There are consequences to both winning and losing a gunfight and consequences still for never taking up the duty to defend your family. Weighing in the balance that winning is the preferred option, how can we prepare? Much of this article, past the introduction, is interesting, and it has many links to excellent primary source material for the conscientious Concealed Carrier. The links and book mentions are one main reason to post it here.

Please do your own research to become conscientious about carrying a weapon; it’s no small thing. Having a weapon lends power, making a man no longer a victim; with it comes great responsibility.

For those who’ve been carrying for a while, we can become complacent. Perhaps mindset refresher training is even more critical than maintaining shooting ability, or at least it’s due an equal time and importance. Most firearms negligent discharges have their root not in any action, but long before that, in a complacent or casual mindset, leading to carelessness.

Mindset is at the core of self defense. From what I recall from the martial arts I studied in my youth, the concept of “mind, body, and spirit” was frequently mentioned and I think that mind being the first element identified by the concept was intentional. Some prominent firearms training organizations include this concept in their slogans and marketing. For example, the first thing one sees on the homepage for Tactical Response is a slideshow with mindset as the first item, that’s followed by tactics, skill and gear. Again, the order is intentional. Another example is Active Self Protection, who uses “Attitude, Skills, Plan” as a slogan in their logo and throughout their content. I suspect attitude in this slogan is synonymous to mindset. Other synonyms might include terms like “mental preparedness” or “emotional fortitude”. Regardless of the term used for mindset, it seems like every philosophy that surrounds every martial art fundamentally identifies mindset as the foundation that is required and necessary in order to win a fight universally. Even various depictions of the Combat Triad introduced by the late Jeff Cooper, which was used to explain the philosophy of violence places mindset as either the foundation of a pyramid or the base side of an equilateral triangle.

For us Christians, the spirit must be the first consideration and the body last. If you have to shoot somebody, you’ll learn the hard way why you should have set your heart right before the God of creation because your mind, sooner or later, for one reason or another, will surely fail to keep you grounded in your prior reality; that’s a promise.

You must have something larger than yourself; that must be God through His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Nobody really knows their own spirit until they meet God because He alone is holy, and we, at our core, are full of sin and corruption. May you meet Him before you die; God have mercy on them.

Consider carefully what will become of your mind if you kill a man, even if justified before God and the laws of men; this is why I prefer the translation of “Thou shalt not kill.” It’s easy to tell a man who has never had to take a life if he prefers the word murder instead of kill. If you kill for any reason, you will soon be met with the knowledge of the depths of the curse of sin upon man and earth. Blood in taking a life made in the image of our God upon your hands, for any reason, is no small thing, and you will never fully recover your innocence nor be the same again. Rarely do some men take to war. But it’s also easy to tell somebody who has never been shot at because they ignorantly promote war.

In my opinion, which I’m still refining, mindset is part confidence and part commitment. Both of those components are developed over time as one works on becoming better prepared to deal with a violent encounter including its prevention (avoiding it), intervention (fighting to break contact), and postvention (dealing with the aftermath). Neither confidence nor commitment are things that can be taught. They are things that are built through education, developing abilities, and introspection. Let’s break these components down a little bit more individually.

Confidence comes from having well placed and earned trust in our abilities and tools. Abilities, in my opinion once again, aren’t limited to marksmanship and tactics. It also includes our abilities to make good decisions. Meaning we know in our heart of hearts that we are unlikely to make a serious mistake that could result in a negative outcome that Claude Werner’s work has warned us about. Confidence minimizes doubt which in turn minimizes hesitation.

Confidence also comes from being adequately prepared to solve the self defense problem that is in front of us. This means being competently skilled and familiar enough with our tools while knowing enough about violent encounters so that there is little to no novelty about what is happening. Based on my limited understanding of the research and work from Dr. Paul Whitesell, Jeff Cooper, John Hearne, and Dr. William Aprill, novelty is something that our brain doesn’t deal well with and can trigger the flight, fight, or freeze response that occurs when the limbic system, or “animal brain”, takes over preventing the use of our cognitive abilities during the encounter which can lead to serious mistakes and negative outcomes.

Commitment comes from knowing and understanding what is at stake coupled with having a deliberate game plan. The stakes at a minimum are serious injury or death for yourself and loved ones present. Those are pretty high stakes, but like I said, those are the bare minimum.

The real danger in mindset, the article goes on to explain, is in finding yourself not knowing what to do. You can read the rest at the link. It’s nice to find worthwhile firearms knowledge that doesn’t gratuitously and needless cuss and denigrate. America needs more family-friendly gun knowledge.