InSights Training Center Blog

The “good guy” with the gun against the “bad guy” with the knife (or machete, axe, club, tire-iron, etc.).  “No contest”, you say. “The man with the gun can’t lose.” Or can he? A great deal depends on his ability with that gun and the proximity of his opponent.

If, for example, our hero shoots his would-be attacker at a distance of 20 yards, he loses. Not the fight, you understand, but most probably his freedom because he will almost certainly be charged with murder. The only thing that justifies your shooting another human being is the immediate need to stop him from trying to kill you (or someone else), remember? Click here to read more »

Since I previously discussed condition white I figured that I would move on to the next one with a little more information that seems to get missed.

Condition Yellow is frequently defined as “relaxed alert” but that doesn’t really explain what an “alert” person is actually doing. Every self defense class on the planet will pay some lip service to awareness with a stock phrase like “be aware of your surroundings”, but no real explanation about how one goes about being aware. Click here to read more »

I think that everyone in the self defense world has heard a lot about Jeff Coopers Color Codes. However like most ”common knowledge” there is a lot of detail that gets forgotten or just glossed over, and like many good ideas the color codes have evolved over time with different schools of thought developing their own variations. Cooper originally envisioned the color codes as a representation of a “state of mind” rather than a particular defensive posture or threat condition. Cooper took the USMC system of indicating the combat-readiness of a unit and applied it to an individual.

I think that models like the color codes are much more effective when they are tied to specific states and actions rather than just expressing a state of readiness. It is important to remember that the color codes are not about the nature of the threat, but about your actions, readiness, and responses based upon the situation. The color codes give us a way of organizing these states and making decisions.

Condition White
Generally condition white gets dismissed quickly as being “unaware” or “unprepared” and students are admonished to “not be in condition white.” Unfortunately it is neither possible nor even desirable for this to be true. This belief that condition white is undesirable stems from people thinking it comes from not paying attention, when in fact it is just as likely to driven by paying too much attention to something.

When you are watching a movie, reading a book (or writing a blog post), you are focusing your attention on something other than your immediate surroundings. This might include the active exclusion of wider sensory inputs, like listening to music to mask the sound of traffic. If you are reading this page you are not looking out the window. We willfully exclude and ignore our surroundings on many occasions because the task we are doing requires our complete focus and attention. If you are focusing on your sight picture then you are not paying attention to your surroundings (at least for the duration of the shot and it’s follow through.) If you are literally asleep then you are most certainly not paying attention to your environment.

The point I am getting at is that we need to recognize the moments when we are going to be in condition white and control the circumstances when this happens. We can go into condition white when have other security measures in place (locked doors, dogs that will bark, alarm systems, people that will serve as our early warning.)
The idea is that we don’t want to be surprised by the threat before we get a chance to prepare, at least a little bit, to deal with it.

There is some discussion over at Sharp as a Marble regarding the link I posted here regarding aggressors claiming self defense.

I think Rob is correct in pointing this out:

… ‘proportionate response’ doesn’t translate into the real world easily …

Using the least amount of force is generally the most legally defensible option. If an aggressor is trying to flee and you are preventing them from doing so it is pretty hard to argue that you couldn’t escape. Self defense isn’t designed to be ‘punishment’, we have courts for that. We must fight until we are sure that we can escape, and then we should do so.

Tactically speaking, if you are spending time on a neutralized threat you are creating an opportunity for another assailant. You have already confirmed that you are in the location where fights happen and we don’t know if the first assailant brought along a (tougher) friend. His friend might have been staying out of it because he didn’t want to get hurt, didn’t want to get in trouble, or thought the first guy could handle it. If the defender starts winning, that equation can change.

The eternal debate: Which cartridge is more effective? 9mm or .45. On the face of it, .45 seems like the obvious choice. However, if you take one of our classes (like General Defensive Handgun) you will realize you can’t use caliber to make up for poor shooting. The bullets just aren’t that big!

Occasionally, a student will mention some “horror story” he/she read or was told involving a bad guy who soaked up 20, 30 or more 9mm rounds and how you never hear about that happening with a .45. Or they will quote some “1 shot stop” book’s studies. By the time you’re done reading this post you should be able to figure out for yourself the usefulness of that material.

I believe there is a non-ballistic answer that can explain some (certainly not all though) of this discrepancy. So this post is going to largely ignore what we know from terminal ballistics and, instead, conduct a little thought experiment that should be illustrative of why you need to be so careful when reading about guns and self-defense.

We will use two hypothetical guns/shooters: Shooter #1 – The 1911 .45 ACP with 7 rd GI magazines. Shooter #2 – The Glock 17 9mm P with 17 rd magazines.

In our thought-experiment, we are going to shoot a bad guy (BG) who is posing a deadly threat towards us. We will assume he is reasonably motivated and doesn’t just quit upon seeing our gun. We will assume that our first shot is a mortal wound to the heart (thus subsequent shots are largely irrelevant). We will assume that there are no spinal hits or effective head shots (which, regardless of caliber, would be instantly incapacitating and so pointless to consider).

Common wisdom is that properly adrenalized and motivated individuals can continue to function for up to 15 seconds with a fatally damaged heart. We will also assume that the shooters can both shoot 3 rounds per second (0.33 splits) and their reload times are 3 seconds.

In our first case, we will assume the BG drops in just 5 seconds. In this instance Shooter #1 (1911) will shoot 7 rounds. Shooter #2 will shoot 16.

Say what?

Yes, the Glock 17 shooter shoots more than twice as many rounds! Remember, this is with the first round being a fatal though not instantly incapacitating wound. What happens if the BG drops in just 3 seconds? Shooter 1 gets off 7 rounds (still) and Shooter #2 shoots “only” 10. Still 40% more rounds! And 3 seconds is pretty quick!

Of course, I picked one of the most extreme cases, just to wake you up. As you lengthen the time to stop, the discrepancy in percentage terms drops but the round count differential still can be rather large. For example, 10 seconds to stop but with 8rd 1911 magazine instead of the 7rd. Shooter #1 shoots 16, Shooter #2 shoots 23. That’s down to +44% more, but +7 in the round count. Note that the 7rd shooter would only have shot 14 in this case!

If you assume a slower reload, say you have duty gear, the differential gets less still. Add in a 4 second instead of a 3 second reload and you have shooter #1 shooting 16 and shooter #2 shooting 20. But that’s still +4 rounds.

In all cases except extremely short times and/or very slow shooting, the larger the magazine, the more rounds you’re going to fire to stop the BG in the exact same timeframe. However, this isn’t an endorsement towards high-capacity magazines! The BG stops in the same amount of time regardless of how many rounds you fire. It’s simply that the shooter with the high-capacity gun is going to shoot more rounds in the same amount of time due to the frictional costs of having to reload more often.

The take away point is this: Round count is largely meaningless as a predictor of cartridge effectiveness without a lot more context. So take what “statistics” you read or hear about regarding self-defense and ammunition with a huge grain of salt!

I don’t think there are any meaningful statistics being gathered about shootings to date. There are far more variables than simply “1-shot stops” or even total number of shots – imagine two Glock 17 shooters against 1 BG in comparison to a lone 1911 shooter – what will the round count discrepancy be in that case?