Readers often ask me about the action-skills training I receive when I write novels like THE PROTECTOR and THE NAKED EDGE. After the Colorado-theater shooting, I was reminded of my firearms training when gun sales increased because people wanted to be ready—“just in case.”
There are good reasons and bad reasons to carry a weapon in the United States. The pros and cons aren’t the subject of these remarks. What I want to talk about is training. When people tell me that they received a concealed-carry license after a day or two of instruction, I’m appalled. Anybody can easily learn how to fire a weapon. It’s not difficult. But there are so many other factors.
A proper concealed-carry course should spend at least a day on the legal use of deadly force. Did the opponent have the means, motive, and opportunity to threaten your life? Did you have absolutely no other option except to shoot? Do you know about grand juries and the sorts of serious questions they ask when someone shoots someone else? Ideally, a proper course would even put you in a grand-jury scenario, requiring you to get an idea of what it’s like to justify your serious actions in a way that convinces people who don’t have experience with guns.
Further, a proper concealed-carry course would provide a minimum of two days in which the class acted out scenarios that may or may not have required the use of deadly force. A man bangs on your door. He’s extremely distraught. He says his car broke down outside and his wife’s in the back seat—she’s pregnant, she needs an ambulance, she needs to get to the hospital! He pushes his way in, saying he needs to use your phone. You tell him to wait outside while you make the call. He shoves you away, demanding to know where the phone is. “Wait outside!” you order him. He knocks you to the floor and lunges past you toward the kitchen, yelling “The phone!” He might be a nutcase. Or he might be telling the truth. If you shoot him, you might be spending the next ten years in jail. Not to mention you might be financially ruined if it turns out the guy was telling the truth and the woman gives birth in the car, but the baby dies, and the woman almost dies also. You’ll be living in a tent by the time the lawsuits are over. But maybe the guy is indeed crazy and dangerous, and you saved the lives of your family and yourself. You need to make a decision in an instant. Good luck. Two days of rehearsal in this kind of scenario are probably not enough.
And then there are the physiological reactions to being in a gunfight. Most gunfights occur within ten feet of the shooters, and in many case, although a lot of shots are fired, the bullets go everywhere, except at the target. A gunfight is chaos and noise and adrenaline. Hearing shuts down. Tunnel vision sets in. Some objects get amazingly large. To replicate that chaos, which is not at all like the movies, this is one valuable scenario I experienced.
I was put through a shooting maze (sometimes called a “shooting house”). Inside a structure, there were various rooms with pop-up targets. Some showed bad guys with guns and grenades. Others showed a businessman with a briefcase or a woman with a baby carriage. One showed a woman being used as a shield by a guy with a gun. But I didn’t know what any of these targets looked like before I entered and confronted them.
My instructor spun me violently five times to the right. Then he spun me with equal violence five times to the left. As dizziness set in, he cursed at me, using the foulest language imaginable. Meanwhile he also pounded my chest and back. He literally threw me into the shooting maze so that I almost fell on the floor.
Mind spinning, heart pounding, lungs heaving, adrenaline flooding, I had 30 seconds to get through the maze and shoot the bad guys but not harm the good ones. I managed to do it, but it wasn’t easy. I personally saw a student empty a 15-round magazine into a target that showed a woman with a baby carriage. The instructor yelled, “She’s got a gun! She’s going to kill you!” The student kept firing. “She isn’t dead!” the instructor yelled. “Shoot her again!”
Having emptied his magazine, the student did a rapid reload and emptied another 15-round magazine into the target of the woman with the baby carriage. He was absolutely certain that he’d shot a bad guy, because the instructor had shouted repeatedly that the target showed a bad guy (the instructor was lying to make a point). It took the student 20 seconds to get his mind straight and to realize what he’d done.
Let’s consider the situation in the Colorado theatre. The place is full of smoke. Theater patrons are stampeding. The loud, action-filled movie adds to the confusion. The shooter is wearing body armor. Does it make sense to use a concealed-carry weapon in this scenario? As more guns go off, who can know the difference between the shooter and the people trying to defend themselves. The phone calls to the police would have said there were multiple shooters, thus adding to the deadly confusion. Well-meaning people with guns would almost certainly have hit bystanders.
It all comes down to adequate training and knowing what’s the right thing to do at the right time. If you decide that a concealed-carry weapon is necessary for you, remember what I said a minute ago. There are few responsibilities greater than carrying a weapon. Does the gun own you, or do you own the gun? There can never be enough training, and it can’t be repeated often enough.
These are some of the topics in my novels THE PROTECTOR and THE NAKED EDGE, which have a long list of the people who were kind enough to teach me the expertise that keeps them alive in their dangerous professions. I’m fascinated by protective agents and the commitment they make to strangers to defend them, even at the possible cost of a defender’s life.
