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

The Argument

The difference between conservatives and liberals is this: liberals care about everybody, conservatives care about anybody.  Economically, liberals want to make everybody’s life equally prosperous.  Conservatives recognize that in capitalism there will always be winners and losers, and thus it is impossible to make everybody a winner, but it is possible to make anybody the winner.  According to conservatives, somebody is going to be a loser in the capitalist system, but it doesn’t have to be you.  Any person can work harder or smarter than their competition and become the billionaire.  This opportunity for ANYBODY rather than opportunity for EVERYBODY mentality is based on the premise that the most intelligent and/or diligent persons will succeed.

Self-Defense.  What does any of that economic theorizing have to do with self-defense?  Well, it’s defense of the SELF, the individual, ME!  This is the same concept, but applied to personal protection instead of personal wealth.  Liberals want cops and soldiers and firefighters to protect everybody, so that they don’t have to do it individually.  Conservatives recognize limited resources and they realize that government probably can protect anybody it wanted to, but not everybody.  They do a fairly good job protecting the President (since 1963), but they can’t protect everybody the same way.  Liberalism extends from the universal healthcare and equality of outcome economics into the realm of personal protection with the same idea: government should protect EVERYBODY. 

They’re right, of course.  When I was in the military, I felt deeply ashamed for what happened on September 11^th, 2001; the national security apparatus of the United States failed to protect Every American as it was supposed to.  They’re right that the government should be able to protect everybody, but it can’t.  This means, mathematically, that some bodies are going to be left unprotected by the government some of the time—realistically most of the time.  Just as equality of outcomes is not possible for economics, it is also not possible for government protection.  This is a fact liberals do not want to admit.  They do not want to accept personal responsibility for their own safety, because they (not unreasonably) believe that the government SHOULD protect them.  They should not have to be responsible for their own protection, because protection is the basic function of government.  To them, it is an entitlement just like education or universal health care; it’s protection of the public from dangerous actors.

Despite what conservatives like me say about liberals, this position is not bleeding-heart or emotion-driven political rhetoric.  It is—in fact—very conservative from one perspective: what are we paying the cops and soldiers and firefighters for if they cannot protect us?  That’s a pretty logical libertarian argument, actually.  Classical libertarians would argue that the only legitimate purpose of the government was in fact protection.  So the belief is neither bleeding-heart emotionality, nor political unreasonableness.  The government’s fundamental job is indeed to protect its citizenry.

But, while logical, reasonable and rational, the belief that government should protect everybody equally, is nonetheless naïve, because it, like Marx, Engle and Bernie Sanders, are detached from reality.  Yes, the government should be able to protect EVERYBODY.  But, even if you believe it can (which is both legally and mathematically impossible), the fact is government doesn’t.  A wise psychologist once said: Don’t “should” all over yourself.  If the world worked the way it SHOULD, then no innocent people would ever be victimized by predators.  But every year about 1.2 million innocent Americans are the victims of violent crime perpetrated by predators the local, state and federal governments were unable to stop.  That is reality.

The difference between what the governments should do and what they actually do is about 16,000 murders, about 130,000 rapes, over 300,000 robberies, and over 800,000 aggravated assaults every year in America.  Between 1.1 and 1.3 million violent crimes occur in the United States every year, even though the government should protect us.  Now, that’s only about .38% of the population facing violent crime in any given year; so an argument could be made that the government is doing fairly well at protecting the other 99.6% of the Every Bodies.  Some other liberals make that argument.  But, again, as a conservative, I don’t look at everybody; I look at the ANYBODY.  I don’t even look at the 1.2 million victims.  I look at the one victim.  SELF­-Defense is about the one victim, who can be ANYONE protecting himself from becoming one of the 1.2 million.

