w.i.d.T.h.6. Principles Chapter 4: T....

T is for Torque: a force that produces or tends to produce rotation or torsion. Torque is circular motion basically. It's the foundation of traditional Jiu-Jitsu, Aikido and Hapkido. In fact Hapkido literally translates to "the way of the circle." These martial arts are all based on using circular motion to do throws, breaks and joint locks using momentum of circular movement. Essentially, using your whole body weight in torsion to defeat a single muscle or muscle group of your opponent's body to destroy their balance, break their bones or control and break their joints. Defensively, circular motion (like a running back spinning out of a tackle) breaks an opponent's holds on you. Torque can also be applied to understand armed combat, circular motion on the battlefield is called "flanking:" moving forces in a semicircle to attack an enemy from the side. This allows you to attack them one at a time instead of facing their entire force head-on. Even in a defensive shooting against multiple attackers, the same principle of moving laterally and forward to get the enemy in a line is a type of flanking maneuver. Circular motion has the added benefit of allowing you to see your entire surroundings. The key to situational awareness is knowing what's going on all the way around you. The phrase "keep your head on a swivel" is another form of Torque that provides situational awareness. So all of these circular type motions whether it's jujitsu's arm locks or hip throws, or flanking maneuvers in a defensive shooting, or encircling maneuvers in the military, I combine into one concept called Torque. Applying Torque to an opponent's body will throw him. Applying torque to an opponent's joints will break them. Applying Torque to an enemy formation will flank them. Applying Torque to the Head/Neck of an opponent will kill or paralyze him. Applying circular motion in a knife fight will expose the enemy's back, which is the best place to attack with a knife. Think in terms of circles. The bad guy is a lug nut, and you are the wrench breaking his grip, his balance, his focus, his vision, his bones and his brain by applying rotational force. That can be arm bars, hip throws, head throws, flanking maneuvers or neck breaks, the principle is all the same. The way of the circle is also the beginning foundation of SIXuational Awareness, the last chapter. Like and Share! Soule Easy 6 Training

w.i.D.t.h.6. Chapter 3: D...

Damage “It’s not how hard you hit, it’s where you hit.” Tim Larkin calls damage “Injury,” and he defines it as putting damage to either bodily structures or systems (senses or organs), without which a person cannot function when they're trying to hurt you. Damage is NOT pain, that is the most important thing to remember. People have different pain tolerances and pain effects people differently. Damage, however, works on everybody because everybody’s bodily systems and structures work the same way, regardless of a person’s strength or pain tolerance. Where to hit varies by the type of tool you are using, whether it is your own body or an extension to your body will determine what you should aim for. Remember from the first chapter, your brain is the Weapon, the tool in your hand or your bare hands are simply extensions of that Weapon. Put simply, with your bare hands, you should target the head, spine, and especially the eyes. With your bare hands the best way to shut down an opponent is not to kick him in the groin, despite what legend says and despite the fact that it actually does hurt most men, but again that’s pain not Damage, and pain tolerance varies by person. There are some men who can just get kicked in the groin over and over again, and does nothing to stop them when adrenaline is pumping. Groin strikes are not causing significant injury to a structure or system of the body. Most martial arts train people to kick people in the testicles, but to effectively attack the groin, what you're actually trying to do is kick somebody in the pelvis and break their pelvis and if you happen to crush their testicles in between your foot and their pelvis that's just added bonus. This is harder than the simple groin strikes most martial arts schools teach; instead of attacking the groin in an unarmed fight, which may or may not work, instead attack the eyeballs, which always causes Damage. Getting a finger in your eyeballs is every bit as painful as getting your testicles crushed. And, it also does significantly more functional Damage because it is taking a way a sensory system from the bad guy. It is also propelling the head backwards, which is giving you control of it, and thus their body (one of the last principles of W.I.D.T.H.6.). There are other targets you can attack unarmed, but few will give you the same result as putting your thumbs into somebody's eye. If you've never been jabbed in the eye with a stick or an inadvertent finger during a sparring match, I can only say it ends a fight very quickly. If you want evidence of that look at any UFC match where somebody accidentally jabs the other guy in the eye; they are instantly on their knees and they have to stop the fight for several minutes while the fighter composes himself and gets his eyes to stop watering so he can see. That is only after incidental contact with the eyeball. If you deliberately shove a digit into an eyeball, especially with your full body weight, you are going to end that fight immediately and you will have taken the Initiative away from the bad guy, even if only temporarily incapacitating him, which gives you the opportunity to deploy a Weapon, or stomp his head in and render him non-functional. With a knife, you should target the throat, as it will give you the most bang for your slice. With a handgun, you should target the high-center chest, meaning the rib cage. With a rifle, under twenty-five yards, or with a scope, also target the high-center chest. If you are armed with an iron-sighted rifle beyond twenty-five yards, you should aim for the “center of mass” of the target, basically the diaphragm muscle, as it gives you the greatest likelihood of hitting the torso, even if your marksmanship fundamentals are off. Exception is if you are in a hostage situation or certain “defense of others” situations, then you may want to take head shots with rifles, remembering your own limitations. Missing a hostage taker and hitting a hostage in the head with a rifle round is no different to the hostage than if the terrorist killed them. By the way, if you're rescuing hostages for a living, you are reading the wrong blog, but that is one of two times I would advocate for taking a headshot. The other is if the bad guy is on his back or butt, but still presenting a threat, still shooting or still trying to aim a gun, then take the headshot as the earth is your backstop. Knives: aiming for the throat for two reasons: One, it’s a softer target than the ribcage or skull, and it can do as much Damage as puncturing the ribcage or skull. The second reason is that typical carry knives are not effectively utilized on the torso. First, most legal carry knives, even if they do penetrate between ribs, are not long enough to do massive damage to internal organs like a hollow-point bullet. Further, stabbing/slashing the abdomen, while readily possible for the average carry blade, is not effective at causing the type of Damage needed to end a self-defense encounter. In other words you can stab somebody in the stomach or in the intestines many times and they're not necessarily going to be out of the fight as quickly as if you stabbed them in the Carotid artery or the jugular vein. Caveat: If you are armed with a knife and can get behind a person, or turn a person around using the next principle we will discuss (“Torque”), then you have numerous targets with a knife that the opponent cannot effectively defend against. Neck, brain-stem, spine, kidneys, back of the knee, Achilles. If you can get to somebody’s back with a knife, they are in a very, very bad situation and you have won that engagement if you have any understanding of biology, targeting and Damage. When it comes to Firearms or even knives you have to treat them just like getting into an unarmed combat fight, meaning you cannot rely on the one hit knockout. One bullet from a handgun is not going to stop a dedicated attacker trying to rape you, main you or kill you. One stab to the side of the neck is not going to immediately stop a dedicated attacker trying to rape you, main you or kill you, either. You have to keep going until they are out of the fight, that doesn't necessarily mean dead, but it means you have put them into a non-functional state, so they are no longer capable of hurting you. The best way to do that is quickly is to cause significant Damage to their sensory systems, their bodily functions or their bodily structures (bones, tendons and ligaments). Damage + Forward Movement secures the Initiative, and remember: the winner of a fight is the person who has the Initiative at the END. “It's not how hard you hit it's where you hit!” Like and Share! Soule Easy6Training.com

w.I.d.t.h.6. Chapter 2: I...

