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Hidden Complexity

I was reading some violent crime studies. One of them began with this sentence: “Gun violence is a public health problem.” It is a simple statement that hides an incredible amount of complexity. I do not know if the authors intended this or not. Let’s go through this sentence.

First, the word “violence.” What does this word mean to you? Well, I suspect most people encountering the word “violence” in this sentence would think of crime. Creating the phrase “gun violence” seems like criminals with firearms attacking people and injuring them. As a test, think of “drug violence.” I think most people would have an image in their mind of criminals protecting their distribution network for illegal drugs. Interestingly, something like “alcohol violence” really doesn’t have the same impact. This phrase may have caused different images in one’s mind during Prohibition, but for now, the phrase “alcohol violence” may result in someone asking you for clarification on what you mean. Do you mean a bar fight, or perhaps a father who comes home from work, gets loaded, and then beats up his family?

“Drug violence” is also not completely transparent in meaning. Imagine if one of your friends told you “drug violence” is getting out of hand. You ask, “What do you mean?” He says that his grandpa came home and committed suicide by overdosing on his prescription pills. I suspect that wouldn’t quite ring true to you as being “drug violence.” This raises a question that may not have occurred to you: What is meant when someone says: “[inanimate object] violence?”

The phrase “[inanimate object] violence” is generally confusing. Inanimate objects are, well, inanimate. They don’t jump up and do things on their own. People are required. When people are involved, intention matters. For example, a person who is practicing fast draw and accidentally shoots himself in the foot. Is that “gun violence?” Similarly, a justified homicide by a woman who used a firearm to avoid being raped by a larger unarmed man. Is that “gun violence?” Lastly, a homeowner who pulls a gun doesn’t shoot it but is able to make an assailant run away. Is that “gun violence?” Sadly, people who use a phrase like “[inanimate object] violence” mean that they do not see any use for that inanimate object, so anything that happens with it is “violence.”

When you read a statement like “Gun violence is a public health problem,” and you think that they mean, “People using firearms to engage in criminal activity is a public health problem,” you would be wrong. What they actually mean is this: “Any person using a firearm that results in intimidation, injury or death, regardless of intention, is a public health problem.” This includes suicides, accidents, justified homicides, and the like. It should include defensive gun uses as well, but some people don’t find defensive gun uses to be a valid category, and they do not want to call attention to them.

Also, the words “public health problem” should cause concern. In the article I saw, there was no footnote indicating a reference. Unfortunately, both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Public Health Association (APHA) articles on gun violence read like anti-gun propaganda. Ultimately, until a source recognizes the following essential points, you should take what they say with a grain of salt.

  • Intention matters. Accidents, suicides, and justifiable homicides are not instances of “gun violence.” Just as a wrong drug prescription in a hospital that results in death, a person taking their life by deliberately overdosing on their prescription drugs, or a hostage killing their kidnapper with a prescription drug overdose are not instances of “drug violence.” Furthermore, a mountain climber accidentally hanging himself with a rope, a person who deliberately hangs themself with a rope or a violent crime victim who defends herself by strangling her attacker with a rope are not instances of “rope violence.” Merely reflecting a bit on what possible meaning “rope violence” could have should make you wonder how the term “gun violence” was even established, much less given such a distorted meaning.
  • Defensive gun use is a valid statistical category where the latest research shows an estimated 1.67 million violent crime victimizations are prevented each year.
  • Injurious aggravated assault, injurious robbery, and rape rarely involve firearms.
  • Criminals injuring/killing other criminals by using firearms represent a different cause than guns. America is in a Prohibition-like environment when it comes to illegal drugs. The buying, selling, and distribution of illegal drugs represent a highly profitable enterprise that criminals are willing to protect and expand. That will include carrying and using their firearms against other criminals, as well as against law enforcement officers or anyone else who negatively impacts their enterprise. To think that criminals will abide by gun laws when it comes to protecting this profitable enterprise is to simply be foolish.
  • The ownership and bearing of arms is constitutionally protected in the 2nd Amendment. The Supreme Court has ruled that the Bill of Rights applies to the states via incorporation. Hence, the following two statements are equivalent:
    • Laws that restrict and limit the firearm ownership of law-abiding citizens are allowed if “violence” is reduced.
    • Laws that enable law enforcement to search the homes and seize law-abiding citizens’ property unreasonably are allowed if “violence” is reduced.
  • Both of these previous statements should strike fear in your heart if you value the protections of the Constitution.

