and point them to these statistics and ask them to prioritize their actions to reduce violent crime.  Why focus solely on rifles when they are a small part of the problem, and already subject to dozens if not hundreds of rules and restrictions?  Why should honest people have their access to rifles restricted, when dishonest people will ignore any new laws and restrictions, the same as they have ignored all the previous restrictions that already exist.

By focusing on the tool – be it a rifle, knife, hammer, or even a killer’s bare hands – we are avoiding focusing on the real root cause, which is human nature and the propensity for bad people to do bad things, whatever way they can.

There’s a reason you never hear of terrorist attacks on Israeli schools.

As I write this, the country is going through a histrionic act of soul-searching after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown Connecticut last week.  Gun grabbers can barely hide their glee behind a veil of crocodile tears, and the rush to enact more gun control legislation is terrifying in its irrational intensity.

The biggest problem with gun control?  There’s too much of it.  There’s a reason that people choose to shoot up schools – because they are ‘soft targets’.  Where else can a crazed gunman be sure to find a lot of helpless defenseless people, with no danger of anyone having a gun and shooting back?

Rather than take more guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens who use their guns exclusively for good and never for bad, why not change the prohibition on guns in schools and instead mandate that teachers take small arms defensive training and be issued with firearms.  We require teachers to spend many years of their lives training in how to teach – why not have them spend another week learning not just how to educate our children, but also how to protect them while they are responsible for the safety of our children.

And let’s now look at an interesting statistic that puts our so-called violent culture into a truer perspective.  As we’ve written about before – see here and here, for example – our rates of violent crime are massively decreasing and now are at about half the levels of when they were at their worst.  During these last twenty years or so, we’ve not seen any abatement in unemployment, gangs, drug related activity, and so on.  But we have seen massive increases in gun ownership and massive improvements in the laws that formerly sought to restrict our ability to own, carry and use firearms in self defense.

The conclusion is inescapable.  More guns and a more realistic approach to their use, equates to less violent crime.

Now, for the really telling comparison.  Please read this article which compares rates of violent crime in various European countries.  Near the bottom, it also shows the rate of violent crime in the US and Canada.  Here in the US, we have a rate of about 466 violent crimes per 100,000 of population.  Up in gun-hating ‘peaceful’ Canada, the rate is more than twice as high!  935 violent crimes per 100,000 of population in Canada.

Now go to Europe, and while a few countries have lower rates, look at the countries with hugely higher rates, including, worst of all, the ultra-gun grabbing country of Britain, with a rate of 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 citizens – almost five times the rate in the US.

These are the real numbers that count.  Sure, 20 dead children is an emotional event that upsets anyone with children (including me).  But that is a rare occurrence, and it happened in a state that is already very restrictive in its gun laws, and in an area where people weren’t allowed guns.  How many laws did that gunman already break?  Enacting new laws won’t be any more effective at preventing him than all the laws already in place.

These children died because of too much gun control, not because of insufficient.

We need to empower and equip schools and teachers with the tools and skills they need to make schools ‘hard targets’ rather than soft ones.  And, most of all, we need to preserve our invaluable Second Amendment rights, so we as citizens can protect ourselves wherever we are (including in school grounds) and so we as citizens can do our bit to keep the violent crime rates falling still lower and lower.

Gun stores and gun shows are all reporting massive increases in business.

Black Friday this year set a new record for gun sales nationwide, which were up 20% on Black Friday last year.

Gun sales can be loosely tracked to the number of calls to the FBI’s NICS background check service.  Any time a person buys a firearm from a registered gun dealer, the dealer needs to call the NICS service for an instant background check and obtain an approval code for the transaction.  Of course, not all sales are from registered dealers (private party sales are excluded) but probably all new gun sales necessarily go through dealers, and so the NICS call volume gives us a way of understanding the number of new guns being purchased and added to the country’s overall supply of guns in private hands.

One call to NICS can sometimes be for multiple guns being sold at the one time, so from that perspective, sometimes the count of guns sold could actually be higher than the NICS call number.  On the other hand, some states also call NICS to validate CCW licenses, and so these other calls to NICS, for purposes other than people buying new/additional guns, tends to mean that the total guns sold are less than the number of NICS calls.

