Beware the Stalker!

Kleanbore · Nov 23, 2019

Thee was a piece on the TV news in St. Louis last nigh about a woman who has been stalked for someone by someone now thought to be seriously deranged, mentally, and likely very dangerous.

Most of the coverage was about the history of the relationship and the ordeal, and about what the police have and have not done.

The cameras also took us to an indoor gun range. The woman was practicing shooring a service-size semi-automatic pistol. Square range, stationary target at some distance, deliberate, slow sighted fire.

....about the same as what we see most people doing at the range, except that her groups were really something to write home about.

Hardly realistic.

There is a gun shop near here that has a laser range with realistic scenarios--moving targets, little time to think , no time to plan, shoot very quickly on target--or LOSE. Had I spoken to her, I would have urged her to try it out.

Can anyone post some really good videos here so we can share them with those sho have not taken a good defensive pistol class? And perhaps some locations of laser training facilities?

old lady new shooter · Nov 23, 2019

Kleanbore said:
locations of laser training facilities

Excellent idea.

bdickens · Nov 23, 2019

Kleanbore said:
...The woman was practicing shooring a service-size semi-automatic pistol. Square range, stationary target at some distance, deliberate, slow sighted fire.

....about the same as what we see most people doing at the range, except that her groups were really something to write home about.

Hardly realistic....

But still more effective than the proverbial hat pin

telomerase · Dec 5, 2019

bdickens said:
But still more effective than the proverbial hat pin

Maybe not... hatpins are quick to draw and may actually be on the victim when needed (if you go back in time to where people wore hats).

The "weapon that works great on the range" probably won't be carried, won't be accessible if carried, and won't be good in really close fighting.

Kleanbore said:
moving targets, little time to think , no time to plan, shoot very quickly on target

Yeah, that.

Balrog · Dec 5, 2019

According to the NRA, handguns are used successfully for self defense thousands of times a year by people with little to no training.

This is not to say that training is not needed. Its a good thing.

But having the mindset to fight and win is a better thing.

Wisco · Dec 5, 2019

Balrog said:
According to the NRA, handguns are used successfully for self defense thousands of times a year by people with little to no training.

This is not to say that training is not needed. Its a good thing.

But having the mindset to fight and win is a better thing.

How good is a person’s mindset, really, if they don’t train? And if they don’t train their skillset, do they maintain their toolset?

I’ve not met many people who had the will to win, but not train.

bdickens · Dec 5, 2019

Mindset.

Skillset.

Toolset.

In that order.

Lots of people over the years have survived some very, shall we say, trying circumstances while having very little in the way of tools or skill.

Conversely, lots of people have had all the skills and tools in the world but died because they didn't have the mindset to survive.

armoredman · Dec 6, 2019

NRA Armed Citizen every month shows people with and without skills and with tools we might sneer at, but with the right mindset they are doing far better than one might expect. I will always advocate the most training you can afford, but I also don't look down on the guy who had to save up for a month to take the local CCW permit class, and carries a Taurus G2.

hso · Dec 6, 2019

Something to consider from the "one size does not fit all" perspective is that not all situations are the same and that a stalker that is considered truly dangerous is different from one that is questionably dangerous to some random threat.

The show of force using a firearm is statistically important in self defense statistics, but the majority of those situations are not a focused stalker who has persistently threatened a victim. THOSE situations involves someone who believes they can dominate and terrorize the victim and may not accept that the victim can actually defend themselves whether armed or not.

OTOH, having a means to defend yourself that you're passably familiar with and have had some practice with is far better than just having a gun as a magic talisman you've never fired. Having more training, especially stress training, is very valuable in being able to defend yourself in a dynamic threat, but first being willing to defend yourself and then getting the means and some familiarity are the initial steps.

Kleanbore · Dec 6, 2019

armoredman said:
NRA Armed Citizen every month shows people with and without skills and with tools we might sneer at, but with the right mindset they are doing far better than one might expect.

A mighty small data set.

And those are the ones who survive.

Balrog · Dec 6, 2019

Wisco said:
How good is a person’s mindset, really, if they don’t train? And if they don’t train their skillset, do they maintain their toolset?

I’ve not met many people who had the will to win, but not train.

I guess their mindsets may be better than you are thinking, since guns are used thousands of times per year in self defense by untrained persons.

