What do actual gun statistics tell us about defensive use of firearms and how many lives are saved each year versus lives taken?

As you likely are aware, the Tennessee legislature implemented "Permit-less Carry" in Tennessee on July 1, 2021. Please educate others that this is not actually "Constitutional Carry," which is based upon the rights afforded by the United States Constitution. Instead, it is merely Permit-less Carry. With Constitutional Carry, anyone permitted to own a firearm would be allowed to also carry one. That is simply not the case in Tennessee as the same requirements for obtaining an Enhanced Handgun Carry Permit still apply to all residents wishing to carry without a permit.

I have talked previously about the Tueller Drill for firearm training. This time, we will be talking about my corollary to this drill that measures response time to an unarmed opponent striking. For my experiment, I set up a scenario where I defined a successful response as stepping forward, making a block, and then a palm strike as a “successful” response to the attack. One might argue that this could be improved by stepping, blocking, and striking at the same time, but remember the effects of B.A.R.? This is not very likely to happen as this is a complex motor…

If you have been reading the previous training reports, you have learned about Non-reactionary Distance. If you haven’t read them and started here…shame on you and go do your homework before reading on! Since we know what Non-reactionary Distance is and how to measure it, it is time to put that knowledge to great use. We already learned that we must keep our opponent at least that distance away to have a chance of protecting ourselves and those around us. We also learned that the lab experiment was probably a “best case scenario” in that B.A.R. would make things worse…

Body Alarm Response (B.A.R.), or as some like to call it, Adrenal Stress Response, is a reality of most violent encounters. Fortunately, it can can make you stronger, decrease your cognitive processing time, protect you from bleeding too rapidly from cuts and other trauma. Unfortunately, it can also make you do the exact opposite of all of those things if not kept in check! There are a host of physical, psychological, and perceptual distortions that can occur that you need to be prepared for. While it is beyond the scope of these reports to go into extensive detail. We do…

During our research, we have discovered dozens of Body Alarm Responses. Since it is beyond the scope of these reports to examine them all, we will jump to the topic of controlling them and using them to our advantage. If our techniques are based primarily on Gross Motor Movement, then we assume that a heart rate between 115 and 145 may actually help us. The initial adrenaline and noradrenaline dump into the bloodstream will give us energy to fight. If the heart rates rises above that, then we run the risk of most all of our techniques becoming inaccessible for…

As I have been preparing verbal de-escalation principles for my curriculum, I was surprisingly faced with an opportunity to put my study into practice. What timing!!!! For those of you who know me, I am not the type that takes ‘crap’ off people. That is putting it mildly! I grew up being bullied and reached a point in my life where I vowed that I would no longer be pushed around. As you may imagine, there is probably some emotional baggage that makes me want to strike back. Add to all of that being a Southerner with Scottish heritage, of…

Are you familiar with the principle originated by Jeff Cooper called Levels of Awareness? Depending on who you ask there are a number of levels. The idea is that a person’s awareness of their surroundings directly affects your response time. Those with a lower level of awareness will take longer to respond to a threat than those who are anticipating or even expecting one. The basic levels are white, yellow, orange, red, and black. Some have removed orange and added gray between red and black, but the idea is the same. Regardless of what you name the levels, the concept…

There is a common principle that many Martial Artists are familiar with called Hick’s Law. Hick’s Law is named after British psychologist William Edmund Hick. The HickHyman Law (for Ray Hyman), also called simply Hick’s Law, describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices he or she has to make. The Hick-Hyman Law assesses cognitive information capacity in choice reaction experiments. The amount of time taken to process a certain amount of bits in the Hick-Hyman Law is known as the rate of gain of information. In the equation,…

Due to the implications of Hick’s Law, I developed a concept several years ago called Universal Response Technique, or U.R.T. for short. This concept is about minimizing the decisions one has to make during a violent encounter. As we discussed previously, more decisions equals more reaction time. Consider what often happens during an attack. The opponent makes a sudden threatening move and the defender has to decide which technique to use, which foot to step with, whether to use hands or feet, and a number of other decisions. And they have to do this operating behind the curve when the…