However you adjust the raw NICS numbers, there remains the simple fact that, in general terms, the higher the number of calls to NICS, the greater the number of new guns sales that are being conducted, and this is particularly true on days when state and local authorities are probably closed and not calling NICS for other purposes (ie, Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays, such as probably is the case in most areas for Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving).

In 2012, Black Friday saw 154,873 calls in to NICS, a 20% increase on the 129,166 calls for last year’s Black Friday.  Call volumes were so high that the FBI computer system overloaded and crashed on two separate occasions.

Every month for the last year has seen more NICS calls than for the same month the previous year, and every year for the last ten years has seen more NICS calls for the full year than the previous year.  Here’s the FBI official statistics on a monthly basis for every month since the NICS system started in November 1998.

Now that President Obama has gone on record, in the Presidential debates, as saying he advocates a re-introduction of an assault weapons ban, and with the renewed threat of a UN weapons treaty abridging our second amendment rights as well, we agree with the flood of people racing to buy firearms that there is good reason to be concerned with the status of our second amendment rights.

As some people have wryly pointed out, Obama has been the ‘best friend’ the gun industry has ever had.  His presidency has seen an unparalleled growth in new gun sales, which seems destined to continue into the future.

Oh – don’t forget stocking up on ammo, too.  Continued attempts to tax every bullet sold, and/or to outlaw lead in bullets, show that the gun-banners are exploring every possible way of diminishing your rights to affordably own and use firearms.

Liberal gun hater Justice Stevens, in a 2006 photo.

John Paul Stevens was the nation’s third longest serving justice on the Supreme Court, having been appointed by President Ford in 1970, and retiring in 2010 (allowing for Obama to replace him with Elena Kagan, who Stevens described as ‘a brilliant justice‘).

Although nominally a conservative prior to his appointment, Stevens generally sided with the liberal side of the court (in case that isn’t obvious from his quote about controversial Kagan).  And so, unsurprisingly, he is also anti-gun, having taken the losing (anti-gun) side in both the two huge Supreme Court Second Amendment cases in recent times – Heller in 2005 and McDonald in 2010.

Although now thankfully retired, he is unable to keep quiet, and this article reports him offering up unwanted advice about how he believes that some classes of firearms can still be lawfully banned, as could also carrying of weapons pretty much anywhere.

About the best news part of this is that having been wrong twice in the two recent Supreme Court decisions, the chances are he remains consistently wrong on these matters too, and that he is confusing wishful thinking on his part with the actual law of the land.

If you can manage to read the whole article, there’s a ‘reward’ for you near the bottom, where the article quotes him as saying :

Stevens also had a recommendation for people who keep a weapon in their homes for self-defense purposes. “Maybe you have some kind of constitutional right to have a cell phone with a pre-dialed 911 in the number at your bedside and that might provide you with a little better protection than a gun which you’re not used to using,” he said to laughter.

Unfortunately, the laughter that greeted this comment was unlikely to be laughter at the idiocy of his statement, being as how he was making it to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence’s Legal Action Project.

His comments, and his judicial record, expose two ugly truths.  The first is that Supreme Court judges may be experts on the law, but they are seldom experts on the matters they are required to apply the law to (in this case, the best way to respond to an intruder threatening you in your own home).  The second and sadder of the two is that Supreme Court judges will sometimes let their own personal ideologies interfere with their supposedly neutral interpretation of the law.

However, supporters of the Second Amendment can take encouragement from one thing he said.  A spurious argument raised by some anti-gunners is that the Second Amendment only covers weapons that were available in the mid/late 18th century, not more modern weapons such as are available now.  But when Justice Stevens refers to constitutional rights to cell-phones with pre-programmed speed dial numbers, he clearly accepts that the Constitution applies not only to the things in place when it was written, but to derivative and more modern things that have subsequently been created.  Such as, for example, semi-automatic pistols and fully automatic rifles.

The new Smart 911 service allows you to provide whatever information you want to the 911 Dispatch service to help them respond to your calls in the future.

