guns

Vester Lee Flanagan: Lessons Learned

August 31, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Vester Lee Flanagan stalked and murdered two of his former colleagues: Alison Parker, 24 years old, and Adam Ward, 27. He walked up and shot them both to death on a self-shot video, posted the video on social media, and committed suicide not long after. This entire crime is an unmitigated horror.

But, as I always say, it would be worse if we didn’t learn anything from it.

I’ve written about personal defense several times before, but there’s one element of it that I haven’t touched upon, mostly because it’s not typically relevant to the average person: if someone really wants to kill you, he eventually will. You can be aware, avoidant, trained, alert, and strong, but if you’ve made the kind of enemy that really does just want to kill you and carries out a plan to do so, you’re most likely going to die unless you’re very fortunate during critical moments of his assault.

“Situational awareness” is a buzzword we throw around that describes being aware of your surroundings, especially in a public space. The “situational” modifier is unnecessary, as anything can be described as a situation, but to sound more tactical we like to add those sorts of adjectives. Situational awareness includes the act of looking around to see if someone with obvious malicious intent is nearby. Muggers don’t teleport in to attack you. If you’ve ever been attacked by surprise, it’s probably because you weren’t aware of your surroundings. Muggers rely on the fact that most people don’t pay attention to what’s around them. They profile potential victims by seeing if they’re alert and looking around or not.

Would being situationally aware have saved Parker and Ward? I doubt it. From the video he shot, it’s clear that they weren’t paying any attention to him during his approach. His dark clothing and the way he crept up reminded me of the video of an assassination attempt on Imelda Marcos. It’s not bloody or visceral, so take a look at it here. Note that everyone else in the crowd going up to talk to Marcos wore white, seemed to be smiling. And then the assassin walks up: dressed in black, scowling, reaching into his sleeve. Nobody noticed this guy until he started trying to hack her up, including her bodyguards. Why not? Because they weren’t practicing situational awareness.

Parker and Ward were not in any position to defend themselves: both were deeply engrossed in a task, both were entirely unaware that a deeply disturbed man had fixated on them. It’s also likely that nothing in their lives had ever prepared them for this attack. They were nice people like you and me. Who expects to be shot to death doing a 7:00 AM interview in Moneta, Virginia?

I don’t think anything could have saved those people from Vester Lee Flanagan. He stalked them, chose a moment that was least advantageous for them, and struck. You can practice awareness, avoidance, de-escalation techniques, and physical combat all day every day, but if someone’s going to go through the same trouble that Flanagan did to stalk and kill you, you’re screwed.

Don’t leave the house mad. Tell your loved ones that you love them.

And be aware, just in case.

Idaho Shooting: Takeaways

January 5, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

This is a nasty, dirty, shitty story, one of the absolute worst I’ve heard of in some time, but if we don’t dig into it at least a little bit, we’ll just paper over it and no one will do the hard work of learning anything.

What happened was that Veronica Rutledge left her handgun in her purse where her toddler son could get to it. Her son got to it and shot Veronica in the head, killing her. The details are in the link.

The family is, for all intents and purposes, ruined. I don’t know how you come back from that. I pray God that they can find comfort in the fullness of time.

Like so many terrible things, it’s bad that it happened, but worse if we don’t learn anything. As part of that process, take a look at this story; does it ring any bells? A 9-year-old girl was handed a weapon she couldn’t handle, and as a result her firearms instructor is dead. Another ruined family.

It’s a mistake to call these “accidental” shootings. Any time a bullet goes where it isn’t supposed to, it’s because the responsible party was negligent in handling the weapon. Neither a 9-year-old nor a 2-year-old are responsible parties. So the responsibility, unfortunately, falls on the victims in these cases. There are no accidental discharges, only negligent ones.

So how do we learn from this? What can we take away?

With weapons, familiarity doesn’t breed so much contempt as it does casualness. This is problematic. If you’re going to take on the burden of carrying a weapon (which is your God-given, inalienable right), you have to include the whole raft of responsibilities along with it. It has to be something you think about. You have to cultivate mindfulness in its presence, because once it turns into just another accessory, you’ve put one foot on the path to negligence.

Hand-flapping about blaming the victim won’t prevent this from happening again, nor will renewed cries for harsher gun laws. It’s absolutely awful that Veronica Rutledge’s name is in the public eye now. The only good that can come of it is increased mindfulness: a gun owner’s most valuable tool.

