Larry’s battle with bad shooting advice continues unabated…
(sigh) —Jack
Over the last week I had a few shooting posts go viral, so I got dozens of that one type of comment that we’ve all seen before: Variations of the MINDSET thing, where whatever you are doing is useless, because unless you are a hardened warrior bad ass like them who has been tested in combat, when the time comes you regular people will freeze, choke, and fail, because you are unable to take a life.
So that got me curious. This gets said a lot. So surely, with millions of regular Americans carrying guns, and thousands of defensive gun uses every year, this must happen all the time right?
And I’ll go ahead and put a TL/DR summary now for the semi-literate whine babies with no attention spans who need their food digested for them like baby birds- No. Regular people who carry guns do not freeze up, unable to drop the hammer on other human beings. Statistically, that almost never happens. That platitude is a myth, usually barfed up by dudes with self-esteem issues trying to feel special.
Now for the rest of you who can read good, here’s the details, some nuance, and some possible explanations.
So after the 20th variation of this dumb ass platitude showing up on my page I decided to see how many cases I could find of regular people who carry guns getting into a violent encounter, and not being able to pull the trigger on the bad guy out of some moral/courage/feelings failure.
Luckily for me, I’ve been a huge gun nerd and training dork for decades so I know a lot of really smart people who do this stuff professionally. And I started asking a bunch of them if they knew of any cases where a regular person went all Upham from Saving Pvt. Ryan in real life, in America, in modern times?
I asked professional face shooters, guys who train cops, guys who train regular citizens, guys who study the psychology of applied violence and human performance, and people who collect and analyze information on gun fights for a living. I asked in private groups made up of professional instructors and training junkies, and then messaged a dozen other people. (and apologies to any of you guys who feel left out because I missed you, this was a rush job) I’m not tagging them here because FB stomps on posts with name tags, but many of you will know exactly who I’m talking about and I’ll talk about them in the comments. (just heading off the dumb ass detractors who are going to claim I made all these people up)
Specifically, I wanted cases with regular people who had decided to carry guns who’d gotten into a violent encounter. Not police officers in duty related events. And not military combat. Those situations tend to be way different, and I’ll talk more about that in the findings.
So, having bugged people with a combined couple thousand years of experience on this topic, you know how many shootings they came up with where that thing we get screamed at happens all the time is confirmed to have happened?
One. Between all of them we came up with ONE confirmed incident. In 2005.
I asked the man who has the world’s largest collection of videos of shootings, and analyzed like 50,000 of them how often he has seen this. He hasn’t. He couldn’t think of any videos showing that. In fact, the big problem was the opposite with people being too eager to shoot when they probably shouldn’t.
So no video and almost no cases anyone could recall. Now, to specify. There were other cases where that *might* have happened, but we don’t know, because we couldn’t ask the armed citizen what was going through his mind at the time unless we held a séance.
However, even if we toss in every event where the good guy died and the cause might have been because he choked and just couldn’t pull the trigger, we’re really having to scrape the barrel because that just doesn’t happen very often. And keep in mind, this is out of thousands of defensive gun uses every year.
If we take every single case where a regular person got disarmed by the bad guy and shot with his own gun, and assumed the reason why was that they just couldn’t shoot the bad guy, and assume moral choking is the reason-which speaking as a guy who has done force on force wrestling with sim guns that is a really bad assumption to make-that’s still a tiny percentage, because that hardly ever happens with CCW. Weapon retention is a lot bigger deal for cops than regular people, because their guns are visible and their job requires them to go hands on with bad people. Regular folks don’t usually do that.
Could there be more cases this group just wasn’t aware of? Yes, very possibly. But could it be a statistically significant number? Absolutely not.
Are there cases where people hesitate to shoot for reasons other than a moral/courage one? Absolutely yes. Especially in regular citizen self-defense, where the goal isn’t “destroy the enemy” or “arrest the perp”, the goal is “survive”. In the majority of regular DGU’s no shots are fired. Bad Guy does something that makes Good Guy think he needs to shoot, gun comes out, Bad Guy decides to stop doing whatever bad thing it was, so he no longer needs to get shot. Yay. Problem solved.
In talking to all these smart people, they all had examples of hesitation, many of them personal, and it had nothing to do with they COULDN’T but rather if they SHOULDN’T. I had guys tell me about going to shoot someone and then stopping because they realized there were innocent bystanders in the backstop. I had guys tell me about going to shoot someone, but then stopping and holding fire because the bad guy suddenly broke off, surrendered, or turned and ran away.