A new service – Smart 911 – is slowly rolling out across the nation.  You can join it now and it is free, and hopefully sooner rather than later your local city/county 911 Dispatch Service will sign up for it too.

It works so that when you call in to a participating 911 Dispatch Service from a phone you’ve registered with Smart 911, the operator’s screen will fill with a lot more information about yourself, your residence, your vehicles, your medical conditions, other people living with you, and so on – all information that you’ve previously loaded into the Smart 911 database.

Now, for sure, some of us hesitate before giving any more information about ourselves to ‘The Man’ than we need to, but you can choose what you want them to know and what you’d rather not share, and if you think it is more likely that you’ll be needing help from The Man rather than hiding from him, you’ll find this very useful.

Normally when you call 911, the operator will only see the phone number you’re calling from, the name and address it is registered to, and perhaps some location data about where you currently are (if using a cell phone).  That’s not a lot to go on, and there may well be situations where you can’t conveniently spend five minutes having a relaxed chat with the operator about exactly what your needs are.  In such cases, the data you’ve preloaded into the Smart 911 service could well be a life-saver – it could well be your life-saver.

You can add a lot of information that might make all the difference when fire, paramedics or police are sent to respond to your call for help.  You can include photos of the people who live in your home to aid in identification, and a photo of your house too.

The photos are great.  It can help reduce a problem that few people think about.  When the police respond to a burglary call, they don’t know who the burglars are and who the lawful residents are.  If they respond to other – eg DV – calls, it can be even more confusing as to who should be living in the property and who should not.  By having your pictures already in ‘their’ database, you’ve helped establish your legitimacy, and so when they see you, their fingers will relax a bit and they’ll not be pulling on their triggers quite so anxiously.

We also recommend keeping some family pictures on display somewhere in your home, so you can point to those when the police are trying to work out who the good guys are.  Pictures of the group of you standing in front of your residence are particularly helpful for that type of purpose.

You can also add information about medical conditions to help paramedics know what they might need to prepare for or respond to, information about pets, cars, and all sorts of other information.

I’ve had problems with first responders having difficulty finding my place in the past.  This new service is sure to help.  Best of all it is free.  So go and join now.  It might save a minute or two of confusion, and that might literally mean the difference between life and death – for you and your loved ones.

This 18 yr old has now been arrested and charged with six felonies after assaulting a 93 yr old man and raping an 84 yr old woman in their home in broad daylight.

We’ve written before about how your seemingly safest place – your home – can actually be full of unexpected dangers.  Our assumption of safety and our relaxation of our normal alertness upon entering our front door means we risk being surprised by already present intruders.

There are – sadly – many dimensions to the risks we have to always keep in mind at home, and we’ve discussed several of them before – the dangers posed when a safe ordinary seeming person comes to our front door, for example.  And we’ve also considered the need to re-secure your house whenever you enter it after an absence, in case it has been burgled, and in case there is a burglary in progress that you interrupt.

This last article suggested that any time you return home and expect other people to be properly present there, you call out to them and exchange all-clear code phrases – things that sound ordinary if intruders are present, but which allow you all to confirm your respective safety.  Calling out ‘It’s only me’ as a signal you are safely entering the house without others coercing you, and replying ‘I’m in here’ or something for the at home people to indicate that they are in a safe situation too takes no time, no effort, no energy.  It will be more bothersome for you to work the button of your garage door opener than it will be to do this simple all clear exchange each time you return home.

The downside, if you don’t, can be horrific.  In addition to the example in the previous article, here’s a new example of how a burglar broke into a house, and during the course of working his way through it, came across a 93 year old man who lived there.  The burglar beat the man, robbed him, and tied him up.

And then the man’s 84 year old wife came home.  It was broad daylight – early afternoon – a very ‘safe’ seeming time of day.

As bad luck would have it, she’d just been to the bank and withdrawn $400 in cash.  She heard her husband moaning upstairs, and so did what most people would instinctively do – rushed up without pausing to think, to see what was wrong with him.

Big mistake.  The intruder tied her up too, robbed her, and also raped her.  Details of this sad story, here.

