The Paradox of Non-Violence

First, I have tremendous respect for Gandhi and even more for Dr. King.  I consider them in an elite class of men in history who have been so inspirational as to earn the title of "Shepherds."  But, shepherds alone cannot protect a large flock of civilians; they need sheepdogs or they need sheep that are religiously committed to their non-violent revolutions.  I say religiously committed because non-violent revolutions only work at the strategic level, when public opinion of atrocities grows so disgusted with the powers that be that they change the system.  In the meantime, though, the atrocities continue at the tactical level.  In other words, many of Dr. King's followers, at the ground level where the protest lines met the riot cops, got maced, beaten with night sticks and some got flat-out killed.  That is the paradox of a non-violent movement; at the strategic level they can succeed in overthrowing evil systems, but at the tactical level non-violence is met with brutal violence.

The problem is that we see these truly rare examples of awe-inspiring men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Junior and we start to believe that their way is the best.  Well, hell, it probably is the best.  But, there is always a tremendous amount of suffering that goes along with such movements, and the leaders of those movements are willing to accept that suffering.  These are figures like Jesus Christ; non-violent martyrs willing to change the world through their sacrifice are hard to find.  They are very rare, and thus non-violence rarely defeats evil.  Evil almost always has to be confronted by violent men willing to do violence on behalf of innocent people.  In other words, the shepherds' attempts to convert the wolves to sheepdogs only very rarely works; most of the time the wolves have to be fought off by "rough men willing to violence on behalf" of the sheep.

Forget about guns, forget about school kids, forget about mental health screening, forget about arming teachers, forget about the Constitution and forget about politics.  The historical facts are that evil is rarely defeated by non-violence, and then only with extraordinary leaders of profound moral and spiritual character, and then only at the strategic level.  Non-violence has NEVER defeated the lone madman.  Unfortunately, because of the examples of Gandhi and Dr. King, three generations of Americans have been brainwashed to believe that non-violence is the best method of defeating evil lunatics.  This is a dangerous delusional view of professional predators and evil madmen.  We have to stop believing this fundamental misunderstanding of non-violence, and stop believing that we have somehow become "more evolved"--as one well-meaning non-violent future victim argued to me--than The Greatest Generation.  That generation understood that evil must be confronted violently and that weakness only achieves great change when it is accompanied by internal strength of the likes of Gandhi or Jesus.  If you do not possess that kind of internal light--as I don't--you have to be willing to confront evil violence through the use of constructive violence.

Some residents of Mount Olympus (America) desperately want to believe in the non-violent approach because they desperately want to deny the fact that we are mortal beings.  They want to believe that we have moved passed the violence of our ancestors.  No REVOLUTION of thought can change our fundamental nature: we are predators who clawed our way to the top of the food chain to dominate a planet because our brains made us the most violent species on earth.  This is why Marxism failed.  This is why pacifists don't rescue hostages from terrorists.  Revolution can't change our corporeal nature, only EVOLUTION can do that, and despite what non-violent advocates (victims) preach, we have not evolved beyond our mortality in the last century.  Trying to legislate or regulate violence out of human nature is like trying to put handcuffs on a cobra for eating a rabbit.

The fact that we are mortal is what makes us susceptible to violence, or coercion by the threat of violence.  This is what professional victims do not understand about predators.  No amount of rules or potential punishments will stop a predator from feeding on prey.  I was in a class one day in graduate school talking about gun control with a number of people of all political persuasions, including one cop also getting his masters.  They were arguing essentially that banning Timothy McVeigh's Ryder truck would have prevented the Oklahoma City Bombing.  So, I told them that they did not understand predators or violence.  The conversation went something like this.

With a bemused smile, I said to the one sitting next to me at the conference table, "I could snap your neck before the cop across the table could shoot me.  Now, he'd probably shoot me after I killed you.  But, how does that help you?"

Their eyes got wide.  The smart ones started accusing me of all sorts of barbarism.  The dumb ones were the ones who scared me; they didn't believe I could do it before the cop across the table got to me (that's delusion for which tragically there is no cure except victimhood).  The one next to me, to her credit, said, "You could try."

I smiled and answered, "Bingo.  That is the only solution.  YOU are the only person that could prevent me from perpetrating violence upon you.  The criminal justice system will punish me, but what good does that do you?"  She got it.  The smart ones who thought I was barbaric, started to understand, all I had to do was convince them that there are indeed barbarians in our midst.  The dumb ones, who believe they live in an impregnable bubble of police and security forces, are beyond reason and will not believe that they are unsafe until they are victims of violence.

It is especially delusional when you see that the trained law enforcement officers of Coward County, Florida had less guts than the 14 year old Junior ROTC Cadets who had to do the job of the Sheriff Deputies.  Even when they are willing and not part of an organization of cowards being led by an incompetent moron like Scott Israel, the fact is cops are not capable of protecting you.  Our criminal justice system is not designed for them to protect you, it is designed to punish the guilty after they commit their crimes.  Which means, EVERY potential victim must be prepared to fight for their life.  I don't care what your stance is on guns or politics, I am talking about the predatory nature of professional criminals.  They don't see you as anything but a target or an obstacle to their goal.  If you are not prepared to defend yourself with your bare hands, with an improvised weapon, with a blade, with a firearm, with your car if you're being carjacked, or with a rifle if you have one, then you are living in that delusional bubble.

Remember, evil is rarely defeated by non-violence.  It is great to revere the exceptions to that historical fact like Dr. King and Gandhi, but do not confuse the exceptions for the rule.  The Concentration Camps of the Third Reich were not liberated by pacifists, folks.  Rough, violent men willing to cut through swaths of German human beings are the ones that liberated Europe and rescued the survivors.  Violence can be used for good or evil, Navy SEALs putting bullets into bin Laden was not an act of evil, but it was certainly an act of violence.  Unless you have the moral constitution of a Gandhi and are willing to suffer the slings and arrows, I'd recommend learning how to shoot some arrows back!