But in each of those THE ABILITY TO DROP THE HAMMER ON THE BAD GUY DID NOT ENTER INTO THE MENTAL EQUATION AT THE TIME.
In talking to one very analytical person who writes books about how the human brain processes this stuff he pointed out that when a surprise bad thing happens all humans have some mental freeze while they process that information. It’s just that the more training people have the faster that process is completed, and if they’re well trained enough it seems like there is no process at all.
He said that it is possible that some people do hesitate over moral grounds while going through that process, and just don’t recall it afterwards, but there’s zero way to really tell. He talked about one infamous mass shooter event where there were a few armed people nearby, but one of them reacted a lot faster than the other two. Could their hesitation have been from this alleged choke freeze or something else? Maybe? But it’s also possible the first guy was just better trained and more tuned up, so he reacted faster.
Also, I’m not saying that everybody reacted WELL. Or that they made the best decision possible. Oh no, people screw up all the time. But cases where they didn’t react or froze and didn’t make any decisions at all are virtually non-existent.
Now, my guess on the reason we’re not seeing large numbers of this legendary choke freeze that self-righteous cockwombles on the internet assume happens all the time to everybody but them, is that people who have made the conscious decision to go through the effort of carrying a firearm have self selected out of the group of people who would be morally hesitant to shoot someone.
Are there people who actually carry a gun, who haven’t thought about ever using it on someone? And they’ve just got it like some magic talisman to ward off evil? Very possibly. Is this common? Apparently not.
Back when I was teaching CCW a zillion years ago I was a young father, so the cheesy analogy I used in class was that it was like teaching our kids about drugs. You don’t wait until somebody offers you some cocaine at a party to decide if you’re going to do drugs or not. You make the decision beforehand. Then in the moment of testing that decision is already done. There’s no big moral temptation. You put on a gun, same thing. Moment of testing comes you already know your decision.
Next up, you can’t compare wildly different things. Having been in the military is commendable. I thank you for your service. However, that’s apples and oranges compared to regular self-defense in America in the year 2025.
Keep in mind that the encounters the military get into are extremely different than the encounters cops get into and those are profoundly different than the encounters regular citizens wind up in. That’s why when dumb asses do the Respect My Authority because twenty years ago I Qualified Expert, that means jack shit if the topic is regular American self-defense shooting.
One difference on the psychology of taking someone’s life is that regular CCW people aren’t usually the aggressor. They’re the responder. The bad guy is who usually initiates the encounter. So it’s the bad guy who has made the moral decision that somebody is getting shot today. The good guy is just like oh man, I don’t wanna die, BANG.
That’s a lot different psychologically than taking the fight to the enemy, and sometimes initiating it from ambush even and blowing away unsuspecting dudes because it’s your job to seek out and kill the enemy. Then you’ve got people like Grossman making assumptions about how hard to impossible it is for people to shoot other people, because he was studying drafted 18 year olds who didn’t want to go to a foreign country at all, who weren’t able to shoot a drafted 16 year old once they got there… and thinking that’s the same mental hang up as some regular woman who just wanted to be left alone who pulls a gun on a psycho who is attacking her right now and he’s not wearing any pants. That lady is like naw, fuck this, BANG.
In asking one of the guys who has been teaching regular people for decades, and has had a bunch of students shoot bad guys, he said he didn’t know anybody who went full Upham, but he could name some kindly grandma ladies who didn’t hesitate to unload on people.
Law enforcement also gets into a bunch of different situations that don’t apply to regular people. We aren’t kicking in doors, serving warrants, intervening in domestic violence, or doing traffic stops, or any of those other high risk things. With the police trainers I asked they had cases where officers hesitated a lot longer than they should have, but those were because of worrying about legalities or they were trying to avoid starting another riot.
There have been super noteworthy cases of moral/courage failings among cops, but in situations which don’t really apply to regular people. There’s a big difference between standing around outside a mass shooting you’re supposed to be responding to and not doing your job, versus being a citizen who ends up in a mass shooting and your job is to keep the bad guy from killing you so you say fuck that guy BANG. Eli Dicken is a better man than the entire Uvalde PD.
So in conclusion, those internet choades are full of shit, and we can stick a fork in that old platitude. They’re just compelled to shit all over anybody who puts in any effort at anything in a desperate and pathetic attempt to feel better about themselves because their father never loved them. Next time you run into one of these losers ask him to name off some examples, and then enjoy watching them cope and seethe. 😀
I keep a tally of where your average Joe or Jane DOES manage to pull the trigger. I can’t include a link, so you will have to search my sight on your own. Search for “self-defense”
There is also a category for Concealed Carry only (most of these events occur at home against home invaders). Go to my site and do a search.
