2aguy
Diamond Member
- Jul 19, 2014
- 113,038
- 53,530
- 2,290
Saw this on the Face site........this is from Larry Correia......author, accountant, firearms trainer, firearms businessman.......he talks about the B.S. anti-gun talking point that normal people will not be able to handle themselves, and their gun, when it comes down to facing a real world, violent criminal....
Over the last week I had a few shooting posts go viral, so I got dozens of that one type of comment that we've all seen before: Variations of the MINDSET thing, where whatever you are doing is useless, because unless you are a hardened warrior bad ass like them who has been tested in combat, when the time comes you regular people will freeze, choke, and fail, because you are unable to take a life.
So that got me curious. This gets said a lot. So surely, with millions of regular Americans carrying guns, and thousands of defensive gun uses every year, this must happen all the time right?
And I'll go ahead and put a TL/DR summary now for the semi-literate whine babies with no attention spans who need their food digested for them like baby birds- No. Regular people who carry guns do not freeze up, unable to drop the hammer on other human beings. Statistically, that almost never happens. That platitude is a myth, usually barfed up by dudes with self-esteem issues trying to feel special.
Now for the rest of you who can read good, here's the details, some nuance, and some possible explanations.
So after the 20th variation of this dumb ass platitude showing up on my page I decided to see how many cases I could find of regular people who carry guns getting into a violent encounter, and not being able to pull the trigger on the bad guy out of some moral/courage/feelings failure.
Luckily for me, I've been a huge gun nerd and training dork for decades so I know a lot of really smart people who do this stuff professionally. And I started asking a bunch of them if they knew of any cases where a regular person went all Upham from Saving Pvt. Ryan in real life, in America, in modern times?
I asked professional face shooters, guys who train cops, guys who train regular citizens, guys who study the psychology of applied violence and human performance, and people who collect and analyze information on gun fights for a living. I asked in private groups made up of professional instructors and training junkies, and then messaged a dozen other people. (and apologies to any of you guys who feel left out because I missed you, this was a rush job) I'm not tagging them here because FB stomps on posts with name tags, but many of you will know exactly who I'm talking about and I'll talk about them in the comments. (just heading off the dumb ass detractors who are going to claim I made all these people up)
Specifically, I wanted cases with regular people who had decided to carry guns who'd gotten into a violent encounter. Not police officers in duty related events. And not military combat. Those situations tend to be way different, and I'll talk more about that in the findings.
So, having bugged people with a combined couple thousand years of experience on this topic, you know how many shootings they came up with where that thing we get screamed at happens all the time is confirmed to have happened?
One. Between all of them we came up with ONE confirmed incident. In 2005.
I asked the man who has the world's largest collection of videos of shootings, and analyzed like 50,000 of them how often he has seen this. He hasn't. He couldn't think of any videos showing that. In fact, the big problem was the opposite with people being too eager to shoot when they probably shouldn't.
So no video and almost no cases anyone could recall. Now, to specify. There were other cases where that might have happened, but we don't know, because we couldn't ask the armed citizen what was going through his mind at the time unless we held a séance.
However, even if we toss in every event where the good guy died and the cause might have been because he choked and just couldn't pull the trigger, we're really having to scrape the barrel because that just doesn't happen very often. And keep in mind, this is out of thousands of defensive gun uses every year.
If we take every single case where a regular person got disarmed by the bad guy and shot with his own gun, and assumed the reason why was that they just couldn't shoot the bad guy, and assume moral choking is the reason-which speaking as a guy who has done force on force wrestling with sim guns that is a really bad assumption to make-that's still a tiny percentage, because that hardly ever happens with CCW. Weapon retention is a lot bigger deal for cops than regular people, because their guns are visible and their job requires them to go hands on with bad people. Regular folks don't usually do that.
Could there be more cases this group just wasn't aware of? Yes, very possibly. But could it be a statistically significant number? Absolutely not.
Are there cases where people hesitate to shoot for reasons other than a moral/courage one? Absolutely yes. Especially in regular citizen self-defense, where the goal isn't "destroy the enemy" or "arrest the perp", the goal is "survive". In the majority of regular DGU's no shots are fired. Bad Guy does something that makes Good Guy think he needs to shoot, gun comes out, Bad Guy decides to stop doing whatever bad thing it was, so he no longer needs to get shot. Yay. Problem solved.