Wisco · Dec 6, 2019

Balrog said:
I guess their mindsets may be better than you are thinking, since guns are used thousands of times per year in self defense by untrained persons.

I think they’re mostly lucky.

boom boom · Dec 6, 2019

Kleanbore said:
A mighty small data set.

And those are the ones who survive.

Kleanbore,
Not to pick a bone but Gary Kleck's and others research indicates that firearms are used defensively in confrontations without serious injury far more than any shootouts occur. The high end is about 2 million or so DGU's per year and even the CDC mentions that the low end estimates would still be about 800,000 DGU's per year. Given training numbers do not approach that status, it appears that the first rule of gunfights is to have a gun certainly ups your percentage of avoiding death or serious injury from criminal victimization.

Training certainly increases the odds for a successful avoidance of the confrontation altogether and it would certainly help achieve success in an actual gunfight as I believe Tom Given's stats for his Rangemaster trainees in the Memphis area was about 60 or so successful encounters versus two losses (neither of which were carrying a firearm at the time). This is from memory mind you. I know that Tactical Professor (Claude Werner) has done some similar analyses involving armed citizens.

One of the things that I believe that fighting spirit and a will to survive encounters can overcome a lot of adversity as it is your own life that you are fighting for and a poor plan well implemented can very well top an excellent plan poorly implemented when push comes to shove. You never know exactly who that person will be in the moment of truth regardless of prior training even in the military or the police.

That being said, a wise person hedges one's bets as best as one can by prudent forethought maximize one's chances if things go south.

One such low cost option would be simply advising people to go and watch an IDPA match or find a youtube of a match online. Once they know what might be needed, then they can shop a bit more knowingly for a trainer. The second is best done through reading books like Mas Ayoob's In the Gravest Extreme and his later reexamination of the topic followed by maybe Chris Bird's books and Andrew Branca's stuff.

JohnKSa · Dec 7, 2019

And those are the ones who survive.

And aren't charged with a crime.

Given training numbers do not approach that status, it appears that the first rule of gunfights is to have a gun certainly ups your percentage of avoiding death or serious injury from criminal victimization.

This will get really messy if we don't distinguish between the various types of self-defensive gun uses. This is a very basic breakdown of scenarios, but they could be broken down other ways, or broken down into much smaller categories. The point isn't that this breakdown is the only way to do it; the point is that lumping all of the possible ways to use a gun defensively into one big group and treating all scenarios as if the same preparation is appropriate for all of them is going to be some what less productive than if we separate the different scenarios into subcategories and think about each one of them individually.

Self-defense gun uses that are not shootings:
1. Self-defense gun uses not involving the gun actually being displayed.
2. Self-defense gun uses involving the gun being displayed but not being shot.

Self-defense shootings:
1. The attacker does not have a firearm or does not deploy it.
2. Self-defense gunfights (both attacker and defender fire shots).

It's important to keep in mind that there's a broad spectrum of possibilities that one may encounter. If one is content to be ready to deal with the scenarios where the attacker turns tail at the mention or sight of a gun (which happens the vast majority of the time), then all the training that person needs is gun safety. If one wishes to prepare for a scenario where bullets are headed their way and they need to shoot back accurately to survive, while at the same time moving to avoid being shot, then training becomes hugely more important.

Jeff White · Dec 7, 2019

boom boom said:
Not to pick a bone but Gary Kleck's and others research indicates that firearms are used defensively in confrontations without serious injury far more than any shootouts occur.

I read Kleck’s methodology and I now take his statistics with a large grain of salt. A lot of Kleck’s research was done by telephone survey and it includes incidents where the person didn’t even see an assailant such as a prowler, but the subject assumed one was there based on the noise and the noise stopped after the subject went out to investigate while armed and even accepted it if the noise stopped after the subject chambered a round inside the house which is making a huge assumption that there even was someone outside to hear the round being chambered.

I wouldn’t count those incidents of things that go bump in the night as a defensive gun use.

boom boom · Dec 7, 2019

Jeff White said:
I read Kleck’s methodology and I now take his statistics with a large grain of salt. A lot of Kleck’s research was done by telephone survey and it includes incidents where the person didn’t even see an assailant such as a prowler, but the subject assumed one was there based on the noise and the noise stopped after the subject went out to investigate while armed and even accepted it if the noise stopped after the subject chambered a round inside the house which is making a huge assumption that there even was someone outside to hear the round being chambered.

