How much firearm training does an ordinary civilian need? Ask ten instructors, and you’ll probably get ten different answers. Some of them might even say, “You can never get enough training,” yet military boot camps and police academies seem to have figured out the right amount.
One way to determine how much training we need is to look at our enemy’s skills. Let’s hear from Adam Plantinga, author of the book 400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman: “Most bad guys can’t shoot for spit. They’re about as accurate as the stormtroopers in Star Wars. … But there are notable exceptions to this. Some felons, especially gang members, do practice. Some have military experience. … They are the reason we have SWAT teams.”
Plantinga’s observation is that marksmanship, for the most part, is not part of our enemy’s skill set. This observation conflicts with most firearm training classes. Firearms training for concealed carry is very keen on making you a better pistol marksman. You can spend thousands of dollars and untold hours on learning to shoot in low-light conditions, shooting from behind vehicles, sweeping your house, and so forth. However, I would wager that an ordinary civilian who has had a couple of quality firearm training classes and shoots a hundred pistol rounds a month at the local gun range is a far better shot than most violent criminals.
What follows from these observations? It would seem that firearm skill is not the same as violence skill. The next logical question is: what does it mean to say you have violence skill? To make sense of this question, we can make some distinctions. First, let’s distinguish between actualized violence and potential violence. We can further differentiate between experienced/inexperienced and trained/untrained. Here are the players that map to these distinctions, starting with the most dangerous:
Actualized-violence-experienced-trained: veteran law enforcement officer, military combat veteran, a violent criminal with military training.
Actualized-violence-experienced-untrained: veteran violent criminal. Although not formally trained, it would be a mistake to underestimate this man. What he knows works.
Actualized-violence-inexperienced: anyone with the proven ability to impose their will on someone else by brutalizing them. They just haven’t done it enough to be considered experienced at it. They may or not be trained on the techniques of violence.
Potential-violence-trained: rookie law enforcement officer’s first day, green military private being deployed to combat, self-defense trainees who have completed many quality courses.
Potential-violence-untrained: most ordinary civilians
It may be tempting to assume that these five categories are separated only by degrees. In doing so, someone may argue that “potential-violence-trained” should be higher up the list. After all, they are competent in the tools and techniques to be effective if a violent situation occurs. I would argue differently: the difference between potential and actualized is separated by one of kind and not degree. Potential and actualized are like voltage and amperage, respectively. Your various traits, personality, character, and body chemistry are like the conductor that transforms voltage into amperage, or in other words, the potential into the actual.
As in the case of lightning in a thunderstorm, the potential is there, but there is no lighting until the air becomes a conductor and allows the flow of electricity. This conductor formation with lightning is analogous to the one that forms in people. Think of a timid mother who suddenly becomes violent when her child is threatened. When this occurs, you watch ancient instincts materialize in the modern world. The mother transitions from potential-violence-untrained to actualized-violence-inexperienced. However, if her child is never threatened again, that conductor may never again materialize. She will continue to be the timid mom as if nothing happened.
For ordinary civilians, the formation of a “3Fs-conductor” happens through a hormone cocktail that is released by our instincts (I’ll explain the 3Fs shortly). One of the cocktail’s ingredients is adrenaline. When this 3Fs-conductor is formed, many bodily changes happen. Our blood is pulled from our extremities and returned to the core, tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, shaky hands, and so forth. Your body cocktail also gives you several advantages in a fight. For example, it maximizes your muscle power and deadens pain. This cocktail makes our experience of reality different from someone who did not get that cocktail.
Let’s suppose that scientists invented a “raw consciousness camera” that hooked into your brain and recorded what you saw and heard. Further, let’s suppose you had a body camera, like the ones law enforcement uses, and both these cameras are recording when you experience a violent incident. It is essential to understand that the two recordings would be different. What you “see” via the “raw consciousness-camera” is what evolution selected for thousands of years. Your raw conscious interpretation of your senses, under the influence of your body cocktail, will lie to you if it means you’ll survive to reproduce. Time may seem to slow down, you only see and hear specific things, you may not remember doing certain things, something that should be painful is not, and so forth. These seemingly odd results are with us today because they helped our ancestors live long enough to reproduce for thousands of years. Reproductive success (and persistence – reproductive success doesn’t work well if all your children die) is evolution’s positive feedback loop.
When the cocktail of hormones is released on our body, there are typically three reactions: Fight, Flight, or Freeze. These three reactions map to our 3Fs. All three are in play at any given time. The more experienced with violence you are, the more predictable the conductor formed may be. However, the other options are not necessarily eliminated. For example, an experienced hunter with a rifle at the ready may turn a corner thinking they will see a buck and instead be looking at a large angry bear. The hunter may freeze. Or he may run. Or he may shoot. What your response is to an unexpected release of the body cocktail may not be as predictable as you would like it to be.
In contrast, an experienced violent criminal may “work themselves up” before brutalizing their intended victim, such as verbally abusing them. They “work themselves up” to get the cocktail of hormones released to create a Fight-conductor and maximize their ability to brutalize. However, if their intended victim pulls a gun with grim determination and our experienced violent criminal sees the willingness to kill in their eyes, that Fight-conductor may instantly change to the Flight-conductor, or perhaps the Freeze-conductor.
With this background in mind, we can now return to the distinction between violence skill and firearm skill for ordinary civilians. Violence skill is the ability to brutalize your opponent, despite or because of the changes your body experiences due to the body cocktail. How you handle the body cocktail is something unique to each and every one of us. It isn’t predictable. We haven’t figured out how to simulate it safely.
This fact is why police academies and military boot camps have a stopping point, and ordinary civilian firearms training does not seem to have one: the police and military will experience violence at some point. Those violent experiences will complete their initial training. Ordinary civilians, on the other hand, may never experience violence. This fact is why the violent criminal has advantages over the ordinary civilian, regardless of the amount of training the ordinary civilian has completed.
In my book, I try and be realistic about the advantages of a violent criminal. I encourage ordinary civilians to make appropriate lifestyle changes, typically small changes, to reduce the likelihood of meeting a violent criminal. In addition, there are many things ordinary civilians can do to help overcome a violent criminal’s advantages – such as proper home preparation and a focused mission. However, the rubber meets the road at some point, and an ordinary civilian may have to go through their unique experience of violence and their body cocktail.
Laurence Gonzales, the author of the book Deep Survival, has an insightful observation for wilderness survival, which I believe is compatible with surviving violence (emphasis mine):
“It’s easy to imagine that wilderness survival would involve equipment, training, and experience. It turns out that, at the moment of truth, those might be good things to have but they aren’t decisive. Those of us who go into the wilderness or seek our thrills in contact with the forces of nature soon learn, in fact, that experience, training, and modern equipment can betray you. The maddening thing for someone with a Western scientific turn of mind is that it’s not what’s in your pack that separates the quick from the dead. It’s not even what’s in your mind. Corny as it sounds, it’s what’s in your heart“
Let us return to the timid mother whose child is threatened. Her body cocktail creates the Fight-conductor, but her heart is what will win the fight. Only her child’s safety or her death will make her stop. An ordinary civilian with all the training in the world, who has no heart in the fight, will likely lose. A timid mother with no training at all, but with all the heart in the fight, can win. Importantly, an ordinary civilian should soul search and determine what they have heart about first, make small lifestyle changes to protect it, and then figure out what training they need to further protect it.
