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.

When real potential security threats are present, unless you’ve practice handgun skills extensively and shot in individual or group training scenarios, all of that prior training, though useful to a degree, was done in the abstract. When facing a known potential threat, for the average CCW holder with basic training, additional training must begin immediately. Here are some basic steps to begin.

Pray individually and as a family. Start reading the works of David and about David together. Discuss his reliance on the Lord and his war/defense tactics and strategies. The Lord of Hosts is not a pacifist, so read the Holy Bible in a new light.

And everyone 16 and up read The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker.

Due to that abstraction, I recommend starting back at the beginning with a basic handgun course for husband and wife and any grown children or other adults in the home. Do the training together. This builds a sense of group purpose and team cohesion, helping to know who is capable and to what extent in order to support each other.

Next, at least take intermediate-level handgun training together. The family can take a training progression to the level they feel necessary, all the way to tactical kill-house, vehicle handgun use, scenario training, etc., if desired.

Fourth, while you’re training, you must develop a home security plan. Do regular walkthroughs of your home at night with the lights off to get used to the layout with limited or no light because you must practice your plan with lights on and with lights off. Without practice, you are back in the world of abstraction again. Plus, what’s in one adult’s mind may not be what the other is thinking and planning, which can get you or your children killed. If you have young children, you must involve them; sorry, no exceptions; this must be done. If children are too young to remember and follow instructions to participate, then the plan must include covering them. To lessen the shock to children, you can start with a fire plan, which every household, eh-hem, should already have. Refine these plans as you learn and practice.

There are home-security consultation firms. I have no experience with any, but we’re supposing that quality ranges widely and some prices may be outrageous.

Additional reading for serious-minded adults can include On Killing by Grossman and Left of Bang by Van Horne. These books are not for everybody and are by no means Christian literature.

In another very interesting and insightful video, Mark makes a very good case for the reason and justification for the supreme court having accepted this case with one justice recusing herself in the case.

He predicts the end of the Chevron doctrine within a year.  I hope so.  The deep state needs to take a very large blow to their authority.  I don’t even believe the three-letter agencies have a constitutional right to exist.

His show-and-tell on hammer fall between single action and double action is interesting.

I know that Colt reduced the spring coefficient on the design, leading to some degree of concern over light primer strikes.

But I haven’t seen this with any ammunition except poorer quality (or in his case, exotic hand loads).

Comments on this are always welcome if you have experience with the new Colt Python.

This post on drawing a handgun covers a critical skill gap suffered by many concealed carriers. Time to muzzle on target wins gunfights. Or, as this very essential short article points out: draw to a first solid hit is most important.

The most important skill with a pistol, as it pertains to self-defense, is being able to deploy it efficiently, safely, and quickly.  We could say that the draw to a first, solid hit, is most important.  I would submit that the draw itself can be separated out from the first accurate hit to an extent because most defensive gun uses end with a gun displayed yet no shot fired.

Ironically, many self-pronounced practitioners of defensive pistolcraft tend to ignore this skill.  I see at public ranges, all the time, people practicing only from ready positions, usually not even wearing a holster.  Similarly, even some serious shooters who are technically skilled and focus on competitive shooting do practice from the holster, but from a holster that is not applicable to concealed carry.

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The draw needs to be well practiced for any number of scenarios.  Most people who do actually practice the draw tend to focus only on the best-case scenario or performing the draw from a standing position with the hands in an optimal position, with both hands available to work on the task.

At the link, this drill offers 8 different situations or types of draw to practice.

There isn’t a lot of shotgun training available these days. Everybody has gone tacticool, but this is a good primary starting point for an average home defense family. There’s been a recent self-defense situation that’s come up with somebody I know, and the primary weapon selection for their home has been a 12ga pump shotgun. One reason is small children, therefore, a desire for limited penetration. I’m not a shotgunner. Any help in the comments would be appreciated.

This three-part shotgun drill at what some consider a reputable resource looks helpful for starters.

I tried to really give this some thought with regard to what is required to actually work in live fire with a shotgun, since a lot of it can be worked dry fire. Also, to set the context, this is meant to be a basic “I have a shotgun for home defense” type thing. Obviously there are skills above and beyond what is covered in this short range session, but those skills are less likely to be used in this context. So what we have here is a narrow focus on the key aspects of shooting a shotgun for home defense.

• The ability to quickly mount the gun properly, acquire an acceptable sight picture, and fire an accurate shot.
• The ability to manage recoil and fire multiple, quick shots as required.
• Building good habits with proper follow through and maintaining a fully loaded shotgun as much as possible.
• The ability to recognize an empty gun and quickly get the gun back to a fighting condition with an emergency reload.

If someone had the ability to set up multiple targets, or wanted to add movement to these drills, that could easily be done while still shooting the same basic drill. The assumption in this case is that range limitations prevent those sorts of things. For the minimal investment of about $10 in 12 gauge ammunition and maybe 15 minutes of time, that is a lot to check off the list with regard to the shotgun.

Full drill at the link.

Edit: Also see, Understanding Different 12-Guage Ammo at Widener’s. Includes pics of patterns for buckshot and slug results.