Using less lethal in deadly force scenarios. Nobody would choose to fight a knife wielding attacker with their fists if they had anything else available. Seeing as how fist fighting is more force than pepper spray, clearly pepper spray is not the answer to deadly force attacks.

Bypassing less lethal tools in deadly force scenarios. There is a lot of confusion about the use of force continuum. Law enforcement has been addressing this in their training for at least a decade: it’s not a ladder and you don’t have to touch every rung. A lethal threat warrants a lethal response. An escalating situation (as most are) provides room for stopping the fight before it becomes a deadly force encounter.

Liability of not using less lethal in deadly force scenarios. This theory that having pepper spray and not using it in a deadly force situation is going to somehow expose you to more legal liability is totally spurious. This is like saying you better not take a martial art, because you will be expected to use some ninja move instead of your firearm. I don’t shoot because I don’t know how to do anything else, I shoot because my training has told me that this is only appropriate response to the circumstance.

Pepper spraying people is trivial. Especially in comparison to shooting people. If you can effect a stop with pepper spray then you aren’t going to be justifying your shooting in court. This is the most likely case: bad guy gets sprayed and quits. Some people are trying to optimize their equipment selection for defending themselves against manslaughter charges: “I carry nothing but deadly force tools”. I would recommend optimizing for winning the fight in a way that gets you the least involvement with the legal system.

I’d just run away. So would I, if I could. This stops being the perfect answer as soon as you are a better runner than your significant other or children. If they aren’t within arms reach it could very well turn into you needing to stand and fight while they get away.

I’d just shoot them. Ultimately I see a lot of people painting themselves into a corner where they are going to have to pull the trigger in order to have any self defense response. I hear a lot of talk in training circles about “lethal force options.” Lethal force is not optional, it’s mandatory. If I had a choice to make I would choose something other than shooting. Lethal force is what happens when all those options are taken away. If I am not facing a deadly force threat then shooting isn’t even an option.

When looking at the increasing numbers of reports about violence against women, it is clear that women’s self-defense against men is becoming an important issue in today’s society. There are many products and techniques designed for women’s self-defense against men, from mace guns to judo and assertiveness training. Unfortunately, these things are becoming increasingly necessary, and it is essential to stay informed of the most effective strategies for women’s self-defense against men.

I guess they are repeating the title over and over again to try and improve the search rank of the article. Otherwise there really is no content in the opening paragraph other than a vague reference to “increasing numbers of reports about violence against women.”

Since more and more women are working overtime and at late hours, extra attention should be given to women’s self-defense against men. Dark parking lots are among the most dangerous places, and it is good idea to walk into a parking lot with a special device, such as a small alarm, whistle or light, or where it is legal, a mace gun or stun gun. The mace or stun guns should not be shaped like actual guns, but should be disguised as cell phones, pens or key chains which can be carried by hand without attracting undue attention.

So having a weapon that looks like a weapon would cause undue attention, and women should have a James Bond-esque cell phone that shoots electricity or pepper-spray? Clearly a concealed firearm isn’t even considered by the author.

It is important to principle of women’s self defense against men always to look straight ahead and always to appear alert. Potential attackers are always on the lookout for women who seem unaware of their surroundings, so give an impression of confidence.

I guess that in the authors opinion nothing projects confidence like locking your gaze on the horizon and marching in a straight line.

Women’s self-defense against men is not always focused on strangers, but, more often than not, an attacker is someone the woman knows. Before making the attack, the person usually stalks the woman to find out her habits and where she is the most vulnerable.

It is therefore a good idea to change your route frequently if you jog or walk for exercise. Be on the lookout for people who are watching your activities and make sure that you are aware of potential dangers. Like fire drills, women’s self-defense calls for identifying potential danger spots, so, as you go through your day, look for those places where a person can easily intrude.

Actually, the non-stranger attacker doesn’t do a multiple day reconnaissance and surveillance, but rather becomes “familiar” and exploits a convenient vulnerability. This isn’t a guy hiding in the bushes with a spotting scope and a notebook. This is the guy she lets carry her groceries because he lives across the street.

