Author: Sebastian

SayUncle responds to a post by Caleb on training thusly:

It’s like there’s this weird dynamic on this training issue where on one side you have people who think all training sucks and as long as they have their lucky rabbit’s foot err gun in their pocket, they’re ten feet tall and bulletproof. And on the other, you have people who eat, sleep and poop training because they’re high-speed, low-drag mall ninja wanna be supper troopers who think everyone who doesn’t work out and train is one cell level above an amoeba in terms of functioning.

I’d be willing to bet the vast majority of people who successfully defend themselves don’t have much more than the basic training requirements for their state. I would never pooh-pooh training, and even though I think HTH training is a good idea, I can’t say that I’ve taken a course. For one, training is expensive, and for two, training takes time, and time and money have been in short supply for two years. Caleb notes:

The great majority of defensive gun uses don’t involve a shot being fired. Most of them are in the home, draws/reloads aren’t a factor, and you know what – the level of training of the good guy isusually not relevant. Those are all great justifications for not getting professional training, because after all you probably won’t need it. That’s the honest truth. But odds are you’re going to go your entire life and never need your gun. $400 for a magic talisman seems a little steep to me.

I think for the carrier, you have a duty to be competent. You should be able to perform all the motions necessary for self-defense with safety and reasonable competence. I don’t think that necessarily has to involve working your way through all the coursework at Gunsite or Insights, though if you decided to do that, it certainly isn’t a bad idea. But if you choose that route, you should choose it for you, not because you have any duty to. Once you talk about going to one of these schools for some of their basic courses, you’ll end up with more self-defense training than many police have, who are orders of magnitude more likely to need their gun than you are.

There seems to be a debate going on in the gun blogosphere about whether unarmed self-defense, or hand-to-hand combat, is a good idea or not. I haven’t been following closely enough to get an idea of what the major arguments are for or against, but I thought I’d throw my two cents into the debate, hopefully without summoning the drama llama.

There’s two types of force, legally. There’s force, and deadly force. Force is generally everything that is not deadly force, which is generally the level of force that is likely to result in grave bodily injury or death, such as a gun, knife, club, etc. Fists can be deadly force under some circumstances.

But your likelihood of running into a situation where force is allowed in self-defense, but not deadly force, are probably greater than your likelihood of encountering a deadly force situation. The force spectrum is awfully wide, before you get to deadly force, and it seems to me that it’s a good idea to have some option in that regard. In that case, I’m not likely to look down on unarmed defensive training. The more tools you have at your disposal if you have to defend yourself the better.

UPDATE: OK, I think the conversation started with this, but I didn’t put two and two together. Yeah, I’d definitely think about seeking out alternate HTH training.

UPDATE: Getting a bit more caught up on this debate, looks like it was an accident, though, I’d be open to the argument that the instructor pushed too hard. Though I’m not an expert on this to really have an opinion on that matter.

An article in the Herald Tribune speaks of the problems with the law. It’s almost like everyone is suddenly looking at self-defense cases and discovering that, shockingly, self-defense cases are all rather circumstantial, and juries can be inconsistent in how they see those circumstances as being self-defense or not.

Unfortunately for the poorly educated media, this was true before Stand your Ground laws, and it will be true after stand your ground laws. In the mean time, it looks like the task force is holding hearings. Our people would do well to mob these hearings so that the opponents of the law are not the only ones being heard.