If the husband and wife had arranged a code-word exchange, this could have been prevented.  Don’t let it happen to you.  Arrange a code word system with everyone who lives with you – for your safety and for their safety.

A very positive outcome to a holdup was achieved by an armed citizen in FL last week.

You may have already read – and possibly seen the video clips – about a wonderfully one-sided shootout in an Ocala FL internet cafe last Friday evening.

Two youths, one armed with a pistol, the other with a baseball bat, entered an internet cafe with some 30 people inside, shortly before 10pm.  They announced their intention to hold the place up and rob not just the cashier but all the people in the cafe.

As partial explanation, it seems that the term ‘internet cafe’ in Florida is a polite way of saying ‘semi-legal online computer gambling facility’, and so it seems the youths figured that some of the patrons, and the establishment itself, would be packing more cash than normal.

But what they didn’t figure was that one of the patrons was packing more than cash.  He – Mr Samuel Williams – had a small .380 semi-auto (looks possibly like a Ruger LCP) for which he had a concealed carry permit.  Although 71, as soon as the two intruders foolishly turned their back on Mr Williams, he got up, approached the guy with the gun, and when the guy turned towards him, pointing his gun at Mr Williams, he opened fire.  The attacker panicked and ran away, with his accomplice following, all the while with Mr Williams chasing after them to the front door, shooting as he went, and sending what looks to be a parting shot after them as they run away down the street.

Both attackers were wounded, and both were arrested not long after at a local hospital.  As for Mr Williams, it seems that no charges will be filed against him.

Although we don’t like to see surveillance cameras all around us wherever we go, we are pleased that there were three different cameras in the internet cafe which between them captured most of the action.  The relevant parts of each have been put together and can be seen at various websites, for example here.  And on this site there is a remixed version with some extra and different footage, but missing out some of the other relevant footage, combined with some helpful commentary by a voice-over announcer.

You should watch both clips to see what happened.  We’re not saying that exactly the same scenario would play out the next time two youths try to hold up an internet cafe, but clearly, what you see in the video clips this time is real life, not Hollywood, and so understanding one scenario and outcome combination helps us all in anticipating other scenarios and outcomes in the future.

It is easy to second guess what happened and how Mr Williams acted as he did, from the comfort of one’s living room, and being able to play through the video countless times, and pause it at critical points to stop and think through the implications of each step of the encounter.  It is very different to be there, living the experience in person, with one’s critical thinking impaired by a huge adrenalin dump and the bowel-loosening experience of having a bad guy point a gun at you.

We think Mr Williams did a wonderful job in the circumstances, and clearly the prosecutors agree that everything he did was kosher.

Nonetheless, there are a few teaching moments in this, which we consider now – not as criticisms of a 100% successful outcome of a nasty encounter, but merely as opportunities for us to learn from this and to help ensure that if we are ever in a similar situation, we experience a similar positive outcome.

Several comments accordingly.

1.  While we can’t really tell much about the two attackers in terms of if they were hyper on drugs, crazed, incoherent, and credibly threatening senseless violence, of if they were cool, calm and collected and unlikely to escalate the situation beyond a simple robbery, it is clear that they were not ‘professional’ criminals.

A pair of professionals do not attempt to take down an internet cafe with 30+ people in it armed only with one pistol and one baseball bat.  They’d need a bigger team of players, and more credible weapons.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that the key fraction of a second of the entire confrontation – the point where the armed attacker swung to confront Mr Williams, and Mr Williams getting off the first shot – resulted in the attacker instantly giving up the fight and running away as fast as he could.  A more hardened attacker would have shot back at Mr Williams, and the situation could have turned out very differently.

Lesson – read your opposition up front so you understand the likely level of threat and response they will pose.

2.  As best we can tell, Mr Williams probably fired four or five shots, maybe even six.  We’re not sure how many of his shots hit the two attackers.  We know some of the shots landed on the bad guys, but we’ll guess not all of them did.