Initiative

Initiative is the easiest self-defense principle to understand and the hardest to achieve. In combat initiative is basically control. It is control of the pace of combat and the ability to impose your will upon the enemy. As law abiding citizens we never start a defensive engagement with the initiative. Therefore, we have to wrestle the initiative away from the bad guy. The winner of a fight is the person who has the initiative at the end. This is true in tank battles, in fist fights, in naval battles, and in self-defensive shootings. So, how do we get the initiative away from the bad guy as law abiding citizens? The easiest way to do it is to start moving forward towards them. In Professor Visitacion, founder of Vee Arnis Jitsu, came up with several "commandments of self-defense" one of which is this: "I can move faster forward than you can move backwards." That's the easiest way to seize the initiative. If you become the attacker, then you cease being the victim. The most aggressive person usually wins in a fight. I had a motto for my unit during the Battle of Sadr City: "Shoot first. Move forward." Now as civilians and law abiding citizens in a civilized country we cannot always be the ones to shoot first, however if we start moving forward and attacking the bad guy, then we successfully take away the initiative from them and we start driving them backwards. When they start retreating, they give up the initiative and they start losing. In a battle, the person that's moving forward, gaining ground, is winning by securing territory. The person or the army that is always retreating, giving up ground, is called the loser. People that train to shoot or fight by going backwards, are training themselves to lose. They are surrendering initiative to the bad guy. Law enforcement does this a lot. Law enforcement has a philosophy of "buying space for time" and that time gives them the chance to de-escalate, or to effect an arrest, or do other law enforcement things. This is incredibly dangerous because it is giving the initiative to the bad guy repeatedly with every step backwards. As self-defenders we are not required to do that. As self-defenders, if somebody attacks us and they intend to do us grave bodily harm, we have the right to defend ourselves effectively, and the quickest way we do that is to take the initiative away from them by moving forward... ....and causing Damage, wich I will cover in the next chapter in detail. Basically, Damage has to do with with accuracy and targeting and being efficient and effective in what you do while moving forward, but the most important thing is to become the most aggressive. Simply put, causing damage is more than just running at him swinging your arms like a windmill ineffectively, or spraying bullets inaccurately, so some training on targeting is necessary to effectively secure the initiative. How we target to cause Damage varies by weapon system and we'll get into that in the next chapter. The important thing is to attack and do so effectively, and that secures the Initiative. Defense doesn't win fights. Ending with the initiative wins fights, battles, wars and self-defense situations. Like and Share! Soule www.Easy6Training.com

W.i.d.t.h.6. Chapter 1: W...

Weapons. In his book Clear and Present Danger Tom Clancy once wrote that the first rule of unarmed combat was "don't get into it." This fascinated me because at that point I was about 3 years into studying martial arts and it was the central focus of my life. I was especially fascinated with the philosopies of martial arts such as Bushido and the animism associated with the various Shaolin animal styles of Kung Fu. Clancy's quote got me thinking that maybe kickboxing, of whatever style, was not the be all and end all of being a warrior. So, I started to focus more on weapons training in the martial arts. As a teenager that mainly meant ancient weapons like the bo staff and swords rather than firearms, but unlike many martial artists I did not see a moral distinction between guns and knives. Many martial artists are, bizzarely to me, vehemently opposed to firearms, believing them some sort of disgrace to their "Ancient Chinese Secrets" or something. Introducing weapons to training begs the question, though, when using them would be justifiable? I studied ten different martial arts over twenty years as I moved around the country and the world, and they all called themselves "self-defense systems." Only one of them was actually an unarmed combat system that taught useful self-defense principles, the rest were crap. Even the good one didn't fully understand what self-defense is. In his book When Violence is the Answer, Tim Larkin defines self-defense as a legal determination made by a criminal justice authority after the fact that what a person did was justifiable violence. It is not a set of skills or a system of martial arts. To meet that standard several things have to be true in a situation. One, you have to be in imminent danger of being maimed, raped or killed. Two, you have to be without other options, such as escape or utilizing social skills to de-escalate the situation. In other words, bar fights are not self-defense, but every martial art I studied was teaching me how to win bar fights, and calling that "self-defense training." It wasn't. But that brings us to the good news about Weapons. In an actual self-defense situation, where those standards are met, as opposed to a bar fight, you are perfectly justified in using whatever weapon you can get your hands on. If somebody is actually trying to maim you, rape you or kill you, there are no limits to the tools you can use to defend yourself unless you live in a criminal-loving jurisdiction run by lunatics like New York or Chicago. If you do live in one of those places, you should move. If you live in a sane place, where you are allowed to defend yourself, and somebody is trying to maim you, rape you or kill you, it's perfectly justifiable to shoot them, stab them or even run them over with your car. Which gets me back to Tom Clancy's quote: "The first rule of unarmed combat is: Don't get into it." There's no reason to get into a fist fight with a psychopath who is trying to do you or your loved ones grievous bodily harm. Find a weapon and use it. 1) Anything can be used as a weapon with a little creativity. Look at the world around you constantly and identify potential weapons. I once watched an Arnis master beat a sixth degree black belt senseless with an empty water bottle by doing knife patterns on his face so fast that he fell down backwards, so anything can be used as a weapon. Beer bottles, chairs, soup cans, cars, knives, keys or best of all a firearm; anything can be used as a weapon, because: 2) My brain is the real weapon. My body is a decent enough tool for my brain to use for self-defense, but I can extend its lethality by putting another tool in my hand, but the real weapon is the human mind. The human mind that designs aircraft carriers and bombers and their bombs, as well as samurai swords, the longbow or a sniper rifle. The brain is your weapon. It is also your adversary's weapon, which makes it your best target. I will talk more about that when we get to the "H" chapter. Thus, in conclusion, 3) "The first rule of unarmed combat is: don't get into it!" Like and Share Soule www.easy6training.com

More on Active Shooters

I have been obsessing over videos and articles about active shooters lately. Something occurred to me today as I was watching the hundredth training video on Youtube. They are almost all titled "Surviving an Active Shooter"/"Active Killer Survival" or something similar. None of them are titled "Stopping an Active Shooter" or "Kill the Killer" or "Shoot the Sonofabitch in the Face". Why not? This highlights the problem. We're not training people to defeat evil, we are training people to "survive" evil. We are ingraining cowardice into our population. That's not going to work in the long run, folks. I have asked some of my friends who are former SWAT cops to help develop a training program to "Stop an Active Shooter." The longer you let an Active Shooter live, the more people get shot, and also the more people bleed out waiting for the EMS to get the all clear from Law Enforcement to go in and start medical treatment and evacuation. Time is the real enemy in an active shooting, not the bad guy. The bad guy is probably suicidal and has very little interest in the next day. The shooter is almost always going to die in the end, but how FAST that happens determines how much evil he can commit. Time is the enemy, therefore Running and Hiding only cause more death. Perhaps not yours, but his next victim may be one of your friends, or a family member, or a fellow parishoner, or an employee, or a student, or a patient. This is the problem with the "Survive an Active Shooter" model instead of the "Stop an Active Shooter" model. Innocent people are going to continue to get shot every ten seconds an active shooting continues until somebody stops it. The average response time to an active shooter in this country is ten minutes. That's an average, with some responses in rural areas taking up to forty-five minutes. But even in cases where the response time is under five minutes, that's still fifty people shot. On average, about half of the shot survive. But, the longer it takes to end the shooting, the longer it takes EMS to get in, so the more people die of blood loss. Please, please watch Tim Larkin's interview with Ed Monk regarding these statistics, available here: So why is "Fight" the last option in an active shooting? Entitlement. We as Americans feel that we are entitled to a life without violence, unlike the rest of the world. We "should" not have to worry about our personal protection. We "should" be safe in our schools. We "should" be safe in our hospitals and churches and offices, et cetera. Maybe we should, but we're not. We're only as safe in those places as we make ourselves. An active shooting is a form of combat, and the same principles that work for a tank battle or a mugging also work in an active shooting. But you have to first commit to Fight first, Run if you are physicall unable to fight and Hide only as a temporary means to launch a counter-ambush. Fight is not the last option, because TIME IS THE REAL ENEMY. Your friends, family, coworkers are going to continue to get shot until somebody FIGHTS. So, how do we fight? 1. With a WEAPON. The first rule of unarmed combat is: DON'T GET INTO IT! Carry. As much as you can. If your church doesn't allow you to carry, you need to find another church, because they are suicidal and will get your family killed. If you work in a place that doesn't allow firearms, get another Weapon. Mace. Bear spray. Wasp spray. A knife. A fire extinguisher. A letter opener. Here's the second component to Weapons: if you see yourself as the Weapon, than anything can become an extention of your body and your brain to make you a more lethal Weapon. 2. By taking the INITIATIVE away from the attacker. Setting up a counter-ambush does this. So does HURTING the attacker. This is easier with a stand-off Weapon, but it's possible with just your body weight also. Hurting does not mean causing pain... 3. ....It means causing DAMAGE. If you have a firearm, you don't aim it for his little toe, you aim for his chest to inflict massive trauma to the bad guy's body. One causes pain, the other causes Damage. This is true with edged weapons and improvised blunt-force weapons also. Hitting a guy in the shoulder with a fire extinguisher might hurt, but hitting him in the Head will cause Damage. Basically this means aiming. It's not how hard you hit, it's where you hit that matters. If you have to use your bare hands, go for the eyes and the throat. 4. Or if you're a grappler, use TORQUE, also called circular motion, to cause that Damage. Torque is using all of your body weight in a circular motion to defeat a single muscle in his body. Judo and jujitsu are based on this principle of circular motion. You can use it to disarm a shooter with a rifle if you can get out of the line of the barrel, grab it and apply Torque and body weight to take him to the ground by swinging the gun away from you and pushing it in a circle to the ground. Torque is especially effective... 5. ....attacking the HEAD/NECK. Eliminating a person's capacity to think eliminates their ability to do harm. Especially with blunt-force Weapons, attacking the Head/neck is the fastest way to incapacitate somebody. With edged weapons, attack the softer spots like the eyes or the throat or the brainstem. Attacking the Head/neck using Torque can quickly cause Damage and gain Initiative away from an attacker, follow up with body weight stomps to the Head/neck also to render an attacker non-functional. 6. Most importantly, be SIXuationally Aware! Check your SIX. Listen to your SIXTH sense when something or somebody does not feel right. Trust your SIXTH sense when you see a guy with a duffel bag or a heavy trench coat in the summer. Don't be embarrassed by telling a cop or another authority figure. Don't blind your other five senses staring into a phone with earbuds in while drinking or getting high in unfamiliar or dangerous places. Be SIXuationally Aware of your surroundings, especially escape routes AND potential improvised Weapons. W.I.D.T.H.6. You have to fight back when evil shows up at your door. Running and hiding from it never works! Just ask the French:) Be armed. Be Brave. Be Trained. Be FAR MORE Dangerous than the scumbags! Soule Easy 6 www.easy6training.com