Non-Fatal Carjackings

The Bureau of Justice Statistics used the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data to run a report on carjackings. The report covers the years 1995-2021.

I will note a few interesting details from the report, but I encourage you to read it fully yourself.

  • During 2012–21, nonfatal carjackings were more likely to take place at or near the victim’s home (39%) than in other locations.
  • The majority of nonfatal carjackings involved an offender with a weapon (59%). Offenders armed with firearms accounted for 38% of nonfatal carjackings.
  • Victims were as likely to resist the offender in a nonfatal carjacking (53%) as to not resist during the crime (47%). About one in four (26%) nonfatal carjackings resulted in victim injury.
  • Offenders in nonfatal carjackings were more likely to be strangers to the victim (64%) than known to the victim (26%)
  • Males were as likely as females to experience nonfatal carjackings
  • The rate of nonfatal carjacking victimization of persons in households with annual incomes of below $75,000 (0.16 per 1,000) was more than three times that of those in households with incomes of $75,000 or more (0.05 per 1,000)
  • 90 percent of the time, there is only one victim.
  • 41 percent of the time, the carjacking happened on a street or parking lot/garage.

A couple of things were shocking. Almost 40 percent happened at or near the victim’s home. This suggests, to me at least, some planning was in order here. For example, driving around neighborhoods looking for cars, finding a target car, and then planning a carjack when the victim was on their way to work or leaving at some scheduled time. Interestingly, the carjack rate where the victim’s marital status was divorced/separated or “never married” is the same (0.17). It is possible that the “known offender” (26%), or perhaps dileberately not identified (10% was that the victim offender relationship is unknown) is an ex-husband or ex-boyfriend. It is also possible that these make up the majority of cases that happen at or near the home.

Some things I thought were missing in the report:

  • The car is recovered 55% of the time, but there is no indication what shape the car is in. For example, was it stripped for parts, wrecked, or otherwise driveable.
  • The number of offenders is not reported.
  • I would have liked to see a deep dive for the victim’s martial status of divorced/separated. Do these primarily represent the home location, the victim injury, the known offenders?
  • The report covers if the victim resisted the offender, but a footnote says that this resistance is not restricted to physical resistance. Some examples would be in order here. Is not opening the door an example of non-physical resistance? Is a defensive gun use where the gun is shown but not fired non-physical resistance? I don’t know.

I cover defenses against robbery extensively in my book. I feel there are still other options for self-defense, but the report would need to be expanded.

The Lottery, Justified Homicides, and Defensive Gun Use

Ever wonder how many people win a million dollar or more lottery ticket per year? I did. I tried to figure out that information. Turns out, you have to dig for it. Luckily, Dan Ma has an introductory to statistics blog and several years ago, he did a little research. Dan looked into state lottery winners in California and Iowa. For California, it is an average of about 10 winners per year of a million or more dollars. For Iowa, an average of 4.4 winners per year of a million or more dollars. You can see his work here.

Using these two states, we can make some guesstimates about the average number of state lottery winners per year, whose winnings were a million dollars or more. California, Texas, Florida, and New York represent the largest populous states, representing about 33 percent of the population of the United States. Since California had an average of 10 per year, conservatively, we’ll say that all four of those states had an average of 10 per year, totalling 40 per year. Next, the other 46 states, we’ll conservatively estimate an average of 5 a year. This total would 46 * 5 and is 230. Thus 230 + 40 will be 270. There are a couple of multi-state lotteries. I’m going to assume they are not counted in these statistics and say they are about 30 winners per year, for a total of 300.

Statista has the number of justifiable homicides from the years 2007 through 2022 here. An average number per year by private citizens is around 338. In short, on average each year, there are approximately as many million dollar lottery winners as there are justified homicides by private citizens. However, there are way more defensive gun uses. According to the National Firearm Survey, there are an estimated 1.67 million defensive gun uses per year. 82 percent of the time, the firearm is not discharged for around 1.37 million. About 1.32 million of those occurred in the home or on the property of the home (79 percent).

