No tactics no training

Lots of things to wonder about in this story, starting with a UK newspaper reporting on an incident in Florida. She hasn't touched the gun since she bought it several years ago, and it was covered with dust, but it was "the first thing she thought of." And then she poses for pictures with the pistol.

Maybe it happened, maybe she is a publicity hound. If it really happened, I am glad she successfully defended herself in spite of doing nearly everything wrong, from not practicing, to going outside to face a threat, to putting her son in the position she did, to talking to the media and posing for pictures.
 
What not to do !!!---' Hadn't touched the gun in years '
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Absolutely 100% commonplace. Some people haven't touched their guns in more than a decade. Some people can remember where they put their gun. I have tools I haven't touched in years either. I have some fire extinguishers that I haven't handled in years as well. They are dusty. I can see that they are still pressurized. No reason to handle them.

No instruction for son . Hadn't shot because the son got between her and perp.
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No telling if she realized her son was even there or going to act, but she didn't shoot her son, used restraint. Maybe she gave him instruction and he failed to abide by it? Who knows?

Son should have gotten on the phone immediately and stayed behind his mother and gun.
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Yep.

Long fingernails is not what I consider smart for safe handling the gun .Too many chances to get in the way. Safety should come first , style second !!
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You know, that is a person decision. She obviously did fine. Not everybody dresses or grooms in a manner that will allow optimal performance should they be in a gunfight today or are prepped for every other possible eventuality either.

Funny thing though, fingernails such as hers are very good as weapons by themselves, especially for a person not carrying a gun on a regular basis.

That you picked the nails to complain about is pretty funny when the nail issue is exceptionally low on the list of tactical errors made in the incident. The woman should never have gone outside and confronted the burglar in the first place. How could you miss that? LOL.

No doubt there would be plenty to complain about here, but this is a classic example of how having a gun can be a game changer, even for those who aren't tactisavvy as the rest of us.

Lots of things to wonder about in this story, starting with a UK newspaper reporting on an incident in Florida.
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The Daily Mail regularly reports on incidents in the US. This is nothing unusual.

She hasn't touched the gun since she bought it several years ago, and it was covered with dust, but it was "the first thing she thought of."
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When we had a fire, the first thing I thought of was the fire extinguisher that I had not touched in years.

And then she poses for pictures with the pistol.
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This happens in a variety of news stories - nothing unusual.

Maybe it happened, maybe she is a publicity hound. If it really happened, I am glad she successfully defended herself in spite of doing nearly everything wrong, from not practicing, to going outside to face a threat, to putting her son in the position she did, to talking to the media and posing for pictures.
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Yeah, it really happened.

http://www.clickorlando.com/news/orange-city-woman-holds-robber-at-gunpoint/28253074
 
If they are dry chemical fire extinguishers...

turn them upside down and shake, annually, to uncake the dry chemical powder. If you don't fluff them there is a chance that when you use them, the nitrogen will come out but most of the powder will stay caked inside.

I've had to use fire extinguishers more often (four or five times in the last 20 years) than I've had to shoot anyone (zero times), but I keep both types of equipment in the best shape I can.
 
I am a believer in training and practice, but darn if does not seem that most folks defending themselves have little or no training, often 'inadequate' firearms, and still manage to stop their attackers. Just read the accounts in the National Rifleman magazine each month.
I can't recall a graduate of Thunder Ranch, with a Wilson Combat .45 doing the deed.
 
I too found it odd that she posed for re-creation pictures. She also seems somewhat disappointed she didn't get to shoot someone. She's lucky too, if she shot him while hiding behind a shed, she might been in a bit of trouble.
 
Heh, that's 99% of the non-gun enthusiast public. Sure, a large part of the US are gun owners but they don't shoot more than once or twice a year, if even THAT. Luck plays into so many of these "Armed Citizen" moments. Glad the lady & her son came out of it alright.
 
I can't recall a graduate of Thunder Ranch, with a Wilson Combat .45 doing the deed.
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Well, gun training pedigrees usually don't come out during the nightly news of home defense incidents. With that said, however, we were taught at TR to stay inside and even then we were taught to use our shotguns or rifles when possible, not pistols. ;) Ironically, I met some folks at TR who had been in shootings and then decided to get training.

She's lucky too, if she shot him while hiding behind a shed, she might been in a bit of trouble.
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She is no more lucky than anybody else who didn't shoot a bad guy at the wrong time. That really isn't luck.
 