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Thanks,
Soule
Easy 6

PS: Now pissing off the delusional future victims on Twitter @easy6training

"Tragedy Porn"

Aaron Sorkin titled an episode of The Newsroom "Tragedy Porn."  School shootings are turning into that for America.  I'm writing this two days after the Parkland, Florida School Shooting.  I don't want to write about the politics of this phenomenon except to say that both sides are wrong and they better start compromising on something to solve this insanity.  What I really want to write about is some philosophy of violence ideas, which are jumbled all together in my head, so forgive me if they're incoherent.  I also want to write about a bizarre historical fact:

The Treaty of Westphalia.  I don't know much about it from the seventeenth century Catholic/Protestant perspective, but I know a bunch about it from the twenty-first century Homeland Security perspective.  Every homeland security class I took in graduate school started with a paragraph about the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the religious wars in Europe back in the 1600s.  According to my professors, warfare became the sole purview of nation-states as a result of the Treaty.  That held true for over three hundred years, until the age of modern terrorism began.  Some of my fellow Homeland Security scholars believed that 9/11 was the end of the Westphalian age, and that Osama bin Laden was the first non-state actor to really conduct full fledged warfare on a nation-state in three hundred years.  Whether they are right or I am about the timeline, the fact is that now self-radicalized and lone-wolf affiliates of nefarious non-state networks can and do carry out devastating attacks inside nation-states.  The example of 9/11 was inspirational to deranged people of many stripes.  Mass casualty attacks are no longer the exclusive province of nation-states.

Seeing lightly armed civilians kill three thousand innocent people in one day is impressive as a military man; it is horrifyingly inspiring to dangerous lunatics.  It's an example of what can be done.  I think that is one component of this phenomenon.  I think another component is the absence of violence in our homes.  Yes, you read that correctly.  The problem is not that we have too much violence, the problem is that we don't have enough of the right kind of violence.  Shocked?  If I failed to show a firearm the proper respect it deserved when I was a kid (who grew up around unlocked guns hanging on a rack in the hall), my step dad Ray Johnston would whip my butt.  When I was eleven years old, my mom slapped me across the face for calling her a cuss word, so I slapped her back.  My dad chased me with a Buick through an alfalfa field trying to run me over for hitting a woman until my mom finally convinced him that all I really needed was a good ass-whipping.  That was the last spanking I ever got, because by then I had learned a very valuable lesson.

The lesson was not that violence is inherently wrong.  Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, that is irrelevant because human beings are an inherently violent species.  We did not gain dominion over this planet by being pacifists.  The lesson my Korean War Vet step dad was teaching me was that violence is never to be used on the innocent.  Violence is not the enemy, violence is a tool that can be used for good or evil.  Pacifists did not liberate occupied France or the concentration camps, violent men in a just cause did.

This is the second cause of this phenomenon.  Young human beings are naturally, genetically programmed through evolution to be violent.  But for about the last thousand years, in the West we've had control mechanisms to channel that violence to productive pursuits.  Without getting into the moral arguments about whether conquering the New World was "good" or "bad," it was a channel for violent young people.  National wars channeled it too.  Chivalry controlled it as well.  None of these were perfect, obviously, because there was still atrocious violence to anybody who wasn't a white male.  I'm not saying there is a perfect solution, because there is not, because of the very nature of human violence.  What I am saying is that in the post-Westphalian era, when lone-wolfs and self-radicalized lunatics see examples of mass casualty events easily achievable, the absence of controls on human children will lead them to being more savage.  But since the Baby Boomer Generation in the West, we have decided to ignore our basic nature.  The hippy fruitcakes of the 1960s said that the real enemy is violence itself, not evil.  They surrendered any constructive violence as anathema, and thus let evil run unopposed.

What I am saying is that some of these kids probably needed to have fathers who would chase them with Buicks through hay fields.  Generation X, my generation, was in general bigger pussies than our parents, and now the Milennial Generation is skinny-jeans wearing basket cases who don't even know what sex they are.  Yet, inside each of them is a barbarian.  But unlike those of us lucky enough to have been raised by members of The Greatest Generation (like my step dad), they have never been taught that it is okay to be violent, but you have to channel that into constructive pursuits.  Like hunting.  Like ranching.  Like fighting terrorists.  Like boxing or martial arts.  We have a generation of thirty year old Americans who have--with the exception of the tiny fraction who join the military--never been punched.  They are castrated socially, but biologically they are still predators.  Then, when they are put under stress, they crack like eggs and unleash helacious violence on innocent people.

Knights in medeval Europe, and Samurai in Feudal Japan, were taught extreme violence.  But they were also taught codes of conduct that tempered and controlled their violence.  Soldiers today are extremely good at violence, but they are taught discipline in basic training courses.  Professional fighters are very effective at unarmed violence, but they are taught self-restraint in the dojo.  We have a parenting problem in America.  Emasculated hippies and their flower-power dingbat birthing partners desperately try to ignore the fact that we clawed our way to the top of the food chain in a bloody struggle that made us the ultimate alpha predators on this planet.  Now, if you ignore that nature in your children, you are raising barely tamed barbarians.  But, if you nurture it and channel it into something productive, you can raise Seal Team Six members, who use violence not at random lashing out, but in precise and controlled ways to protect innocent people by annihilating evil people.

Violence is not the enemy, folks.  Uncontrolled, undisciplined children who have never been taught to harness their human biological urge to be predators are the enemy.  Start disciplining your future mass shooters.  Make them war heroes, or astronauts seeking the next frontier, or Olympic athletes.  Get them into a dojo that will teach them the philosophy of when to use the skills of fighting, not just how to use them.  Teach them that violence is sometimes necessary to stop evil.  Pacifists did not liberate the concentration camps in Hitler's Europe, rough, violent and brave men willing to kill to protect innocent people did.

I'm a violent person by nature.  I was a very angry teenager from a dysfunctional home life and very easily could have been one of these mass shooter kids.  I had very violent fantasies when I was a high school kid about things like this.  But I was in a martial arts school that was teaching me self-control and self-restraint in addition to self-defense.  My adopted family taught me that violence is not inherently evil and that it is usually the only way to defeat those who are truly evil.