However, it is relevant to observe that neither of the two attackers shows any sign of being incapacitated at all from their wounds.  Sure, its only a small .380 semi-auto that Mr Williams has, but the teaching point here is that you can’t expect one (or possibly even two or three) hits on target to guarantee that your attacker will cease to be a threat.  Your job isn’t finished after firing the first shot, you need to keep at it without pausing and stop only when the threat has clearly ended.

3.  Coming back to the four or five or maybe even six shots fired.  We’re astonished that no-one else was hit, and mildly surprised as well that the armed attacker didn’t even loose off some ‘blind’ unaimed shots in the desperate hope of at least getting Mr Williams to back off his attack.

In addition to the 30 people in the cafe, who knows who was in the adjoining stores, and who knows who was on the street outside.

It isn’t just people you have to worry about, although for sure, an unintended fatal hit on an innocent passer-by should be your greatest concern.  What say a stray round hit someone’s new car.  You could be up for a thousand dollars or more of repairs to the car.  Maybe a round goes through a store window (they’re expensive) and then rips through various expensive stock items in the store.  And so on.  Even a .380 round can go through a number of walls and other objects before finally coming to rest.

If you’ve got to shoot, then you’ve got to shoot.  But if you don’t have to shoot, it is better not to (kinda obvious, don’t you think!).  It could be argued that by keeping up a ‘hail of fire’ Mr Williams was effectively controlling and dominating the battle space, and keeping the initiative, ensuring that the two attackers didn’t have a chance to regroup and mount a counter-attack.  That’s a valid consideration.

But we’re somewhat troubled by his last shot in particular – the one he shoots out the door as it is swinging shut, with the two attackers racing away as fast as their legs will carry them.

Was he still justifiably in fear of his life at that point?  Did the two attackers still pose an immediate credible danger to him?  This is actually a very complicated question to answer, because there are elements of both ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in the answer.

Our feeling is that Mr Williams dodged both a literal and also a figurative bullet in this case.  He was very lucky the bad guys didn’t shoot back.  And he is also very lucky that the DA decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and not press charges.  Realize that it is often easier for a DA to press charges than to hold them back – they can reason ‘It is a grey area, maybe it was lawful and justifiable, maybe it wasn’t; I’m not going to take a position on it, let’s leave it to a jury to decide’.  And then all of a sudden you’re ‘in the system’, facing months of uncertainty and tens of thousands of dollars in attorney fees, with no guarantee as to what the jury will decide.

Which leads to our next point.

4.  The second link above has the commentator saying that Mr Williams told the police he was in fear of his life.  That’s a key phrase to use when being subsequently interviewed by the police (assuming you decide to say anything at all prior to your attorney arriving).  It seems that Mr Williams knew exactly how to respond appropriately to the police.

Keep in mind another thing as well.  The ubiquity of video cameras.  Try to remember that anything you do may have been recorded and, if it was, will be analyzed every which way to see if you can be blamed for anything.  It is as though the DA, judge and jury are all behind a bulletproof glass screen, watching you as it all goes down.  While cameras don’t lie, poor quality surveillance video and bad camera angles can definitely mislead and give incorrect impressions of things as they happened.  Your point of view – from your eyes – and the time pressures acting on you – are never captured by passive motionless cameras on walls and ceilings.  Things you see might not be visible to the cameras, whereas things you don’t see may be obvious to the cameras.  Unfortunately, people will subsequently evaluate and judge you based on what the cameras show them, not on what you had to make sense of, from your perspective, in the heat of the moment.

You also need to keep in mind that this all happened in Florida.  The laws concerning justifiable use of deadly force vary tremendously from state to state – how you could respond, and how in turn the police and prosecutors would respond – might be totally different in your state.  The fact that Mr Williams was not prosecuted does not guarantee a similar outcome if you behaved identically in your state; indeed, it doesn’t even guarantee a similar outcome if you behaved the same way in FL either.

And while it seems no criminal charges will be pressed against Mr Williams, we don’t yet know what the two attackers might choose to do in the form of filing civil charges against Mr Williams.  Civil charges can be more vexatious because the burden of proof shifts from a 99% type burden of proof in a criminal case to a 51% burden of proof in a civil case.  Furthermore, in a criminal case you hopefully have a moderately dispassionate prosecution, but in a civil case, it is all about money – both money for the complainant and also money for his/her attorney.  The costs of defending a civil case can be every bit as high as defending a criminal case.