No doubt there would be plenty to complain about here, but this is a classic example of how having a gun can be a game changer, even for those who aren't tactisavvy as the rest of us.
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This. So much this.

I'm a big fan of training -- it was my hobby and my volunteer life for years before it became my business. Even so, any honest look at guns in America yields up the following set of awesome facts:

  • 115 million Households in the US (Census Bureau, 2013)
  • 47% of US Households contain at least one gun (Gallup, 2011)
  • 54 million - Households with a gun in the US (my math)
  • 60% - percentage of gun owners who own guns for self defense/personal protection (Gallup, 2011)
  • 32.5 million Households with at least one person who owns a gun for personal protection (my math -- going on the assumption that every household with a gun must contain at least one gun owner, and based on Gallup's finding that 60% of gun owners own guns for personal protection, I believe the number of individual people who own guns for protective purposes is almost certainly higher than this, but not lower)
  • 11.1 million CCW permit holders in the US (Crime Prevention Research Center, 2014 -- John Lott's group)

Either one of those last two numbers would be enough to absolutely flood the firearms training industry with far too many students, if only one out of every ten people sought out training just once every few years.

Nevertheless, most estimates put the number of defensive gun uses to around 2 million events per year. (See http://www.buckeyefirearms.org/myth-3-25-million-defensive-gun-uses-each-year-cant-be-accurate.)

The entire firearms training industry, including every firearms instructor in America, the 97,000 NRA certified instructors and RSOs, the retired military guys and everyone in between, including all parts of the spectrum from the rawest incompetent up through "tier one" trainers and everything in between, does not train that many people per year. Nor anything like it. Never has.

So ... what?

So we see incidents like this, where the mere presence of a gun is a game-changer. Even though the owner had to blow the dust off it, and we could probably make a yard-long list of all the things she did untactically.

But I still believe in training. Not because incidents like this don't exist. But because in the long run you’re always going to make smarter decisions when you know what to do than when you don’t. You’re going to behave more safely around dangerous weapons when someone outside yourself has spotted what you’re doing unsafely and given you ways to correct it, than you will when you’re simply guessing at those things for yourself. You’re going to make better choices about equipment and practice when going to class has driven you to choose safer gear, to practice more in dry fire, to pay closer attention to the types of details that most people miss when they teach themselves. You will behave more safely when you have good, solid, honest feedback than you will when you haven’t had that feedback. And you will certainly behave more safely when you have been taught to perform a skill than you will if you just take your best stab at it without any instruction. You’ll be safer for having studied self-defense skills under supervision on a calm day at the range than you will if you try them for the very first time on some dark night when someone is trying to kill you.

And for me the bottom line is this: After studying this discipline for 15 years, I've come to the (hardly new) conclusion that the main value of serious training lies in helping people discover what they can or cannot actually do, and especially in helping them figure out what not to do. People who've had serious training very rarely get into serious confrontations -- because they know what they can do and what they can't do with a gun in hand. They learn where the limitations of the gun are, and where their own limitations are, so they're able to make good decisions based on that. (Exceptions? Of course there are! Rarely doesn't mean "never." But the basic rule of thumb seems to be that good training functions more as an innoculant or prophylactic, and less as as curative or even a palliative.)

pax
 
pax said:
You’ll be safer for having studied self-defense skills under supervision on a calm day at the range than you will if you try them for the very first time on some dark night when someone is trying to kill you.
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Have you ever taken a defensive driving course and practiced defensive driving techniques on a calm day at the skidpad?

Very few people have, yet it would be far more likely to save your life than any amount of firearms training (assuming that you're not a drug dealer or professional burglar).

According to the FBI, in 2012, there were 8,855 total firearm-related homicides in the US.

According to the NHTSA, in 2012, there were 33,561 motor vehicle deaths in the US.
 
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Have you ever taken a defensive driving course and practiced defensive driving techniques on a calm day at the skidpad?

Very few people have, yet it would be far more likely to save your life than any amount of firearms training (assuming that you're not a drug dealer or professional burglar).
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So you are suggesting people not get firearms training unless they have done some sort defensive driving training that is more practical or more likely to be needed? Not bad logic, but not necessarily on the same scale. You might as well argue that people would be better off taking nutrition classes and learning to eat better since obesity (and obesity complications) kills over 100,000 Americans per year. You can do that in a calm classroom.

http://www.nbcnews.com/health/healt...sity-may-be-even-deadlier-thought-f6C10930019

Now if you were taking true combat-type defensive driving because people were out to get you on the road, that might be another matter and it would be secondary, but complimentary to defensive gun courses. But we aren't really talking about people trying to kill you on the road.