So, having said all of that, I hope our politicians do something to help identify these mass shooters before they start pulling triggers.  But since that is relying on politicians to do something sane, I would also recommend every American learn to protect themselves.  Learn how to be a hard and resilient target.  Accept that since 9/11 we live in a far more dangerous world than we did during the Cold War.  Most importantly, please don't raise your children to be hippie pacifists, because the only hope we have of defeating terror is by having courage!

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Soule
Easy 6

"Concealed Carry Clothes" are Crap!

Please watch this video:

https://www.facebook.com/1702322993391740/videos/1935418573415513/

What do you think?

Let me preface this by saying that I agree with the point they are making, that purses are not for carrying guns (or laptop bags, guys).  My absolute hard and fast rule for my students about carrying a gun is that it has to be carried on their person; I discussed various methods of doing so in detail previously, so I will not re-hash that here.  Having said that, I have a big problem with this video, because it is trying to teach that concealment is critical and attainable no matter what a person wears.  While that is probably true, it is an utterly stupid message to be sending to people.  CONCEALMENT IS NOT THE POINT OF CARRYING!!!!!  Gun fights happen in fractions of seconds; if you have to partially undress to draw and fire a gun to protect yourself, you are carrying a dumbbell in your underwear and have no concept of gun fighting.  I challenge her to get to any of those guns in one second or less in that video.  Or try to do so with one hand while fighting off an attacker.

This is backwards thinking when carrying a gun.  No matter what holster companies, “concealed carry clothing” companies or ultra-compact pistol manufacturers tell you, the most important thing in carrying a concealed firearm is NOT how concealed it is!  The most important thing is how well it can save your life.  I’ve talked about this in terms of capacity and caliber of a gun (i.e. “firepower”), and in terms of carry methods (i.e. “efficiency”).  Both of these principles are far more important than the ease with which a firearm can be concealed.  This is because both of these factors have actual impacts on fighting with the gun rather than hiding the gun.

A gun that you cannot access, draw, aim and fire is not really a functioning firearm.  It’s just pocket litter, or jewelry, providing the wearer a false sense of security or an accessory designed to make the wearer feel good, but nothing more.  This is the same outcome as taking a gun loaded with blanks out for self-protection.  The whole system has to work in order for you to defend yourself.  The gun is just one part of the system.  The holster, the ammunition, the concealing clothing all have to work with you to get the gun out and engage a violent criminal in self-defense.  The most important thing in the system, though, is your training.  Training is not just how to shoot the gun, it is not even just how to draw from concealment, present the firearm and engage the hostile; those are just the physical aspects of it.  There is also a mental component to training; thinking through a situation, having situational awareness, knowing what to do.  The other aspect of training is the most important: will and perseverance.  So, there is a lot more that goes into effectively engaging in armed self-defense than just concealing a gun somewhere on your person where nobody can see it.  How you conceal a firearm is only one aspect of being a concealed weapon carrying citizen, and it is the least important aspect of the whole system.  Instead of focusing on how to hide the gun, you should focus on how you would deploy and use the gun if you needed to.  How do you do that most efficiently?  How are the obstacles (clothing, seat belts, car windows, holster retention devices, et cetera) going to hinder you from efficiently securing the gun, drawing the gun, presenting the gun and engaging with the gun—with one hand, in a fight, in one second or less?  See, that is gun fighting, and doing nothing but concealing a handgun somewhere on your body behind three layers of clothing, holsters and retention straps—that require you to use two hands and hop on one foot to get a chance of getting it out in five seconds—is not gun fighting!  You would honestly have a better chance at certain self-defense distances just using your bare hands rather than trying to fight through all of those obstacles to get to a gun.

That realization right there must beg the question, then, in our minds: Why the hell am I carrying a gun if I have it concealed so well that I can’t use the damn thing when I need it?  Don’t get me wrong, if somebody tackles me from a blindside and I don’t see them coming, I’m going to have to fight bare handed long enough to get to the gun, and I think everybody should have enough empty hand skills to do that.  However, the goal of carrying a gun should be to protect yourself and those you care about.  If that tool is not making self-protection more efficient for you, then why carry it?  You are not accomplishing anything to increase your safety.  If you think the word “concealed” is the most important word in the phrase Concealed Carry, you are totally missing the point of having a gun on you.  You are carrying JEWELRY, and a bad person will beat you senseless, unconscious or to death while you get HIS new gun out of your concealed carry garments so he can pick it up and go victimize somebody else.

This video is not wrong in what it’s trying to say, that guns must be carried on the person in order to be secure; if a purse snatcher grabs your purse, and you have a gun in it, you just armed a criminal.  But, the makers of the video demonstrate everything else terribly.  If you are going to carry a concealed handgun for self-protection, you have to have it accessible enough to be useful in protecting yourself!  Stop buying “concealed carry” crap!  The same amount of money you spend on that crap would be better used buying ammunition to go practice with on the range!  You only really need one holster for the weapon you are going to carry concealed, and you need to wear it all the time, and you need to practice drawing the gun from the holster under concealment and engaging targets at the range.  Stop buying every accessory some gun-toting seamstress can devise to hide a gun so efficiently it takes a safe cracker to get to it.  Instead, start figuring out how to overcome that crap that hides the gun, so if--God forbid--you ever had to actually USE a gun, you could get to it.  Remember, the most important part of carrying concealed is CARRYING, not concealing!

What do you guys think?

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Soule
Easy 6

Concealed Carry Fashion Part 2

Last weekend I talked about the various methods of carrying concealed with their advantages and disadvantages.  I start with the framework of wanting to be able to defend myself effectively and efficiently with a firearm, which means I have to carry a gun in a way I can get to it easily and present (draw and point) it for engagement efficiently.  This mentality is thinking from the gunfight backwards to the way you carry, rather than starting with a method of concealed carry, a concealable gun and then thinking your way forward to a gunfight, as the concealed carry accessory industry would prefer.  The conclusions I reach are that, while there are a lot of ways to carry concealed, only a few are useful for a gunfight.  Best to worst: Three O’clock Carry, Four O’clock Carry, Appendix Carry, Shoulder Holster Carry (vertical) and Small of the Back Carry.  It is inefficient to carry in a pocket holster or an ankle holster.  Lastly, it is flat out dangerous to carry in a cross-draw holster, a horizontal shoulder holster or in a purse/satchel off the body.