Cowards and Psychopaths

People willing to commit mass murder are not going to be deterred by more laws. They are willing to murder dozens, if not hundreds, of people. This is the most heinous crime our system of justice has, yet they are perfectly willing to slaughter human beings for racial, religious, sexual or political bigotry. What law is New York going to pass that could possibly scare suicidal terrorists hell-bent on mass destruction? Don’t rack your brain, there isn’t one. People who are willing to commit mass murder will not be deterred by a misdemeanor weapons charge. They are evil criminals, they don’t care about laws; that’s the definition of evil criminals. You cannot legislate your way out of a confrontation with evil men. These aren’t people who run red lights, or go ten over the speed limit. Laws will not deter them. Murder is already illegal. In fact, it’s the oldest crime in the world, yet people still commit it. More laws aren’t going to stop that. You know what stops a murderer? A better defender. Ask any battered spouse with a restraining order that some piece of garbage walks right through on the attack; paper doesn’t beat rock. It certainly doesn’t beat bullets. To beat a rock, you need a bigger rock. Meaning, you have to be more dangerous and more capable at violence than the criminal predator. The laws they want to pass actually make society more dangerous. They want to write a piece of paper that bans good people from having rocks at all, and so only the bad guys have them. The bad guys don’t care at all about another law on another piece of paper, and they aren’t giving up their rocks. In between the previous paragraph and this one, the Uvalde, Texas shooting occurred. The terrorist shot nineteen elementary school kids. So, I’m going to stop arguing about guns. This is about a willful disbelief in evil. I don’t understand how people can not believe in evil. How else could you explain a lunatic shooting nineteen children between eight and ten years old? It’s not a matter of the mental health crisis in this country, which is obviously real, or bullies, it’s simply evil. This person was not raised with a moral compass to know that you don’t murder children. That seems like a pretty obvious and simple rule to follow. We can debate a lot about varying degrees of right and wrong, but you’re going to have a hard time finding the person who thinks murdering school children is a gray area. So, this was a broken psychopath with no remorse for innocent life. “He was bullied as a child because he had a lisp,” one report said. Well that certainly justifies murdering nineteen children ten years younger than him. Are you kidding me? He was bullied? Everybody is bullied in school at some point; you don’t get to go murder innocent children because of it! I was bullied as a kid, you know what I did with that anger? I joined the Army, got trained how to kill people with everything from a TOW missile to my bare hands to PROTECT innocent people and kill BAD PEOPLE! That’s the constructive way to use that rage and violence, to KILL TERRORISTS, not become one! There is something broken in our society that doesn’t believe in evil anymore. I’m not saying that in a religious context at all, by the way. But something has been lost in how we socialize children to be moral citizens with consciences that preclude the murder of other school children. Part of this is cowardice. We are a society of cowards. This encourages terrorists to conduct attacks. They don’t fear opposition, and they bank on their actions terrifying further the cowards unwilling to oppose them. This is not a debate about guns, it is an indictment of the cowardice now prevalent in our society. That cowardice is what allows these terrorists to succeed. Besides cowardice, the other part is the end of moral education for young Americans. We refuse as a society to parent children. To develop them into moral citizens. Parents want to be liked by their kids instead of respected by their kids. I’m not a parent, I’m sure it’s hard, but where the hell were this terrorist’s parents? Why didn’t they teach him it is evil to kill helpless children? Where did they go wrong? He shot his grandmother first before going to the school. What were they teaching him? What were they failing to teach him about right and wrong? This is the crux of our problem. We’re educating psychopathic terrorists because we aren’t socializing them to be moral citizens. This kid was like a Wild Child who raised himself in the woods with no moral foundations. Maybe we need to start charging the parents of these nutjobs with crimes? Maybe that would motivate them to instill some semblance of basic humanity into their little bundles of psychopathy. The two combined, our cowardice as a society and our immoral training of angry young men, is getting children killed. You can debate gun control forever, we have been, and I don’t give a damn what side you’re on, it doesn’t address these two problems. We are producing evil men without consciences who have no qualms about murdering scores of eight-year-olds. And the vast majority of our society is too chicken-shit to confront such evil bastards when they attack. We cannot continue as a society under these conditions. This is how societies and empires always fall, with moral decay inside to the point they are so rotten that they cannot defend themselves when the barbarians arrive at the gates. If you love your children, you better start turning this around. Raise them to be brave. Raise them to channel anger or rage towards evil. Be Galahads not Gandhis. Pacificism is the Virtue of the Victim. Courage is not hard when you accept that there are things more important than life, like the lives of eight-year-olds or thousands of innocent civilians in some building United 93 was screaming towards. Stop being cowards; be like Todd Beamer and stand up to evil when it attacks. “Let’s Roll.” Soule www.easy6training.com

Virtues

Patriotism may be the "virtue of the vicious" as Oscar Wilde said, but Pacifism is the Virtue of the Victim. There have been two and half successful instances of pacifism changing the world for the better, and only one side was being non-violent at the time. Gandhi's revolution in India was a success, but thousands upon thousands of Indians were beaten, bludgeoned and shot in the process. The Civil Rights Movement in America was largely successful due to Dr. King's stance of non-violent protest...then he was shot. The half is the Christian "revolution" that took three hundred years of being fed to lions before a Roman Emperor finally converted. I wouldn't call that one entirely successful, especially since the symbol of the revolt got crucified. I respect the morality of Jesus, Gandhi and MLK, but the vast majority of times when evil has been defeated in the world, it has come by force. In interpersonal violence, pacifism is suicide. Anti-social predators are not impressed with the morality of turning the other cheek, they simply prey upon the weak and take whatever they want. That can be your belongings, your money, your body, your limbs or your life. The only thing that stops them is more effective violence. In a world without the professionals to whom we outsource our violence, like cops and soldiers, the citizen is left to a world full of predators without a protector class. German Jews in the 1930s and 1940s, for the most part, believed God would never allow the evil that they were witnessing right in front of them (but denying) to happen to them. That is why when the State of Israel was founded--by force--that it adopted the motto "Never Again." European Jews, who founded Israel, had learned the horrible lesson of pacifism in the face of unspeakable, uncaring and methodical evil. The Israelis are not pacifists. Pound for pound, the Israeli Defense Force is the finest fighting force on Earth. Despite all of the wars and attacks on them, trying to finish what Hitler started, they fight on each day and continue to survive. Yet, they are defending a religion of peace, in the holy land, with ground sacred to three of the five major religions on Earth by killing and dying for it. They may be vicious. They are not victims. And they Never Again will be. The difference between the Israeli people and the American people is this: Israelis believe in evil. Many European Jews did not believe in evil. They denied to themselves what was going to eventually happen. And millions of them died. The survivors, who founded Israel, never again made that mistake. By contrast, when America was attacked on September 11, 2001 by unspeakable, uncaring and methodical evil, a shockingly large segment of our population denied it happened the way it did in order to continue to live in the delusion that evil is not real. Another large segment of Americans blamed America for being willing to defend Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, angering the evil lunatics who founded al Qaeda, because it's easier to blame yourself--like a rape victim--than confront the fact that there are evil people in the world. They will kill you, rape you, rape your children, burn families alive in hellfire atop crumbling skyscrapers, all because they HATE YOU, whether you did anything to them or not. I wonder if American Individualism, which I love, causes us not to be able to understand these days why people would hate us as infidels even though we had never met those people before? Or if it's something more pathological that we just cannot live outside of our illusory bubble of protection? So that when it is shattered, we retreat into a state of denial? I think that's probably more likely, but either way, it's delusional. Because there is evil in the world. There are evil men who do evil things to innocent people everyday. The average American has been protected from that evil by professionals for the last 80 years, so they don't believe it is real. But the people in our society who live in poverty, they understand violence, and are not delusional about it. The inner cities of this country are failed states, where armed militias control the streets instead of the governments. They aren't pacifists. It's rich and middle class white folks in this country who are utterly brainwashed into believing that violence can never find them or hurt them, and that evil doesn't exist. They are the pacifists. And therefore, they are the victims of their own virtue. There are hyenas in the world. Be the lion. It takes a lot of hyenas to take down a lion. In other words: Be Armed. Be Ready. Be More Dangerous than Predators! Like and Share! Brian Soule Easy6Training.com