Missing from the NHSTA data are the number of people killed who were intentionally and knowingly breaking the law such as by speeding, but the data do show that 52% of the deaths occurred when people broke the law by not wearing seatbelts. While the NHSTA numbers are bad, no doubt, 1/3 of the fatalities are caused by drunk drivers. 14% were of pedestrians for whom defensive driving would not have helped them, and another 2% were pedal cyclists.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811856.pdf

When you break down the numbers and compare then to gun fatalities, how much the types of incidents differ becomes apparent. They aren't really comparable and there is no indication that defensive driving would protect you from the same sort of problem that defensive gun classes are supposed to protect you from or that defensive driving would appreciably change the #s of deaths given the numbers of folks who intentionally break the law by driving drunk, speeding, or by not wearing seatbelts.

I do agree that defensive driving courses would be beneficial to a lot of people, but keep in mind that drivers have already had to pass a competency test for driving. No such testing exits for gun firing.
 
Have you ever taken a defensive driving course and practiced defensive driving techniques on a calm day at the skidpad?
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Yes, I have. (But it's irrelevant; see DNS' reply above.)

"Firearms-related homicides" is not the relevant statistic here. Personally, I'd rather be shot than beaten to death -- and would rather be beaten to death than to be kidnapped, raped, and slowly tortured to death over a period of four days as Meredith Emerson once was.

So instead of artificially lowering the number to make your point, be more realistic. Include everything inside the larger and much more relevant column titled plain old "homicides," period. And then add in aggravated assault, which is when someone tried to kill someone else and almost succeeded, often resulting in serious lifelong medical problems for the victim. Add forcible rapes, kidnapping, and violent sexual assaults.

The numbers are still low, aren't they? The crime rate has been falling, dramatically, for several decades now. Murder hardly ever happens.

That's probably no real consolation to the family of this woman or any of the other ~40 people murdered the day she died. So it's not really about the odds. It's about the stakes.

So set all the numbers aside, and think this through. Every single victim of violent crime did not expect violence to happen to them that day, at that time, in that place. If they had, they would not have been there. Just as no one involved in a car accident ever expected to get into a car accident that day, nobody involved in a violent crime expected to face a violent criminal that day.

If we all had magic crystal balls, we could all just pay for one-day car insurance and wear our seat belts only on days when we felt traffic was going to be particularly dangerous. We could get training to deal with the exact situation we knew we were going to face (three seconds, three yards, three shots...?) and never worry our pretty little heads about any of the other possibilities (a 15 yard shot, in the dark, with a small handgun, on a moving target violently attacking, at close quarters, the person we love best in the world...). But we can't and don't know what's out there. So we buy car insurance and wear our seat belts. And some of us carry guns and learn how to use them effectively.

Not only this, but ...

If today you walked into work, and you suddenly saw a violently enraged, armed man kill your co-workers and then he began coming after you, would you want to be able to do something about it? Or would you prefer to hope that he would decide to stop on his own, perhaps with just the help of a visual aid?

Personally, I'd rather know what to do and how to do it if needed. That's why I'm a fan of training. Of course I know that lots of people out there prefer to remain ignorant in this area. That's another possible choice, just not my preferred style. If I'm going to go to all the hassle of carrying a gun around with me as often as I do, with all that entails, I think that would be an absolute waste of effort if I didn't also at least learn how to carry it safely and use it effectively.

To me, carrying a gun without a decent level of training makes about as much sense as keeping a first aid kit without knowing how to use that strappy-gadget with the twirly thing on it.

pax
 
Lizette Rosario said:
But while she admits that she had owned the gun for five years, she'd never touched it until yesterday.

She says that it had been collecting dust on her night stand.
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pax said:
I'm a big fan of training -- it was my hobby and my volunteer life for years before it became my business....

If I'm going to go to all the hassle of carrying a gun around with me as often as I do, with all that entails, I think that would be an absolute waste of effort if I didn't also at least learn how to carry it safely and use it effectively.
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If it was my business to train people in fighting fires, I would also be a big fan of people getting firefighting training. Hopefully I would be enthusiastic about it. Same thing applies to guns, martial arts, defensive driving, nutrition, first aid, and anything else that could possibly prevent someone's death.

