You stocked supplies with plenty of beans, bullets, and Band-Aids. You have backup plans to your backup plans and know your family can survive months without any contact from the outside world. You are ready for just about any cataclysmic event, should one happen. But are you really ready for the most important decision of your life and the life of your family members? How far would you go to protect your life and the life of a family member?
Preparing for disaster doesn’t necessarily mean you prepare for armed combat, but practically, disasters create an environment where the aggressor takes all from those unable to maintain control of their possessions. Those that have not prepared and find themselves with nothing to lose will do whatever it takes to survive, even robbing, stealing, or killing others to take their supplies. In a time where laws cannot be enforced, the primal law of the land is king, for whoever is stronger than another, owns that which he can take by force. This not only includes your supplies and food, but also your family members.
Some people refuse to consider preparing for the possibility of horrific violence that may be placed upon their family members. By rationalizing fear with excuses of “we’ll be too far away from the city for this to happen”, or “I’ll just shoot whoever tries”, will only increase the odds of failure should you or your family face threats of death and violence. The first step of surviving a violent encounter is accepting that it can happen no matter your preparation or denial of the possibility.
As you read this, you are now preparing yourself to defend against this potential violence. After you read this article, you need to rise from your chair and make plans to save your life and the life of your family members by following two simple rules; (1) Physically prepare to fight for your life and (2) Mentally prepare to take a life. Unless you have experience in the military or law enforcement, you need to do a lot more than convince yourself that the solution of “I will just shoot them” is all you need to do. Easy in theory, but in practice, not so much.
The easy part is preparing now for physically defending your family in the future. This does not mean purchasing an armory of weapons and a ton of ammunition; although if you can do this, you’ll be the envy of many and possibly the focus of a government investigation. You also do not need to spend years earning a black belt in martial arts. You do need to know what constitutes a weapon and how to employ it. This includes items specifically designed as weapons, such as a shotgun or handgun. It also includes items not specifically designed with a self-defense purpose, but can be effective improvised weapons. Something as innocuous as a rolled up magazine used as an impact weapon or a power cord of a lamp used as a garrote can be considered improvised weapons and not under the control of any law as weapons.
If you have chosen to not be around firearms, nor touch them, or even teach your children how to be safe around firearms, then you really need to know how to use a wide range of firearms. Those that regularly carry and practice with firearms are comfortable with their firearms, in the loading, field stripping, and cleaning of the weapons. The more varied types of weapons used the more versatile ability in using different types of firearms. Someone without firearms experience may one day have to bear arms and use that weapon immediately, or face certain death. If you cannot even find the safety of a firearm, load it, or fire it accurately, the weapon is useless in the defense of your family. At a bare minimum, without even purchasing a firearm, classes exist where you can learn the operation of revolvers, handguns, rifles, and shotguns. By at least knowing how firearms operate, given a tragic scenario where you may have the good fortune to find a weapon or take a weapon away from your attacker, you just might be able to use it effectively. Before thinking this may be more than you want to take on, consider that the operation of all weapons is really quite similar in basics. Learning how to operate one type of revolver will allow you to figure out another type when there are slight differences. Remember, it’s not like Hollywood. Firearms need to be loaded and re-loaded. They jam. And if you don’t aim or use an accurate pointing system, you will miss. Just because you may not want to handle firearms does not mean your future attackers feel the same.
From now on, if you haven’t been doing so already, you will look at ‘things’ differently. Walking into your office, you will see the lamp on your desk a little different. As you look at the lamp, you ask yourself, “If I were to use this as an impact weapon, how would I hold it?” Loose items on your desk will be looked at as if they were items of lethal force or at least a distraction when thrown at an attacker. Your home will become an armory without firearms. Anyone’s home can become an armory. Beyond kitchen knives, any item can be used as an impact weapon, penetration weapon, as cover or concealment, or as a distraction thrown at an attacker. Your basic training need only consist of thinking of how you would use these things, not actually trashing your home and office by practicing.
After you learn the fundamentals of common firearms operation, where you can safely load and effectively shoot a wide range of firearms, you are still not ready. Even after you look at everyday items as improvised weapons habitually, you are still not ready to defend your family against violent attackers. There is the non-physical aspect of preparation; you need to prepare your mind for the potential violence and just as importantly, prepare for the psychological effect of the aftermath of violence. The end of a violent encounter, doesn’t. It continues for years and sometimes for a lifetime.
There are many facets of violent encounters that affect the outcome of the encounter, especially when your life is at stake. During a life and death encounter, where one or more attackers may be intent on taking your possessions, your life, and maybe assaulting your family members, you will endure the highest stress, ever. This stress will negatively affect your (1) physical ability to respond, your (2) mental capability to think, and your (3) coping measures for the aftermath. You can lessen, but not eliminate, these negative effects with preparation.