War Stories: Keys Are for Pussies

November 3, 2014 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

During my tenure with “the most dangerous press in America,” I got to see a lot of very interesting things, talk to some fascinating people, and take part in activities the average person rarely gets to witness. All of it legal, of course. When it came time for me to describe some of what I learned in the books The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse and, to a lesser extent, The Blessed Man and the Witch, my younger brother told me, “When I read your books, I know that the fight scenes are realistic.” I appreciated that; it’s very difficult to show real-world combat tactics through fiction in a way that makes sense to a reader regularly exposed to media representations of violence. What follows is an example of an experience I had that would be considered atypical.

We were in the production phase of a shotgun video intended to take the viewer from firearm selection to the penetrating power of various rounds (slug vs. birdshot vs. buckshot) to bare-bones shooting tactics. Across the board, it was a great instructional video, and arguably the best of its kind.

Near the end of the first day of production, we drove to the on-site shoot house to show the power of a door-breaching round on an exterior door you’d find on a typical suburban home. Most people won’t ever have to blow a door open with a shotgun, but we had the ammunition and door, and part of the video was about exploding various shotgun myths (like the notion that you can just stand in a doorway and blow scores of people away with one shot). So we went for it.

The problem was that we’d forgotten to get the key to the shoot house. A shoot house (also called a kill house) is a purpose-designed building used for teaching close-range firearms tactics. Depending on your budget, it might be furnished (to give the trainee a more realistic experience), have a roof, and even video cameras to record the training. This shoot house was about as good an example as you’d want to train in and included a grate-style ceiling on which the trainer/RO (Range Officer) could walk and observe the drills being practiced.

But we didn’t have the key. It was back at the main building.

Rather than go through the rigmarole of getting into the truck and driving the onerous two minutes or so to get it, one of the men with us said he had his lockpicks in the glove box of his car. In less than a minute he had the lock open and we were setting up our cameras. The man who’d done it wasn’t a professional locksmith or super-secret spy: he was using skills he’d learned and practiced over time to solve a problem. Most, if not all, of the other men there could have done the same thing. It wasn’t a big deal. Just thirty seconds with a rake pick and tension tool.

Typical Monday.

Book Review: The Blue Tent Sky

October 20, 2014 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

I can’t remember where I found the link to Brian Aitken’s Indiegogo site, but I do recall that once I read it, I had to contribute. His story required it.

The book blurb says, “In 2010 Brian Aitken was sentenced to seven years in prison for possessing firearms he legally owned. He lost everything, including custody of his son, for a crime he did not commit. After spending four months behind bars, Governor Chris Christie demanded his release. This is his story.”

For anyone interested in personal freedom, firearms laws, individual rights, or an inside look at an extremely arbitrary and capricious legal system, this book is a must-read. The early part of Brian’s story is immediately recognizable: an acrimonious divorce followed by parental alienation, but it soon spirals into a horribly Kafkaesque nightmare culminating in a seven-year prison sentence for the crime of moving one’s lawfully-owned firearms from one residence to another.

While gripping, the book isn’t without its flaws. Some grammatical mistakes, odd phrasing, and disjointed story-telling occasionally mar the narrative; it needed one last pass with an editor before it went to print. In addition, there’s a ham-handed marketing effort to make Brian’s story a left vs. right issue, which doesn’t fit. The American left doesn’t like guns and wants to outlaw private ownership of them, yes, but this case was about the typical unthinking gun-grabbing that’s part and parcel of northeastern liberalism, not a true political effort. An overzealous prosecutor and disgustingly biased judge wanted to make an example of Brian not because he was a conservative, but because he dared to own guns in their state.

Brian had been gored by two bulls: America’s awful family court system (which treats all fathers like disposable potential abusers) and New Jersey’s contradictory, even senseless firearms laws. I can’t imagine how terrible it must be to have one’s own son ripped away like Brian’s, but to be sentenced to prison on top of that for not having done anything illegal is unthinkable. Despite this, Brian treated the subject matter with admirable grace.

The story hits its nadir with Brian’s chilling account of county jail, followed by prison. As appalling as the experience was, the injustice of it made it even worse, no doubt, and I needed a Silkwood shower after reading it.

Whether or not you can ever see yourself in Brian’s shoes, what happened to him was a terrible injustice. Buy his book. Read it. And stay out of New Jersey if you legally own a firearm.

Four out of five stars.

News Analysis: Studies in Negligence and Danger-Seeking

September 1, 2014 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

There are two stories that hit the wire last week, and each need to be discussed with an eye toward pragmatic analysis rather than hyperbole.

