review

Unthinkable – Part 2

Posted on by Tim

I’ve spent a fair bit of time in this space discussing the disconnect between the way criminals approach the world and the way normal people (people like you) approach the world. Self defense is a matter of problem solving…but I don’t think there are a lot of resources that do a truly good job of explaining the problem that the law-abiding citizen is going to have to solve. The average Joe/Jane who carries a firearm does so to have an effective means of defending themselves from criminal assault…but very few have any understanding of how criminal predators actually function. Criminals, the vast majority of them anyway, are not random. They are not like a meteor falling out of the blue and hitting you on the head. As I tried to demonstrate with the series of previous articles, criminal attacks exhibit process, planning, training, deliberation, and application of past experiences to present circumstances.

The other half of Unthinkable is essentially a guided tour of the criminal mind, allowing you insight into the who, what, when, where, and why of criminal violence. William Aprill is a former police officer and deputy US Marshal turned mental health professional. He’s spent much of his adult life interacting with and studying the kind of people who generate those news stories that bewilder and horrify most normal people. In Unthinkable he gives you the benefit of his learning and experience in a series of easily digestible presentations on violent criminal actors, how they operate, and how to defend yourself against the worst case scenarios that a violent criminal actor may put you into.

Greg (left) and William (right) going over a safety brief before beginning the instruction on disarm techniques.
Greg (left) and William (right) going over a safety brief before beginning the instruction on disarm techniques.

If you’ve heard discussions about self defense before, you’ve heard the term “de-escalation” quite a bit but it’s often used out of context. De-escalation or a general commitment to staying out of trouble is a good default strategy but it’s really not the most applicable concept in the consideration of self defense against violent criminal actors. The golden ticket of self defense is de-selection.

William spent a bit of time explaining the concept of heuristics and further explained that these quick judgments are typically the criteria used by criminals in the selection of victims. To paraphrase William, criminals typically have a simplified go/no-go decision tree that usually precedes an attempted crime. They are making quick judgements about potential targets based on information that people are putting out into the world, usually without any conscious awareness of it.

If I asked you what you could determine about a person by watching them walk to their car in a parking lot I’d dare say most of you would respond that you couldn’t tell very much about them…but stop for a second and think about all the things you unconsciously recognize about them. Can you find any useful information about someone based on the watch they are wearing? Their makeup? Their clothing? How about the way they move their arms when they walk? How about something as simple as their gait? Think about an occasion when you watched someone carrying something heavy, or when you saw someone with a severe injury that limited mobility moving around.

When you stop and really think about it you come to understand that human beings are constantly streaming important information about themselves out into the world. There are solid indicators of social status, economic status, general health and athletic ability, and our awareness of the world around us that we put out there all the time…and criminal actors notice these indicators.

Remember that criminals are perpetually on the hunt. They are looking for those “go/no-go” indicators without the people they are sizing up even being aware of it. Here again, think about it: If I told you that somewhere out in the Wal-Mart parking lot there was a dude sizing you up for a potential criminal assault, would it change your behavior? Absolutely. If you know that there’s someone considering attacking you then you couldn’t help but change your entire demeanor…and that change in demeanor, believe it or not, can be enough to put you in the “no-go” category. You would likely be more deliberate with your steps, you wouldn’t be overloaded with bags, and you would be looking carefully at the surrounding environment instead of having your face buried in your smart phone. These are all signs that attacking you has a lower probability of success and that alone can de-select you in the mind of the bad guy looking for a target. Simply by changing the sort of information you are communicating into the environment you can prevent even being considered as a potential target for an attack. That’s far better than having to pull a gun to stop an attack.

I have pages of notes on William’s presentations at Unthinkable and it’s impossible to condense them all into a blog post that’s over 800 words already…and I haven’t even discussed his presentations on the classification and background of criminal actors, or his extremely interesting presentation on the mental aspects of surviving a hostage situation. He even presented an excellent close range weapon disarm block with simple, effective techniques for those worst-case scenarios where there’s literally the barrel of a gun sticking into your anatomy.