Possibly there's a difference in philosophy between someone who carries a gun as often as possible and someone who doesn't touch one for five years.

Lots of possible psychoses out there. Some people are unduly afraid of flying, and won't go on an airplane. Some are unduly afraid of drowning, and won't go in the water. Some are unduly afraid of violent crime, and arm themselves to the fullest extent possible.

Everyone analyzes their situation differently. More training is generally better, just don't be surprised when people analyze what's actually relevant or important to them differently than you do.
 
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Of course I know that lots of people out there prefer to remain ignorant in this area
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Some prefer to remain ignorant to the fact that people don't have to have "formal training" to learn simple things like how to shoot well enough to protect themselves.

Training comes in lots of forms, and not all of it involves paying someone who thinks they know more to tell you their way of doing it.
 
"Ignorant" is not a dirty word.

The things I don’t know fill vast acres of bookshelves in warehouses on Amazon and my local library. They’re crammed into millions of Wikipedia pages and discussion groups and informational websites. They’re all over my house. The things I don’t know fill my world, and that’s okay. Will Rogers spoke truth when he said, “We are all ignorant, only on different subjects.” There’s no shame in it, because it’s a normal human condition.

The things people choose not to learn about far outnumber the things they do. Some people choose not to learn much about self defense -- again, and that's okay. Ignorance in this particular area is just not for me, that's all.

Also, one more observation: the less people know about a given subject, the less they think there is to know about that subject. And the higher they estimate their own skills within that area.

pax
 
Have to add a quote from David Dunning, from an article titled, "The Anosognosiac's Dilemma" published in the NYT awhile back.

David Dunning said:
If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody’s field of ignorance.

To me, unknown unknowns enter at two different levels. The first is at the level of risk and problem. Many tasks in life contain uncertainties that are known — so-called “known unknowns.” These are potential problems for any venture, but they at least are problems that people can be vigilant about, prepare for, take insurance on, and often head off at the pass. Unknown unknown risks, on the other hand, are problems that people do not know they are vulnerable to.

Unknown unknowns also exist at the level of solutions. People often come up with answers to problems that are o.k., but are not the best solutions. The reason they don’t come up with those solutions is that they are simply not aware of them....

Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge. The average detective does not realize the clues he or she neglects. The mediocre doctor is not aware of the diagnostic possibilities or treatments never considered. The run-of-the-mill lawyer fails to recognize the winning legal argument that is out there. People fail to reach their potential as professionals, lovers, parents and people simply because they are not aware of the possible.
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The person who teaches himself how to fire a gun may become very good at firing the gun in one particular context and set of circumstances, and may also think that knowing how to shoot a gun in that context is all it would ever take to defend himself from a violent crime. But he probably will never realize just how many different skills he might need during a criminal encounter, and he probably won't ever discover the different (and often, more joyful!) choices he might make in his everyday life if he knew more about effective self defense.

pax
 
Also, one more observation: the less people know about a given subject, the less they think there is to know about that subject. And the higher they estimate their own skills within that area.
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Once again, I think you're making the false assumption that because they don't have "formal" training, they don't know things.

Training comes in lots of forms other than a few hours of class time on a weekend
 
Snyper said:
Also, one more observation: the less people know about a given subject, the less they think there is to know about that subject. And the higher they estimate their own skills within that area.
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Once again, I think you're making the false assumption that because they don't have "formal" training, they don't know things.

Training comes in lots of forms other than a few hours of class time on a weekend
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Snyper, that is not a false assumption. It is a logical conclusion. If one's knowledge of a subject is sparse, there will be completely unknown facets.

This is not to say that self-training is by definition inadequate. Study of the literature on the subject (any subject) and diligent practice can duplicate a lot of what the paying student learns at a formal school, and Pax did not discount that.

The point I would like to emphasize is that entirely self-directed training often leaves out areas of study that would be useful. As we grow up, everyone develops blind spots. Removing those blinders is difficult to do by oneself and formal training is often the best (but certainly not the only) way to expand one's horizons.

Respectfully submitted

Lost Sheep

p.s. "the less people know about a given subject,...the higher they estimate their own skills within that area." There have been studies that support that conclusion (sorry, I don't have citations, but I have heard such reported, and it makes sense from what I know about human nature, as well). Put another way, and more pointedly, "Ignorance is bliss."
 
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