Audio of Podcast
Transcript of Podcast
Shawn Vincent:
Alright, gents, so here we are, we’re back again. We are on our 36-month crusade to introduce our listeners—armed defenders and concealed carriers—to our curated list of 36 lessons for Armed Defenders. This is a list that we’ve built by working together and talking to all sorts of experts in the self-defense industry, both from a legal side and from a tactical side. This is the benefit of our years and years of experience and study on this topic. Today is lesson number two, which is: get firearms and self-defense training. And Steve, I want to start with you on this because itt seems like … well, here’s the deal: You don’t have to take a lot of training to get a CCW permit in most places. Just the basics. Some places have constitutional carry, and there’s probably a lot of people out there who have a firearm who don’t have a good sense of even how to operate it, let alone what self-defense laws are. And you’re a trainer, you see some of this stuff firsthand. Tell me a little bit about the range of students that you encounter in your professional career as a firearms trainer.
Steve Moses:
My gosh, I’ve been doing this for 30 years. I would say the vast majority are novice shooters or people that have been shooting for a long time and don’t realize they’re novice shooters. And one of the things that I always kind of thought is interesting is that, you know, you do not have to get training in order … Well, in some instances, you have to have a short exposure to a class if you want to go do concealed carry. But in terms of owning a handgun and running it, you don’t have to have training. But yousure have to do that in order to get a driver’s license. And so I’m not saying, yeah, it should be mandated. But, you know, very few people that learned how to drive their car on the family farm and then, OK, I’m ready to go. And then they go out and get in heavy traffic
in an urban area—it’s not going to go well.
So training is that one thing that gives us some control over a scenario in which we become involved. And so a lot of people don’t realize that you take a person that goes to the police academy, that takes 600-plus hours of training that includes use of force, criminal law, de-escalation, defensive tactics, firearms training … after graduating from the academy, then they’re almost always assigned a field training officer because they are deemed too inexperienced to go out and start patrolling on their own. They’re not … they do have no knowledge on how to safely interact with people that may be potentially dangerous.
Well, I mean, if you consider their how they are viewed and compared to the average, you know, armed defender, the armed defender is just well, well, well underprepared and without professional training. I don’t think you have the skills and I … there’s a saying that I really like: That the the body can’t go where the mind has not been. And once you’re in that situation in which you’re facing a deadly threat or potentially deadly threat, you know, being uncertain and indecisive is definitely not going to work for you.
And that’s exactly where I was in 1980 when I captured a burglar at 3 a.m. in the morning holding a screwdriver. And at that particular point, as soon as it was over, I made the decision that, my God, I almost got killed. I didn’t. I’m going to get training. So I kind of look at it as a training like a seatbelt. I definitely want to put that seat belt on before I get out in traffic. Otherwise, it’s going to do me no good if I need it and it’s not there for me.
Shawn Vincent:
Don, I’ve got to ask you, have you ever been to, like say, a family reunion or a big gathering, and there’s somebody who wants to take a group picture, and they get the whole family lined up. There’s dozens of you out there. You’re in the hot sun. Everyone’s taken a minute away from having a nice time. And that’s when this person decides to figure out how the timer works on their camera. Right. Have you been there? Right. With some of the cases that we worked on together, haven’t you got the impression?
Don:
Absolutely. Yes, yes.
Shawn Vincent:
… that the defender was about as familiar with their firearm and self-defense law as this family member was with their camera.
Don:
Absolutely, I know people that have gone for some training, at least the training required to get the carry permit and maybe a little bit more, bought a gun, and then joined CCW Safe or one of the similar programs out there, put the gun in the glove box or maybe even in their pocket. And then a year and a half later, having never shot it again or never taken any more training, wind up in a situation where they believe they need to use their gun—and it’s never gone well. It’s just never gone well. There’s too many decisions that have to be made in a dynamic situation for them to feel uncomfortable and awkward and uncertain about their own ability just to figure out the right end of the gun and how to get it ready to fire and then fire it if necessary.
And I don’t like hearing those stories afterwards. You know, I want to hear those stories beforehand so you can suggest that part of the self-defense plan is, certainly, understanding the legal boundaries and understanding where and when and under what circumstances you can use lethal force. But as I hope Steve will really emphasize and drill into here in this segment is the importance and the real-world practical value of having that training. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have to make those split-second decisions in a self-defense scenario.
