Chapter 6
REALITIES OF DEFENSE SHOOTING:
THE AMBUSH ATTACK
Then YouTube came along.
The criminal didn’t politely stand at twenty-one feet, graciously show his knife, then start running at his victim.
YouTube, along with the other video sharing sites on the internet, started showing dashcam and surveillance camera videos from all over the world. What they showed was something of a revelation to me: self defense incidents weren’t like what I’d been taught or envisioned. They were fast, violent, nasty affairs wherein the criminal didn’t politely stand at twenty-one feet, graciously show his knife, then start running at his victim. Instead he’d wait until he was within just a few feet and then suddenly - and without much, if any, warning - attack.
That was my wake-up call.
Hollywood depiction of violence bears little resemblance to the ugly, gritty world of predatory attacks.
BOY, WAS I MISINFORMED!
Even though I consider myself immune to fiction, Hollywood depictions of violence were a lot closer to what I’d imagined would happen than were those gritty videos. But as I watched video after video of people getting severely beaten - or even killed - I slowly learned that the reality of a criminal attack isn’t like what we’re shown in the movies or on television. What’s worse is that they don’t even have much resemblance to what many shooting instructors teach. That’s because the criminal attack usually happens faster, and with far less warning, than anyone really expects.
Being good at the wrong things isn’t being prepared.
After that, I confess I went through several years of being afraid that I wouldn’t be able to defend myself with the gun that was on my hip every day. Though I told myself my training was the best available and that my diligent practice reinforced my above average skills (hey, I was even winning local club matches now and again!), somewhere deep in my mind I knew that being good at the wrong things wasn’t being prepared.
I recommitted myself to training in ways that were congruent with what I was learning about real criminal attacks. The result is what you’re now reading.
EVIDENCE-BASED TRAINING
In the old days of self defense education - a mere thirty or forty years ago - the only basis for training in defensive shooting were the stories that people who had “been there” were willing to tell. Today we know that first-person accounts of traumatic events are rarely accurate8, 9 but back then we didn’t. We took them at face value, and so much of the defensive shooting doctrine from that era is based on participant’s flawed, subjective recollections. Much of that doctrine still persists in some quarters.
As time went by, technology and science came to our rescue. Technology in the form of ubiquitous video, like the police cruiser dashcams and video surveillance, made sure that more crimes were caught from an objective viewpoint. The internet played a role as well, because much of that footage ends up online where it can be seen by anyone. Today, any interested student of self defense can do a quick search and find hours of real-life video showing what happens when people are forced to defend themselves. What’s scary to the uninitiated is that most of those videos show not fights, but attacks - vicious, brutal, targeted attacks. Fights are polite in comparison to the way a predator extracts what he wants from his victim.
Ubiquitous security cameras preserve video of actual attacks for later analysis.
At the same time, we’ve learned a tremendous amount about how the body reacts to a lethal threat. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) says that we’ve learned more about the brain in the last ten years than we knew in all of recorded history up to that point10. This new knowledge includes revelations about how our brain makes decisions in critical situations, how it processes information, and what it directs the rest of the body to do when faced with a lethal threat. Because of this incredible progress in science we now know that there are specific natural reactions to a lethal threat, reactions which can’t be trained away or ignored11.
Any training program on which you embark must be evidence based if you expect that training to hold up in the face of an actual attack. Evidence based training must take into consideration the latest information, both what we know about how attacks happen and what we know about how the body reacts to those threats.
AWARENESS IS A FALLACY
One of the doctrines that came out of the dark ages of training was the idea that some level of generalized ‘situational awareness’ would keep you safe. There was a time when I too believed that, until I started to see the video evidence. It became clear that there was a serious flaw in that advice, a flaw of which even the least intellectually endowed criminal could take advantage.
The flaw is simple: you can’t be completely aware every minute of the day because you have a life to live. No matter how much attention you pay to your surroundings, sooner or later you’re going to need to read the menu or watch the movie or supervise your children or look into the eyes of your date. That’s life, and those distractions happen hundreds of times a day to even the best of us. (Frankly, if they didn’t I’m not sure I’d like my life all that much! Continual paranoia is not fun.)
This isn’t to completely discount the value of being aware of your surroundings, only to put it in perspective. You can’t be aware of everything around you all the time. You can be aware of some of the stuff all of the time, or all of the stuff some of the time, but not all of the stuff all of the time. At some point you’ll return to being human and pay attention to something else. That’s just natural.
What’s also natural is that this is the point at which you are most vulnerable and, not coincidentally, the point at which the savvy attacker will often choose to initiate contact. Superb situational awareness may only delay the inevitable; an attacker who is sufficiently motivated (i.e., there is something he really wants) to attack a person displaying good awareness may choose to bide his time, knowing that within a short period of time something will attract the victim’s attention - then he can strike.