The first is the story of the firearms instructor who had been killed on the range by a 9-year-old girl with an Uzi submachine gun. We’re going to ignore media bias for the purposes of this discussion: how the story has been reported, and why certain words were used to describe the incident.

The bottom line is that the range instructor was negligent. He killed himself, ruined that young girl’s life, and caused irreparable damage to both his family and the girl’s. What he was thinking is something we’ll never know, though I’m reasonably sure it was a variant of, “We’ve never had a problem before.”

One thing serious shooters understand early on is that there are no such things as accidental shootings. Any time a bullet leaves the barrel in a direction it wasn’t meant to go, it means that the shooter (or in this case, the instructor) was negligent. He ignored one or more of the four basic rules of firearms handling. They are:

All guns are always loaded.
Never point the weapon at anything you don’t intend to destroy.
Keep your finger off the trigger until your sights are on the target.
Always be aware of your target and what’s around and behind it.

In this case, Charles Vacca put the enforcement of those basic rules on the shoulders of someone incapable of obeying them: a 9-year-old girl. And he died as a result of that horrible mistake. She couldn’t handle the weapon properly.

Imagine driving down the road and almost hitting somebody. Your mind goes through all the awful scenarios, and you feel terrible about what might have happened. But there’s some relief there, too, because it didn’t happen. The 9-year-old won’t ever have that relief. Nor will her family.

I am not blaming the victim, because the victim is the 9-year-old.

The next story involves a former Marine and his Air Force buddy who were beaten outside of a Waffle House in Mississippi. The Marine, Ralph Weems, had been critically injured as a result of the beating. Here’s the most important part of the story:

“The Associated Press reports that Weems went to a Waffle House early Saturday. His friend David Knighten, an Air Force veteran of the Afghanistan war who was with him, told reporters that a man told him politely outside the restaurant that it wasn’t a safe place for whites, because people were upset by the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.”

Nevertheless, Weems and Knighten went in there.

Why?

We all know how the world should be. It should be perfectly okay for anyone to walk down any neighborhood anywhere at any time of day and not fear being victimized. But it isn’t. It clearly isn’t. Until we get to that point, we need to act with a modicum of caution and, dare I say it, situational awareness.

For whatever reason, Weems and Knighten decided to ignore a perfectly reasonable warning, and suffered injury as a result. You know how in horror movies, there’s that one character who opens the door he definitely shouldn’t, and you think to yourself, What a dumbass. I would never do that? Weems and Knighten went through that door.

That didn’t have to happen. It’s as if they were asking to get beaten up. Nobody’s arguing that they deserved it, or that beating up strangers is a justifiable way of expressing frustration about race relations in the United States. That’s stupid. But what’s equally stupid is ignoring the world in which we live.

The best self-defense techniques always begin with awareness, avoidance, and de-escalation. Weems and Knighten were apparently unaware of danger (despite being warned about it), they went toward the danger rather than avoiding it, and they didn’t de-escalate the situation by fleeing when danger was imminent.

Don’t do what they did. Be smart.

Louis Awerbuck

August 22, 2014 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Typically, I reserve Friday posts for my hobby, which is baking bread. I’m brooming that this week because this is the last month Louis Awerbuck’s column will be running in SWAT Magazine. Louis died on June 24, 2014.

His friend Robbie Barrkman wrote a moving tribute to him that you can read here.

If you’ve never heard of him, it wouldn’t be a surprise, and Louis himself wouldn’t have cared one way or the other. He didn’t seek the spotlight. To call him a firearms and tactics instructor would be technically correct, but they’re labels, and labels are necessarily limiting. For the straight biography, visit his website.

I worked with Louis (pronounced “Louie”) on two instructional video projects in the early 2000’s: Only Hits Count, a combat shooting video, and Safe at Home, a home defense video. The leather-jacketed villain holding the hammer on the cover of Safe at Home is me (with hair).

Simply put, Louis was a man of respect. A brilliant tactician with real world experience that he never boasted about: it just informed what he taught and how he taught it. Self-effacing almost to a fault, and had an incredibly dry, clever sense of humor. His delivery was deadpan in a way you’ve never heard before. Sere. Arid. I can’t claim him as a friend, but I really quite liked and admired him. During my time in publishing, I’d worked with many, many combat shooting experts. Some good, some great, some mediocre.

Louis was in a class by himself. I wish I’d known him better. It would have made me better.

Requiescat in pace, Louis.