The second aspect is carrying an effective tool.  This is very tricky, because a .22 caliber Derringer is more effective than nothing, and a Desert Eagle .50 caliber is highly effective but not very easy to carry concealed.  So, it is always a compromise between firepower and concealment, and if you add in the other variable of capacity, you have a three dimensional scale.  So, to simplify, there is a general rule: carry the most powerful, highest capacity weapon you can effectively conceal.  That is a basic principle of a gunfight, which is contradictory to what the firearms accessory business is trying to sell you.  They are trying to sell you products that compete on concealment rather than firepower.  That is amateur thinking; that is a victim with a gun, not a gunfighter.  A gunfighter wants to get to the gun as quickly and efficiently as possible; the “concealed carry fashion industry” sells things that completely ignore those goals.  The products they sell either have no retention, and you have a gun rattling around in the lining of your jacket/bag/fishing vest, or they have multiple straps that you need two hands to undo in order to get access to the firearm.  Both of these reduce the efficiency of drawing and engaging with the weapon.

Worse, they look like exactly what they are.  Here is a general rule of thumb in life, if you are walking around town wearing an NRA hat and a khaki fishing vest, you are not carrying concealed!  You have a spotlight on you with a little cartoon bubble saying, “Look at me, I have a gun and a Concealed Carry Permit!”  Trust me, I know ten guys that dress that way and I just shake my head.  It is extra ridiculous because these are the guys that practice the least with their firearms.  These are the guys that take the gun to the range once every other year.  These are victims, in other words.  If I was a bad guy with a knife and I wanted a gun, then that is where I would be getting one.

Therefore, the two biggest mistakes you can make when carrying a concealed carry handgun are: to cover up a pistol with a bunch of “I have a gun” clothing, or cover it up with clothing designed to conceal a gun so effectively that you can’t get it out if you need it.  So, like with the firepower vs. concealment spectrum, you have to find a compromise in how you dress between concealing the gun and using the gun.  Sometimes, as I’ve said, I am required to wear things that make concealment very difficult.  In that case, I consciously choose to violate my own rule and stick my little .380 ACP in a pocket holster in my pants pocket, because gunfights are percentages games, and having the little pocket pistol is better than not having anything.  But, at those times, I am uncomfortably aware that six rounds of .380 ACP in a pocket holster is far less firepower than nine rounds of 10mm or eight rounds of .45 ACP, but sometimes the requirement for concealment overrides the benefit of a higher caliber pistol, and you have to compromise.

I want to make the point here, though, that such occasions are the exception not the rule.  It is knowingly taking a greater risk than carrying a .45 at the three o’clock under my jacket.  There might be good reason to take that increased risk, but I do not get into the habit of doing so.  I recognize that I am temporarily putting myself at a disadvantage by doing it, for the sake of going to a wedding in a tuxedo or going to a luau on a beach in shorts and a t-shirt.  I do not compromise firepower and capacity on a daily basis, even though there is a greater risk of exposing the firearm.

Which brings me to my second tangential paragraph: exposing a firearm is not the end of the world.  The gun fashion industry would have you believe it is the worst faux pas imaginable.  It is not.  But, even if it was, who cares?  Carrying a gun concealed is considered by most liberal idiots to be a massive faux pas already; exposing it inadvertently is not going to offend anybody who isn’t already offended.  If some liberal idiot who knows nothing about guns for some reason sees a gun and has a panic attack, you cannot control that.  If you take self-protection and protection of your loved ones seriously—which is true of everybody who carries a gun—then that priority overrides considerations of breaching etiquette.  These gun magazines that say exposing a gun is the absolutely worst thing you can do, ever, are staffed with people who have obviously never been…you know, shot at!  I have inadvertently exposed a firearm on numerous occasions; nobody has peed themselves and had a nervous breakdown.  I have deliberately walked around open-carrying on thousands of occasions and, except a few sideways glances, no negative consequences have ever occurred.  Worrying about not offending some anti-gun idiot should not cause you to reduce your ability to win a gunfight; remember, the life you save may be that anti-gun idiot’s.

Okay, back to concealing clothing.  If you start from the concept I described first, which is dressing for a gunfight rather than trying to gunfight in how you choose to dress, then there is yet another basic compromise you have to make and still be fairly fashionable: length versus fit.  You can always conceal a gun if you wear long and loose clothing like fatigue pants and a fishing vest, but you look either like Henry Blake from MASH or you look like some wannabe Blackwater mercenary.  Either way, it is hardly fashionable, and in the case of the latter it is hardly concealed carry if your whole outfit is broadcasting “I have a gun on me.”  Wearing “concealed carry clothing” like the vests with the sewn-in holsters, is also not very fashionable, nor is such clothing efficient for getting into a gunfight.  But, you can still conceal a pistol with decent firepower if you compromise either on shortness of clothing or tightness of clothing.  As a general rule, you cannot wear short and tight clothing and also conceal a—powerful, high capacity—handgun in a manner that is gunfight-efficient.  Basically, ladies and "gentle" men, while you can wear skinny jeans and carry a gun concealed, you can’t do it while also wearing a halter top!  In other words you will have to make a compromise on your fashion for your personal defense.  Basically, you can sacrifice one of the two: you can wear tight clothes, but they have to be long (think Trinity in The Matrix), or you can wear short clothes, but they have to be loose (think baggy cargo shorts).