Steve Moses:
Oh, I’d love to do that. I mean, one of the things is I don’t think that the average armed defender needs to just completely, you know, jump off in this and train like John Wick. I think if you take somewhere between maybe, you know, over a couple of years, 16 to 24 hours of professional training from someone that is qualified and able to teach you how to deal with these various scenarios, how to operate your gun safely, how to get it out of a holster quickly, how to shoot, you know, relatively accurately. Most of these self-defense shootings, they’re measured in feet or just a few yards. I wouldn’t be surprised if the average distance between a, let’s just say, a violent criminal offender and his or her target may be 15 feet max, and it may be closer to five to six.
And so being able to get that gun out of the holster and use it without having to think about anything but solving the problem at hand, being able to place those rounds accurately where they need to be placed, I think, gives people a great ability to, in many instances, manage their fear. And by that, I mean you are less likely to overreact and getting your gun out too fast because you didn’t know what else to do and then perhaps use it in such a manner that you actually injure or kill third parties that were not part of the you know the entire contact confrontation didn’t. So I think that’s real important it’s not that hard to do it just takes a commitment.
And then the other thing is if you want to be a good golf player you can’t take 16 hours of instruction and then be good to go for the next 10 years. You need to do some practice, and the great thing about practicing these defensive skills is that most of it is done in dry practice at home. It’s not live fire. That ability to do everything right, even without shooting a round at that particular time, that’s where that starts getting engrained, you know, and you start building up those skills.
And then, you know, go shoot once a month. Shoot 50 rounds, confirm that everything’s going good, and then go back to it. And I tell you what, it’s one of the most freeing things that a person can learn. And one of the things that I really like, and I’ve really enjoyed about teaching people is watching them walk away feeling like, okay, I’m empowered. If I do my part, I can handle almost anything that’s going to be thrown up against me.
Shawn Vincent:
Yeah. So that confidence, let’s talk about that for a minute. It was just one thing that you said a minute or two back that I think is like the basic lesson when it comes to why you’d want training. And that is the confidence to draw your firearm and put a bullet on target if you need to, without having to think about every step along the way. Right? So there’s this muscle memory that comes in when anyone does something physical, whether it’s playing the guitar or playing pickleball, right, Don? That certain motions you get, you get to the point where you’re not thinking about that. Your body just does them. But if you don’t know that, then it’s really awkward. And so when you’re facing an attacker and you’re actually getting to the point where you are in fear for your life or for great bodily harm, that’s not the time to start fumbling with your cover garment or have questions about how competently are you going to get that firearm out, and is it even operational yet? And can you put some bullets where you need to? So you’ve told me time and time again that a lot of times inexperienced armed defenders will pull the firearm too soon because they don’t know if they’re going be able to get it out in time later. And then the introduction of a firearm to a potentially …
Steve Moses:
That’s right.
Shawn Vincent:
… explosive confrontation then elevates it for one, instead of de-escalating, you’ve just escalated this confrontation. And if you don’t make that gesture competently and confidently, then this aggressor, if they’re a seasoned criminal who handles firearms themselves, will know that you’re, let’s just say, chicken shit with that gun. That’s fair to say.
Steve Moses:
Yeah, and if you’re too indecisive and concerned about everything that might happen, you may not go for that gun soon enough and then you become that victim. And, you know, just think of all those instances where people have been threatened and they pulled their gun out and the criminal started walking towards them, closing distance, going, “What are you going to do? Shoot me? You’re going to kill me?” And I mean, that is a conundrum.
The better trained and skilled you are with having experience in envisioning what some of these scenarios might look like, and even maybe doing some force-on-force or role-playing. Okay, that often allows you to delay the time that you need to go ahead and bring that gun into play. It may allow you more time to break contact, or it may help create that distance that you need to do that. So there’s just no downside to training that I can see
Don:
I’ve seen those scenarios, Steve, actually. I take a lot of phone calls from people that are involved in self-defense incidents. Many of them are relatively minor in the legal sense of things. Maybe somebody didn’t get arrested or got arrested for a relatively minor offense. But I have actually seen more than one scenario where as it was described to me, the attacker did exactly what you said, challenged, even mocked the defender. “What are you going to do? Shoot me? Oh, you got a gun?” You know, “Big guy, right? Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead.” And I even had one case where the person continued to approach, disarmed the defender, knocked him to the ground, took his gun, and then waited for the police. He had no intention of actually taking his gun and using it. He was just, I guess, asserting dominance or didn’t think this guy in a second would actually use it, went so far as to take his gun and knock him down and sit there. So I see that stuff from my standpoint, taking calls, I guess you call them “live-action calls” … almost, hearing it right afterwards. And it shocks me, you know, it shocks me that that’s happened more than once.