5.  Here’s a thought that is easy with hindsight to come up with, but which you need to train yourself to always have in your mind.  We saw the two guys come into the internet cafe, although when they did, Mr Williams had his back to them and was presumably concentrating on playing a computer game.

But we don’t know if the two attackers had already had a third or fourth person walk into the cafe normally.  This would be a far from unknown situation.  We don’t know if there were more accomplices about to break in through the back entrance, or more waiting outside with a getaway vehicle.

Mr Williams was extremely fortunate that there were only these two attackers.  You might not be so fortunate.  You must always be looking for the bad guys that you don’t see, as well as keeping an eye on the bad guys you do see.  Tell yourself ‘if I don’t see anyone else, that just means I’m not seeing them, it doesn’t mean they’re not there’.

And remember also that it ain’t over until the fat lady sings.  Who knows what that really means, but in our context, there are two vitally important thing to always do at the apparent end of a confrontation, things that Mr Williams does not seem to do.

First, scan and secure your environment.  Check for other bad guys lurking around you.  Don’t relax at all until you know, for sure, that none of the other onlookers are potential bad guys.

Second, your tactical reload.  Mr Williams had shot 4 – 6 rounds in a semi-auto that probably only had six or seven rounds in it to start with.  As soon as he had finished securing the store, he needed to reload his weapon, just in case.

Summary

From when the two attackers burst in to the internet cafe, to when they left it even more quickly, was a mere 17 seconds.  Much of the confrontation was at very close range, in a dynamic rapidly changing situation with everyone moving and changing positions.

This was a very difficult scenario to control – it was difficult for the two attackers to start with, as we saw, but it was also difficult for Mr Williams subsequently, also.  He did a great job.

And after having read our comments and analysis above, hopefully you’d do a similarly great job – or even a better one – if called upon to do so in the future.

Gun sales continue to increase every month, and violent crime rates continue to steadily fall.

About this time last year, we commented on the annual release of the FBI’s violent crime statistics, showing a continued significant decline in violent crime of all type.  At the same time, other FBI statistics showed a steady increase in the number of guns sold each month.

Is this a coincidence, we wondered?  Or do increased gun sales actually lead to a decrease in violent crime – quite the opposite of what the gun control crowd would have us believe.

Well, we now have another year of statistics, both for violent crime rates and for gun sales.  And, guess what.  The FBI reports that violent crimes are down another 4% in 2011 compared to 2010.

Interestingly, the biggest decreases in violent crime were in the areas where a stronger offender preys on a weaker victim – types of crime where a firearm can be most helpful to restoring a balance between attacker and attackee.

For example, rape, down 9% in non-metropolitan areas (probably also the areas with highest gun ownership), down 6.8% in metropolitan counties, and down in all other categories except one – large cities with populations of 500,000 – 999,999, which showed a slight increase (0.5%).  Interestingly, these types of large cities are also the types of cities most likely to have the greatest restrictions on gun ownership.

At the same time that violent crime continues to decrease (and the decreases are even more significant when you consider that the population as a whole has increased), gun sales have continued their steady growth.  As this table clearly shows, total pre-sale ‘NICS’ checks were 15% up in 2011 compared to 2010, and continue to be up so far in 2012 as well.

A 15% increase in gun sales, and a reduction in violent crime.  And not just in 2011.  But in the last almost 20 years, consistently, almost every year in a row.  Violent crime rates are now down to the lowest point since 1970 – 41 years back.

Kinda makes you feel good, doesn’t it!

An innocent stranded motorist is suddenly attacked and beaten up by four assailants.

It is always massively preferable to learn lessons from other people’s misfortunes rather than to be doomed to repeat their experiences ourselves.

One of the great ways to learn about street survival skills is to see real world examples of what can happen to people who aren’t prepared for the events that evolve.

Here’s one such a dismaying scenario, a story full of lessons for us, and happily able to be experienced and enjoyed in the safety and comfort of our living rooms.  We suggest you view the video to see what happened, and then read on for our analysis of the salient facts and our recommendations for how to avoid becoming a similar victim, yourself.