So, after much compromising between carry methods and concealment, between firepower and concealment, and between fashion and concealment, I realized the best solution to all of these compromises for what I like to carry (.40, .45 or 10mm) and how I like to carry (3 o'clock or vertical shoulder holster) dictates how I dress.  I have to wear a hip-length coat.  That can be a car coat, a pea coat, a suit coat or a blazer.  They can be fitted, but they have to be long.  They don't have to be overly formal, either.  While I have suits, wool blazers and sport coats, I also have a couple of western leather blazers, a couple light-weight cotton summer blazers, and I have several car-coat length jackets.  That fits how I carry, which is determined not by style or concealment, but by effectiveness in a gunfight.  I don't recommend going out and buying clothing that is specifically designed with holsters built into the panels like some super-spy jacket.  Or, dressing like Henry Blake from MASH.

Nope.  Just wear a blazer.  You can wear a blazer with jeans and a t-shirt.  You can wear a blazer with slacks and a dress shirt and tie.  You can wear a blazer with a turtleneck and a shoulder holster à la Steve McQueen in Bullitt.  Or, like me, you can wear a blazer with jeans, cowboy boots and a button-up.  You can wear them to almost any occasion without looking over-dressed.  I’ve even worn light-weight linen blazers to beach parties in Hawaii and still looked appropriate.

In the alternative, if you are a person who does not want to wear long clothes, then you have to wear loose clothes.  You have to wear loose clothing if you want to carry an effective weapon.  I can conceal my little .380 ACP in a short, tight suit vest, that is true, and I used to do that.  Then I got to thinking that if I am really worried about self-protection, and I own a bunch of higher caliber pistols, why am I trusting my life to a little pocket pea shooter?  Instead, if I want to carry the guns I want to carry, I had to start dressing in less fitted clothing.  That is the short but loose theory.  I know a lot of guys in Colorado that walk around all summer (and some even in the winter) wearing nothing but cargo shorts and T-shirts.  That can work, if you dress loosely enough to conceal a gun.  But, you can't dress in clothing that is both short and tighter fitting.  I have worn cargo shorts, a loose t-shirt and an open button-up over top of it in the summer, and that works fairly well for concealing three and four o'clock carry.  A summer-weight button-up doesn't work with a shoulder holster, Crocket, so don't even try.

So, my shopping trip to find a vest that was long or loose enough for me to carry concealed, was a failure.  It was not a failure because there were no vests that could conceal a gun, it was a failure because they would not conceal any gun I would want in a gunfight.  I realized that that is the difference between the mentalities.  One is self-defense thinking (i.e. dressing for a gunfight), and the other is fashion, or prioritizing concealment over everything else (i.e. dressing like a victim with a gun).  I also realized that if I ever have to get into a gunfight again, then I want a tool that has the capacity and firepower to give me the greatest opportunity to win that gunfight, which honestly is a rifle.  But, since I won't be concealed carrying a rifle, then I want a pistol that is powerful enough, carried efficiently enough (i.e. I can rapidly get it into the fight with one hand from concealment), and that has a high enough capacity to give me the best chance of winning that gunfight.  Therefore, as often as I am allowed by circumstance, I am going to carry a full-sized automatic on my hip or—if it’s longer than four inches—in a vertical shoulder holster.  This results in three methods of dressing, two of which don't make you look like a wannabe mercenary or Henry Blake: fitted clothing that is long enough to conceal a gun, or short clothing that is loose enough to conceal the gun.

Ladies, this includes you too.  How did Agent Scully carry her sidearm in The X-Files?  She carried in a belt-holster, under a blazer, on her body.  I know women’s clothing tends to be more tailored and form-fitting, but female detectives and female FBI agents manage to carry concealed on their person every bit as easily as their male counterparts.  Don’t buy the little blazers that end at your belly-button, though.  Remember, clothes can be tight or short, but they can’t be both.

Last thing: speaking of tailoring, find a tailor who is not an anti-gun idiot and will tailor the garment with you wearing a firearm.  A friend of mine used to manage a men’s store and two of his customers were in the executive protection business; they trusted my friend to tailor their clothes around their guns, radios and telescoping batons.  My friend was not an anti-gun idiot and did not have a nervous breakdown when these two came to get measured for suits wearing their "Batman Belts."  By the same token, if you are buying off the rack, wear your gun into the fitting room and make sure that the jacket you’re buying fits not only you, but also the concealed carrying you.

Please like and share,

Soule

Easy 6

Concealed Carry Fashion Part 1

I was looking for a Carhartt or similar vest today that was long enough to cover my pistol.  Now, I approach concealed carry differently than other people do.  To me, concealment is secondary to defensive shooting.  Which means, I want the most powerful handgun I can conceal, and I want to be able to present that firearm as fast as I can.  While there are many other ways to carry a firearm that are more concealed than how I carry, none of those allows rapid presentation of a powerful firearm in a gunfight.  So, I start from the gunfight and work my way to what I am going to wear rather than starting with what I am going to wear and figure out how to conceal a gun most covertly.  I see this as a defensive thinking mindset over a style mindset (which somewhat bothers me, actually), so I've described below a few ways to carry.

I always tell my students to keep the firearm on your person.  Never, never, never carry a gun in a purse or a laptop case or a satchel; if I steal any of those from you, I just got a gun.  Which means I am limiting myself significantly in how I carry a concealed firearm.  I can carry Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum in a laptop case.  Since you have to carry on your person--and this is really a non-debatable issue for me in my classes--you are reduced to a few ways of carrying a pistol and their advantages and disadvantages.  For why this is so important, please watch this great Youtube video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDwQCOJVXq4

The three o'clock (note: I'm writing as a right handed shooter, obviously left handed people this would be nine o'clock) is the fastest, most efficient way to present the gun from concealment; as opposed to a leg holster which is faster but open-carried.  Three o'clock position is where cops carry their sidearms for a reason.  It is where your arm is attached in line with the firearms.  However, it is also very difficult to conceal.  Width of the firearm is what determines how easily it conceals, and putting a hard metal object against your hip bone makes it stick out.  You can't effectively conceal a pistol with a t-shirt like this, regardless of what the commercials tell you.  Having said that, the reason I almost always carry this way is for the very important reason that I can draw the gun with one hand from behind a concealing garment very quickly and start to engage immediately.