I wouldn’t count those incidents of things that go bump in the night as a defensive gun use.

I hate to disagree with you but the Bureau of Justice Statistics that conducts the National Criminal Victimization Survey that Kleck used is one of the biggest surveys over time conducted by the DOJ for decades. If there was a problem with its methodology, then his critics, of which there are many, would have gladly eviscerated him. It actually encompasses about interviews of 160000 people in 95000 households https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=tp&tid=31 They do it right and spend the money necessary to get good results.

What you are criticizing are faults using a self-report bias but that is pretty much dealt with in his range estimates. If anything, non-response might be a problem as some of the respondents are perhaps not the most honorable folks. In a large enough sample such as this, the errors generally wash out.

The NCVS was developed pretty much because the FBI's UCI was found to be unreliable in some respects and underreporting criminal victimization as a lot of folks never go to the police and file reports, particularly on minor matters. That ironically is especially true in a lot of communities that have extensive crime and subsequent dislike for involving police in their interactions. Police departments have also been known to manipulate their submissions as well. Thus, the traditional way of doing research is triangulation where you use multiple different methods to make up for the shortcomings inherent in one approach.

Kleanbore · Dec 7, 2019

boom boom said:
Not to pick a bone but Gary Kleck's and others research indicates that firearms are used defensively in confrontations without serious injury far more than any shootouts occur. The high end is about 2 million or so DGU's per year and even the CDC mentions that the low end estimates would still be about 800,000 DGU's per year.

Yes, of course. I have been involved in four. Never fired a shot.

I needed no training at all.

I have since availed myself of training. I would only have gone about one of them the same way.

By the way, for reasons extant at the times, none were reported.

They were real, serious encounters, "DGU"s in Kleck's terminology and by any standard..

Kleck's data do not offset the faults in the Armed Citizen articles.

The only problem with Tom givens' data is the size of the sample.

Those people, of course, had been trained.

boom boom said:
One such low cost option would be simply advising people to go and watch an IDPA match or find a youtube of a match online. Once they know what might be needed, then they can shop a bit more knowingly for a trainer. The second is best done through reading books like Mas Ayoob's In the Gravest Extreme and his later reexamination of the topic followed by maybe Chris Bird's books and Andrew Branca's stuff.

Good idea.

JohnKSa said:
If one is content to be ready to deal with the scenarios where the attacker turns tail at the mention or sight of a gun (which happens the vast majority of the time),...

That describes my four DGUs.

I did know how ro shoot.

JohnKSa · Dec 7, 2019

That describes my four DGUs.

Exactly!

Statistically speaking, that's what would be expected. Kleck's data indicates that 4 out of 5 successful DGUs don't even involve the gun being fired.

Another 10-12% or so successful DGUs involve the defender firing a shot that either misses or causes no significant injury to the attacker.

The remaining 8-10% or so are the scenarios where the situation is resolved by shooting the attacker and causing a significant injury.

That last 18-20% or so of successful DGUs, where shots are fired by the defender, also includes a much smaller subset of scenarios where shots are fired on both sides--where an actual gunfight occurs.

It's easy to get into trouble by talking about the overall statistics about successful DGUs (most of which aren't even shootings, let alone gunfights) while picturing the small subset of DGUs which are shootings, or the even smaller subset which are actual gunfights.

There is no debating that guns are very effective defensive weapons, even when they are not fired, however, when using Kleck's data as strong evidence that no training is required to be successful in a DGU it's important to understand the nature of most DGUs and that most of them aren't shootings and that even most of the ones that are shootings aren't actual gunfights.

Personally, I don't have a problem with a person deciding to carry a gun with the intent of never using it for anything other than "display purposes" as long as they don't ever buy ammunition for it. IMO, it's reasonable for a person to look at the statistics and decide to play the odds. In that case, it makes perfect sense for them to also eschew training. At least they understand the statistics and are drawing a logical conclusion from them. It's absolutely not the approach I would take and absolutely not something that I would recommend, but at least it makes sense and stems out of a correct interpretation of the data set.

The problem comes when the statistic is not broken down and the overall number (ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the data set has nothing to do with either shootings or gunfights) is used as justification for not training.

Beware the Stalker!

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