So, this young man (24) had his car break down when driving home late one night.  He left his car, and decided to walk the short distance the rest of the way home.  It was an upmarket residential neighborhood in Tampa, and so he probably felt there to be little threat to his safety in doing so.  And as an army soldier, he doubtless felt reasonably well prepared to handle any low level of casual threat.

It seems there were three people ahead of him walking in the same direction.  One of them turned and walked back, and asked if the soldier could spare him a dollar.  Rather than refusing, the soldier agreed, and reached for his wallet.

While distracted by the task of getting his wallet, the person who had approached him immediately attacked him, joined within a second by one of the other two people.

As you can see on the video, the third person comes back to the soldier as well, but hesitates before joining in, then starts to kick and punch the soldier with every bit as much effort and enjoyment as the other two.

But wait, there’s more.  A fourth guy comes running up from behind – but is he there as an avenging angel to save the soldier?  No!  It seems he has seen the potential opportunity to anonymously join in the beating up of a white guy, and joins in for the sheer devilry of it.

Maybe he was a member of an organized gang of four patrolling for victims, but we kinda doubt that, because it seems from the timing that he was too far away to be actively aggressively circling in from behind.

So that’s what happened.  Now for the lessons.

1.  ‘Good’ and ‘Safe’ Neighborhoods Are Sometimes Neither

Bad guys commute to work, just the same as we good guys do.  While some neighborhoods are clearly unsafe and high risk, there’s no such thing as a 100% safe area.

Don’t let your guard down just because you feel that you are in a ‘good’ neighborhood.

The victim probably thought ‘I’m in a good neighborhood, and I’ve agreed to give this guy the dollar he asked for, so I have nothing to worry about’.  How wrong was that!

2.  Keep Bad Guys A Long Way Away

The next lesson is not to let strangers get close to you, especially on an otherwise empty street late at night.  Bad guys tend to be nocturnal, and also prefer empty deserted areas where they can carry out their activities free of interference from others.

If you don’t have your gun in your hand when someone approaches within 21′ of you, the person coming towards you can get to you and start attacking you before you can react and respond and draw your pistol.  Indeed, even 21′ is probably too dangerously close, depending on how alert you are (ie how long from when you finally recognize a threat to when you then respond to it) and how quickly you can access your pistol and present it.

That fancy ultra-concealable holster?  The one that takes you two seconds to access and get your gun from and pointed in?  Add another half second or more for reaction time, and in 2.5 – 3 seconds, a bad guy can cover more like 21 yards than 21 feet.  That’s a huge danger/vulnerability radius.

One more thing about the danger radius.  If it is something more than 21′ for one person, it becomes appreciably more for two people.  Maybe it takes you half a second after shooting at a first aggressor to recover your sight picture and switch to lining up on a second aggressor.  In that same half second, the second aggressor can get 10 or more feet closer to you.  If there are three aggressors, then the third one has another 10 ft while you are dealing to the first two.  If there are four, not only does the fourth have another 10 ft (we are now at 50 ft out, by the way) but almost certainly, one of the first three was not stopped by your first shot and is now approaching you

3.  Identify Potential Threats

Another lesson is to identify potential threats.  On the face of it, a low-profile slouched over beggar type person asking for a bit of spare change doesn’t seem like the sort of person about to viciously beat you up.  But attackers are masters of the art of disguise – of disguising their true intentions.  Asking for some change or asking for the time or asking for directions are all great ways of misdirecting their target individual.  The perceived normalcy of such requests obscures the threat behind them.

It doesn’t matter what the purpose or reason – you must keep strangers safely away from you, and if they approach you, you need to be able to react.

We of course don’t know, but we’ll guess that in a fair fight, where the soldier and first attacker were both told to go at it, then the soldier may or may not have prevailed, but probably he’d not have immediately been cold-cocked and knocked to the ground.  But because the aggressor had the benefit of total surprise, his first blow set the scene and took out the soldier immediately, and from that point forward, it was really just a question of how much beating the aggressor and his one, two, three friends would give to the soldier.

