Fair enough. It is true that I do not teach what other people teach on a handgun range, or teach the same way that most firearms instructors teach. People who have taken more traditional handgun classes might think mine is a bit extreme. My philosophy is different than most competitive shooting organizations or advocacy groups that train gun familiarity, how cartridges are put together, and how to get killed in a pistol fight by compromising your position and reducing your accuracy as you back away from a threat. It is true that I don't teach that.
I teach people to Attack. I believe firefights are won by what the military calls "violence of action." In the self-defense world that translates into individual aggression. If somebody is trying to kill, maim or rape you, being some calm, Jedi-like Buddhist monk is not going to save you. Pacifists do not win wars. So, in my philosophy, you have to build a switch inside of you that can be thrown that instantly changes your personality from a well-socialized, stand-up citizen and productive member of society, into a violent, aggressive, skull-stomping, throat-biting killer. In other words, you have to be a werewolf. Seriously, when you start with the mindset, then the tool is irrelevant. My dad used to say he'd rather fight alongside the one guy that could kill somebody with a spoon rather than the hundred guys who needed rifles, tanks and helicopters. The hundred guys need weapons. The guy with the spoon IS the weapon.
So, what I try to teach people with a handgun is the same thing I try to teach them with a knife or what I learned in unarmed hand-to-hand combat training: the most aggressive person wins. The problem is that term "wins." Most people think in terms of sports when we talk about winning and losing. Even "self-defense experts" train their students to win in a competition sense of the word. But that's not really a life or death struggle. In real self-defense, losing is dying. So, you can't ever afford to be the loser in a self-defense situation, because it's not a bar-fight where you get your ass kicked, broken ribs or teeth knocked out. That is NOT, despite what all the commercials and movies tell you, the same as self-defense. Self-Defense is the legal determination after the fact that the force you the defender applied was justified, up to and including lethal force.
What I try to train is not how to use a handgun as a weapon. I try to train people to use their mind as a weapon, to unlock their predatory instincts that are buried under thousands of years of socialization, while holding a handgun. The handgun is just a tool that makes the violence easier. But the violence comes from the mind, the real weapon. Once you understand that, it doesn't matter what tool you have in your hand, you can use a rifle, a pistol or a knife. Or, with no tools, you can improvise a defensive tool or with some training, use your body as the self-defense tool. But, the goal is the same in combat regardless of whether armed or unarmed: neutralizing the threat.
If you are unwilling to do that, then you should not carry a gun or a knife; they will get taken away from you and used on you in a violent encounter. If you don't have the WILL to use deadly force to protect yourself, you are just a victim-in-waiting, no matter how much training you take, or how big of a gun you carry. Despite what victims-in-waiting believe (or say on social media), just carrying a gun does not dramatically improve your probability of surviving a violent crime. Nor does receiving basic firearms familiarity training with a handgun, rifle, shotgun or carbine increase your chances of victory in a self-defense encounter. Programming the mentality into yourself that you will never be a victim is what increases your chances of winning (i.e. living) in a violent encounter. With that mentality, I can teach you to shoot a pistol accurately enough and fast enough to defeat most violent criminals. Without that mentality, you can be armed with a .50 cal machine gun, and your'e still going to be a victim if violence finds you.
Does that make me crazy? Yep. I fully admit that I see the world through different eyes than almost all of the people I teach. I see it through the lens of a combat veteran who has seen real violence, experienced real violence and perpetrated real--LETHAL--defense. Once you get RPGs flying past your Humvee window the first time, you take your blinders off to the dangers of the real world. You take your head out of the sand and stop pretending that you are safe. Some would argue that having those blinders removed does indeed constitute a mental illness. But is it? The truth is, you don't unsee war, and I would not want to. Combat opened my eyes to just how fragile life really is, and it taught me to appreciate life more, and seeing that fragility, I became smarter about my personal protection. Am I a paranoid, hyper-vigilant gun-nut vet? Am I a coward? Am I a crazy, hyper-aggressive werewolf waiting for a full moon to snap? Maybe all of those, maybe none. What I am is a survivor of three tours of combat in Iraq and about a dozen firefights, two of which involved me using a handgun.
I think that means I have something to teach people who are serious about self-defense. If you're serious about self-defense, then you too are crazy. You are paranoid. You are hyper-vigilant. You may have already been a victim, or are just afraid that one day you might be. The alternative to my kind of crazy is delusion about the effects of violence. As I wrote recently, the violent crime rate to a victim is 100%. That means, the probability of you being a victim of violent crime is irrelevant. But, the "sane" people of the world think a 1% chance of being murdered is not worth preparing for. Those people are the crazy ones, to me. The outcome of a 1% murder rate is still death; some innocent person is killed because they were unprepared when violence found them. You can gamble that you will always be in the other 99%, but everybody in the 1% was betting on the same thing. Or you can get a little insurance from a crazy person.
Now, one day at a shooting range can't prepare anybody for war, but if I can give my students some tips and tricks that I learned in 31 months in combat, then maybe I can help them program that switch inside their brains to be better prepared for that black swan event. Odds are, violence will never find you. Odds are, it will never find me again either. But, do you want to bet your life on those odds? Or, do you want to take off the blinders, program the switch and be prepared to be a little "crazy" if you have to let out the wolf someday? Without the right mentality, no amount of firepower will win the fight by itself. As importantly, without the right mindset for what is justifiable self-defense, even if you do "win" the fight, you may be haunted by it for ever. So, be the right kind of crazy:
"Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."
--General James "Mad Dog" Mattis
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Soule
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Thanks!
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