"B****, I OPERATE!"

This video: https://www.instagram.com/tv/CPS6i3En9WH/ (link below) is a video that Dakota Meyer posted several years ago. And EVERYBODY lost their crap about it. If you look at the comments on IG calling him....a Medal of Honor Recipient....just horrible, and patently disgusting things, you realize he is exactly correct. I own body armor. I own (too small) camouflage. I own a chest rig. I own a couple of AR's. I owned them when I was in the military, and I trained with them a lot to get better at my job. I don't anymore. I shoot the rifles maybe once or twice a year. I try on the body armor maybe once a year to make sure it still fits my middle aged beer gut (It doesn't really). When I go to the range for fun, I wear a white shirt and non-camoflauge cargo pants because they reflect the sun. When I teach a class, I wear a bright red shirt so other people can always see me (and I don't get accidentally shot by a nervous student). I used to wear a drop leg holster; I don't anymore. Why? Why don't I wear the drop leg holster or a chest rig or a plate carrier? Because I don't walk around town with that crap....anymore. I did walk around Baghdad with that crap, in a camo uniform, with a kevlar helmet that had a mount for night vision goggles on it, and a Yarborough knife that I didn't earn but was given to me (and my brother) by a Green Beret...and you know what? It SUCKED! The hottest I ever saw in Iraq was 146 degrees; in "full battle rattle" that BLOWS!!!! But I don't do that for a living ANYMORE. My "EDC" these days is a subcompact 9mm, a pocket knife and a keychain with pepper spray on it (maybe some other stuff). So, unless you are a SWAT cop, training with all that extra crap is a waste of your limited training time and--more importantly--budget! That money you spent on a plate carrier and a "war belt" and everything that 5.11 sells, could have been better spent on ammunition for the concealed carry pistol you ACTUALLY CARRY EVERYDAY! Dakota is correct. Taking all that crap to the range is Live Action Role Playing gaming. Time. Excluding teaching, I spend about four hours a month on a shooting range just practicing. I can spend that four hours practicing drawing my pistol from concealment and putting shots into a man-shaped target from a realistic distance, adding in some movement and maybe some reloading drills, because that is what I am ACTUALLY GOING TO HAVE ON ME if I ever have to shoot at somebody again....OR, I can waste my time playing a dress-up game and shooting zombie targets with an AR in "full battle rattle" doing transition drills and PRETENDING I am getting good at "Operating." That's bull crap. If you don't believe me, PLEASE watch the Active Self Protection channel on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsE_m2z1NrvF2ImeNWh84mw In thousands upon thousands of shootings caught on security cameras and cell phone footage, NONE of the civilian self-defenders were dressed like Navy SEALs! They used concealed carry pistols that they had practiced with as much as they could/would to get to a level of competence that made them effective SELF DEFENDERS! We are DEFENDERS, we are not OPERATORS doing raids on enemy safe houses! Stop spending time and money on FANTASY bull crap, and instead buy target ammo and invest the training time shooting the tool you are ACTUALLY GOING TO HAVE! The last thing I will say is this: 99% of all self-defense shootings are not done by SEALs, Green Berets or Recon Marines. Those guys don't tend to get mugged or raped all that often. Self-defense shootings are done by ordinary civilians with ordinary guns (WEARING ORDINARY CLOTHES) who don't have plate carriers and gas masks and machetes strapped to their belts! Self-defense shooting is a martial art, like Karate or Kung Fu, it is NOT tactical warfare! Tactical warfare almost always involves military units conducting highly rehearsed missions based on intelligence, unit training and a hundred other things that happen BEFORE the first shot is ever fired. That's not self-defense. And if you get those two confused, you are going to prison, because as self DEFENDERS, we have to be legally justified in protecting ourselves and loved ones, which means you can't be a vigilante going out HUNTING "bad guys." Please watch the video. "Stop LARPing!" -Dakota Meyer, USMC, MOH Be SIXuationally aware. Be armed. Be more dangerous than the scumbag! Soule Easy 6

Balancing Preparation vs Preppers

haven't written in a long time, 2021 was kind of a down year for Easy 6 Training, so I wasn't teaching much or writing much. But, as I am looking around the world today, I feel the need to write a bit about how things have changed in the last two years. It has gotten more dangerous. Cops are quitting in droves, and they are not being replaced. Crime is skyrocketing for a number of reasons I may get into more in detail in later blogs, but basically the lack of cops, political changes in the prosecutor profession, economic uncertainty due to the pandemic and prison releases due to the pandemic. In addition, since my last blog, we lost the war in Afghanistan and gave hundreds of thousands of fully automatic weapons to terrorists, and an air force. The new political leadership has thrown the southern border wide open to them. Truckers on protest. Russia has invaded Ukraine. North Korea is testing ballistic missiles every week. China is preparing to invade Taiwan. "Dogs and cats, living together! Mass Hysteria!" Don't get hysterical, but also don't be naive. Arm yourself somehow. If you live in a place that doesn't allow the carrying of firearms, you are in far more danger than people who live in free states, but you can still have something. If you can carry a knife, do so. If you can't, carry a kubaton, preferably one that's pointed, or a heavy steel pen. Or a stun gun. Or pepper spray. Or even something like this self-defense key

Remember, the first rule of unarmed combat is DON'T GET INTO IT! Be armed. The cops are not coming to save you. What few cops there are left in our cities are terrified to lose their job because some cell phone camera footage gets edited to hell to show cops as evil racist thugs who randomly attack minorities. If that's the public perception, why would a cop save you and risk that video? They won't. So, you are your own first responder. Being armed is the best way to do that. If you live in a free state, and you can buy and carry firearms, you need to get a rifle. I have been preaching about pistols for years. I carry a handgun every day, and I have sworn up and down that 99% of any self-defense situation could be solved with a handgun. I am not being a hypocrite; I am saying the level of threat in this county has gone up. Now, I'm not advocating walking around town with an AK on your chest to prove some point. I'm saying you should have one at your house, with a decent supply of ammunition. It doesn't have to be an AR or an AK, or any sort of "modern sporting rifle." It could be an old lever action 30-30, or a .243 hunting rifle. The point is you want something with some range beyond a pistol. You don't have to adorn it with crap, either, like lasers, lights, tactical scopes or any of that crap. An AR with iron sights is good out to at least 300 meters with the bare minimum training. A hunting rifle, even farther. Have a few boxes of ammunition for it. Get a good Individual First Aid Kit (IFAK) that you can throw in your briefcase or your purse. I carry a tourniquet, a trauma bandage and a pair of medical sheers in my coat pockets. I wear coats with a lot of pockets. I can put extra mags in them. I put a flashlight in one. I put a cigarette lighter in one (probably the most useful survival tool). And I carry a 3.5" tactical folding knife in another pocket; that length is legal in my state, some states it's longer. This knife is a weapon, not a tool, for that get a leatherman or gerber multitool and throw it in your vehicle with the IFAK. Take a First Aid class! Take a rifle class. Take at least a self-defense seminar, if you aren't already studying some form of martial art. Lastly, most importantly, take a concealed carry class, get your permit, AND CARRY! The best martial arts instructors I have ever known all say carrying a gun is the best form of self-defense out there; they train people for when they can't have a firearm. A note on shotguns. If you are good with a shotgun shooting rifled slugs at long range, then I would say it's even better than a rifle, because it can also be amazing at close range with shot shells. But, if you don't have a rifled barrel, or are not competent with it at long ranges, I would personally recommend a rifle instead. This is my opinion, and obviously some people will disagree and say shotguns are the best all-around self-defense tool. There is merit to that argument, but new shooters I feel can much more easily learn to handle a rifle than a shotgun. But, if you have the means, get all three, a concealed carry pistol, a shotgun for home defense, and a rifle if things get very serious. I'm not trying to sound like a prepper. I don't have food buried in the yard, or geo-cached in the hills, or urine-purification equipment. But I have enough canned goods to last me a month if the truckers go on strike. I have several fully loaded magazines for a rifle in my safe and my concealed carry pistol, and I do have a home defense shotgun loaded with bird shot so I'm not shooting my neighbor's dog. I'm not trying to prep for the end of civilization--I have no desire to live in some post-apocalyptic Mad Max world, folks--I am trying to be prepared for temporary disruptions in our civilization. Like violent crime entering our lives. Like terrorist attacks (which I think will skyrocket in the coming years). Or even strikes of essential services like trucking, farming, power generation, etc. It's not about killing zombies or Russian paratroopers like so many idiots fantasize about. It's about being armed and prepared enough to wait several hours for first responders to get to you. That's the balance I'm looking for. Be Armed. Be Aware. Be More Dangerous Than Him. Thanks, Soule Easy6Training

