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

Initiative

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

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

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

More on Active Shooters

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

Cowards and Psychopaths

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

Virtues

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

"B****, I OPERATE!"

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

Balancing Preparation vs Preppers

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

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