We still have a lot of “movieism” out there.
People are used to bad guys in media who will happily charge right at any person with a gun. The thing is, the vast majority of violent assholes aren’t particularly suicidal, and while some will stand around and mouth off at you, the majority will suddenly remember that they have an appointment somewhere far away.
These fall into the same category as “the streets will run red with blood…” and “Stand your ground is a license to kill” and “every gun owner is just one bad day away from being a mass murderer.” (yet, somehow… every bus driver and airline pilot is not one bad day away…)
.
It is a lot of keyboard warrioring, and should be ignored.
.
Now, having said that, people can and do freeze. It does happen, it has happened to me, as I sat there doing nothing as my car slid on the ice. I wasn’t prepared to slide, so when it happened, I was not prepared to take the appropriate action to right the skid, and remain on the road. (Thankfully, no one was hurt and no damage.) And, because of that experience, I am MUCH more prepared to deal with a skid on the ice. I know the signs, and I can take the appropriate action to avoid, or correct the slide.
.
Which is the key point here. The folks that carry in public ARE prepared for the “skidding in the snow” scenario. You immediately become more attuned to your environment, you do what you can to avoid exposing the firearm, you also become more polite, and road rage basically disappears. Why? Because you are choosing to carry a tool capable of dispensing lethal force, and you are aware of it, and increased vigilance will (hopefully) ensure you never actually have to use that lethal force.
But were you morally opposed to correcting your slide? Did you freeze because you decided that you couldn’t, in good conscience, not allow your car to slide as it wished? 😊
Yes… I was absolutely terrified, TERRIFIED I say!!! that the public would think I was some kind of horrific hater that just cannot tolerate the existence of water in a solid phase.
That was a fantastic response, thanks.
Many years ago, my wife was involved in a case where she was cornered in a below-ground parking lot by a man who (we found out much later) was a serial rapist and a murderer. She was last out of the building, door auto-locked behind her, and W.B. (bad guy) steps out of his car on an intercept. She changes direction twice; he changes to continue intercept. At about 10 feet, back literally against the concrete wall, she drops her armload of notebooks & purse and brings the 6″ Dan Wesson .357 to bear. W.B. freezes so fast, she said it looked like a cartoon character screeching to a halt. After looking at each other for “about a week”, she realizes that he’s waiting for instructions from her. Not yet well-trained (though having read most of Mas Ayoob’s books & articles), she finally squeezes out “MOVE”. W.B. then backs up a few steps, turns and runs for his life, leaving junker Pinto behind. She scoops up her stuff, locks herself into her car, and shakes for 10-15 minutes. Yes, you can shake hard enough to hear the bullets in your gun rattle.
Point of all this is that she held fire, not from freezing up, but because she’d read Mas’ work telling that your right to shoot stops when the threat does. When he froze, the immediate need to shoot was removed. When he ran away, it evaporated.
Would she have shot him? Absolutely, if he’d taken one more step. She remains certain that she would have killed him with one round of 125 gr. 357 Mag that she practiced with and was comfortable with. That began our adventure into teaching, almost 40 years ago. She still has (and occasionally shoots) that Dan Wesson revolver. She’ll keep it till the day she dies.
Well done on the part of your wife.
I do notice one thing when it comes to self defense cases (anecdotal evidence at best, I have zero actual statistics to back this up) but women tend to get a little more wiggle room when it comes to justified self defense shootings.
.
Still, valid and important point. Your wife’s only “freeze” was not realizing the assailant was waiting for her to make the move first. Hopefully, she is never in the same situation again, but I bet she will take control a lot quicker.
This is Sam’s wife. You are 100% correct. If, God forbid, I am ever in a similar situation again, I will take control much quicker. Back then, I was obviously, much younger and not as learned about self defense as I am now. Thank God, I had the gun on me at the time. If it had been left in the car, I would never have gotten to it. If anyone chooses to carry a gun, please remember to have it with you. Leaving it at home, or in the car, means you won’t have it with you when you need it.
I remember reading a blog from a Defense attorney that liked to specialist in Self-Defense cases who talked about this. He stated that it comes down to the fact that a reasonable person views many more things, in particularly an unarmed man advancing on a woman with apparent hostile intent, as much more likely a deadly threat threat than for another man. You have to sell to a jury that a man is in life or death situation with another man who has yet to actually prove he is deadly threat, but with a woman its a much easier case to make.