"Why do you need a gun?"  Statistically, I probably don’t.  The probabilities are in my favor that I will never again have to pull the trigger on another human being: less than .4% of the population of the United States is a victim of violent crime every year.  So, the odds are with me, with you, with EVERYBODY that he or she will not be a victim.  Liberals look at the 325 million of everybody.  As a conservative, I look at the individuals; I look at the ANYbodies, whether that is in economics, education, health care policy OR personal protection.  Not everybody can be protected, which is okay, because not everybody is going to be a victim.  In fact, only a tiny percentage of everybody is going to be a victim of violent crime this year, so the odds are against any particular person being a victim.  This is the insanity of liberalism, Marxism and ends justifying the means slaughter of millions, by the way.  To hell with the individual being raped, murdered or assaulted; "statistically, the crime rate is really actually pretty low."  Some leftists don't care about the individuals that make up the society, they just care about the "society as a whole," aka the EVERYBODY.  The problem with that statistical thinking is that an individual SOMEBODY is going to be a victim.  In fact, 1.1-1.3 million SOMEBODIES are going to be victims of violent crime this year.  Each one is SOMEBODY else’s child, parent, sibling, spouse or loved-one.  For them, the violent crime rate is not .38 percent, it is 100 percent.

As a conservative, I am an individualist.  As an individualist, that is how I look at violent crime, from the perspective of the individual victim or potential victim.  The FBI says we have a violent crime rate of about 382.9 per 100,000 people.  But the 382.9 PEOPLE do not care about the rest of the 100,000.  To the victim of violent crime, the violent crime rate is 100% because violence is interpersonal, not statistical.  Liberals ask, “With a .38% violent crime rate, why do you need a gun?”  I carry a gun because that .38% represents 1.2 million INDIVIDUALS who are victimized by predators every year in this country, despite the best efforts of local, state and federal governments to protect each one of them.  I recognize Reality; the government is unable to protect everybody, and therefore ANYBODY can be the victim of violent crime—if they rely on the government to protect them.  I no longer expect the government to protect me.  I do it myself.  Even if statistically, and demographically, the odds of me having to defend myself from violent crime are incredibly remote, I still am prepared to protect myself because the government isn’t there, won’t be there and Constitutionally couldn’t prevent violent crime from happening even if they were there.

Thanks,

Soule

Easy6Training

PS: Besides which, I don’t have to explain why I need a gun.  Our second guaranteed freedom—immediately after the right to think, speak, write, pray, and express ourselves however the hell we want to—is the right to defend all the other freedoms if somebody tries to take them away.  Exercising this freedom requires no further justification than does attending a particular church, mosque or synagogue, protesting a politician, or writing this blog.  I do all of those however the hell I want to, because the Bill of Rights says I can, and that second freedom prevents anybody from stopping me;)

The Absence of Law and Order is Called WHAT?

This is, by any definition, the absence of order.  When the law enforcement community is castrated by political correctness and unable to prevent harassment and minor assaults on themselves, what hope do you have that they will help you?

What I think should happen: NYPD should go on strike until Mayor Bill de Blasio resigns or is recalled and a new administration and police commissioner are in place that will restore law and order in NYC.

What will actually happen:  good cops will continue to quit, because who would put up with this crap?  So instead of good cops, you have a hot head cop, who is going to shoot one of these morons.  That will start the first round of riots.  Pointing a super-soaker at a cop is not a good idea, you dumb asses, especially in times of limited visibility.  So, we're going to see dead kids with toy water guns in their hands, and people are going to scream, "Police Brutality!  They killed my poor little baby Thuggy McPunkerson, and he never did nuthin' to nobody!"  (Except point that toy gun at a cop about twilight).  Which is just another example of great parenting.  Oh, wait, I forgot where this is happening, what parenting?  The hot head cop will then be accused of using excessive force, he will be fired, but he probably won't be prosecuted because the D.A. knows he won't get a conviction if he's honest, or simply because he needs cops to be on his side in his job of prosecuting actual criminals, so the cop will go free but have to find another career.  This will start the second round of protests of people screaming "institutional racism" that protects cops who kill innocent kids with nothing but toy guns; those protests will rapidly devolve into total riots and the inevitable burning down of a neighborhood drug store for some reason.  The cops will get blamed for that too.  So more of them will quit.  Now response times have tripled or quadrupled in areas that are already under-policed.

Conclusion #1: If you're a cop, you should quit, because this is total crap.  This will escalate to beyond water to gasoline or other chemicals.  These water runs are just rehearsals.  And when you defend yourself from Thuggy McPunkerson with a bucket of gas, you will be the bad guy.  Quit.  Let these social justice warriors have exactly what they want.