Four o'clock is almost as good.  The gun's a little farther away, so a little slower, but still able to get it with one hand.  It is also easier to conceal carrying on the back of the hip and the curvature of your spine than on you hip bone.  It is conceivable to wear thin clothing and conceal on the four o'clock, but there is an extreme risk of exposing the gun when you tie your shoe, or reach for the top shelf, if you dress that way.

I am not a fan of appendix carry, personally, because I am not a twenty-two year old fashion model with a six pack, but if you are, it's almost as good as four o'clock carry.  Once you get to the gun, it is faster than four o'clock; concealment is a little easier, it is less likely to be exposed.  Having said that, the biggest problem I have with appendix concealed carry is that you MUST use two hands to get the gun out quickly.  If time is a factor, you have to grab the concealing garment upward with your weak hand to draw the pistol with your strong hand.  That's no problem as long as you are a far enough distance away from your attacker to make those two moves before he can close the distance.  However, violent crimes often don't happen at that distance.

Shoulder holsters: never, ever, ever, ever buy a horizontal shoulder holster!  First, the same thing is true of a cross-draw holster, you are presenting the grip of your gun to your opponent.  Mostly, however, it is a really bad day when the gun falls out of whatever doomed-to-fail retention strap it has fighting gravity, and hits the floor in public.  Plus, you are pointing a gun at somebody all the time behind you.  Guns don't "just go off," however it breaks a fundamental of firearms safety to never point a weapon at something you don't want to destroy.  Vertical shoulder holsters are another matter.  Vertical shoulder holsters are what I use to conceal full-size handguns.  Concealment is great (so long as you don't take off your jacket), and you can get to the gun with one hand.  Disadvantages are that presenting the gun is slow; you have to reach across your body and backhand the pistol forward.  My philosophy of shoulder holsters is that they are really good for full-sized handguns and weather allows concealment with a jacket.

The "12 o'clock" carry.  I can't even discuss this without cracking jokes.  In all seriousness, there's no need for this, as it has no greater advantage than appendix carry, with all of its strengths and weaknesses, but the risk of sticking a gun down the front of your pants is way more than I want to take.

The slightly-less funny ankle holster.  First of all, ankle holsters were designed for back-up guns, not your primary firearm.  If you carry a back-up, fine, put it on your ankle.  But otherwise, physics is against you.  You not only have to use both hands, you have to use one leg, to draw the gun.  Very slow.  Very complex series events to draw the gun, from a disadvantageous position when you get it out and start engaging.  And it does not really offer any advantages in concealment.

Instead, I recommend pocket carry.  I have a small .380 ACP caliber gun that I can carry in a pants pocket holster.  This is the total compromise of my philosophy of starting from the gunfight and working your way to what you're going to wear.  However, sometimes what you wear is dictated to you, like a formal occasion.  Then, rather than going unarmed, I carry the pea-shooter in a pocket holster.  The holster is the important word there.  Don't throw a gun loosely into pants pockets; they make special holsters and gun-mounted clips for pocket carrying of small pistols.  A gun rattling around in your pocket unsecured could lead to a bad day.  I wear this when concealment is absolutely essential, recognizing I have sacrificed firepower and speed of draw, but a small slow gun is better than no gun in a gunfight.

That brings us to the weak side cross-draw, the "ten o'clock."  The advantage is that you can get to the gun with one hand.  The disadvantages out-weight the advantages, however.  First, it is slower; you have to reach across your body to draw, and you have to present the weapon in a backhanded motion.  Second, it's very easy to expose a gun in this position.  As a result, third and most important, like the horizontal shoulder holster, you are pointing the grip of your gun at your opponent.  In a grappling situation, that is really bad.

Lastly, small of the back.  Tactically, it is every bit as good as 4'oclock.  It is massively uncomfortable if you have to sit for any length of time.  You can get to the gun with one hand.  You can draw relatively fast.  It is relatively good at concealment, except when reaching high.  I don't like that you can't see to re-holster, and re-holstering usually takes two hands, which is not nearly as big of a problem as drawing, but it's something to think about.  You cannot carry a very large thick (meaning, in general terms, powerful) handgun this way very comfortably.

In conclusion, I firmly believe that the three o'clock position is the fastest, most efficient way to present a gun.  I recognize that you have to dress a certain way to pull that off, and many people do not want to dress that way (including me sometimes).  And sometimes you can't dress that way for weather or occasion reasons.

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Soule
Easy 6

Philosophy

The problem with philosophy in self-defense is that it’s the wrong philosophy.  I do not mean that the opinions are wrong, I mean that the subject matter is not really self-defense philosophy.  In armed self-defense—which few people actually teach, but I am considering weapons instructors broadly—the primary focus of the training is on safety.  In my state, most of the people carrying guns around for “self-defense” have gone through an 8 hour class on firearms safety.  The main purpose of this class is to teach people how to safely operate a firearm on a shooting range.  It really instills a healthy respect for the capability of a firearm to do damage.  This on many occasions scares people into not carrying the gun.  This is not self-defense philosophy, it is sports mentality.  Shooting is a sport, and you take your equipment to the field in a bag, you load your ammo, and then you consciously engage your brain to switch to the task of shooting.  As I have written many times, the biggest threat in an ambush is the confusion.  Training to shoot when your brain is actively engaged only in shooting, not distracted by anything from the target, is not really training for self-defense.  It is good training for marksmanship, but marksmanship is only the very basic first step in self-defense shooting.  Sports and self-defense have nothing to do with each other; many people understand this in unarmed self-defense, but don’t recognize the same thing is happening in armed self-defense.