I was going to say something but you covered it completely with this:
“Now, my guess on the reason we’re not seeing large numbers of this legendary choke freeze that self-righteous cockwombles on the internet assume happens all the time to everybody but them, is that people who have made the conscious decision to go through the effort of carrying a firearm have self selected out of the group of people who would be morally hesitant to shoot someone.
Are there people who actually carry a gun, who haven’t thought about ever using it on someone? And they’ve just got it like some magic talisman to ward off evil? Very possibly. Is this common? Apparently not.”
I agree totally that the overwhelming majority of people who have gone through the process to procure a carry firearm, and then gone through whatever legal and shooting training necessary to safely carry one have quite probably taken the time to think through whether or not they would be capable of having to use lethal force to defend themselves or others. If they have decided that they’re not able to do so, they almost certainly stop carrying. Those who have thought it through and made the decision to keep on carrying have also made the decision in advance that, YES, they will use if necessary.
Speaking only for me, a group of one (1), I try to carry a set of options in my head. “If he goes the other direction, then I keep going. If he seems to be following, I do this other thing. If he comes toward me quickly, or in a threatening manner, then …”
Yes, I have thought hard about “Would I take a life if I had to? What would those conditions be that define ‘had to’?”
It sounds like they’re claiming that the ~99% of DGUs that end with no shots fired were largely because of the gun owner freezing or being morally opposed to pulling the trigger.
That’s an assumption without evidence, and we can counter the claim with case after case in which the presentation of the firearm caused the Bad Guy to reconsider his actions, thus ending the threat AND the legal justification for shooting.
Why, it’s almost like concealed carriers have not only done the necessary soul-searching that the decision to end another life requires, they ALSO maintain the level-headedness to weigh the legal justifications for the use of deadly force IN REAL TIME!
Thus, I find the whole “You don’t have the MINDSET to pull the trigger” claim insulting on a personal level. The average CCW-er not only has the mindset to pull the trigger if/when necessary, but also the presence of mind to decide when it’s NOT necessary. Any claim to the contrary insults both our resolve and our intelligence.
It rhymes with the old “knuckle-dragging, inbred gun nuts” vibe.
And so I ask: Who is writing these posts? Interns with Brady/Giffords/Everytown?
“And so I ask: Who is writing these posts?”
Thanks to Elon enabling region location data, we know it’s mostly guys in Pakistan, India, Middle East, China, places like that.
Go Elon!
There’s that, and there’s also a whole lot of ignorant people on ‘our side’, sad to say.
Fudds and Timmies live among us, and sometimes we’re our own worst enemy.
Heh. I qualified expert.
On a range with a custom shop 6 inch Python.
No threats, all the time in the world… And if you miss anything with one of those guns,, it is because the gun has detected your unworthiness!
“…when the time comes you regular people will freeze, choke, and fail, because you are unable to take a life.”
Generally the decision to have a firearm, do the training and carry it weeds out all the weenies who are “unable to take a life.” That only happens in Hollywood.
Not to mention, if you’ve got your firearm out and pointed with the safety off, you know d@mn well you are about to die. Massad Ayoob titled one of his books “In the Gravest Extreme” and that pretty much covers it.
Civilians hold their fire until they can’t anymore. That’s how the statistics go. 9/10 the mere sight of you getting ready to kill them chases them away. 1/10, you gotta pull the trigger.
Much kudos to the guy in Bondi Beach who wrestled the gun away from Mr. Terrorist today. He tackled that guy with nothing but his hands and his b@lls of steel. Thanks, Liberals.
Too bad he didn’t shoot his ass, because the dude just got another gun and continued.
In my personal experience regarding combat, it isn’t really a question of whether a person will actually pull the trigger or not, but rather how it will affect them afterwards that is up in the air. Anybody is capable of pulling the trigger if the situation requires it. The emotion afterwards is what varies wildly. I have had brothers totally break down in the aftermath of a firefight where they knew they had killed the dude on the other end. This doesn’t make them a pansy, or a pussy or anything else other than a normal human being with a conscience. Our brains aren’t really wired to kill other human beings, and there isn’t a person alive, no matter their skill level or macho mindset that knows how they will handle the aftermath until it actually happens.
I taught my wife and boys how to shoot, but I have also had long talks with them about what could happen afterwards. It has been almost 20 years and I still see faces sometimes in my dreams. 100% righteous shoots, but that doesn’t change the fact that you have taken the life of another person. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or a bonafide sociopath I wouldn’t want on my team or anywhere around me.