These statistics, at least to me, indicate we should be spending much less time focusing in on justified homicides by private citizens and more time thinking about home and property security as well as simpler firearms for defense of your home and property.

Violent Crime and the Victim’s Marital Status

The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) keeps track of the victim’s marital status. There are several possible values for it:

  • Never married
  • Married
  • Widowed
  • Divorced
  • Separated

These are mostly self-explanatory. However, an essential point is that “Never married” does not mean single. Another critical item is that this value has no relationship to the offender. It simply is the victim’s marital status. As an example, a victim’s marital status of married doesn’t mean the offender was their spouse.

“Never Married” has a few of correlations:

  • Violent crime offenders are often young males. They often assault young males or young females.
  • Youth correlates with not being married.
  • Youth correlates with the willingness to take risks.

One item that the NCVS does not record is whether the victim had a child (or children) under the age of 18 when the crime was committed. If the victim were a woman, it would also help to know if she was pregnant. When combined with the marital status of “Never Married,” this data would allow us to understand single-parent crime victims and their circumstances. Why is that important?

Single parenthood has dramatically increased since the 1960s. Many single women parents have dropped out of high school or college. These women are often in financial difficulties, and there are various government programs to help them. If the woman does meet a person they want to marry, these programs may end when the marriage is finalized. A couple will earn less than they did as a girlfriend and boyfriend. Realizing this situation, a couple may choose not to get married for financial reasons.

Sadly, couples who don’t need government help have picked up on this situation. Some unmarried couples raising children exploit government benefits by staying single. For instance, a woman may rent a place from her boyfriend’s parents or friends, file as a single mother, take advantage of all the government programs, and get to live with her boyfriend. The boyfriend files as single and says he lives with his parents. Their resources are distributed among family members to hide income and perpetuate government benefits. Unless government workers actually visit homes and engage in surveillance of the beneficiaries, this fraud will go undetected. Not even in anonymous surveys will these people admit to what they are doing. In short, we can say:

  • There can be relationship complexity for Never Married couples.
  • There can be relationship complexity for Never Married women with a child or children.

Considering these five things, perhaps it does make sense that “Never Married” is the most common marital status among violent crime victims. However, one thing that bothers me is that if you ask people about a domestic violence situation, many people will answer that the victim’s marital status will be “Married.”

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should run out and get married to prevent being a victim of violent crime. However, what it does mean is that if you are ready to get married and your instincts tell you that you are with the right person, you shouldn’t hesitate because you are worried about violent crime (e.g., domestic violence). Any given domestic situation will likely be more complex without the legal protections of marriage. After all, in the old days, couples would consider murdering their spouse before considering divorce! That doesn’t help much around violent crime, but it speaks to the commitment many people felt about marriage!

Obviously, things change. You may find your marriage is wrong and need to get out of it. What do the violent crime statistics say about divorce? Well, another shocker is that violent crime from divorced couples is even lower than from married couples. Here are the actual statistics from 1993 to 2021 from the NCVS (95 percent confidence intervals are in parenthesis):

  • Aggravated Assault, Victim Not Injured (men primarily the victim sex, public places common, offenders are more often strangers. i.e., more likely to be things like road rage)
    • Never Married: 50.62% (48.50-52.74)
    • Married: 29.86% (27.59-32.13)
    • Divorced: 12.43% (11.23-13.63)
  • Aggravated Assault, Victim Injured (men/women about equal for victim sex, the location of a home is common, offender more likely to be someone the victim knows. i.e., more likely to be domestic violence)
    • Never Married: 57.17% (54.02-60.33)
    • Married: 18.47% (15.89-21.06)
    • Divorced: 13.19% (11.05-15.34)

Perhaps it is time to think about our perceptions of domestic violence and the victim’s marital status. They may be leading us away from reality.

The Intentional Measurement Swindle

This post has a long introduction – please be patient. After the introduction, I’ll show how it relates to gun rights and self-defense. However, you need to understand the methodology detailed in the introduction.

