Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make

[Paladin]

Karl Rehn wrote a good book review on a topic that should be of interest to all gun owners:

Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make (Werner, 2019)

I have to agree that knowing the law, having adequate marksmanship and gun handling skills, and having good situational awareness and decision making skills are all fundamental to avoiding catastrophic mistakes.

Some of this can be trained at home, in the classroom, and on the range. However assessing situations and having good decision making skills are best taught in the force-on-force environment. Analysis videos like Active Self Protection help, but in order to perform under stress force-on-force really is the best way to close that gap.

[oljames3]

Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make is worth getting and reading. From the introduction:

This book is not about techniques of shooting firearms; it is about Decision Making, specifically Bad Decision Making. Our Mindset leads to our Decisions. Our Decisions lead to our Actions. Our Actions lead to our Outcomes. This sequence controls our destiny in everything we do, including using a firearm for Personal Protection. Unfortunately, decision making in the firearms community tends to focus on the tool, the firearm, instead of the desired outcome for owning it. Endless debate goes on about caliber, action type, ammunition capacity, and other material oriented aspects of ownership. In the broad context, these are extremely minor considerations as long as the owner can operate the firearm adequately.

Where the discussions don’t go nearly enough is the circumstances involving the usage of firearms and the decisions about our internal software that we have to make. “Usage” doesn’t always mean shooting the gun, either. There are a host of other issues, such as storage, legalities of carrying, and even possession, that aren’t often discussed. But those internal software issues are much more likely to determine the difference between a Positive Outcome and a Negative Outcome than hardware issues like type of gun and caliber. The amount of misinformation that runs rampant within the gun community leads many new owners down the wrong path in their Mindset and potential Decision Making.

Owning a gun definitely falls under the saying “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” While the firearms industry tends to tiptoe around it, the fact of the matter is that, now, most guns are purchased or acquired for the purpose of protecting ourselves and those important to us. And that’s for good reason. A gun gives a small or frail or elderly person the same power to inflict damage on another person as a young athletic male possesses in his bare hands and shod feet. Without that leveling of the playing field, our society would inevitably return to the law of the jungle, i.e., the survival of the fittest. A gun then is the instrument and tool of equality in American culture. As Colonel Samuel Colt said in the 19th Century, the gun is ‘The Great Equalizer.’

If you aren't already familiar with Claude Werner, you should be. https://tacticalprofessor.wordpress.com/

[Paladin]

Having bought the ebook, read, and digested it, I would say it is an excellent resource for instructors. NRA training already addresses the subjects raised, but the ebook illustrates every point with great examples.

I especially like this portion:

Attacks by dogs and wild animals are more common than people realize. The nature of an animal attack is that the party to be protected is in close contact with the animal. There will also most likely be considerable movement on the part of the animal and the person being attacked. Because of this, closing with the animal and picking the appropriate position and time to fire may be imperative. It was recently discovered that a woman who was attacked by a bear was, in fact, killed by a bullet from her husband’s rifle when he fired from a distance. There are several such tragedies on record.

Having had experience with animal attacks, I can say this is very true.

Claude Werner was an instructor at the Rogers School, so like Bill Rogers he unjustly criticizes point shooting. OC spray or Point shooting is actually what you need to handle the animal attacks he describes above.

Overall I believe Claude Werner's lists show key areas where training is critical. The goal of firearms training is to enable success and stop serious mistakes from happening. Proper decision making is central to the OODA loop.