This is because they start over-focusing on the tool (the firearm) and forget the fundamental lesson of weapons training: I am the weapon!  The gun, the knife, the sword, the car, the aircraft carrier are not the weapon, the people operating these things have to be the weapon.  When people go from the martial arts mat to the shooting range, they lose a certain aggressiveness.  People believe the tool will make it easier to protect themselves.  That is only half true.  A gun makes killing an enemy physically easier than doing it with your bare hands, but it is still mentally as difficult.  Training in what the Army calls an “Admin” attitude—as opposed to a “Tactical” attitude—gets people complacent.  They are not complacent to range safety; my point is that range safety makes people complacent to the very unsafe experience of a gun fight.  It is a very confusing, chaotic and frightening experience.  Training to calmly stand on a range, take a deep breath, let it out, and slowly squeeze the trigger of a pistol to where it surprises you will allow you to hit bulls eye targets, but has nothing to do with training you how to defend yourself with a firearm.  In fact, it may actually make you less capable of defending yourself than somebody who does not go practice just marksmanship.

Weapons-based martial art systems usually teach the wrong philosophy as well.  A great example is teaching stick fighting to fight the opponent’s sticks instead of attacking the opponent.  Now, there are exceptional teachers out there who teach to use batons to break through the opponent’s guard and bash his scull in with a baton, but much of stick fighting is putting sticks in a ring to fight each other.  That’s not self-defense.  Or, training people to use a knife as a defensive—as opposed to offensive—weapon; cutting hands and arms to keep distance, trying to fence with it in essence.  Knives are good for stabbing people or slitting the throats of sentries; they are not a dueling weapon.  But, we start (I used to do this too), teaching hand to hand combat concepts with a blade instead of just stabbing the enemy until he’s dead.  Again, dueling is a sport mentality.  It was one hell of a sport back in its day, but it was still a sport.  That is not the right philosophy either.

Of course, traditional martial arts, by definition, totally teach the wrong philosophies for people who want to learn self-defense.  One, they teach a sport philosophy for fitness rather than self-defense.  Two, they teach to always walk away (“never throw the first punch”), the mindset of The Karate Kid’s Mr. Miagi.  Three, they teach eastern religions as a part of their martial arts.  None of these things is necessarily bad, and as I have said in the past, the study of traditional martial arts makes a more complete person.  But, these are passed off as “self-defense” and they are the exact opposite.  They are monastic tenets that come from the religious institutions involved in the founding of traditional martial arts.  These are not the concepts you need to master if you want to survive a deadly-force encounter or a real—not sport—self-defense situation.  These are pacifist philosophies, or at least mild-mannered-monk philosophies, that do not fully appreciate how to survive an ambush.  Ultimately, they are designed for self-mastery and not personal protection in the physical realm.  They teach some excellent conditioning skills, regarding how to use the different parts of the body as tools, but they don’t really train people to be the weapon.

Ironically—proving my point—I have said these things to people who are very good martial artists and they challenge me to a match in the ring.  I have always accepted on one condition: I would accept the challenge if they let me enter the ring with the things I carry every day for self-defense.  No really great martial artist has yet accepted my counter proposal.  That is exactly what I mean when I say that, in combat, winning is cheating.

If you are unprepared to kill somebody to protect yourself or somebody you care about, you are nothing but a victim waiting to happen, and you should stop reading this blog now.  If you are still reading, I will attempt to explain what the philosophy of self-defense really is.  It is combat.  Essentially it is doing whatever is necessary to get home to your family.  Combat is not a sport.  There is no such thing as a fair self-defense engagement.  Self-defense is violence.  You have to be the most violent in order to seize the Initiative, and remember that whoever has the Initiative at the end of a fight is the winner.

A real self-defense situation is one where the outcomes are life or death.  So, the real philosophy of self-defense is the same philosophy we teach soldiers facing life or death situations in combat.  You are either the winner or you are dead.  Beating the shit out of somebody is not self-defense.  Getting the shit beat out of you is also not self-defense.  Self-defense is when you stab the guy beating the shit out of you, kicking you in ribs on the pavement, ten times in the femoral artery until the blood stops spurting.  That is self-defense.  The philosophy behind it is the deeply held belief, in one’s core, that I am going home no matter what.  When you start from that belief system, then—and only then—all of the skills and all of the tools you learn how to employ in the physical realm of violence are useful.  The tools are added to a solid foundation in the actual philosophy of self-defense.  Self-defense is combat.  It may be interpersonal combat, but it is still combat, and the only way you survive in combat is getting the Initiative and keeping it. 

Now, does that mean that the only option you have is killing?  No, that is not what I am saying; what I am saying is that the person who is willing to kill to save his life has a better chance of surviving combat, regardless of how much violence he had to apply, than the person who is willing to get into some martial arts tournament.  You can use whatever amount of violence it takes to seize and maintain the Initiative.  But, if you are not willing to use lethal violence, then you are giving a violent criminal—who is perfectly willing to be lethal—an advantage over you; you have a weakness that can be exploited.  Now, we all have physical weaknesses; some people are stronger than others, some people have physical disabilities and limitations, that’s not what I’m talking about.  I personally have had way too many orthopedic surgeries in my life to want to get into a jiu-jitsu match on pavement.  What I am is a combat veteran who is perfectly willing to cheat my ass off to get home.  I am perfectly willing to kill a violent criminal who tries to hurt me or somebody I care about.  My physical condition might mean I lose, but I will not lose because of mental weakness.  If I die, I will die trying to kill the bastard and take him with me.  If you don’t have that mental fortitude, the willingness to be the most violent, then you will lose to those who are willing to be the most violent.

What frustrates me a great deal about modern America is that even people learning how to fight, are not learning about combat.  I firmly believe that the rise in terrorism in America since the 1980s is directly attributable to the pacification of our society.  In the 1950s, American men understood far less about fighting than MMA teaches today, but they understood far more about combat than the average martial artist is taught today.  Or what the average CCW holder is taught in an 8 hour safety lecture; the purpose of a gun fight is to be really dangerous, not safe.  So, we as instructors need to start training people in the philosophy of self-defense, the mentality of kill or be killed, instead of training them to be really athletic victims in life or death encounters.

Backwards Ideas

I harp on the concept of aggression a lot.  Aggression gets a bad name in society, which is probably justified, but a self-defense situation is not society, it is in fact the deliberate betrayal of the social contract that makes a group of people into a ”society.”  In that state of anarchy, where survival is at stake, aggression’s bad name goes out the window.

