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Editorial
I've been shooting all my life;
I don't need training for concealed carry
David A. Lombardo
There is a very common misconception among general aviation pilots. It is the belief that an equal number of takeoffs and landings are proof that one is a good pilot. Takeoffs and landings are the easy part; it's operating complex systems during an emergency in bad weather that determines whether one is a good pilot or a framed picture on a mantle with dust all over it.
In the shooting community, Jeff Cooper encapsulated it best when he wrote in Guns and Ammo magazine, "Owning a pistol no more prepares one for a gunfight than owning a piano prepares one for Carnegie Hall."
Three or four times a week I get a phone call from someone who tells me they really don't need the 16-hour course. They are almost always borderline angry that the state is forcing them to get training because they've been shooting their entire lives. They equate turning hundreds of pounds of gun powder into smoke, even making holes in a black circle, as verification they're prepared for the reality of a close quarter lethal force encounter.
I ask about under-powered and over-powered rounds and most understand those issues but wall penetration not so much. I ask about the influence of their autonomic nervous system and rarely does anyone understand anything beyond the startle reflex.
Few have given any thought about how to draw a gun from a holster and are startled to learn that about 20 percent of all police officers killed in the line of duty with a handgun, are killed with their own gun after drawing it out and getting it taken away from them.
One of the greatest myths is that you shoot someone with a handgun and they fly backward and hit the ground dead. It's not coincidental that no military has ever gone into combat exclusively carrying handguns. Cooper summed this up pretty well too with, "The government issued .45 pistol is the greatest gun ever made to fight your way back to a rifle."
Here's what people don't understand. The goal is not to kill another human being; the goal is to prevent him from killing you. Whether you wound him mortally is irrelevant if he lives long enough to kill you too. You shoot to stop a threat but a determined shooter can even survive a hit to the heart long enough to take you with him.
The goal in concealed carry is to stop the threat immediately. It can be done in two ways: Psychologically and physiologically. If the gun is out and the fight is on, psychology has probably failed and you're left with the challenge of stopping someone in their tracks not 10 minutes later or five or even one.
To do that with certainty requires an understanding of human physiology, the mechanics of shooting the firearm, the proper choice of ammunition including type of bullet, and a reasonable grasp of tactics.
But the single most critical factor is a clear understanding that you're the victim and in most cases that means you're playing catch-up baseball. More than likely you won't have sufficient time to react which leads us to tell students they also need to learn some basic close quarter open hand tactics to disarm their opponent or deal with someone who has a knife.
Our 16-hour Illinois Concealed Carry I seminar is built on four pillars: How to avoid getting into a gunfight, how to win if you do, how to win legally, and how to mitigate civil suit. I've gotten callous toward people who get upset because we do the minimum required range time as per state law and spend most of the course on those four pillars.
They want a shooting course and the truth is using lethal force for self-defense is far more about knowledge than shooting not to imply that shooting isn't important. If you can't get the gun on target and lead down range very fast you have a serious problem but it's a psychomotor skill that you can develop with practice.
I tell them if you give me enough bananas I can train a monkey to shoot someone at 15 feet. When people ask why we cover so much book work I say I don't ever want to see one of my students on the front page of the paper under indictment nor on the back page in the obits. They usually laugh but I'm not joking.
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