Thankfully some of William’s material has been committed to DVD form which he will happily sell you for a modest fee. I picked up his “Violent Criminal Actors” DVD and his “The 5 W’s of Personal Defense” DVD at the course because there was so much excellent material presented I’m certain I need to go through it again to pick up things I missed the first time.

After the class had finished on Sunday afternoon I was waiting to snag the DVD’s from William and I told Greg Ellefritz that if it were possible I would happily trade every carbine course I’ve ever taken for Unthinkable because it’s so much more relevant and useful for my goals than all those hours of sunburned misery doing turning drills with a carbine. It’s not that the carbine courses are bad, just that it’s a weapon I can’t carry and so it’s unlikely I would ever use the thing…but this information about how violent criminal actors select victims, simple and effective disarm techniques, and better insight into the very different mindsets that criminals and the law abiding bring to the table when their paths intersect…that’s information I’ve been looking for all along.

If you have the chance to take Unthinkable, I encourage you to do so. William is partnering with different co-instructors across the country that will all bring something unique and worthwhile to the table in addition to his fantastic presentations on what makes bad guys tick. Having the gun is great, but the gun is just a tool…it’s having the kind of information and flexibility presented at Unthinkable that makes the difference between someone who has a gun, and someone who is armed.

gun stuff

How to install a spring kit in a Smith & Wesson revolver with Jerry Miculek

Posted on by Caleb

Let’s face it, revolver fans. We’ve all spent time on youtube looking for videos on how to install this part or that part in our gun, and a lot of time we end up settling for some dimly lit, out of focus garbage video with some dude’s gross toenails. Fret no more, because Jerry Miculek, the definitive expert on S&W revolvers has produced a simple, easy to follow video on doing exactly that. Without gross toes!

Smith & Wesson

Gun Nuts Review: Smith & Wesson 638 .38 Special

Posted on by Caleb

Smith & Wesson 638 two page right side

2014 was the last year that the humble j-frame was a legitimate contender at the IDPA BUG Nationals. In early 2015, the rules were changed in order to make Back Up Gun a full on division, and to do that meant making it a mandatory six shot division. The justification for this was that classifying with a five shooter would have been a nightmare, and while that’s true, it’s sad that IDPA killed the only place where the old-school king of carry guns could play. With the rise of the 9mm pocket gun, what is to become of the humble Airweight?

Continue reading →

safety

When it comes to safety, take nothing for granted

Posted on by Tim

When handling firearms we layer safety procedures because doing so is the best way to prevent maiming or killing someone by accident when handling a lethal weapon. Unfortunately people do not often observe all of these rules carefully…especially when performing what we often refer to as “administrative handling” of a firearm. Administrative tasks like loading and unloading a firearm are, believe it or not, one of the chief vectors for accidents involving firearms. Often this is because of people doing foolish things like trying to manipulate the weapon with their finger on the trigger. Every now and then, though, your finger doesn’t need to be on the trigger:

 

The video captures what is commonly referred to as a “slam fire”, a circumstance where the closing of a weapon’s action on a live round will actually cause the round to fire. In this case it is a pump-action shotgun where clearly a part is broken or sufficiently out of spec that the act of chambering a shell causes the weapon to fire. It is possible for this condition to exist with any semi-automatic, pump-action, bolt action, or lever-action firearm…pretty much anything that isn’t a revolver. I’ve witnessed a slam fire in person on a couple of occasions with semi-automatic rifles with broken parts. Thankfully no one was hurt in those instances because the people handling those weapons did so with rule 1 in mind.

When handling a firearm, do not take for granted that it is in proper working order. Although this sort of thing does not happen very often, it does happen. That is why the first law of firearms safety is to keep the muzzle from covering anything you are not prepared to destroy. I’m sure the person who purchased this firearm had never experienced a slam fire before and was quite shocked when it happened…but by treating the weapon with proper respect they avoided hurting anyone and we got a useful video about why we layer safety practices rather than a news story about a preventable tragedy.