Introduction

I have a technology background. The term “balloon effect” is used when a fix is made to a complex system, resulting in another problem popping up in a different part of the system. Here, the balloon represents any problem, not just the original one. Hence, you push down on the balloon in one area (i.e., fixing a problem), and the balloon expands into another (i.e., creating a new issue).

Unlike a balloon, this relationship can be complicated to track. You attempt to address an issue and seemingly do so. Then, it turns into a completely different issue, whose connection to the original issue and fix is not apparent. For example, many software fixes are checked in a development cycle. When another problem emerges, it may not be clear which fix caused it. Furthermore, if new code is still being added, this code could have defects that cause problems in other parts of the system. In short, it becomes messy to try and find out what caused this new issue.

The number of defects a software product has is a typical measure of its quality. Software companies have a testing or quality assurance organization responsible for finding and reporting defects. Testing occurs at almost every step of the software development process. Often, the number of outstanding defects is a criterion for releasing a software product to customers. This measurement can be manipulated. For example, imagine if there was tremendous company pressure to release a software product to customers. The CEO calls the test manager in and tells the test manager to quit testing the product or be fired. The test manager complies. The number of reported defects drops because no one is testing, and the product can ship without reported outstanding defects. This behavior, of course, is unethical. It also shows how the measurement process can be gamed.

What keeps this situation from happening all the time? The “problem” with our defect example is that ethical people raise hell because what is going on is obvious. Employees who care about the quality of the product may resign or take another job elsewhere. Customers who receive a buggy product complain, and the customer support group takes issue with the process.

Unfortunately, there is another unethical method of getting your way. It keeps measuring the same thing, just like our defect example, but pushes the actual costs to the unmeasurable, and, significantly, it is not apparent at all. I call this the Intentional Measurement Swindle.

To illustrate this better, let’s move to another example. In technology companies, it is common to hire “cost-cutter” types to come in and help streamline the company. One of the most common things was centralizing departments or organizations to save money. Consider the Information Technology (IT) department of a company. The IT department typically handles employee computer, network, and access problems (and many other things). Here is what I’ve seen happen:

  • The “cost-cutter” comes in and adds up the costs of having decentralized IT departments. Often, the company has a local IT department at every reasonably sized site. For instance, there is a site in Denver with its IT department, one in Dallas with its own, and so forth.
  • The “cost-cutter” tells the company that the IT department needs to centralize to save money.
  • The “cost-cutter” then implements an IT self-help process and online documentation that the employees must follow if they have trouble with their computer, password, or whatever. Since most online help and documentation are outsourced, only a few people are on the centralized IT budget.
  • The “cost-cutter” then shows the budget of the new centralized IT department and compares it to the previous budget of the decentralized IT departments. It is much less.
  • The “cost-cutter” gets a large pay bonus.

This process seems reasonable. The “cost-cutter” took an easily measured activity and made it the evaluation metric. A higher number meant failure, and a lower number suggested success. Again, this seems reasonable. However, what happened is that the actual costs were pushed out to something hard to measure and unobvious. What is it that is hard to measure? In the centralized IT model with the self-help center, the IT work is pushed out to all company employees! Some of these employees may be high-salaried employees. Now, you have a software architect making six figures a year and spending hours going through self-help trying to fix their laptop. In the decentralized model, an IT person would fix the computer for the software architect. In sum, the decentralized IT department allowed the software architect to do other things – like go to unproductive meetings (almost kidding).

Tracking the time each employee spends on their job, down to the hour level, is difficult. If you tried to track it to that detail, each employee would have to spend an hour a week just reporting how they spent the other hours of the week—hardly an efficient strategy. The unethical “cost-cutter” uses this fact to hide the actual costs of the new implementation. What needs to be noticed is that the company’s employees have differing job responsibilities between the two models. The more responsibility an employee has that doesn’t relate to their job (IT work), the less efficient they are at the job they were hired for (e.g., software architecture).

I’ve used the IT department as an example, but trust me, an unethical “cost-cutter” can size up almost any “improvements” on this basis. They are thinking: “How can I implement a change that is easily measured for my benefit yet push out the actual costs to areas that are almost impossible to measure and so granularly distributed that those costs are not obvious?”

