Double Naught Spy
New member
I agree completely but playing dead completely negates any possibility of stoping the threat with an apporpriate amount of force.
Apparently time and time again, the threat is stopped by playing dead. That was the point of the examples. The threat may move on, but the threat to you is stopped. When the threat does move on may be what gives you the opportunity to react, as pointed out, and to react at a point in time of your choosing such that your chances of success may be higher.
I had also started the thread on tackling an active shooter (and examples of both active shooters and those threatening to be active shooters). http://thefiringline.com/forums/showthread.php?t=436861
My point in looking at these alternative tactics was to see if they could be used effectively or not. Turns out, they can, despite some of the claims or perspectives that guns are the be all to end all when it comes to self defense. What good is a gun at times whe you don't have one. Far too often on this forum and others we read where folks proclaim that being unarmed (not having a gun, specifically) means being defenseless, but for many of us, being unarmed is a condition with which we are faced with some regularity. So are we really defenseless if we are unarmed?
That is an amazing perspective given that so many folks consider themselves as being "prepared" for such events where they might have to engage in self defense, but being prepared only seems to mean having a gun and being willing to use it if necessary, otherwise, they are "defenseless."
While it might be nice to be Bruce Lee or to have his skills, turns out that folks with all sorts of training and lack of training manage to effect a variety of times of self defense in lethal force encounters that work and work with surprising levels of success.
We like to say that the best defense is to be armed. It may be, or not. As a buddy of mine pointed out, the best defense is to not be where the threat is. However, somewhere along the way, many of us got the idea that "defense" means doing physical harm to the opposition. It is something of a strategy based on a good defense being based on a good offense. However, defense is just that, protection from attack. It does not have to mean doing harm to another person to stop the attack, but that is one venue. Defense encompasses a variety of considerations, one of which is playing dead which is a form of deception. You can run away. Maybe you are smart and can just avoid bad situations all together. Maybe you can hide, use cover (even if not hidden), etc. Even if without a physical non-biological weapon of your being (such as a gun, knife, stick, etc.), you can engage offensive defense where you take the fight to the opposition and people do this with equally surprising success without being Bruce Lee.
As the above scenario demonstrates, not every situation is appropriate to a "react with force" strategy.
Right. Sometimes I think we are going to react ourselves to death. The critical thing is making the right decisions based on the situation. There were folks at Luby's, VT, and a couple of other mass shootings where folks reacted with force and got killed as a result. Force is great, but it has to be used appropriately. A lot of brave people are dead as a result of poor choices in their timing to use force.
Personally, I have never quite followed the logic of having a gun for self defense and then having the attitude that if I saw anything going wrong that I had to react with force, putting myself in grave danger as a result. That would seem to be counter to the notion of "defense."
Sometimes the best option is to not make yourself the most important target to the opposition.