To survive an armed self-defense situation—or any self-defense situation for that matter—you must become the aggressor.  I tell my students that they have to develop a “switch” that goes from ordinary, mild-mannered citizen to warrior in a split second.  The easiest way I can teach that is to teach forward movement.  As the victim of a violent encounter, you do not have the luxury of initiating the altercation, otherwise you are a criminal.  This means that you have to TAKE the Initiative away from your attacker.  You do that by becoming the aggressor and moving forward; in other words: attacking your attacker.  You are not attacking somebody if you are moving backwards.

Which is the point of this blog post: never move backwards!  To prove my point I am going to give an example that on the face of it looks to disprove my point, but it illustrated a need for me to be clearer in how I explained a technique on the range.  I taught a class recently where I was demonstrating extreme close range presentation and firing of the pistol.  Extreme close range I define as arm’s length away.  That is essentially one yard—depending on your height—and within gun-grappling range.  The technique was how to get into a good Weaver Stance (which all three of my students actually preferred to the Isosceles Stance for the first time) from that extreme close range.  Basically it entails drawing the pistol to the high compressed ready position and then extending your arms forward at the same time you step backwards with your shooting leg into the Weaver Stance, thus keeping the firearms stationary in space.  This seemed like a contradiction to my philosophy of aggression to some, because I teach from every other distance to step into the Weaver Stance with your non-firing leg, moving forward.  But, this did not violate the principle of not moving backwards, because, the firearm did not GO backwards.  It was the same distance from the target at all times.  The muzzle of the gun never moved rearward of its initial position in space from the high compressed ready, which is key.  The students eventually understood that the pistol was not moving backwards, even though I was moving my leg backwards into a better shooting position, and extending my arms forward simultaneously.

So, I use this as the exception that proves the rule, even though it’s not really an exception, because the gun doesn’t move backwards.  Other than that situation, I always advocate moving forward, either stepping into the Weaver Stance with the non-firing leg, or stepping outward (not backward) into the Isosceles Stance, to get ready to move forward.  What I like about the Weaver is that I have started to move forward immediately, starting the fight for the Initiative immediately, instead of an intermediate side-step.  What annoys me about some instructors is they miss the point of combat, which is all about Initiative, so they talk about drawing while retreating or even drawing while falling backwards.  That may be cool gunslinger acrobatics, but it misses the point that combat is fundamentally a struggle over Initiative.  That is why I always advocate moving forward into the target while engaging, then closing with and slicing through the target’s spine to get out the other side.  That is the “switch” that has to be thrown.

The easiest way I have found to train this is to throw the switch with your feet.  When your foot takes a first step in the direction of the enemy, you have just begun to take back the Initiative from the attacker.  This is what I mean by becoming the aggressor.  Anybody that is advocating drawing the pistol while retreating, or finding cover to get into a protracted stalemate exchanging shots with a violent criminal, does not understand how important Initiative is in combat.  Lots of people have argued with me that the advantage of the gun over a knife is that it allows standoff.  I will say, though, that if you are engaging another person with a firearm, that standoff is moot, and then you have to think of it like a knife fight in a phone booth.  You stab into the body of the other person as fast and as brutally as possible, over and over again, seizing the Initiative from him.  It is all a battle for Initiative; whoever has it at the end of a fight has won.

Armies rarely attack each other at the same time.  Usually, one attacks and the other defends.  When they do attack at the same time—something called a “meeting engagement”—there is an intense battle for the Initiative, then one gets the upper hand and starts pushing the other backwards.  If you are going backwards, you are losing ground, you are losing coordination and agility, and you are just overall LOSING.  So, refuse to go backwards.  See yourself as the aggressor, slicing through the enemy like a hot knife through butter.  The closer you get to him, the more accurate your fire becomes.  The more accurate your fire becomes, the faster you can fire, the greater volume of accurate fire you can achieve, the less resistance you will face; those are the factors that make up what the military calls “violence of action.”  If you ever have to defend yourself with deadly force, you want to do it with as much speed, shock and violence as you can muster; let your fear turn to resolve and meanness to kill the bastard trying to kill you.  An interesting fact is that women sometimes have a hard time accepting this “switch”—until they become moms.  Moms instinctively will throw this switch to protect their kids.  Think like momma bears at all times, though, to save your own life too.

Anybody that teaches you to retreat in the face of a violent situation, is fundamentally teaching you to lose the battle.  Unless you are barricaded into a defensible position in your house during a home invasion, which I have described more as a “far ambush” than a “near ambush,” your best bet is to become the aggressor.  In the “near ambush” situations like a mugging or sexual assault or carjacking, it is far better to throw the switch, get mad, get mean, get violent and get HOME by going through the spine of the assailant.  So, stop listening to the people that talk about the draw and fire on the retreat.  One of the most important principles of unarmed combat that I learned in martial arts came from Professor David James’ of Vee Arnis Jujitsu, which is, “I can move faster forward, than you can move backwards.”  In other words, the person moving forward has more “speed, agility and ability” than the retreating party.  There is absolutely no difference between that principle of unarmed combat and the principle of an amphibious invasion force of several military divisions.  If an attacker gets you to start moving backwards, he has already won sixty percent of the battle.  If you are the one that is moving forward, then the enemy will be forced to either stand their ground and die, or retreat and flee.

So, become the aggressor.  To do that, throw the switch.  You throw the switch not just with your mind, but with your legs!  Get moving!  Taking the steps towards the enemy, and engaging with increasingly accurate fire, forces him to cede the Initiative to you and retreat.  If you finish a fight with the Initiative, it means you have won that fight.  Never move backwards, even if your leg moves backwards, your arms should move forward so that the firearm’s stays stationary in space.  If you have to reload, move sideways so that the muzzle is never moved further away from the enemy, then continue to move in and kill the bastard.  People that advocate a defensive posture in a “near ambush” situation will get you killed. 

Moving backwards is a backwards idea!

Soule (Easy 6)