When it comes to firearms safety, take nothing for granted. If you treat every firearm you handle with the expectation that it will maim or kill if you screw up, odds are you won’t ever maim or kill anyone.

Stay safe…

review

Unthinkable – Part 1

Posted on by Tim

I’d wager most readers of this site own a firearm at least in part for self defense. I’d also wager that most of you who own a firearm for self defense have sort of an idea in your head about what a self defense scenario looks like. I’ll venture further out on a limb and posit that the picture in most of your heads doesn’t look anything like this:

A mob of “prep school” students attack a good Samaritan trying to escort an older lady to her car.

Or this:

The immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing

ATM robberies and attempted street robberies happen quite frequently (especially in Memphis, where the “prep school” mob happened) and if the risk of experiencing personal violence was a pie chart that sort of crime would be by far the biggest chunk of the pie for most people. Unfortunately there are all manner of bad people out there ranging from your typically anti-social street criminal looking for profit to politically/religiously motivated terrorists who want piles of dead bodies on the news and all the way up to the top of the heap with psychopathic sexual sadist for whom extravagant and elaborate torture and murder is their preferred form of self-expression. I hate to rehash that line from Forrest Gump, but you truly don’t know what you’re going to get. You don’t usually get a say in what sort of bad man will cross your path.

This past weekend I was able to attend a new course put on jointly by Greg Ellifritz and William Aprill labeled “Unthinkable: Concepts and Techniques for the Gravest Extreme” that dealt with a number of topics surrounding the idea of the worst-case scenario. It should be noted, here, that being targeted by a criminal in the first place is pretty far into “worst case” territory to start with, but there is still a broad spectrum of worsening dangers within that heading. Being targeted by the typical street tough for a holdup is bad. Being targeted by a kidnapper for ransom is worse. Being targeted by a sexually motivated psychopath is worse yet, etc.

Have you ever pondered what would happen if you were taken hostage or kidnapped? Obviously the gun-guy answer is that you’d shoot anyone trying it deader than de Gaulle…but what if you didn’t have your gun? What if for some reason you had to travel to a place where you couldn’t carry your handgun and then you find yourself being kidnapped? What if you are in a third world country and the local police are the ones kidnapping you?

Being restrained is a likely part of such a scenario. Even in less exotic sorts of crimes like a home invasion it’s likely that the bad guys will attempt some sort of restraint. Having some idea, then, of how to escape common restraint methods is a pretty good idea. Greg Ellifritz has restrained a lot of people and due to his penchant for traveling to the sort of places where the difference between the local police and the local criminals is largely just a uniform, he’s spent a lot of time thinking about how to escape from restraints. During one of the blocks of instruction in “Unthinkable” Greg shares some basic information about the most common types of restraints (duct tape, flex-cuffs, zip ties, rope, handcuffs) and the most effective ways to defeat them. Then he actually broke out a number of different restraints and the students in the class practiced escaping them. Take a look at his technique for breaking out of a zip-tie restraint:

 

Sure, Greg is a big guy but you don’t have to be a power-lifter like Greg to use his technique. Just about everyone in the class who tried was able to break the 75 pound zip ties using that technique and many were able to break the 150 pound version Greg is demonstrating in the video. The same technique works with duct tape, too, if you’re wondering. We spent quite a bit of time on handcuffs as well…and I learned that apparently cheap handcuffs people buy at BDSM-themed stores don’t use the same type of handcuff key that most police-issue handcuffs use. Bad guys don’t often use handcuffs, but if they do they might not always be the top shelf models. That’s a useful bit of information to have. Partially because of knowing a slightly different strategy for different cuffs, and partially because it gives me plenty of excuse to label this section of the course “50 Shades of Greg”. (Thank you, thank you! I’ll be here all week! Try the veal!)