This encounter was lost in a fraction of a second, because the soldier allowed his attacker in close where he could surprise him.

4.  Take Control

This guy ended up being beaten by four people, but note the social dynamics of how it played out.  There were only two primary aggressors, and only one of the two primary aggressors approached the victim.  If the victim had assertively taken control of the situation at an early point, the first aggressor almost certainly would have backed off, the second aggressor would have stayed back, and the other two participants would have done nothing at all.

As you see on the video, the third person only joins in when he is certain there is no danger to himself.  The fourth person’s motivations are unclear – we earlier guessed he might be just a casual passer-by who saw a safe opportunity to strike some blows for ‘racial freedom’ or whatever.

In any group, there are only a very few people who will aggressively lead and initiate a violent action.  Most of the group members will hang back and only take part when they are no longer needed – when it is safe for them to do so.  If you can confront the leaders up front, the others will pose less threat to you.

If you’re facing down a group of ten people, you can say ‘Okay, so maybe I can and maybe I can’t kill you all.  But I for sure can get some of you, and I’m going to shoot you and you first’, pointing at the people closest to you and the ringleaders.  ‘So all of you, back off, right now!’  This might take the fight out of the ringleaders, when they realize that there is not safety in numbers.

The other thing you can do is, after making that statement, is get one of the weaker wavering group members to comply.  ‘You, start moving back right now!’  As soon as one person starts to back off, the fight goes out of the group as a whole.

5.  Beware of the People You Don’t See

In this case, the victim was probably focused on the person who came and asked him for a dollar.  But there was another guy close by as another immediate potential threat, another not far away, and a fourth guy behind him.

If you are aware of your surroundings, the fact that there were three people close to you, none of whom looked like people you’d invite home to spend time with your family, and a fourth person behind you, and all of them looked like they might be acting together (same general demographics) you should be on a high level of alertness prior to any of them approaching you.

If one person is a threat, two people together are not twice the threat, they are four times the threat.  Three people become nine times the threat, meaning, yes, four people are a sixteen fold increase in threat.

What to Do to Avoid Such Encounters

You can’t afford to get behind the curve on such things.  You need to keep distance between you and the potential aggressors, and you need to draw them out and establish a clear signaling of their intentions.

Clearly, you can’t just shoot every group of people you happen to meet on the street just because they’re there – you need to cause them to display bad intent, and you need to give yourself a chance to warn them off and/or completely confirm the threat they pose.  This can only be done with time and distance, it can’t be done at a six foot arm’s length sort of encounter.

If someone is traveling in a direction that will cause them to naturally intersect with your own direction of travel, that might be a coincidence.  So you change your direction of travel.  If the other guy then changes his direction of travel and comes towards you, then your alert level shoots up.  He has signaled that he is a potential threat.

Note a key thing here is that the other person comes to you.  That is essential.  Your ability to claim that someone was an overt threat to you is massively weakened if you approach them.

So, you’ve altered your path of travel, and they’ve altered their path of travel to again intersect with yours.  You now need to warn him off and command him to stop, to go away, or whatever.  You need plenty of space between the two of you to allow yourself time to determine if your instructions have been complied with or not.

Hopefully, if the potential attacker ignores your request, you still have time to present your weapon and point in, with enough time and distance to warn the bad guy off, rather than needing to immediately shoot.

It goes without saying that if a person altered course to come after you when you altered course to avoid them, if they then failed to stop approaching after you called out to them and asked them to stop and go away, and if they still continued to close the distance when you pointed a gun at them, there is no conceivable way this person is an innocent stranger who just happens to be passing by.

The fact that they are willing to continue the confrontation in the face of your pointed in pistol shows them to be absolutely intent and determined to press the fight to you.  You don’t need to know who, what or why, you just know that this person is willing to risk his own life to get to you, and it certainly isn’t so he can simply shake your hand and wish you well.

One Last Lesson

We’ve written 2000 words in this article so far.  But every one of those words is useless and meaningless if you don’t have a gun with you and aren’t prepared and able to use it.  Your pistol.  Don’t leave home without it.