I refer to this process as the Intentional Measurement Swindle.

Firearm Rights and Self-Defense

In a previous post on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I talked about how I found it odd that the CDC didn’t seem to have any partnerships with the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), or the National Firearm Survey (NFS). I also pointed out in another post that the CDC does not seem to be involved with the National Shooting Sports Foundation and its work on suicide prevention. Given the CDC’s stance on its “Fast Facts: Firearm Violence and Injury Prevention” page and declaring firearm violence a public health issue, these lapses seem pretty odd.

Other things seem odd as well:

  • On their Fast Facts page, the CDC divorces intent from firearm deaths. Suicides, murder, justified homicides, and criminals killing other criminals are all lumped together. They use this information, along with much lower-quality information on firearm injuries, to justify declaring that firearm violence is a public health problem.
  • If you read my book, you know that 98 percent of all violent crime is aggravated assault, robbery, and rape. Here is a Fast Fact that the CDC doesn’t mention: If you are injured in one of those crimes, firearms are rarely used.
  • The CDC no longer publishes defensive gun use statistics.

In declaring firearm violence to be a public health issue, the CDC is hoping to get new powers. These powers could very well lead to things like restrictions on firearms, federal lawsuits to put gun manufacturers out of business (in the name of public health!), and so forth. Let’s assume that severe firearms restrictions are passed in the name of public health. The next question would be: Are these restrictions successful? To determine that, you have to measure.

Currently, the CDC’s gold standard of measurement is the number of firearm deaths per day. What would happen if these severe firearm restrictions were reasonably successful? Well, the number of firearm deaths per day would go down. If it does, it seems like a success! But wait, there’s more…

  • The number of defensive gun uses would also go down. Around 82 percent of the time, the firearm is not discharged in defensive gun uses. This fact implies that the offenders weren’t armed with firearms, or there would likely be a shoot-out. We also know from my book that 98 percent of violent crime is aggravated assault, robbery, and rape. When the victim is injured in these crimes, the offender rarely uses firearms. Because there are an estimated 1.67 million defensive gun uses a year, there would be a dramatic uptick in non-firearm violent crime injuries if potential victims were not able to secure a firearm to defend themselves.
  • The number of suicides by firearm would likely decrease. However, we know from my book that 50 percent of the time, suicide victims don’t use a gun. Assuming that a suicidal individual couldn’t access a firearm due to these restrictions, there is a good chance that they would find another means to take their life. Thus, I suspect that the number of suicides would remain the same even though the number of suicides by firearm would decrease.

In short, severe firearm restrictions might lead to fewer firearm deaths per day, but actual suicides would be about the same, and there would be a dramatic uptick in non-firearm violent victimizations. These effects would not be detected by simply looking at firearm deaths per day. Thus, the CDC could claim success if its only measurement was firearm deaths per day.

This process is no different than what happened during alcohol Prohibition. If your only measure of success is the amount of alcohol consumed each day, then Prohibition was wildly successful. The reason Prohibition wasn’t successful was the significant amount of violent crime that increased due to it. This violent crime uptick was primarily carried out by gangsters who were intent on buying, selling, and distributing illegal alcohol. Fortunately, these violent crimes were well reported, and the nation’s citizens were informed of them. Hence, one of the reasons Prohibition was repealed was to take the money out of the illegal alcohol trade and reduce gangster violence.

Non-firearm violent crime victimization, I would wager, would not have the same impact as it would be finely granulated across all the residents of the country. Today, murder dominates the headlines, yet it is less than two percent of all violent crimes. I doubt very seriously that dangerous, violent crimes that don’t involve death and firearms will get any media attention. After all, it doesn’t today.

In short, the CDC is set up for an Intentional Measurement Swindle.

Preventative Medical Scans

As a follow-up to my last post on fact boxes….

A recent article in the New Yorker on Full Body MRI Scans shows some of the complexities with too much information. Here is a quote, but I urge you to read the article in its entirety.

