1. Breaking the gun and rendering it useless except as a striking weapon.
2. Inducing a malfunction or jam which renders the gun nonfunctional until remedial action can be applied.
3. Pushing a loaded firearm out toward the attacker where they have a better chance of grabbing it.
These are all very low percentages, like miniscule. I will say, that having occasion to strike with a loaded gun in a civilian setting where in that instant it makes more sense....is also probably a very low percentage occurrance. I'm just open to it as opposed to saying "never."
If you have time to strike by moving your whole body forward into the attacker, you have time to shoot repeatedly in the same interval. Once the gun is empty, if there's still been no opportunity to create distance in the process of emptying it, then it makes good sense to use it as a striking weapon.
Like stated above, we probably won't be doing this with a loaded gun, we'll be shooting them.
with enough force to move a large person back far enough that the striker takes the attacker's place during the strike will damage the hands/wrists of a person who hasn't practiced that kind of thing a lot. Maybe even if they have.
Run your demo again at full speed with a dummy that weighs 180lbs and video tape it.
Have you done it? Do you know? If you are striking the torso with a fist and do not have a great fist and wrist position...yes, you'll break something. However, there are scores of target areas and ways to strike them without risk of injury to ourselves. The strike demo'd is one of them. We aren't striking a 180lb heavy bag suspended from a ceiling. We are striking a 180lb object that is 6' tall, balancing on 2 small sticks. The strike is to soft flesh well above the CG of the tall object. They will move and displace pretty easy. Striking into their CG in the torso will yield less displacement and require better striking structure. Think stomp, heel palm, forearm, hammer fist.
If you strike well below the CG (knees, ankles), their weight adds to the injury once the joint gets dislocated. Our force just has to get the joint out of alignment and to the pathological limit where it starts to tear....but we'll use all the force we can generate anyway.
It can be as simple as stepping in and slamming your forearm into their throat, another step slam a knee in the groin, another step and stomp through the knee. 3 steps, 3 gross-motor movement strikes, 3 injuries, no damage to ourselves.
You can push someone back if you don't strike at speed because then the amount of force required is reduced. But that increases the risk of a parry or grab.Not the same physics. Barbells don't give when encountering flesh and bone. They don't have joints. Even with a locked knee and hip, a 135lb person won't apply as much force as a 135lb barbell impacting with the same velocity.
Force applied is equal to the momentum of the striking object divided by how long it takes to decelerate the striking object to zero velocity. A totally unyielding object will apply more force than an object that has yield even if both are the same weight and strike with the same velocity.
I understand that the analogy is not exact. The human application of force is too complex for any equation. I do not know how much force it takes to tear the ligaments in the knee.
What I do know is a) it takes far less than a 135lb woman is capable of generating if they get as much weight into it as they can. b) the person being struck already has the potential energy stored to injure their own knee (their weight plus gravity), we just have to set things in motion.
Finally, striking with all your weight is a little slower and you are fully commititng. This is what generates the comments about how they can parry, grab you, your gun etc. Well, here's the conundrum. What is going to stop the threat? A busted lip? Swollen eye? No, assuming they don't decide to quit, the only thing stopping them is injury, broken body parts until they can't function.
If you are holding back, striking with only limb strength quickly, worried about what they can do to you, you are making that a self-fullfilling prophecy because each strike has less potential to injure them making them more able to parry, grab, counter etc. If you blast into them with all you've got, the odds of injury go way up. I'm not talking about a MMA match with 2 equal fighter who know what's up. The 135lb female can't possibly survive by "fighting" the bigger stronger attacker with traditional striking. It won't injure them (except eyes, throat, groin, these targets don't require lots of force). I always assume they will be bigger-stronger-faster than me. I don't want to "fight" them either or find out how good they are.
Launch your body at a weak area of theirs that is available and exposed, connect with a hard part of you that is rated to take the force (forearm, heel, etc) and injure them. Bare minimum, you'll knock them off balance and gain an opportunity to break something else before they get their balance back.
"But what if they......" Well, what if? There are no guarantees. The criminal justice system has a term for people who always worry about what the other person might do and how to counter it or defend themselves. They are known as "victims."
I'm not worried about what they are doing. I'm 100% focused on injuring them. Go ahead and grab my gun (if you can). Wrestling or grappling over it will be impossible though...because I won't. While they are going for the gun, I'll tear out their eye or crush their throat. It is not possible at the same time for them to be grabbing my gun and also protecting the other target areas. Their hands are on my gun, congrats!
To wrap up, what do you have to lose? We are talking about a situation we couldn't avoid or run away from. A situation degraded to the point that we can no longer shoot them and must either strike to injure or do nothing. Fight like your life depends on it, commit 100% of you to destroying whatever vulnerable anatomy of them is exposed. Don't hold anything back and don't waste a fear-based second worrying about what they might do.
). See how I finish standing where they were with my center of mass totally displacing them? All my weight was focused on the handgun muzzle and went into their throat. Devastating (and lethal) strike, no matter what you weigh or how strong you are.