Conclusion #2 If you are a law abiding citizen, expect even fewer cops to be around when you need one in the coming days, weeks, months and years.  You better learn to get dangerous, folks, because the boys in blue ain't coming!  Even if they were coming, they're not allowed or willing to do anything for you, because as soon as they shoot the bastard trying to stab you, some crying crackhead's mother will be on the news screaming "racism," costing the cops their livelihoods, careers and pensions.  Why would they risk that to stop somebody with a knife a whole 21 feet away?  If your sense of personal safety and security before the Obama years was based on the belief in law enforcement being there to protect you, that was probably pretty naive.  If your sense of personal safety and security is based on that belief today, you are simply batshit crazy delusional!

The absence of law and/or order is anarchy.  Mass migration away from the law enforcement profession by good officers is leading to anarchy.  Castrating law enforcement officers who stay on the force, by not allowing them to do their jobs and allowing blatant disorder to rule the streets, is also leading to anarchy.  Having seen actual anarchy a few times, I can tell ya, things get real sporty for the sheep when there ain't no sheepdogs anymore.  The only sheep that survive in those situations are the ones with horns.  "If you're gonna be a sheep, you better be a bighorn sheep!"  One scary fact to close with is this: the United States has about 23,000 fewer law enforcement officers today than it did in 2012.  It's like SGM Plumley said:  "Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves!"

Like and share!Soulewww.easy6training.com

Cowards

My frustration with naïve idiots is at an all-time high.  Their desperate desire to wish away violence is understandable for children, but for adults who live in the imperfect world of mortal humans, such desire, laudable as it may be, is basically mental illness.  It is a delusion to believe that mortal beings, subject to the vicissitudes of life and death, can ever truly achieve a pacifist Utopia.  As long as we are mortal creatures, and are vulnerable to death, evil people can prey upon that mortality or the fear of that mortality for evil purposes.  If we were invulnerable immortal creatures, violence would be rather unproductive for predators.  But we are mortal, we are vulnerable, we can be killed, maimed and harmed, so living in a fantasy world where that is not the case is literally lunacy.  Such beliefs about the nature of the world would be considered schizophrenic if it wasn’t for the fact that such a HUGE number of young people all suffer from this shared psychosis.

I long for the days of dropped gauntlets.  Not just because I think many true indignities would be solved rather promptly—and many illusory indignities of mock victimhood would not seem quite so important to the affected snowflake—but also because it would be a way to demonstrate conclusively to every whining coward afraid of death just how the world really works.  See, every time I hear one of these lunatics on the news, inevitably supported by the majority of journalist cowards as the obvious opinion, I want desperately to slap them across the face with a glove and explain the simple truth of life.  “You are allowed to live in this shared delusion of a ‘safe space’ called a civilization because of the largess of men like me.  Violent men keep you safe, because violent men are constantly trying to do you harm.  You don’t see it, you don’t believe it, but I assure you it is true.  And all that would be necessary to shatter your shared delusion is for men like me to either, 1) stop, or (far worse for you), 2) switch sides.”  At this point I often wonder what they would do when I put a knife to their throats, purely for demonstration purposes.

Fundamentally, though it has become a trite way to sell t-shirts, there really are only three kinds of people in the world: prey, predators and protectors.  The prey cannot exist without the protectors.  The predators cannot exist without the prey.  The protectors could exist rather more comfortably without either.  And they often fail.  The victim of every violent crime is a victim because they relied on a protector to stop the predator instead of being self-reliant.  This week, in a move that the cops I work with find concerning, but I find an amazing statement of hope for a civilized society, a protector was charged with eleven crimes because, fundamentally, he was a coward.  He took a job, swore an oath and collected a paycheck to serve as a protector of children in Parkland, Florida.  He defrauded his community.  Thus, we can’t even rely on the protectors when they are right there.  The Virginia Beach Police Station was right across the street from the office building that nut job shot up last week; twelve victims-in-waiting died because they believed a protector was right across the street ready to save them.  The shared delusion of a ‘safe space’ in which you are invulnerable to violence is madness.  It will get you raped, maimed or killed.  You have to be your own protector.

The real world, outside your bubble of false-security, is indeed a scary place.  But, once you take responsibility for your own safety, and you confront that fear by popping the bubble, you start liberating yourself from the terrors that lurk in the shadows.  Once you learn how to defend yourself, protect yourself, fight for yourself, you accept the presence of the fear, and you learn the skills you need to overcome the danger, instead of running away from the fear.  If you’re gonna be a sheep, be a bighorn!

Soule
Easy 6
www.easy6training.com