There were no visible problems in my lungs, liver, pancreas, or brain, the nurse said. My sinuses were a little swollen, probably from allergies. There was, however, a solitary spot on my prostate. Lesions are graded on a scale from one to five, she explained, based on their likelihood of being cancerous. “Your score is a three, smack dab in the middle,” she said.

[…]

Doctors have a word for accidental findings that produce more questions than answers: incidentaloma. I knew that I probably didn’t have prostate cancer, and that most prostate cancers don’t prove deadly. But I also knew that, because it is so common, it ranks as the second leading cause of death from cancer among men.

A few days later, I sheepishly informed my primary-care doctor that I’d had a full-body MRI. She graciously ordered a blood test; a urologist recommended a dedicated prostate MRI, and, if the results weren’t too alarming, regular follow-ups after that. The immediate cascade would probably cost several thousand dollars, split between me and my insurance. I thought about the other ways in which the money could be spent: months of insulin for diabetic patients; scores of inhalers for asthmatic children; colonoscopies that are proven to find cancer and save lives. When I told Davenport, the radiologist, he shook his head and face-palmed. “Prenuvo probably views your story as a success—I view your story as a tragedy,” he said. “They’ve created in your mind this uncertainty. You were a healthy person, and now you’ve become a patient.”

https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-medicine/will-a-full-body-mri-scan-help-you-or-hurt-you

Self-defense: Strategy, Context, and Tactics

In my book, I used the “fact box” to discuss the benefits and harms of concealed carry. The fact box was created by the Harding Center for Risk Literacy. I first read about them in the book Risk Savvy by Gerd Gigerenzer. They were developed to help people determine the risk of specific health tests, like early detection tests for cancer. I recommend you read all the books by Gerd Gigerenzer.

What could be wrong with early-detection cancer tests, such as mammograms? This could be explained in two words: False Positives. For example, assume you are diagnosed with cancer, but it is a non-progressive kind. It won’t kill you until you are 136 years old, long after your life expectancy. Unfortunately, many hospitals will treat this non-progressive cancer as though it were progressive. As many of you are aware, cancer treatment can be a horrible thing to go through. One should be sure that it is necessary.

The benefits of such early detection scans must outweigh the potential harms of false positives. For mammograms, the benefit is one out of every thousand women compared to women who do not get a mammogram. This is a small number. Furthermore, early detection scans promise more years of life for the patient. This extra life is a testable hypothesis. It turns out the same number of deaths occur over eleven years between early scan patients and those that do not get scanned. This is not a ringing endorsement, even for an early detection test as popular as mammograms.

The fact box is also an excellent idea for self-defense methods. Each self-defense method has benefits and harms. As long as we do good research on populating the fact box, it becomes an essential strategy for evaluating self-defense tactics. However, something important is missing, and that is context. Going back to our health example, a woman with hereditary risks of breast cancer would likely require different early detection processes or treatment options than a woman without those risks.

Context is especially relevant when considering self-defense tactics. Let’s consider an extreme example. Two countries are at war, and you are a spy with critical information that will turn the tide of the war in your country’s favor. You’ve memorized this information and destroyed the paper documents. However, if the enemy captures you, they may torture you and obtain that information. The enemy could easily win the war if they can force you to talk. The self-defense method you choose is to wear an explosive vest with the detonator already pushed in. If you are surprised and knocked unconscious, the vest will still explode, you’ll die, and the secret is safe. If you can make it to your leadership, you can tell them the information and hope they have an excellent bomb expert who can diffuse it before your thumb tires out.

Now, if a normal everyday person with the same violent crime risks as other normal everyday people were to tell you that they wear an explosive vest as their self-defense tactic against violent crime, you would not want to hang out with the guy. If he blows himself up, he’ll take you and anyone else in the vicinity, including the criminal. Worse, he might accidentally blow himself up and anyone else in the area buying groceries or getting fuel. The harms would outweigh the benefits for everyday civilians.

So far, context is about determining your threats and your level of risk. There is another thing to watch out for, which is context-shift. This shift is common in self-defense methods. For example, many self-defense advocates will glean everything they can from tactical law enforcement teams. However, these teams are focused on something other than self-defense. After all, they may be raiding a house or stopping a bank robbery. These are offensive missions. As such, it is often an untested assumption that what is suitable for offensive missions must also be good for self-defense. This assumption may not be valid when comparing S.W.A.T. teams to everyday ordinary civilians.