Shawn Vincent:
We looked at a case in the news where somebody tracked down a stolen laptop or something with an air pod, right? And went to this mall parking lot with a firearm to confront the thief, and the thief attacked them, took their gun, and then shot them with it and fled the scene. So that’s a bad, you know, one thing that we’re looking for in a self-defense scenario is to have a positive outcome, which is one where you don’t get killed or horrifically disabled and wounded, and you don’t go to prison for it, right? That’s what we’re looking for. Our first lesson is to break contact. So as soon as you can stop that fight, keep it from happening, or end it and walk away, that’s the best way to win it, as Don told us last time.
Don:
And you know, Steve, don’t you think too—since we emphasize the notion of deescalation, breaking contact, employing less-lethal options if you have them—the more competent and confident that you are in your skills with a firearm that you can get at it and use it if necessary, that it gives you a little more room to consider less-lethal options, a little more opportunity to analyze what you can, and if you have a less-lethal option to go ahead and try that, knowing that if it doesn’t work, you still have other options.
Steve Moses:
No, absolutely. Yeah, another thing is, I mean, if you want to take this training a little bit further, and I highly recommend it, is there are some instructors out there that basically have trained under such people as Craig Douglas, Paul Sharp, Cecil Burch. There’s a number of others that will show you how you can block a sucker punch at short range—which is what happens in a lot of instances, the person walks up there, turns a little bit to the side, and then sucker punches that person. So if you know that this guy does come up here and suddenly tries to punch me, I can survive that and get myself into a position where I can either break contact or, if necessary, seriously injure this guy. That’s also a great aid.
Craig also teaches a technique, I think they call it the “eye thump,” we call it the “face thump” just because we work with church security teams. Basically you almost use your hand like a can of OC. 100 % of the objective is to cause that person to close their eyes momentarily and allow you to create distance. So there’s a lot of wonderful stuff out there. And once you experience it and you see instances where other people have used it successfully, it is very empowering.
Shawn Vincent:
You know, so the first lesson I got from you on the value of training is just if you’re confident and competent with your firearm, then you won’t go to it too early and you won’t wait too late before it’s too late to use it. And God forbid, Don, you’re not going to have it taken away from you and used against you. Right. Second step, though, to what you guys both just said, that is the training gives you more intermediate options. Right. If you’re not confident with your firearm, a defensive display is not really in your toolbox, right? Or if you’re not familiar, you talk to Steve about time and distance, right? And I know, I heard a term the other day I liked: “If you can’t sway delay, right?” So if you can’t convince the guy to stop approaching you, but you can make it take longer, then, a little space, a little time, a little distance that allows you to create a plan.
W like to use the word “disambiguate.” Disambiguate the attacker’s intentions, use verbal cues, use other things that might allow you to get away or stop the fight. You have that, and that’s all part of training, right? Firearms self-defense training is not just going to the range and being able to put holes in paper about, you know, eight to 15 feet in front of you, right? It’s about how you think about it, how you de-escalate. Avoidance. It’s about, to your point, sometimes I tell folks if they’re fit enough, knowing how to take a punch and knowing how your body reacts to that is a good thing to do. Like you talked about, the training you get on how to sort of protect yourself from a sucker punch if you know that you can handle a little tussle before you have to use a firearm or respond to that, that’s more confidence, and it gives you more options.
Steve Moses:
Right, and it’s just a simple non-diagnostic response in which basically you’re just basically, for lack of a better term, I am building a helmet out of my meat and bone in my arms, so no matter where that punch lands, the chances are that it’s going to knock me down or knock me out are way reduced. So I don’t care what angle is coming from, if I do it correctl,y it greatly reduces the chances that that’s going to happen.
And in regard to also devising a plan, what I prefer to do and encourage students to do is you have a Rolodex of plans already inside your brain. And so what you’re doing is you’re going through that Rolodex. OK, what is the best response, not reaction. What is the best response? I’m defaulting to that. Then I may need to, you know, go to a different one in case that one fails, because sometimes they do. It’s like, I know what I need to do here, and I’m going to do it.
And that’s one of the things that I found during my 18 years in law enforcement. Most of the excitement, if you will, occurred when we were on a team and we’d go in and do high-risk, what they called “writs of possession” in houses in which, you know, there was somebody that was considered to be violent, armed. They were part of a local militia operation. And so we trained, we trained, we trained. And then when something did happen, you knew what to do. You didn’t even think about it. You just acted upon it. And as concealed carriers, you don’t need a big litany of plans like that. You need a few basic plans, maybe four or five, something like that. But if you think about that, you train, and if this guy does this, I’m gonna do this, then you are well ahead in the game.
Shawn Vincent:
Sure. And a good trainer is going to give you some real-world scenarios where these are the kind of common things that you might have to think about, and here’s a response to that that you can put in your toolbox. Right. And so then, just like the muscle memory on using the machine, if you have a mental memory of what your plans are, that you don’t have to stop and devise them in the heat of the moment when there’s a crisis. You can fall back on your training. And that, again, brings the confidence in.