If you think you’d enjoy reading action scenes based on the variety of training I received, please click on the the titles that are highlighted above.
David,
After the web of comments that spun from your post last week, this is an excellent summation of what training with firearms is all about, and why it is so necessary. Thank you for driving the point home.
Best,
Gina Fava
Hi, Gina. I worry about people who think they can be gunfighters simply because they watch shooting in movies. If I can use some of my credibility as the creator of Rambo to persuade people to combine common sense with a ton of training, they can avoid a lot of trouble.
Hi David,
One of the best post I’ve read regarding civilians using a firearm in the “real world”. I have to agree with you that real life usage of a firearm isn’t as easy as it looks on TV. It’s fine to learn the theory in a classroom and shoot a few practice rounds on a paper target in a secure area. It’s an entirely different thing to actually shoot at moving target while your vision and hearing capabilities are impaired. It takes months of serious training and an endless number of scenarios to prepare someone physically and mentally how to react to a high-stress situation involving a firearm.
BTW, if you are ever in the Ottawa Region and interested in trying our shooting house, don’t hesitate to contact me.
Simon
Hi, Simon. Good to hear from you.It was great to meet you at Thriller Fest. The movies have corrupted people into thinking that they can all be gunfighters. I agree with Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his book ON COMBAT, only 10 percent of the population can handle it, and even then they’d need a ton of training. Safe travels to you.
I enjoyed this article, especially the part about the chaos and closeness of a gunfight. It made me remember a statement Wyatt Earp made, when he was questioned about how to survive a gun battle, and (back in the 1800s) said basically the same thing you said. A rational mindset, a clear head and the ability to hit something 15 feet away are more important than all the practice shooting in the world.
James, what you say is absolutely true. I may have read the same Wyatt Earp piece that you did. In my Western novel LAST REVEILLE, I have a scene that features a true story about Earp and how he helped a man in a gunfight in El Paso.
Well done David. I went through a similar course and near the end of the second day, most of us did feel like we were Jason Bourne. Then the instructors took us to the shoot house and humbled everyone. It was then that I realized I needed more training (also a great marketing ploy by the shooting school!), even though I had been using firearms since I was a kid.
I eventually took a CCW class and it was a joke. Twelve hours of lecture on where you can and and can’t carry a gun and a very, very simple shooting test. As I’m sure you’ve experienced, it’s one thing to shoot at a paper target and hit your mark. It’s the Twilight Zone when you have to make a snap decision on whether or not to shoot, draw from concealment, hit your target, while simultaneously getting yourself out of harm’s way.
John, you probably heard that in NYC when the police confronted a man who had just shot and killed someone near the Empire State Building, the resulting gunfire not only took down the shooter but wounded a lot of people in the area. Most gunfights occur within three yards and are far from the disciplined events that we see in films or read in most novels. I think everyone with a concealed carry license should be required to show proficiency in a shooting house. That will humble a lot of people, which is what some CCW folks need. Thanks for getting in touch. David
Hi David
I have never seen your site before and like it very much. I just read the above piece you wrote about carrying concealed and am amazed people can do this in America as here in Scotland we are not permitted this option. If someone breaks into your house here and tries to kill or rob you , no matter the circumstances , if you shoot them or kill them in self defence you will go to prison. This has played out in basically every case ever heard here.
So to read that people in the US are allowed to actually defend their lives and property by carrying or storing in house for defence is difficult for us to get our heads around.
What you wrote is completely accurate and probably an understatement of how difficult it is to go from passive distracted to aggressive focused in a split second. When pistols were legal here about twenty years ago now I used to go to a gun club and fire at skittles from about fifteen feet. I never hit one even once, and that was without adrenaline making my hands shake like crazy.
I think the courses for concealed carry should be long relentless and totally brutal and run by people from the police or armed services who have experienced close combat because if you ever find yourself shooting at someone who pulls on you the chances are that they will have the calm of the sociopath which will make their shooting awesome as was the case with but to name one: the attempt on President Ragan where several aimed shots found their mark on his body gaurds. What a lot of people do not see is that even if you know it’s coming , you still don’t have time to put your target down.
By the way you sent me your autograph once. I asked you ” Did Dekker really burned the money? ” and you said “allas he did”. I never expected a reply from such a succesful writer, thanks for the effort it is appreciated!
I’m still working my way through your books and they are totally excellent !
Best wishes
Steven
Steven, I totally agree with your comments. Thanks for remembering that I sent you an autograph. Years ago, I was on a publicity tour in Scotland and loved your country, especially Hadrian’s Wall.As it happens, my next novel, MURDER AS A FINE ART (next May) features a real-life person associated with Edinburgh, Thomas De Quincey (author of CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER) who is buried there. Good luck to you. David