Many strategies for women’s self-defense against men include some kind of martial arts training. Although many critics complain that techniques learned in classes can not be adapted well to the street, martial arts give women strength and confidence to be able to ward off an attacker.

The rest of the article goes on to try and sell a number of different martial arts without an real knowledge or analysis. The whole article is just a little bit of fear-based marketing copy designed to pad someones website and sell pepper spray disguised as lipstick or a block of Tae Kwon Do classes.

So why am I bothering to call this out? Because there are a lot of people who have a scary experience, throw a few keywords at google, and end up buying a stun gun (that doesn’t work) or enroll in some less than reputable martial arts class for a couple of weeks.

While the private citizen carrying a concealed firearm isn’t as likely to be a target for a disarm while the firearm is holstered, I can certainly see a number of scenarios where an assailant might make an attempt against a drawn gun.

If a criminal doesn’t believe that you are going to shoot, or is willing to risk a bullet to escape arrest they might decide to try to do a disarm.

Get good equipment. I frequently see $1000 guns in $20 holsters, worn on $2 belts. A good holster and a belt are a significant portion of the holstered retention equation. Cheap holsters will not keep the gun from falling out, or will rip right off of the belt leaving the attachment loops behind. Holsters that snap or clip onto the belt offer almost no resistance. I highly recommend purchasing high quality holsters, and belts. While much more expensive they truly do last much longer so the expense is justified in the long run.

Use good ready positions. Some ready positions lend themselves to gun grabs more readily than others. The weaker the position the more inviting it is for a grab. The classic low-ready (arms extended at about a 45 degree angle) is one of the worst for both shooting and retention. Keeping the firearm tucked against the body is the mechanically strongest un-holstered position.

Don’t use the wrong tactics. People that want to hold the assailant at gun point until the police arrive expose themselves to a greater risk of disarm attempts. The time spent in proximity to the criminal is a window of opportunity for something to go wrong. Complicating that with trying to dial 911 and communicate with the dispatcher creates a distraction that most people could do without. It would be better to get a good description and have them run and then call the police after they have left. The legal justification for using your firearm is a threat to your life, the subject’s non-compliance may or may not constitute a threat that you can justify shooting him for. It would be much better for us if we didn’t have to shoot anyone.

You can’t always ‘Just shoot’ them. A common answer to people grabbing for an un-holstered handgun is to shoot the person making the grab, but this isn’t always as simple as it sounds. If the assailant has a hold on the gun it can retard the action of the slide (or bind the cylinder on a revolver) preventing more than one round from firing. When the gun discharges it might not be oriented toward the assailant, so gambling on the ‘one shot stop’ is even less of a good bet.

There is also whole class of gun-grabbers that we don’t want to shoot. It might be a friend or spouse who thinks you are over-reacting, it might be the 70 year old grandmother of the assailant who just wants to protect their grandchild. We might be able to make the argument that shooting this class of people is legally justified by the circumstances but again, it would be preferable not to have to do so.

Martial arts or combatives might help you. These can fulfill at least part of the role of retaining the gun. The problem is that a lot of martial arts are largely incompatible for fighting with a drawn gun. Whatever arts or techniques you intend to apply must maintain control of the muzzle and be aware that this fight is going to take place in a clinch. If you need distance to execute your technique you are probably not going to get it. Losing control of the firearm generally means that you are now in the position of needing to perform a disarm in order to ultimately retain the gun. Disarming techniques are part of retention.

Don’t abandon the gun. I have seen it advocated to let go of the gun, and either transition to another weapon or apply combatives or martial arts techniques to recover it. It would never be my primary plan to loose physical control of the gun. At best such a strategy provides the assailant with a club, and at worst a fully functioning firearm.

Transition to another weapon. I am all for transitioning to another weapon if it is available, but I would keep control of the primary whenever possible. In such a situation I would prefer a knife to a backup firearm. A few good cuts should produce some psychological and mechanical advantage.

Remove Ambiguity. Issuing verbal commands can help you determine if someone is really a threat. A stranger approaching you in a dark parking lot might be perfectly innocent, but the potential for danger is too high to make this assumption. The circumstances are not in your favor. If you yell “Stop! Don’t come any closer!” most normal people would probably stop, especially if they actually didn’t intend to do you harm. To continue approaching someone who is telling you to stop is threatening, To approach faster is very threatening.