The most sobering block of instruction Greg presented, at least in my mind, was on bombings. Now I’m sure if you asked most gun guys what they would do about a suicide bomber, they would likely say something along the lines of “shoot him in the face!” and that’s not really a terrible plan…but how do you identify a suicide bomber? Did you know research has been done and it’s been determined that it takes on average 8.2 seconds from the time a suicide bomber picks the exact spot of his/her (because women play this game too, now) detonation to blow up the device? Did you know suicide bombers are often deployed with armed handlers on scene to overwatch the process and, if necessary, remotely trigger the bomb? Suddenly a suicide bomber doesn’t sound like such a simple problem, does it?

Active shooters have been increasingly incorporating explosives into their plans, too. The Columbine massacre was originally intended to begin with a bombing. The perpetrators intended to blow up the lunch room with a duffle-bag full of pipe bombs and then shoot anyone who survived the explosion. They even had multiple successful tests of the devices they planned to use, but an unnoticed change in the manufacture of the clock they were using as the timer on their bomb prevented the initial explosion. They had multiple hand-held explosive devices they hurled at responding officers. The Tsarnaev brothers in Boston used multiple small explosive devices in their attempt to fight with and escape from law enforcement response to their initial bomb blast at the marathon.

This didn’t get much coverage, but the Aurora shooter rigged his apartment with a series of pretty sophisticated triggers designed to blow up the building and draw emergency response away from the theater so he could have more time to generate a body count. Think hard about the planning that took, folks. It took bomb techs three days to disarm the bombs in his apartment. Lots of people called the guy “crazy” in the aftermath of that horrible event, but most probably don’t realize that “crazy” guy wired up the proximity sensors from a garage door to blow up his apartment. He wasn’t just some wild-eyed, bewildered nutcase…his actions were as coldly calculated as they come.

Just to spread a little more cheer, it’s becoming more common for an explosion to be a first step in a multi-phase plan. Blow up one bomb, wait for EMS and police to arrive on scene to deal with the problem, and then blow up a second device hidden on scene to take out the first responders. Eric Rudolph blew up a pretty harmless bomb at an abortion clinic to draw in EMS and police response, and he set up a second bomb where he thought the command post for the emergency responders would be. In the Mumbai attack the terrorists used this multiple-explosive methodology to attack and delay police/military response.

Note that at every single one of these incidents I have mentioned ordinary citizens are present either as intended victims or survivors. That means people just like you are present at the scene of just about every bombing. It happens to people just like you…so maybe it’s a good idea to have some familiarity with how bombings happen, no?

None of these are happy scenarios to think about. That’s where the course’s label is derived from…the unthinkable. The stuff people don’t want to ponder because it involves acknowledging a very limited control of events and a very limited number of options in response. The gun, to many, is their talisman of control. The magic totem that’s going to give them a say in their destiny when bad things happen.

The gun is certainly a wonderful and very powerful tool, but it’s not wise to pin your survival strategies entirely upon the possession of that tool. “Unthinkable” arms you with information. Critical crucial knowledge that may not be needed every day, but if the “Unthinkable” actually happens to you it gives you enough exposure to know there is almost always something you can do to improve your situation. The exposure opens your mind (which will not be functioning at peak efficiency in a life-or-death situation) to possibilities for winning even when others might insist that all hope is lost…and that’s the mindset that sees people through the worst of situations.

 

 

 

 

editorial

Should the firearms industry tighten the admission standards for media at trade shows?

Posted on by Caleb

Every year when I attend an industry trade show, I think of this exchange from the best episode of Firefly, Shindig:

Kaylee Frye: Don’t you just love this party? Everything’s so fancy, and there’s some kind of hot cheese over there.
Cabott: It’s not as good as last year.
Kaylee Frye: Oh, really? What-what’d they have last year?
Cabott: Standards.

neckbeard blogger

In that episode, Cabott is the bitchy, stuck up girl, and we’re supposed to dislike her for being mean to the plucky and adorable Kaylee, which of course I agree with. But it gets me thinking, have media standards gotten too lose at industry shows? I remember my first SHOT Show, in 2008. I had no business being there; my blog was small with limited readership, and really I was just some asshole who liked guns but had the right connections to get a media badge at SHOT. Now, I’m still just some asshole who likes guns, but I do this for a living now. It’s funny how that changes my perception of who should and shouldn’t be at shows. What further complicates this issue is that each show is a different audience. For example, SHOT and NASGW are trade shows – not technically open to the public, so I feel that they should enforce tighter standards on media than at a show like NRA, which is open to the public.