First of all, I want to say that your observations and evaluations of this subject are, IMHO, remarkable.
To a degree, I fit into each of these groups; I served in the Marines (no combat experience), served as a LEO for almost 15 yrs (most of which was on the street in moderate to rough areas), and have carried as a civilian since I was about 23 or so (56 now). I have had either a CCW or a badge (or both) since then, and have been shooting since I was 5 yo.
Larry makes an outstanding point about the mindset for each ‘group’ being very different. Soldiers are ordered into combat situations, and are trained to follow orders. There is also the point of fighting for the guy next to you more than anything else… think of Shugart and Gordon during the Battle of Mogadishu. 2 elite soldiers, members of Delta Force, repeatedly requested (really, they basically demanded) to be allowed to drop on one of the downed Blackhawks to defend the pilot (Mike Durant) KNOWING that backup/relief was far away, and that going in was essentially a one-way mission. They gave their lives for Honor and Brotherhood. THAT is the real essence of what being a soldier/warrior/Marine is… we defend the weak, but we fight for and beside our brothers in arms most of all.
LEOs (cops) are different. Whereas a soldier follows orders to fight, LEOs are ‘shooters’ first. LEOs are trained to use all other means of avoiding lethal force if at all possible, and to be honest are often trained in a way that puts the idea that we will be reamed severely if we ever discharge our weapons… even when it is absolutely justified. History has shown us that this is true in almost every case. Officers who have shot armed subjects have to deal with the basic investigation, Internal Affairs review, review by the District Attorney (and usually a Grand Jury), the possibility of being sued by the subject and/or the subject’s family (and do NOT give the BS about officers being untouchable due to Qualified Immunity… that is a horribly misunderstood and often misapplied concept). A LEO-involved shooting is not like the movies… they don’t just continue with their duties. They get interviewed repeatedly, taken off active duty (for a widely varying period depending on the department and circumstances), and often end up being shunned by some of the same people they risked everything to defend… and these are the cases where justification is easy!!!!
In murkier situations, even if the shoot is found to be clean and appropriate, the raking over the coals is extended and brutal.
In my service, I can honestly say that there were 5 instances where I could have fired my weapon and been 100% justified… but thankfully each time the situation changed at the very last second and I didn’t have to pull the trigger. Subjects surrendered or dropped weapons just in time. I was fully ready and prepared to shoot, but it just wasn’t necessary in that final instant. One time, the only reason I DIDN’T shoot was because another officer shot the armed subject just before I would have been face to face with him at a distance of about 15 feet. I saw the subject falling as I turned a corner, watched the gun fall from his hand, and almost shot him myself because for an instant I thought he was reaching for it again while on the ground… but he was just ‘scrabbling’ (my term) at the ground from the shock and pain of multiple bullet wounds.
But then there is civilian carry. As noted, civilians are not like soldiers or cops… they aren’t intentionally going into harms’ way. Those who are in their homes are defending home and family – people who would never think of firing in any other situation will shoot an invader of their home without hesitation to protect family members.
And then there is the average CCW person, out at the store or restaurant – maybe with someone, maybe alone – who ends up being in the middle of a critical situation. Many of these instances involve the CCW holder waiting for the right moment to act… they have already made their decision; they are just waiting for that moment. I’ve seen scores (maybe hundreds) of videos that show this fact. They bide their time until the bad guy(s) have their backs turned, are distracted, or are about to kill another innocent and the CCW person is forced to act.
Other times, it is an immediate reaction to a sudden situation, and they really don’t have time to think about it. They defend themselves or someone else and the conscious mind doesn’t even process what happened until it is already over.
But everyone reacts in their own way. Some people train to the point that it is a virtually automatic reaction once the brain determines that there is a lethal immediate threat (even if that judgment is flawed!). For others, it is just an instinctive reaction… but the result is the same.
There are some people out there that think just the threat of using force is sufficient to stop a threat; and honestly, sometimes it is. But the assumption that the threat is all that is needed is horribly flawed. A threat that cannot be or is not backed up with action is useless – and often worse than no threat at all. There is little that is more useless than an unloaded firearm, because if the bad guy(s) don’t believe the threat is real, there is nothing to fall back on. And in the eyes of the Law, presenting an unloaded firearm as a threat is the same as presenting a loaded one.
If there is a legitimate lethal threat presented, most people who are willing and able to react with lethal force against that threat will do so as soon as they have the opportunity (or think they have it). Training – physical AND mental -will help prepare a person for that moment… and how to deal with the aftermath.