Competition vs Combat vs Self-Defense: Conclusion

 First, to clarify, I have said for years that the definition of Self-Defense is "a legal determination made after the fact by a criminal justice authority" (Tim Larkin, When Violence is the Answer).  I absolutely still believe that; what I am referring to in these last few columns is the distance at which self-defense shootings occur.  If a situation is determined to be self-defense after the fact by a criminal justice authority, it is typically going to happen within a certain distance, because there has to be some element of imminent danger to be determined as Self-Defense.  Sorry if that confused anybody.

So, having said that, allow me to go back to confusing people by misusing my own terms again.  What makes good self-defense shooting?  In the past few weeks, I have written about how the fundamentals of marksmanship either apply or don't to self-defense shootings in close proximity.  Breath control is useless.  Slow and steady trigger squeezes are unimportant if you have a proper tight grip on the gun.  Aiming is not optional outside of gun-grappling range because of the risk to bystanders,  Stances are irrelevant because in a six-foot fight, your stance will never be what you practice.  That covers four of the NRA's five shooting fundamentals.

The one I didn't cover is Follow-Through, because it confuses the more important aspect of successful defensive pistol shooting: speed!  The purpose of engaging with a handgun when your life is threatened is to "stop the threat."  What does that actually look like?  Well, what I teach students is that the goal is to put the enemy into shock, INSTANTLY!  That is the critical aspect of winning a self-defense encounter of any type; cause Damage to the attacker as fast as you can.  Now, if you shoot somebody in the chest with one 9mm bullet, he will eventually go into shock, he may even die.  What most people don't understand is that "eventually" means he is still functionally able to hurt you before he goes into shock.  That is why it is so critical to shoot fast into the ribcage and put him into shock, instantly.  That means putting two to five shots into his ribcage in under two seconds.  Which can only be achieved if you GRIP the gun correctly and pull the trigger as fast as possible without moving the point of bullet impact outside of the attacker's ribcage ("accurate enough" shooting). Second point, the precision of the shooting in a ribcage with a handgun is not nearly as important as the volume in achieving the objective of putting the enemy into shock, instantly.  Hitting somebody three times in the lungs or liver or spleen in one second will actually have greater medical effect on the enemy than hitting him once in the heart in that same one second.  Both of these scenarios are survivable, despite what Hollywood says, but the three less-accurate shots in one second will cause greater shock and systemic shutdown, ending the fight more quickly.  That's the main objective in self-defense shootings: end it QUICKLY.

And that is the fundamental difference between combat distances and self-defense distances in shooting.  In combat, you shoot to wound, despite what hostage rescuers preach, because the laws of land warfare are very specific about this point.  The reason soldiers can't modify ammunition to make it more lethal is because the Geneva and Hague Conventions legally make warfare about putting the enemy out of the fight with a single shot wound.  At self-defense distances, I have to shoot until the attacker is incapable of harming me.  Now, whether he lives or dies is up to doctors, our goal is to end the engagement as fast as we can, and the best way to do that is to put him into shock instantly, which requires multiple shots delivered as fast as possible into the ribcage.  Which is why I argue that pistol fighting is a lot more like fist or knife fighting than rifle combat.  It is much more grisly and violent, and the outcomes are usually more gruesome, because the closer you get to an enemy trying to kill you, the fewer options you have.  You have to end such fights as quickly as possible, to minimize your exposure to getting hurt instead.  In a tank battle, miles apart, things can happen more slowly than in a knife fight in a phone booth.  The closer you are, the faster things need to happen to minimize risk.  That is why Follow Through is not worth talking about for Self-Defense distances, because while it might technically happen, it will happen in a fraction of a second between shots if you correctly manage the recoil of the handgun with your grip, trigger pull and aiming.  Proper recoil management is proper Follow-Through, it's just allowing you to shoot much more quickly than traditional understandings of Follow-Through as preached by bullseye shooting at paper ranges.

Be the Gunslinger!

In conclusion: the goal is to end a self-defense encounter as quickly as possible without risk to yourself.  How do you do that?  By incapacitating the enemy as quickly as possible, which medically means I want to put him into shock, INSTANTLY!  What's the best way to do that with a handgun?  Putting two to five rounds into his ribcage in under two seconds.  The faster you can put him into shock, the less risk you are exposing yourself to in a self-defense situation.  Speed is the most important aspect of self-defense shooting and it is achieved by proper grip, trigger pull and combat accurate aiming (ribcage).  Precision is for competition or hostage rescues (combat).  Calmness is for snipers, not self-defenders.  Slow and deliberate decision making is for generals, not gunslingers.  Be the gunslinger. 

Hope you liked these tips on effectively defending yourself with a handgun at close range.  If so, please share this blog with other people you may know who want to learn.  If you totally disagree and think I'm an idiot, please also share and comment.  If you want to learn how to do it for real, give me a call.

Thanks,

Soule

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Competition vs Combat vs Self-Defense: Breathing

Prologue: The premise of this series of columns is that there is a significant difference not just between Competition shooting and Combat, but also a significant difference between both of them and Self-Defense shooting.  Like most instructors, I define Self-Defense as happening within seven yards.  Combat typically happens at ranges greater than that, obviously there are times when combat happens closer than that, but then it more resembles "hand-to-hand combat"/"close-quarters combat"/"extreme close range combat," or whatever the cool-guy acronym of the year is.  All of these buzzwords are talking about the same thing: fighting in close proximity.  The military and SWAT teams make a distinction between close-range combat and long-range combat for a reason, because they ARE different.  I call them "Self-Defense" distances and "Combat" distances as a way of distinguishing the two, but whatever the title, there are differences in how shooting is done in each.  The differences are the premise of this series, resulting in a conclusion that much of what the armed public trains on with firearms is training for Combat or Competition, rather than Self-Defense, which I believe is a mistake.

For Example: "Breath Control," the firearms industry's fancy way of saying breathing, is the next shooting fundamental I want to compare between Competition, Combat and Self-Defense.  But not really, because it's bogus.  Very simply, at long distances or extremely precise shooting (like hostage rescue), breath control is important.  Neither of these should be done with a handgun.  I will grant that on occasion "operators" have rescued hostages with handguns instead of rifles, but that is a much higher level of training than most armed citizens possess.  Also, those are Combat situations, not Self-Defense.  Things like school shootings, or a church shootings, or other types of "Defense of Others Shootings," are clearly NOT the same things as Self-Defense, and are in fact types of Combat operations undertaken by trained military and SWAT personnel.  Back to the point: in Combat at longer ranges, or in precision shooting Competitions, Breath Control is important.  In Self-Defense shooting, it is neither important, nor really very possible.