Create Hesitation. Getting a command to stop will force many people to hesitate, especially if they haven’t committed to a course of action yet. That hesitation buys you a little bit more time to escape, prepare to fight, or further evaluate the situation.

Provide Direction. Tell the assailant what you want him to do. Let Go! or Go Away! in conjunction with another level of force tells the assailant how to avoid getting hurt (or getting hurt any more). If they are now facing your drawn handgun they might not know what to do – the problem has moved off of their mental map sheet. We don’t want the assailant to ‘freeze’ like on a bad TV show, we want him to run as far and as fast as his little criminal feet will carry him.

Alert the Witnesses. Many crimes need to happen in isolation. If you can draw a crowd you might be able to prevent the attack. Maybe there is someone that will come and help us, but at a minimum we are establishing who is the defender and who is the aggressor. This sets the context for all our other actions in the mind of the witnesses. If we have already shouted Stop! Stay Back!and the assailant has closed the distance then we have a justification for using another level of force, and we have clarified our role as defender for any potential witnesses.

Practice is going to the range (or it’s equivalent.) This where you repeat what you have learned in training. Practice makes you better at what you know, but it doesn’t do much for learning new things. If you practice looking at your front sight and pressing the trigger it won’t make you better at reloading the gun or clearing malfunctions. Practice is what creates a “habit” (good or bad.) Undisciplined practice really isn’t practice at all. I see people at the range all the time making their guns go bang: magazine after magazine, box after box of ammo, and they never seem to show any improvement.

Testing is any sort of competition. Shooting IPSC/IDPA, ring fighting or martial arts tournaments are an objective measure of a set of skills. It’s not combat, but it is being forced to produce results under stress. There are those in the “tactical” shooting world that dismiss the guys that play gun games as “gamesmen” or point out that some piece of the game isn’t really “real world.” I would point out that the top-tier military units all seek out and train with the best competitive shooters and try to learn speed, accuracy and gun handling from them. They don’t seem to have any problem with tactics or real world performance.

The Hippies:“…so you’d rather kill some poor bastard down on his luck than part with a few bucks? That’s some good humanity right there. “
So their mugger isn’t a person who has decided to make a career out of taking other peoples property by violence, but a person driven to desperate measures by circumstances.

The Gunfighters:“My mugger’s wallet is a Springfield XD .40 Sub-compact and many hours of training for just such a situation. Make my day.” Life imitates Hollywood, where the hard-bitten gunfighter rids the world of evil-doers to the accolades of the crowd and a hearty pat on the back from local law-enforcement.

The Tough guys:Yeah, I have a body build that makes me look like the kind of guy who beats up muggers for fun. I might put one of these together just so the mugger will feel totally bad ass before I go all ninja on him.
Because the muggers are never bigger, better armed, or working in groups. I once saw a security detail from the US that looked like it was made of football linemen turned bouncers. While that would probably be impressive in a US night club, it didn’t dazzle me to much in country where street kids have AK47’s and two magazines.

The Good Area Guys:I use the “don’t be in places where you’re likely to be mugged” defense.
Because muggers obey some sort of criminal zoning restrictions. At best this is optimizing a statistical trend, but doesn’t really apply to individuals that actually leave their homes occasionally.

There were also some good, thoughtful comments:
The issue isn’t “is their life worth the money in my wallet”, but rather “is their life worth my life”. The act of shooting someone, even in justifiable self defense will undoubtedly cost you more time and money than a stolen wallet.

Most of what I have read are laundry lists of things that can be pressed into a self defense use. I don’t like these lists because they leave out far more items than they include. It is more useful to think about “classes” of objects rather than specific items. I also tend to see things listed that are not all that much better than nothing, so it is a waste of time readying a weapon that isn’t any better than being unarmed.

Distractions This best summarized as “throwing your hot coffee in his face”, but anything at hand will do. Basically if we have something in our hands that can’t be used as a weapon is getting thrown at his face and followed by strikes. I don’t subscribe to the “distract and run” theory, because most distractions will only buy you a second. That second is enough to land a good blow, but probably not enough to create a useful amount of distance.

