What Will You Do?

You’ve seen posts reminding you that you are your own first responder. I have more than occasionally pointed out that you are responsible for your own safety, but I fear that too many fail to realize how quickly things can go bad.

Consider this: the Tombstone streetfight near the OK Corral (October 26, 1881) left three men dead and two others wounded. All of that occurred in approximately 30 seconds, with some 30 shots being fired. While this was a police action, my point is that a lot of death and destruction can occur in a very short time. Add to that the fact that the national average for police response time is about 15 minutes.

Another piece of data that should be important to our personal-defense plan is that citizen-involved shootings are generally over with three to five shots having been fired. That means they are over whether we win or not. Survival is not so much about carrying the coolest gun or having the greatest round count as it is about quick reaction time and making center-mass hits.

Awareness helps us avoid some conflicts altogether, or we may have learned to simply talk our way out of others. All of that is good, but we still need to have a plan for dealing with those who are bent on delivering pain and suffering without regard to our position or response.

Focusing on this worst-case scenario dictates not only what kind of defensive handgun we carry but, more importantly, how we carry it. Can you really get to it in a hurry? It might be a good idea to change the way you dress in order to be able to get your hands on that gun more quickly. And I would suggest that nothing is quicker than having the gun somewhere around your waist area, accessible to either hand.

I would also suggest that split times or speed reloads are not nearly so important as being able to make a smooth draw stroke and deliver two quick shots to the vital zone. That is what stops fights.

Studying gunfight data tells us what we really should be planning for and practicing to deal with. In those situations where we see the problem from afar, we may have several options available to us, one of which might be deploying the defensive handgun. But, the really dangerous ones are those that happen in a split second and are over before we’ve had the chance to draw a breath… again, whether we win or lose. How to do you plan to deal with those? How do you practice? What will you do?