It is possible to control your breathing while being shot at from fifty yards or greater.  I have done it.  It is impossible, in my opinion, for the vast majority of people to control their breathing in a gunfight at five feet.  Adrenaline floods your system, you are instantly in a fight-or-flight situation, with a heartrate at or above two-hundred beats per minute, and you are gasping for air.  I have done that also, and still managed to shoot a handgun "accurately enough" into a human torso, to survive.  You know what I wasn't doing?  Controlling my breathing!  I do believe there are probably some very elite special operations personnel who could control their breathing in a six-foot gunfight.  I am not one of those guys.  Nor is anybody reading this column.  But it doesn't actually matter, because at Self-Defense distances (from zero to seven yards), no amount of breathing problems will cause you to miss a human ribcage with a modern handgun: the ribcage should be the preferred target for Self-Defense Shooting (see the last column).  In reality, it's not Breath Control that is causing people to miss at these ranges, it is flinching, or "Anticipating the Shot."  It's often blamed on breathing because the bullet impact is above or below the intended point of aim, and in rifle shooting, that usually indicates poor Breath Control.  But with a pistol at seven yards or less, it simply isn't true.  People flinch the barrel up or down, because of anticipating the bang, not because they're breathing "incorrectly."

More importantly, it's a stupid thing to train for Self-Defense shooting.  Now, it is a fundamental of marksmanship that should be taught to new shooters, and if you're going to go to a range and shoot bullseye targets, good Breath Control will make you more accurate.  But when somebody is trying to kill, maim or rape you from six inches to six feet away, you will not be calmly exhaling and slowly squeezing a trigger when the sights are perfectly aligned.  That's myth, it's absurd, and frankly it's dangerous, because it's teaching people unrealistic things.  In rifle shooting, Breath Control is way more important.  In precision shooting, whether in Combat or Competition, Breath Control is important.  Even in long-range pistol shooting, it is important.  But those aren't Self-Defense Shooting situations.  That leads to the next column, which is about what is actually important in a Self-Defense Shooting situation: how FAST you can stop an attacker with "accurate enough" fire.  That is entirely based on Grip, Self-Defense ("accurate enough") Aiming and Trigger Pull and has nothing to do with Breathing or Stance or Precision.

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Soule

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Competition vs Combat vs Self-Defense: Aiming

Sights: Not just there to tacticool-rack on your belt or boot.

 So far, I've talked about the differences in Steady Position (stance and grip) and Trigger Pull in competition shooting vs combat vs self-defense shooting.  Now, I'm going to cover a much more complicated fundamental of shooting: Aiming.  It's very complicated because there are not just three versions of aiming based on the three different situations.  Sometimes in competition, very precise shooting is necessary and thus meticulous aiming is necessary, and sometimes speed is more important than accuracy, and at short ranges "accurate enough" does not require using the sights at all.  In combat, it's slightly less complex, you always aim.  Again, the premise of these blogs is that combat is different from self-defense and both are different from competition, though competition can help shooting in the other two.  That being said, in combat you always use your sights, unless you are in extreme close quarters ("gun grappling" range), which much more closely resembles hand-to-hand combat (i.e. the typical self-defense shooting range of less than two meters) rather than rifle combat of several hundred yards.  A significant difference between combat and self-defense, however, is that "collateral damage" is acceptable in combat.  Which means, even though you are using your sights, the enemy WILL BE moving to avoid bullets, as a result, often in combat, we miss.  Sometimes those misses cause collateral damage.  That is perfectly legal and accepted in war zones.  It is NEVER acceptable in a self-defense shooting situation, which means you have to be absolutely precise in self-defense shooting.  How precise is that?  Good question.  The answer doesn't change in self-defense shooting; it will change in defense of others type shootings like a school or church shooter or a hostage situation.  Again to reiterate, I consider those type of scenarios combat not self-defense.  But in self-defense shooting, the answer to the precision question never changes: the ribcage.  That's how precise you have to be.  From a thousand yards, that's very precise shooting with a sniper rifle.  From a hundred yards with a pistol, that is very precise shooting also.  From a wrestling match in an alley with a mugger or a rapist, that is not very precise shooting at all.  So, the target doesn't change, the difficulty of hitting it changes with distance (and thus the necessary precision of aim required to hit the ribcage).  That being the case, there are three levels of self-defense shooting in my opinion:

1) Within 1 meter (arm's length): Shooting should be done from the hip into the torso of the opponent without any attempt to utilize sights at all.  At this distance, it is difficult to miss.  Shooting From Retention drills.

2) Greater than arm's length, but less than 2 arms' lengths (approx 6 feet).  Shooting should be done from the Compressed Ready Position (meaning gun is in a 2-hand grip, in front of the torso, but arms are retracted not extended) to prevent gun-grappling (opponent grabs your gun because he's within your and his arms length).  Shooting from Compressed Ready, sights are not used, rather the orientation of the body towards the opponent (the Natural Point of Aim) determines the orientation of the barrel.  With the barrel parallel to the ground, oriented at the torso of the opponent, shots will hit somewhere in the ribcage from 1-2 meters out.

3) Greater than 2 arms' lengths.  Use the sights!  Collateral damage CANNOT be accepted in self-defense shooting situations, unlike in a combat zone, which means you are accountable for every round that comes out of the barrel of that gun.  Some people can Point Shoot (not use the sights) beyond two yards, but from a self-defense perspective, there is no reason to, in my opinion.  If you are outside the range at which he can grab your gun, then there's no reason to shoot from the Compressed Ready or Retention (the hip), and the risk to hitting innocent bystanders increases with every inch farther away from the opponent your muzzle gets, which will end it being a self-defense situation to where you can be charged with a crime.

Most competition shooters look at that very differently.  Their perspective is about speed, if they can shoot from the hip and hit the target at longer ranges, that can shave time off of their scores, adding to their points.  That is absolutely the opposite way a self-defender should look at using sights and aiming.  Just as in combat situations, the default should always be to use the sights.  The only time we don't use the sights is when there is a real risk of the gun being batted to the side or taken away from us, in which case shooting from the Compressed Ready or Shooting From Retention are Techniques (remember, difference between Tactics, Techniques and Procedures from my last blog) to overcome the situation that prevents using the sights, but every modern firearm is designed WITH SIGHTS for a reason.  They should always be used unless it's impossible.  Competition shooters do not risk collateral damage and they don't have to be as precise sometimes.

In conclusion, when should you use your sights?  Always, unless there is a defensive reason not to (gun grappling), in which case you use the next best options based on distance.  Just because you can point shoot and hit a steel plate at three meters doesn't mean anything in a real self-defense engagement.  As a final caveat, I will simply say that self-defense situations are dynamic.  A fight that might start a seven meters can very quickly change to one meter or less, so all of these distances I'm referring to are AT THE TIME OF THE TRIGGER PULL.  That means the gun will be moving between these various levels of extension at different times in a gunfight, and that's a good thing.  If a guy is charging you with a knife and you have to collapse your shooting position back to the Compressed Ready when he breaks that two meter line, so that you can KEEP FIRING, then do it.  There's not static cardboard targets, which is why you should always use your sights UNLESS YOU CAN'T.

Like and Share if you liked/agreed/disagreed/care:)

Soule

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Competitive Shooting is not Combat; Combat is not Self-Defense Shooting

Practical Self-Defense??  Really??

Prologue: As I was writing this, I kept using certain terms that I feel I need to define up front.  In the military we use the acronym TTP, that stands for Tactics, Techniques and Procedures.  We use the acronym and all three of those concepts blend together, even though they are separate and distinct:

Techniques: Individual skills that are the building block of the other two.  For example in pistol shooting, how to draw the handgun from the holster.  It's the same way every time, and practicing it builds reliable muscle-memory.

Tactics: Unit maneuvers with many factors including force structure, terrain and weather, enemy capabilities, et cetera...requires creativity and judgment. For example, entering and clearing a building; every building is slightly different with rooms and walls, so you must make quick tactical decisions.

Procedures: Hard written rules for accomplishing specific types of objectives, not subject to creativity and judgment. Firearms safety rules: always keep  the muzzle pointed in a safe direction, for example.