Another factor in context is the laws of your state. Many laws receive public support because they are “tough on crime.” This often means for drug or gun crimes, there are mandatory prison sentences. Regarding mandatory sentencing laws around guns, there can be a problem. For example, what a concealed carrier thinks is a defensive gun use could end up being an aggravated assault charge. Depending on your state, an aggravated assault with a firearm could result in a mandatory prison sentence if convicted. Because of this extreme penalty, most civilians will want to avoid a jury trial, hoping for a plea bargain. The reason is that if a jury convicts, the judge cannot do anything because of the mandatory sentence law. It is another reason why civilian defensive gun use often goes unreported. If the offender runs away without injury to him or you, why invite further scrutiny, especially if it can land you in prison?

Ultimately, that gets us to tactics. You can choose one or more self-defense tactics based on the fact box and context. I go through a preliminary fact box for concealed carry in my book. However, you can create one for any self-defense method or tactic. Unfortunately, most individuals focus on weapon-specific issues, like ease of concealment, number of rounds, cartridge, and so on. For ordinary civilians, there are some other key questions you should answer as well:

  • Are there any laws restricting the weapon or its capability?
  • Can there be valid business restrictions against the weapon?
  • If you have the weapon on your person, what would be the experience if you were pulled over by law enforcement for a traffic violation?
  • Are there any travel restrictions regarding the weapon?
  • Are there weapon-specific mandatory sentences regarding the use of the weapon?

Remember that ordinary everyday civilians will likely never experience a violent crime. These five basic questions represent what they will need to deal with much more often. For example, making a mistake with a firearm during a traffic stop (e.g., reaching for your wallet and the law enforcement officer sees your gun) could have life-altering ramifications.

Ultimately, a self-defense method should result in either a neutral or positive value for you and your loved ones. Perhaps it saves a life or prevents a criminal victimization. However, it should not have any negative value for you or your family. There should be no increased risk of suicide or horrible accidents. Much like the health fact box looks at several years, your self-defense fact box should as well. The positive or negative value your self-defense method has on your life and the lives of your loved ones is a testable hypothesis.

Memes

I like memes!

For a wide variety of reasons, when I am traveling, I carry a 1911 in condition 3, which means I have to rack the slide to shoot. I’m an ordinary civilian with a normal threat level. I’m mostly concerned to minimize opportunities for negligent discharges and being able to easily separate my magazine/ammo from my gun and put both in secure storage. This way, I’m good legal standing wherever I travel. The bottom line is that ordinary civilians will be stopped by law enforcement more times than they’ll be in a violent crime. Also, they will experience more negligent discharges than violent crimes. It makes sense to make law enforcement stops safer (your magazine in one lock box and your unloaded gun in another) as well as reduce the likelihood of a negligent discharge by a drastic amount.

An obvious downside is that drawing and racking the slide increases your time to shoot by a half a second or so (assuming you practice). Is it critical? It could be. But guess what else is critical: the draw from the concealed carry holster. If you are worried about half a second, you should be open carrying with a holster designed for a quick and smooth draw. The time difference between a concealed carry draw and an open carry draw is far more significant than drawing concealed and drawing concealed plus racking a slide. By choosing to concealed carry rather than open carry, you are, implicitly most of the time, saying the increase in draw time doesn’t matter in order to have the advantages of concealed carry. In other words, the title of this meme could also be: “When you thought you had time to draw from a concealed carry holster.”

Another downside: It requires two hands to rack the slide. This objection is better. Carrying in condition 3, for all practical purposes, does require both hands. I’m okay with this requirement. Others may not be. I’m making an explicit risk management decision. I’m saying I want the advantages of concealed carry and the advantages of safety. I’m deliberately choosing to have the disadvantage of draw time and requiring two hands to gain those advantages.

