Lets take an extreme hypothetical situation:
1. Subject exits his car and proceeds to cross the parking lot to enter a grocery store.
2. Subject is attacked by a known, violent, felon in a manner that clearly poses a lethal threat.
3. Subject responds appropriately with deadly force, shooting the attacker with his licensed, concealed, handgun (this is clearly a “good shoot”, with lots of witnesses.)
4. Police respond and investigate.

So taken at face value this is triumph for law abiding citizens, concealed carry, and the 2nd amendment. Now let me start adding a bunch of strange equipment and behavior to our hero:
- His (primary) handgun is Desert Eagle .50AE with a laser and a flashlight.
- He has 5 magazines for his primary handgun.
- All of his ammunition is hand loaded and he made his own jacketed bullets to some exotic specification.
- He is carrying secondary and tertiary handguns, with reloads for each of them.
- He is carrying 4 folding knives (of legal length in the jurisdiction), of a type originally designed for sentry removal and issued to the navy SEAL teams.
- He is wearing hard body with rifle plates and a ballistic helmet.
- “Born to Kill” and “I am justice” are written on his helmet.

Admittedly, this is hyperbolically weird, but all of this gear is legal (at least for the sake of this argument.) In the eyes of the extremely paranoid he is “well prepared” to buy a pack of hot dogs at the grocery store, but a lot of people would say he is “looking for trouble.” Some of the people in the “too much gear for a shopping trip” camp are very likely to be the witnesses, responding officers, prosecutor, the jury, the media, and the general population.

A Boy Scout without a pocket knife is just wrong. I started carrying a pocket knife (even to school) when I was about six or seven years old. Every Cub Scout I knew had a pocket knife. When we were full fledged boy scouts we graduated to fixed blade knives, hatchets, and machetes.

So much of the great tradition of Scouting has been pansyfied to the point that it is no wonder that kids would rather play video games than go to the woods. If all of the scouting adventure is going to be nerf, they might as well just stay home.

Full force training. Certainly if we need to perform a skill under stress we should have some practice in that skill under stress. Ideally we would be training in as close as we can to “actual combat conditions,” but there are limits to how well we can simulate this environment, and more importantly the student needs some ability to perform the skills required before applying stress.

Relaxed Training. Is where you learn new skills. Ideally drilling parts of the skill in isolation and building to a complete technique. I can take a new shooter and scream “speed reload” at him until I am blue in the face and eventually the fumbling will accomplish getting the gun reloaded, but not in a timely or efficient fashion. This also holds true with combatives techniques. Until a technique has been rehearsed without resistance and time pressure it has very little hope of becoming consistent. If you can’t do it under perfect conditions what chance do you have under combat conditions?

Stressed in training, calm in reality. This an excellent goal, and from what I have observed: confident, successful, application of technique comes from first training the skill in a low stress environments and after achieving proficiency, then ratcheting up the realism. I completely agree that you ultimately have to progress to executing techniques in realistic scenarios under realistic stress if you want the best chance at executing successful techniques in the real world.

I know that this is kind of old news, but I am adding for completeness. I cannot fathom the purpose of this device. From the manufacturers website:

A LaserLyte original, the Pistol Bayonet is ready for any situation – or just looking cool on your favorite gun.

I can’t think of a situation where I need this, nor one where it would look cool. Some people have made the “weapons retention” argument, but I remain unconvinced. This is about as useful as a fish bicycle.

The reason they are useful for the police is because they are an effective low level of force. If you make the case that they are too dangerous for regular people to use then doesn’t that make them a higher level of force? I can see the defense attorney already:

“…the police then used a weapon on my client that is so dangerous, private citizens aren’t even allowed to possess it…”

When asked if he was advocating violence against the President, Broughton said he wouldn’t answer the question directly.

“I don’t care how God does it, I’m not going into further detail than that,” said Broughton. “It would be better now than later.”

So for all of the rhetoric about normalization, not hiding, etc. It turns out that this might not be the best spokesman for the gun rights movement after all. While I am not a fan of our current president, I think praying for his assassination is clearly over the top.

Disengagement. This is a complicated way of saying “running away” (or used preemptively, “don’t be there.”) Obviously this perfectly sound advice and I am in complete agreement that this a very good idea for staying out of both danger and legal trouble. It is not the ultimate trump card that some make it out to be simply because there are situations where you cannot run away from, either for practical reasons (no available path of escape) or moral reasons (running would mean you leaving your child or spouse to face the danger alone.) In terms of self defense as a private citizen we are always working towards disengagement, but we must recognize that there might need to be intervening steps between the beginning of the confrontation and our finally being able to disengage.

Deescalation. Deescalation is the process of being (or at least appearing to be) reasonable and or conciliatory, in the hopes of diffusing a potentially dangerous situation. This is what is known as “talking your way out” of fighting. Most people have some basic idea of how this works, and the better and more practiced at it you are the more applicable it becomes. I consider deescalation to be a core self defense skill and should get at least as much thought and attention as learning to shoot or fight. Unfortunately many situations cannot be deescalated through reason, compromise, or dialogue. This is where pacifism fails: some people are ideologically bent upon causing you harm and they are not going to be dissuaded by discussion.

Verbal Commands. A verbal command is a stated demand for compliance. This generally implies that there will be consequences for non-compliance and those consequences include the application of a higher level of force than verbal commands. I think this is where a lot of generic self defense curriculum goes awry, because if there isn’t a credible ability to use force after issuing verbal commands it simply amounts to a bluff. Should a subject comply with the commands then that might create an opportunity for using deescalation and/or disengagement.

Application of Violence. Hopefully, there was an opportunity in a developing situation to apply the previously mentioned steps and something (or some combination) was effective. Other times a situation can require the immediate application of violence because of the nature of the threat and the circumstances. Ideally the amount of violence will be the minimum that is sufficient to stop the attack. In the wider self defense community the martial arts purists seem to think that they can fight their way out of every situation (except for those that believe an armed assailant is instant death) and the firearms purists who believe that any physical altercation is justification for gunfire. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. As a general guideline, you will have an easier time (legally speaking) if you can stop an attack using something less than lethal force – even if you are not required by law to do so.

… It scared me to no end. It also pissed me off. If you all four hadn’t had guns, we would’ve had a completely different situation. Instead, you got all six of us tied up while you stole what you deemed worth jacking. What also pisses me off is that you were all black. Why the fuck would you feed the stereotype? I couldn’t see more than your eyes and a little bit around them, so I found myself racial-profiling out of fear. I stopped doing that, because I’m stronger and better than that…
…I work hard as an attractive woman to be intelligent and interesting, because I don’t like perpetuating negative stereotypes. I wish you would work just as hard to rid the world of the stereotype that black men should be feared because they’ll put a gun to your head and steal…

I cannot read this article without wondering if the author would have been happier if her home invaders were more racially diverse. Now for the gun rights portion of the post. When we talk about “normalization” or similar sentiments regarding gun rights, this is part of the audience we are trying to convince. These are people who worry about ethnically stereotyping the home invaders that victimized them. I don’t think they get reached by shock therapy (or even lobotomy.)

The idea that people would have some kind of practical (or tactical) answer to a home-invasion robbery (regardless of race) is totally alien to those of the authors ilk.