The immediate physical effects that you will experience during a life and death encounter will affect your motor skills along with altering your audio and visual perception. Your heart rate and breathing will increase and you may have uncontrollable trembling and potentially, a loss of bladder and bowel control. You might experience tunnel vision, where your field of vision becomes restricted so narrowly, that you may only be able to see the attacker’s weapon. Your audio senses might block out all noises or even intensify certain sounds. Examples of this would be the person that saw the barrel of a .22 handgun look as large as a cannon barrel, or the noise of a .22 sounding like a cannon.
Seemingly easy tasks such as unsnapping a holster becomes more difficult with trembling hands and a loss of fine motor skills that require precise movements to find a snap or lever. The passage of time may also feel distorted, in that everything moves quickly or in slow motion. Although there are researchers that dispel the notion of slow motion, there are also many accounts of persons that distinctly remember thinking to themselves, “why is he moving so slowly?” during lethal force encounters.
The physical reactions to a life and death situation are instinctive to the human body. Increased blood flow through a rapid (higher than normal) heart rate, increased oxygen through rapid breathing, increase in gross motor skills, and perceptional changes in focus all contribute to life saving skills…if you are being chased by a lion and need to run fast without thinking.
In our world of defending against human attackers, we need to maintain our dexterity in handling weapons, our control of bodily functions to fight, and our mind to think. The only practical method of doing this is through self-induced practice. Shooting competitions, as one example, condition the mind and body to automatically perform several key movements, with fluidity, under a time pressure to achieve a goal of accurate fire. Practicing the manipulation of a weapon to the point that thinking is not needed to perform will check one box off of worry in a lethal force encounter.
Scenario based training, such as with paintball guns or lasers, can also imprint a consistent response to a perceived threat through repetitive practice. These practical training scenarios can reduce your reaction time and train your mind as to how people act and react. As an example, continually reacting to a role that reaches for a weapon in a specific manner, such as reaching in his waistband, trains your mind that a certain movement implies a certain result. Reaching into a waistband implies pulling out a weapon. Training yourself for these small gestures gives you more time to identify the threat and react.
Perfect practice makes perfect, and by training your body to arm itself automatically when a threat is perceived will allow your brain to focus on other important issues. Some of these issues include identification of the threat and decisions on how to react, when to react, and if you need to react at all. Maintaining control of your body and mind, as much as can be possible during this time, allows you the most effective means of defending yourself and family. Knowing that you may be suffering from tunnel vision might be enough to calm yourself to expand your field of vision. Knowing that the trembling you feel does not have to do with being afraid, but a normal reaction to a life and death experience allows you to concentrate on the more important issues facing you at the time.
Although you cannot control the effects of an adrenaline dump, you can recognize the effects and control your reaction to them. As long as your brain continues to think, you can reduce irrational decision making, or an uncontrolled fight/flight response. You may also prevent your mind from simply freezing and not knowing what to do, other than hope for a divine rescue.
One of the most effective means of training for lethal encounters is through visualization. Simply visualizing a scenario and your correct response will give you positive results in the future, in similar situations. If your work requires you to fly constantly, you can constantly visualize scenarios during flights and think of reactions to threats. Over time, you’ll have a bank account of many responses to many types of threats should it ever happen (again). Again, thinking is of utmost importance, as you need to be able to quickly identify if there is a threat and choose an option to deal with it, sometimes within a split second.
Another important consideration to prepare is that of the aftermath of a life and death encounter. Regardless if you had no choice but to take a life or if the attack was prevented through other means, there are long lasting effects. As each person is different, there are different reactions. These reactions range from elation of surviving a lethal encounter to revulsion as to what transpired. Regret, anger, aggressiveness, nightmares, loss of control of emotions, trouble concentrating, flashbacks, and just plain not feeling ‘right’ are effects of being a survivor (or winner) of a lethal force encounter. Denying that these can happen to you may only make the effects that much worse. This has nothing to do with being ‘tough’.
Some of these effects can be reduced or eliminated through the physical practice mentioned in this article and others reduced through visualizations, all of which need to happen BEFORE the incident. After the incident, therapy and counseling will help cope with the negative effects. By not preparing beforehand and certainly by not taking care of yourself afterward, you can expect the full effect of a post-traumatic stress disorder. Those that have trained for their career in deadly force encounters, such as those in the military and law enforcement have an edge of training and experience. They even may have an edge in delaying the after effects of deadly force encounters. But, we are all human and suffer from the human condition. Eventually, everyone, including the most experienced combat veteran, will experience these life changing effects, whether it be days after or decades later.
The intention of this article is not to convince anyone to avoid taking a life should that be the only recourse in protecting yourself and family. The intention is to push you to prepare yourself now for that horrific event in the chance that it comes to your door or into your home. It is also to help you to help your family member that may have to go through this to save your life as care and understanding does help.
So as you prepare with supplies, prepare for winning a lethal encounter. As much as you try to avoid it, and as much as you hope that it may never happen, you just never know. The odds of a lethal encounter are higher than you may imagine, even as you shop in a grocery store, fly on a plane, or stop at a traffic light. Avoid that what you can; gain control of that which has gone out of control; and take comfort in your faith and family to support your traumatic experience should it ever come to that.