In my book, I try to make self-defense a risk management decision. Only by being honest about the benefits and harms of self-defense methods can someone properly evaluate them. Also, I try to make self-defense holistic. There are many ways to dramatically decrease your risk of violent crime. These methods are not mutually exclusive to say, carrying a firearm, but can complement them. For example, many states have increased penalties for crimes committed with a firearm. In Arizona, a negligent discharage in a municipality is a felony and you can see prison time if convicted. The law doesn’t care if you are a criminal using a firearm to rob someone or a concealed carrier who has a negligent discharge in a grocery store parking lot. If you don’t feel you can provide for your family in prison, you may want to evalute the benefits and harms of carrying a handgun with a loaded chamber in Arizona.

What works for me may not work for you. I certainly don’t try to convince people that what I do is what they should do. I do try to convince them that they should evaluate their self-defense method holistically and regarding benefits and harms. A person who properly evaluates their self-defense method in such a way is in far better shape than someone who doesn’t.

Memes like this one are funny and have a grain of truth. Let that grain of truth make you think deeply about the choices you make for self-defense.

A Popular Topic

In the March/April 2024 Combat Handguns magazine, we have another article called “What To Say To The Police” by the vetran Massad Ayoob. Ayoob writes great thought provoking articles and his experience provides him great insight.

I’ve written about this topic in the past here and here, so I’ll try and focus on a couple of different aspects. In general, this is a controversial topic that elicits emotional responses. What concealed carriers want to know is what to say. Quoting from the article: “Andrew [Branca] agrees that a brief statement can be helpful, but worries you may not be thinking straight under stress. […] Andrew says getting arrested is the least of concerns; the point is not to spend your life in prison.”

Unfortunately, in a caption to an Armed Citizen article, the following is stated: “Notice how many people in the “Armed Citizen” column aren’t even arrested? Does anyone think that would have been the case if the “didn’t say anything to the police” after shooting someone?”

I feel this caption is very misleading (it is also repeated in the article). The only way to properly understand if the people in the “Armed Citizen” column did the right thing is to create a report where the people and location where protected (i.e., made anonymous), provide a transcript of the discussion with law enforcement, elminate the outcome (e.g., arrested, not arrested, or criminally charged), and provide this report to various criminal defense attorneys. Ask the attorneys if the suspect said too much to law enforcement. If you read my blog post on Annie Duke’s book, you’ll know that making a bad decision and getting a good outcome is still a bad decision. How many of these “Armed Citizen” suspects talked too much with law enforcement in the opinion of criminal defense attorneys?

Also in the article, there is a discussion about Marc Victor and a brief statement. It is stated that both Victor and Ayoob recommend a brief statement if it was a “good shoot.” The following is then stated. “If someone doesn’t know what constitutes a good shoot, why are they carrying a gun?” Again, I find this misleading. It isn’t whether you think it is a good shoot, it is a question of how it is presented to a group of reasonable people and whether they think it is a good shoot. The whole point of saying nothing, giving a brief statement, or spilling your guts to law enforcement is about that.

Lastly, there is this statement in the article: “At the start, let’s be clear that speaking ot the police is good avice only for those who have acted justifiably. It is certainly not the advice that defense lawyers give to their general clientele, who a high percentage of the time are in fact guily of the crime or at least some lesser included offenses.” Unfortunately, I can use this statement to justify not talking to law enforcement. Guess who law enforcement mostly deals with? Guilty people. The more information you give them, the more the confirmation bias kicks in – they started out assuming you were guilty of a crime and everything you say confirms their initial suspicion! Also, what you think is justified versus what reasonable people think is justified could be very different.

The bottom line is that a veteran law enforcement officer will get any ordinary civilian in stressful circumstances (more than likely, their first time in such circumstances) to sing like a canary. Really the only way to get this resolved is to print out something on the back of your lawyer’s card (if you carry a gun, you should have an attorny on retainer) that you can simply repeat over and over to the law enforcment officer. Marc J. Victor has such a card, but whether law enforcement and other criminal defense attorneys agree with what he writes is another matter.

In the end, the back and forth between law enforcement and criminal defense attorneys on this matter should be enough to convince a law-abiding ordinary civilian to seriously evaluate less-than-lethal options for self-defense.