No matter how aware you are, even if you’re always swiveling your head, sooner or later something will catch your attention, giving a predator the opening for an attack.
Criminals often set up their own distractions, like asking for the time or directions.
Criminals often set up their own distractions. While the victim is busy dealing with an innocuous request or conversation (“hey buddy, you got the time?”), the attacker makes his move. Situational awareness can only go so far.
A training regimen which assumes you will always have advance notice of an attack due to superlative situational awareness is fundamentally flawed. It assumes a set of conditions which are probably unlikely to be continually present even with the most conscientious person, and which can be manipulated to facilitate the attack.
AMBUSH: THE PREFERRED METHOD OF THE SAVVY CRIMINAL
Referring back to the work of Tom Givens, we find that the victim was almost always surprised by the attack. I refer to this as the criminal ambush: confronting someone suddenly and unexpectedly in order to commit a crime. Whether the criminal is physically concealed (waiting behind something) or psychologically concealed (obscured by social conditioning or distraction), he strikes when the victim does not know or expect that the attack is coming. The aim is to catch the victim off guard, and it usually works.
It’s a little uncomfortable admitting that you can be surprised, but you can be. I can be. I’ve watched some ardent proponents of the situational awareness defense concept, and I’ve seen many times in their daily lives when they’re distracted enough by things in their normal routine to be surprised. You need to come to grips with the idea that you may be starting ‘behind the eight-ball’ against your attacker.
This understanding, this realization and admission, is vital. As I noted previously, the ambush is the hardest attack from which to mount an effective defense. If you know ahead of time that you’ll be attacked, you can be proactive; you can get into the perfect shooting stance and draw your gun to the perfect sight picture and use perfect trigger control to fire the perfect number of rounds into a perfect group, thus ending the fight. (Or you could just run away before it happens.)
If you don’t know the attack is coming until it happens, all of that goes out the window. Your body, conditioned by the inherited survival instincts of the millennia, behaves in a predictable manner that you’ve probably never before experienced. You don’t get your perfect stance or perfect sight picture, and as a result of not training under such conditions, you can’t perfectly control your shots like you can on the shooting range. The result is an inefficient response that leaves you exposed to danger longer than is really necessary.
The skills necessary to mount a successful reactive, counter-ambush defense are very different than those used to initiate a proactive defense. As I think you’ll see in the coming chapters, what works for the proactive shooting doesn’t work for the reactive defense. However, the reverse is true - because what works when you’re in reactive mode still works when you do have a little preparation time.
Think about all the times when you might be surprised - like while taking care of your children’s needs, for instance.
Training for the ambush attack allows you to respond to the greatest number of incidents and is therefore the most efficient way to train.
THE COUNTER-AMBUSH TRAINING MODEL
Your defensive shooting training regimen should be based on a counter-ambush training model: reacting to an attack that is surprising, chaotic, and threatening.
It’s surprising in the sense that you didn’t know it was going to happen, largely because it happened when you were distracted by the normal happenings of everyday life. It’s chaotic, in the sense that you don’t know what’s going to happen next and are forced into reacting to what’s happening. It’s threatening, in the sense that it poses an immediate and otherwise unavoidable danger to your life or limb - and it’s a danger to which the correct response is shooting.
This surprising, chaotic and threatening event is referred to in the Combat Focus® Shooting program as a “dynamic critical incident.” That’s not a term I use because it’s impressive; I use it so that there is no confusion in anyone’s mind what I’m talking about. This is a specific kind of attack; it’s not a fight, as I’ve said, because ‘fight’ implies both consensual violence and a duration that’s longer than the typical crime. It’s a criminal ambush attack, a predatory attack, that’s usually over a few seconds after you recognize that it’s happening. It’s a very small slice of time, but it’s likely to be one of the longest six or eight seconds in your life!
DISTANCE AND THE AMBUSH
As I mentioned in the introduction, these attacks usually happen beyond two arms’ reach but - as Tom Given’s data shows us - usually within roughly 15 feet. If you think about it, that makes sense; the criminal attacker wants something from you, so he needs to get in fairly close proximity. (This, as opposed to the paid assassin who would simply shoot you from the shadows. Or blow up your car. Or poison your hamburger. You get the idea.)
Since criminals also often use distraction and misdirection to their advantage, they need to get within conversational distance to do so. This tends to explain the data that Givens has collected on those actual attacks his students faced.
The tower sniper or the mall terrorist or the active school shooters are the anomalies, the least likely of threats to face. That doesn’t mean that you should completely ignore the possibility of facing one of them, only that you’re much more likely to need to deal with the mugger coming around the back of your car and grabbing your door than the deranged killer with a rifle sniping at passers-by. The close-in ambush attack is the most common type of deadly force attack, and is thus the most likely kind of incident you’ll have to face. The rest of this book is devoted to helping you prepare for it.
Many attacks happen within conversational distance.