Steve Moses:
And I tell you the other thing too, it’s like, okay, where am I going to find these trainers? Well, here’s the thing, it may take more than one, and it may take 32 hours instead of 16 hours because you didn’t get with the right person, you know, at first, or he didn’t have all the, you know, the answers that you were looking for. But you can…
Well, I tell you, you’ve brought us a lot of folks that are good trainers, and I don’t know one good trainer who would tell you that they’re the only one that you’ll ever need. Everyone finds their niche, and they specialize, and those guys get lots of training from lots of different people. And gals.
Steve Moses:
Right, right. And a good trainer will go say, “Hey, go train with other persons.” You know, go out there because this is just one way of doing it, and someone else may have a slightly different way, or they may have a way of explaining it that makes more sense to you, or they may show you how to do that a little bit more efficiently or effectively.
Don:
You know, I’ll just mention my two cents’ worth on the broader concept of training. Because I would think, included within that broader concept, are just learning and thinking about things that will make you safer. The notion of situational awareness, the idea of not walking down the street looking at your phone and not paying attention to what’s around you. The decision not to go out at one o’clock in the morning and walk six blocks in poorly lighted conditions to the club that you’re going to. Just stuff that’s really common sense, but I think that’s incorporated in the training notion, isn’t it Steve? I think the trainers will tell you training is beyond just being able to pull the trigger accurately and such. It’s more of, for lack of a better term, a mindset as well.
Steve Moses:
The good ones will do exactly that and at the risk of sounding a little bit arrogant here, I think this podcast right here is an example of training because we’re putting forth information for people to consider that may not have considered before, and I guarantee you that with the good advice you guys are putting out, people are being exposed to stuff that they can use tomorrow, and we may also just be kind of like, okay, yeah, all right, we’re peaking their interest a little bit and saying: “Hey guys, why don’t you go and look for training like this or consider training like this?” Because if you are willing to put in the work on the internet, there’s a ton of information in there, and there’s a hundred thousand tons of bad information in there. So choose wisely.
Shawn Vincent:
Well, yeah, there is. Don, I want to wrap up with a story that you shared with me about a well-regarded professional in the industry that we all three have met, who has a very fast draw, very good shooter, very competent, and also in super great shape and can handle somebody in a fight if he had to. Right. And he approached a young guy on the street who was causing some problems to see if he could get him to go away. And this was a kid who was somehow … probably newly acquired a firearm … and he displayed it and said, you know, “I could shoot you right now.”
And this person we know, he knew that he could get the jump on this guy if he needed to. He knew that he controlled the situation still, even though this punk kid had a firearm in his hand and was threatening to use it. But he had the good sense to know that this guy’s probably just all bluster. And he had the training and he had the confidence and the competence, and his skills were where he knew he could wait to see if this gets worse before he has to draw and kill this poor kid who’s just being an asshole, right?
And so I think, it allowed him to be in control of the situation and just make better decisions. And this is a guy, by the way, who’s well-versed in what the actual consequences of using deadly force would be, and knew that, just for his own inconvenience, it’s not worth getting involved in this.
Don:
Yeah, it’s all of that stuff juxtaposed against an objective view of this scenario. If you had video of this scenario and saw it unfold as an objective observer, you would say this guy was threatened with a firearm and absolutely had the legal right to use deadly force in response. So that’s sort of the threshold here. But because of the training and the experience and frankly, the good sense and judgment and the ability to be calm under stress, which I think we’re talking about as a byproduct, maybe a direct product of training, right, Steve? The idea when you’re confident in your skills, then you are more calm and able to handle the stress of something, because you know what you can do and what you can’t do. So in that scenario that you described, Shawn, when this kid, trying to be a bully and just trying to, in his own way, this threat when he said, “You know, I could shoot you.” The fellow on the other end of that said to himself, “First of all, no, you can’t.” He knew that he really wouldn’t be able to, even though he thought that. He had the skill and the ability and the good judgment to avoid being shot. And unfortunately for this kid who never knows that the guy he pulled the gun on just saved his life by not … just saved his life.
Shawn Vincent:
Just save his life. Yeah. That is brilliant. And we can kind of wrap it up on that. Steve, I think having good training actually gives you the ability to save somebody’s life who might have otherwise given you justification to shoot him because you can do that. And that’s what we call a good outcome. If you can both walk away with it. No one gets hurt and no one goes to jail, and nobody’s dead.
Steve Moses:
Absolutely, it’s a win-win.