It’s difficult to talk about this issue without sounding like an elitist jerk, so I’ll just get out of the way: there are people credentialed as “media” at SHOT Show who have absolutely no business being media, or even at the show itself. I know, because I was one of those people. But how do you control that while still allowing access for up-and-coming writers and bloggers, people who are grinding to pay their dues? Essentially, the question I’m stuck on is how does an organization keep the riff-raff, the tire kickers, and the T&E whores out, while still providing a means for people on the way up the food chain to earn their chops?

I’m not just talking about online media here either. The guy who writes one article a year for Middle BFE Fishing Journal shouldn’t be there any more than the guy who runs Fred’s Gun Blog that has three posts and 1 reader (Fred’s mom). At the same time, enforcing standards on “traditional” media is a lot easier than digital media, because you can say “you must have at least x articles published each year to qualify” is a fairly objective standard. Of course, with the freelance game getting tighter and tighter, most up and coming writers are eschewing that model entirely, preferring to…wait for it…create their own content on their own sites.

Which makes sense, when you think about. Why would you suffer the slings and arrows of writing someone else’s assignments when you can create your own work, about what you’re passionate about, and if you’re lucky connect with a reasonably sized audience. So with more writers, and talented ones at that, pushing into digital media, how do you effectively qualify digital media?

The easiest answer is of course, traffic. You can set an arbitrary threshold of “site must have x pageviews or uniques a month for the author to participate” – but that’s not really a 100% solution. I mean, if my site was called “Tits and machine guns” and all I did was post pictures of slutty girls with automatic weapons, I’d probably have triple the traffic I have now, but that wouldn’t mean I was actually qualified to cover SHOT Show. To flip the script, you could have a very in-depth, technical, knowledgeable youtube channel full of news and how-to vids that only has 2,000 subscribers – you’d be absolutely qualified to cover SHOT, but your traffic is a joke.

The truth about gun reporting is that the best way to determine whether or not a site should or shouldn’t be qualified is about the same way you distinguish erotica from porn: I can’t tell you the difference, but I know it when I see it. Traffic is important, yes. But so is content. So is frequency, quality, even little things like site design.

To close this post out, I’m going to post some hypothetical bloggers. I want you to post in the comments whether or not, based on the information I give you, whether or not they should be credentialed as media at SHOT.

Blogger 1
Works primarily as a defensive firearms instructor, teaches open enrollment classes about shooting fundamentals. Blogs 1-3 times a week, posts entirely about defensive shooting concepts, products, and ideas. Has about 75,000 unique visitors a month.

Blogger 2
Day job unknown, posts two posts a day, five days a week, M-Th are focused on video games, Friday is a weekly “firearms friday” where they take the guns from video games and shoot them on a real range. Isn’t really a good shooter, but due to crossover appeal reaches 1 million unique visitors a month.

Blogger 3
Posts primarily about non-firearms topics, but is a gun enthusiast. Possesses poor technical knowledge, minimal shooting skills, and frequently passes bad information based on ignorance and a lack of skill. Due to a lack of technical writing skills and poor content, reaches less than 5,000 unique visitors a month.

Blogger 4
Some asshole that was on Top Shot and thinks he/she is hot shit now.

Blogger 5
Blogger 5 is the prototypical enthusiast blogger. They have a regular 9-5 job, but they like guns, like to shoot, are reasonably knowledgeable, and post decent content. They’re not superstars, they make mistakes, but they work hard and have attracted a loyal following. Their posts are a mix of firearms related stuff, maybe some personal stuff, maybe their other hobbies mixed in a bit, but mostly keep it centered around guns/politics. Let’s say between 10,000 and 40,000 uniques a month.

Let me know in the comments what you think, not just about the bloggers at the end but the post in its entirety.