Having established that, let us begin:

The shooting industry has started to recognize a distinction between shooting sports and combat in the last few years.  "Practical" shooting sports are, like all athletic pursuits, driven by outstanding performers.  The best competition shooters in the world, however, do things to make them faster that are not tactically sound in combat situations.  The best of them will admit that; guys like Rob Leatham and Taran Butler acknowledge that to be the best in their sport, they have to focus on the skills that allow them to shoot fast and accurately enough to get points.  This means standing tall, head up, bringing the gun up to eye level, lightened triggers, lightened guns, et cetera...  Many of these things are not tactically sound.  Some are partially sound, depending on the equipment somebody is carrying in combat.  For instance, using the isosceles shooting stance is a classic argument among athletes putting holes in cardboard targets that do not shoot back.  Without a doubt, it is faster to shoot multiple target scenarios from the isosceles stance; and if you are wearing body armor with chest plates, it is also the tactically smart thing to do.  But, if you are not wearing body armor, "blading" your body away from full presentation of your vital organs to an enemy shooter is the more tactically sound method; this is why it was taught to soldiers and cops from World War Two through Vietnam and into the 1980s.  It's better to get shot in the shoulder than in the center of the chest.  So, that's one example of many shooting techniques that may or may not be a good tactic depending on the setting and the equipment.  

For SWAT cops, wearing plate carriers and Kevlar helmets, that technique would also be a good tactic, but for plain-clothed detectives wearing suits and ties, with no body armor, it would not be as tactically sound.

I say all of that by way of introduction, because the shooting "world," the industry and enthusiasts/athletes, mostly accept the logic that there is a difference between competitive shooting and actual combat.  In the same way, self-defense shooting is different from either of them also.  Combat is all about advantages.  Finding the higher ground, the more defensible position, the best tactics for the size of the unit, the right mixture of forces including tanks and infantry and artillery and battleships...  Furthermore, smart combat is about Initiative, setting the time and place of battle.  A self-defense shooting engagement is none of those things.  By the nature of violent crime, self-defenders are always at an "Initiative Deficit," meaning they are ambushed.  Fighting out of that ambush is where many of the techniques of competitive shooters can be useful: fast draw, shooting from compromised positions, et cetera.  Self-defense pistol shooting, by contrast, is more akin to hand-to-hand combat then full-scale combat.  Just like in hand-to-hand combat, it is the techniques that are important, as any tactical considerations are moot, because really the best tactic for self-defense considerations is to avoid the situation entirely, or escape a violent encounter before it starts.  Those are good self-defense tactics, though not techniques.

This is why I talk about the martial art of shooting, because self-defense pistol engagements are much more like a fist fight than a tactical military defense.  Most happen within six feet, many happen much closer than that, within arms length.  Which means that many of the aspects of training that go into competitive shooting are unimportant in a self-defense engagement.  Within arms length, there is no reason to aim a handgun.  In grappling range (a martial arts idea), it's very dangerous to use sights as the gun can be taken away, it will be deflected from the natural point of aim that competition shooting emphasizes, or the fundamentals of marksmanship that combat training emphasizes.  In the Army, soldiers qualify shooting at man-shaped and sized targets out to three-hundred meters in basic training.  Even military pistol ranges are shooting out to 35 meters.  No self-defense shooting situation happens at those ranges.  Active shooter situations are not the same as self-defense shootings; those are acts of terrorism, which is a type of combat scenario, and the lone pistol-armed defender against an active shooter has a very low-probability of success, which is why I don't teach Active Shooter Response.  That is a tactical scenario, which requires either more people (security teams) or more equipment (rifles) than an armed citizen with a concealed-carry 9mm handgun can reliably provide.  Not saying it's impossible, but the odds are strongly in favor of the active shooter, especially if armed with a rifle.  

But I digress, the point I'm making is that self-defense shooting is much more akin to fist fighting than combat scenarios, and while some techniques from the competition world can be useful, some are not at all useful.  Another picture worth a thousand words:

Now this is a more accurate vision of a self-defense shooting situation.  It's very chaotic, not based on good fundamentals of marksmanship as taught for combat, nor speed-accuracy balance as preached in competition.  The self-defender is falling down--knocked down by the skateboard--draws the gun, shoots the man on the left who had tried to stab him, all in about two seconds, while grappling and in a fist fight.  That's self-defense shooting.  It's not tactically elegant.  Nor is it sexy like watching a world-champion competition shooter blaze through a course of fire.  It is really the martial art of shooting, just like stick fighting or knife fighting or fighting with a katana, a pistol is just a different tool that (slightly) extends your body, but you're still in a hand-to-hand combat distance and range most of the time.

Therefore, what should you be practicing?  Is competition shooting making you better at self-defense?  Probably it is, if you are focused on the consistency of some techniques and the speed with which you can put accurate strings of fire into aggressors, but understand a lot of what makes competitors great is not very smart when people are shooting back at you.  I wrote a column recently about the "tactical lean" and why it's not very good for sport shooting, but if you look at this picture again, he got knocked down because he was not in a good fighting stance.  A good fighting stance is good irrespective of the tool you are using to fight the engagement.  Now, that makes me a slower shooter, but it means when somebody swings a skateboard at me, I have things I can do to that person with or without a handgun.  In my principles of self-defense, I preach that I am the Weapon, and the gun is just a tool, just like a knife or an automobile can be tools of self-defense.  That's why my technique for shooting is a fighting stance, leaning forward on the balls of my feet, aggressive, on balance, and able to move my feet for targeting instead of just my arms.  I would lose in shooting competitions using this method, however, in a handgun fight, most competitive shooters would lose to my techniques.

There are many of these differences between combat, competition and self-defense shooting.  In this column, I focused on stance, one of the shooting fundamentals taught in all three disciplines, but with different motives for emphasizing different techniques.  In my classes, I try to bring up these distinctions and always come back to the idea that self-defense with a pistol is exactly the same as self-defense with your bare hands or a knife, the only difference is the targeting.  So as you go about practicing and training to defend yourself with a handgun, take from the competition side and the combat (tactical) side, but always think about whether their techniques make sense in a sub-six-foot encounter against a guy with a knife or a skateboard.  Some of them will, some of them won't, but view them all through the lens of a fist fight and you will be preparing yourself better for actually employing a handgun in a self-defense shooting.

Please like and share with other shooters and self-defenders.  I'm always open to feedback, especially if you totally disagree with me.  I don't take it too seriously, it's just shooting people!

Thanks,

Soule

Easy 6

www.easy6training.com

Civilian-Military Divide

 I have three sides to my personality.  I suspect most combat veterans and first responders are similar to me in this.  I believe this is why we have what I will call for simplicity's sake the "Civilian-Military Divide" in communication in American society.  But understand, I am including anybody that works to protect the populace from physical violence, not just soldiers.

The first component is the funny teacher.  I am considered an excellent instructor not because I am better at executing the tasks being taught than others, but because I make learning enjoyable and entertaining.  I'm funny.  Not everybody thinks so, but those who do think I'm the funniest guy they know.  But the humor is dark.  Military personnel, like cops and paramedics, develop twisted senses of humor.  It's a defense mechanism and a reflex that eventually becomes the dominant component of one's personality.

To shield us from the second component, a morose and dark view of the world.  The humor allows us to maintain our sanity in insane situations.  Joe Galloway in the opening to We Were Soldiers Once... And Young, wrote, "Those of us who have seen war will never stop seeing it..." What some mentors of mine would call "Asocial Situations," not as in wall-flowers at a party "asocial," but rather situations defined by the absence of society.  What I would refer to as "anarchy," or the absence of social norms.  Combat is anarchy, which is not really how humans are designed to live.  War is only traumatic because it is the complete lack of social order or structures of continuity that our brains have evolved to crave and create.  Humans are social creatures, so "Asocial Anarchy" is not our natural habitat.  This morose view of life in a state of nature--anarchy--is the honest view of human nature outside of social constraints, and it is terribly depressing.  Somebody once said depression is seeing the world as it actually is.  This is why the humor is so critically important to people in life and death professions, because it shields us from those horrors.  But it offends many people outside of those professions.

These two components are readily understood in the civilian world, at least intellectually if not through experience.  I think one of the big problems with our mental health industry is they only know how to treat this second component really well.  They miss the component that truly divides the military from civilians: violence.

The scary third component to my personality, and those of other warrior professions, is the capacity for and the nonchalant attitude towards violence.  This Divide is not a lack of support for troops, this generation of warriors is far better supported than the previous.  Nor is it always an unwillingness of veterans to talk about it.  Many don't talk about it, and that's a tragedy, because that is what leads to post traumatic stress coming back to haunt people decades after combat.  But even those who are willing to talk about it, who recognize the need to talk about it and purge the trauma from our systems, rarely find an audience willing to listen.  That is the Civilian-Military Divide in modern America.