Striking Tools Anything that you can hold in your hand that will give you an advantage can be used as a striking tool. If it is harder or sharper than your hand it will probably work as long as it isn’t likely to damage your hand. Most of the time striking with a fist sized is done with a “hammer fist” type strike or a “palm heel” that uses the object as the striking surface. Larger items (pool cues, sticks, etc.) work pretty well with a baseball bat swing in the absence of a fancier or more sophisticated techniques.

Since we don’t have a lot of control over the targets we are going to hit, I wouldn’t use anything that I would be unwilling to strike full-force against a heavy bag. The “keys between the fingers” is a good example of this, you are about as likely to tear up your hands as you are to punch the keys into your assailant.

Projectiles There isn’t much of a role for throwing hand-sized objects. Anything that you could throw that would inflict injury with you could probably strike with and don’t stand the same chance of missing. Normally if an assailant that is far away enough to make throwing things worthwhile then the time would be better spent running.

Generally I think about throwing furniture. Hurling a chair or overturning a table can slow down a charging assailant. Kicking furniture into their path can also be helpful in that regard. Putting barriers between you and the attacker increases the amount of time for you to respond with something else.

Fixed Objects Rather than striking the assailant with an object, strike the object with the assailant. Things like telephone poles, picket fences, mailboxes, parked cars, and traffic are great things to drive people into.

Fixing somebody against a wall or the ground increases the power of your strikes because it takes away their ability to “roll” with it. Strikes against downed opponents are frequently a fight ending scenario. If you look at professional MMA you can see that “ground and pound” is still a pretty solid strategy. What you don’t see in MMA is kicks, stomps, and elbows against downed opponents – these techniques are disallowed in the rules because of the frequency of serious injury.

To my mind there is no more a “gun vs. knife” debate anymore than there is a “hammer vs. screwdriver debate.” A knife fills a different role than firearm does. As I have previous explained here, there are a lot of things that knives do much better than firearms. This does not make knives a firearm replacement.

Fighting at contact distance you can certainly use your firearm, but once it becomes a wrestling match getting the firearm into play becomes a lot more difficult:

• The typical handgun requires a lot more motion to draw from the holster than a normal folding knife or short fixed blade.
• It is very hard to draw a firearm with the opposite hand in the event that your primary shooting hand is pinned, locked up or disabled.
• Most semi-autos end up being single shot weapons because a change in grip angle causes “limp wristing” or slide bumps into something and interrupts it’s cycling.
• It is pretty easy to become your own backstop when entangled on the ground.

Because knives are so easy to conceal a lot of the Tueller drill/21 foot rule thinking doesn’t always apply: an unarmed subject approaching from 21′ doesn’t normally justify drawing a firearm. Tueller demonstrated that you need 21′ to draw a firearm if you want to remain flat-footed and shoot the person who stabs you.

A simple wrist grab has all manner of escapes, counters and other responses. Some martial arts seem to have a fetish for this attack, and all sorts of joint manipulations are built around it. Many students are surprised when I teach responses to wrist grabs that include strikes, knives, and gunfire.

Correctly they will point out that a wrist grab is not in and of itself a lethal threat. This is absolutely true, but in the totality of the situation it might be an element of a lethal threat. If the attempt to pull you into the van full of ski-masked assailants begins with a wrist grab there is certainly justification. The wrist-grab is not the lethal threat: getting pulled into the van is.

We need to remember that without a context we are just practicing a drill, trying to learn the technical aspects of a technique and not demonstrating a use-case. We are answering the “how” question and not the “when” or “why” questions. Knives and shooting are not my default response to a wrist grab, but they are certainly within my range of responses.

This can go the other way too. Some people think that the Teuller drill means that we need to shoot people with knives (or other contact distance weapons) that are within some fixed distance. A threat with a knife that responds to a verbal command of “Stop” might not need to be shot. I would certainly be creating distance and getting a weapon in hand, but if the verbal commands are working I don’t have a reason to shoot (yet), I just have an excuse.

The complete scenario (or as much as we can understand of it) dictates what the appropriate response should be. There are a number of models for making these sorts of decisions, and none of the good ones look like a list of “Attacker does x, I respond with y.”