Twenty-first Century Americans are divorced from death.  The insane panic currently gripping and destroying the country is a great example of that phobic reaction to death most Americans born after the Second World War have inside.  By contrast, the guardian class of our society, are intimately familiar with death and violence, and NEED to talk about it.  For the first ten years after I got out of the Army, the VA could not diagnose me with PTSD because I did not avoid talking about combat.  That's one of the diagnostic criteria of PTSD, an intense avoidance of the subject.  Finally after ten years, one VA psychologist asked if I thought I had PTSD, and I said I did, as I had claimed it seven years earlier when I couldn't sleep, and she explained that I had all the symptoms except that avoidance of talking about violence.  That seems absurd to me, because I knew that the worst way to treat traumatic experiences was to bottle them up for four decades and keep having nightmares, as I had witnessed.  I know enough about psychology to know that the key to overcoming PTS is to divorce the memories from emotion, and the best way to do that is to talk about it.

But the modern American civilian doesn't want to hear about dead bodies and missing limbs.  They are horrified by the mental images brought up by veterans casually talking about the effects of Hellfire missiles on human beings.  Or .50 caliber sniper bullets entering chest cavities.  Or pictures of the effects of IEDs on the limbs of young Americans.  That is a problem.  It is not a new problem, and perhaps it's the natural state of a civilized and successful society that the protected are not just protected from the physical dangers of the world, but also from the mental horrors of their protectors.  But if natural, it is certainly unhealthy for the protectors.  Which is not the point I'm trying to make, about veteran/first responder mental health, but rather the underlying cause of the problem: lack of communication between the two worlds.  I think we do a great disservice to our protectors by not allowing them to speak without being horrified by their stories.

But more importantly, and the true purpose for this essay, is the disservice it does to everybody else.  This Civilian-Military Divide caused by the horror of the third component does not just disallow the protectors opportunities to therapeutically express their experiences, it disallows the protected from learning the truth of the world outside our borders.  This Divide reinforces dangerous illusions most modern Americans have about safety and security.  That is why I am writing about it.  The political, personal and personality issues aside, we have a society that is delusional about violence.  Most Americans today do not believe in evil.  Those that do believe violence itself is evil, not individuals.  This is terrifying to me.  This is the Appeasement mentality that almost lost Europe to Hitler.  A revulsion to all violence is the foundation of subjugation.  Hitler was not defeated by Appeasement nor pacifism, but by greater, more righteous violence.  That most Americans today do not believe in the concept of righteous violence, directed towards evil people, victimizing innocent people, is truly scary to me.  This is an effect of the divorce from death that our society has engaged in since 1945.  Everybody except the first responders, the warriors and the evilly violent criminal elements of our society who victimize the naive.

I'm writing about the Divide because I can be the funny instructor.  In engaging and humorous ways, I can teach people how to shoot cardboard, I can teach them how to stab training dummies, and I can teach them how to punch heavy bags or even spar against another "fighter."  However, I cannot teach them how to truly defend themselves if they do not believe in the concept of righteous violence.  One way they can learn is to listen to veterans and cops.  Not just passively, but actively seek out and talk to people who have survived life and death struggles through the use of righteous violence.  If you want to save yourself, or greater still save this country from physical or even psychological invasion, then the mentality of a killer has to stop being abhorrent to the average American.  Sealing the Divide is the best way to accomplish this.

Some say I advocate violence.  I do.  I advocate righteous violence against evil people who attempt to harm the innocent.  Many (I hope not most) in twenty-first century America believes that makes me, and people like me, the evil ones.  Those who believe that, 1) "sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf," (hypocrites) and 2) worse, are simply waiting to be victimized because the "rough men" can't be everywhere.  The wolves are starting to outnumber the sheepdogs.  So the sheep better start growing some horns: "If you're gonna be sheep, be a bighorn sheep!"

Brian Soule

Captain, US Army (Ret)

Easy 6

www.easy6training.com

My Crazy Teaching Philosophy

Well, it happened, I got my first bad review on social media.  I was called "crazy" for how I teach people to shoot.

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

Like (or hate) and Share (or curse),
Soule

Choose to Be Safe Everywhere or Nowhere

Life is a binary state, not a statistical proportion.  There is no such thing as being 83% alive or 66.67% dead, despite what Miracle Max may say.  As Americans, we are programmed to trust statistics from our childhoods in math classes through adulthood in our voting behavior.  Public policy is based on numbers in a democracy.  The majority wins.  The policy that does the most good for the most people is generally preferred.  But, that is not an accurate interpretation of the binary state of life and death, and our preference for “data-driven” evidence in our society causes disastrous miscalculations when confronted with violence.  Violence is the binary switch that goes from light to dark: life to death.

The miscalculation lies in the belief that you are safe, just because you are in a statistically “safe” area.  A statistically “safe” area is one that has a lower violent crime rate than a statistically “dangerous” area that has a higher violent crime rate.  We consume that statistical data, and then make the inference that as a result of being in an area with less violent crime, we are personally safer.  But this is the wrong inference to draw from these statistics, because those crime statistics are not saying how likely you are to survive a violent encounter, just how likely you are to be in one.  But our safety is not based on the likelihood of the encounter, it’s based on the outcome of the encounter.  Put another way, humans are just as vulnerable biologically in Beverly Hills as they are in Compton.  A knife blade in the side of the neck works just as well in either location.  The correct inference to make from being in a low violent crime area is that a violent encounter is less likely to occur.  This is a fair assessment, though paradoxically feeling secure—reducing our posture of situational awareness—may mean we are actually more prone to victimhood in so-called “safer” areas.  But, whether we are more or less likely to have a violent encounter in a “safe” neighborhood does not determined what the outcome will be of any particular violent encounter.  Simply stated, violent crime statistics confuse the likelihood of violence with the consequences of violence; such confirmation bias in low-likelihood of an event then programs—especially affluent—people to believe in the insignificance of the consequence.  Put another way: regardless of how statistically improbably violence may be in any given location, when it does happen, the crime rate is 100% to the victim.

So, since life is a binary—not proportional—state of being, and since our perception of safety is an inherently flawed conflation of geography and the probability of an event occurring, rather than the consequences of that event occurring, where are we ever really safe?  “Nowhere,” is the sadder of the two answers to this question.  Geography cannot make the human body more impervious to damage.  Letting your guard down in “safer” places can actually make you more vulnerable to violence due to diminished situational awareness.  But, the other answer to the question is this: “Everywhere.”  Because geography is not what makes us safe, we can actually be just as safe in Baghdad as we are in Beverly Hills.  But first, we have to understand what “safety” actually is, rather than what we’ve been programmed to believe it is by geographic crime statistics.  Real safety is the ability to affect the outcome of a violent situation, regardless of its probability.  The first step in this is being aware that violence can find us in any country, in any city and in any neighborhood on earth.  To be safe Everywhere instead of Nowhere, we can’t allow ourselves to be lulled into a reduced readiness posture; we have to be vigilant.  We have to be prudent; we have to learn to trust our sixth sense when it is trying to warn us of danger.  We have to be prepared with the right tools to handle a violent situation if it pops up; this means never being unarmed.  Do not ever let yourself be described in the paper the day after your death as an “unarmed victim.”  Lastly, we have to be skilled.  We have to get trained in how to protect ourselves.  At a minimum, you should be able to use a rifle, a pistol, a knife, an impact weapon and your bare hands effectively to survive a violent situation and escape.  That means you should get training in each of those disciplines.  To be safe Everywhere instead of Nowhere, all you have to be is the most dangerous person there. 

Predators, whether quadrupeds or of the criminal bipedal variety, understand this natural law.  Lions don’t hunt tigers, they hunt the weak.  I am not talking about appearing to be the most dangerous person on the block, to be clear; intimidation is a foolish strategy.  Being capable of defending yourself in any situation is not the same thing as being intimidating.  This capability comes from training, but the first step in the training is to debunk these false beliefs about safety, geography and statistics.  Recognize that you are vulnerable to violence, no matter where you live, how much money you have or how secure you think you are.  Also, recognize that statistical data about violence is totally irrelevant when it comes to an individual act of violence; remember, the crime rate for a victim of a violent crime is 100%.  Then, accepting the vulnerability, you can take the steps necessary to overcome the vulnerability through training, equipping and preparing for violence if it finds you.  If it does find you, remember WIDTH6:

Find a WEAPON: almost anything.
Seize INITIATIVE: attack, don’t defend.
Cause DAMAGE: not pain.
Use TORQUE: body weight plus circular motion.
Attack the HEAD: shut down the computer.
And watch your 6!

Soule
www.Easy6Training.com