In talking to all these smart people, they all had examples of hesitation, many of them personal, and it had nothing to do with they COULDN'T but rather if they SHOULDN'T. I had guys tell me about going to shoot someone and then stopping because they realized there were innocent bystanders in the backstop. I had guys tell me about going to shoot someone, but then stopping and holding fire because the bad guy suddenly broke off, surrendered, or turned and ran away.
But in each of those THE ABILITY TO DROP THE HAMMER ON THE BAD GUY DID NOT ENTER INTO THE MENTAL EQUATION AT THE TIME.
In talking to one very analytical person who writes books about how the human brain processes this stuff he pointed out that when a surprise bad thing happens all humans have some mental freeze while they process that information. It's just that the more training people have the faster that process is completed, and if they're well trained enough it seems like there is no process at all.
He said that it is possible that some people do hesitate over moral grounds while going through that process, and just don't recall it afterwards, but there's zero way to really tell. He talked about one infamous mass shooter event where there were a few armed people nearby, but one of them reacted a lot faster than the other two. Could their hesitation have been from this alleged choke freeze or something else? Maybe? But it's also possible the first guy was just better trained and more tuned up, so he reacted faster.
Also, I'm not saying that everybody reacted WELL. Or that they made the best decision possible. Oh no, people screw up all the time. But cases where they didn't react or froze and didn't make any decisions at all are virtually non-existent.
Now, my guess on the reason we're not seeing large numbers of this legendary choke freeze that self-righteous cockwombles on the internet assume happens all the time to everybody but them, is that people who have made the conscious decision to go through the effort of carrying a firearm have self selected out of the group of people who would be morally hesitant to shoot someone.
Are there people who actually carry a gun, who haven't thought about ever using it on someone? And they've just got it like some magic talisman to ward off evil? Very possibly. Is this common? Apparently not.
Back when I was teaching CCW a zillion years ago I was a young father, so the cheesy analogy I used in class was that it was like teaching our kids about drugs. You don't wait until somebody offers you some cocaine at a party to decide if you're going to do drugs or not. You make the decision beforehand. Then in the moment of testing that decision is already done. There's no big moral temptation. You put on a gun, same thing. Moment of testing comes you already know your decision.
Next up, you can't compare wildly different things. Having been in the military is commendable. I thank you for your service. However, that's apples and oranges compared to regular self-defense in America in the year 2025.
Keep in mind that the encounters the military get into are extremely different than the encounters cops get into and those are profoundly different than the encounters regular citizens wind up in. That's why when dumb asses do the Respect My Authority because twenty years ago I Qualified Expert, that means jack shit if the topic is regular American self-defense shooting.
One difference on the psychology of taking someone's life is that regular CCW people aren't usually the aggressor. They're the responder. The bad guy is who usually initiates the encounter. So it's the bad guy who has made the moral decision that somebody is getting shot today. The good guy is just like oh man, I don't wanna die, BANG.
That's a lot different psychologically than taking the fight to the enemy, and sometimes initiating it from ambush even and blowing away unsuspecting dudes because it's your job to seek out and kill the enemy. Then you've got people like Grossman making assumptions about how hard to impossible it is for people to shoot other people, because he was studying drafted 18 year olds who didn't want to go to a foreign country at all, who weren't able to shoot a drafted 16 year old once they got there... and thinking that's the same mental hang up as some regular woman who just wanted to be left alone who pulls a gun on a psycho who is attacking her right now and he's not wearing any pants. That lady is like naw, **** this, BANG.
In asking one of the guys who has been teaching regular people for decades, and has had a bunch of students shoot bad guys, he said he didn't know anybody who went full Upham, but he could name some kindly grandma ladies who didn't hesitate to unload on people.
Law enforcement also gets into a bunch of different situations that don't apply to regular people. We aren't kicking in doors, serving warrants, intervening in domestic violence, or doing traffic stops, or any of those other high risk things. With the police trainers I asked they had cases where officers hesitated a lot longer than they should have, but those were because of worrying about legalities or they were trying to avoid starting another riot.
There have been super noteworthy cases of moral/courage failings among cops, but in situations which don't really apply to regular people. There's a big difference between standing around outside a mass shooting you're supposed to be responding to and not doing your job, versus being a citizen who ends up in a mass shooting and your job is to keep the bad guy from killing you so you say **** that guy BANG. Eli Dicken is a better man than the entire Uvalde PD.
So in conclusion, those internet choades are full of shit, and we can stick a fork in that old platitude. They're just compelled to shit all over anybody who puts in any effort at anything in a desperate and pathetic attempt to feel better about themselves because their father never loved them. Next time you run into one of these losers ask him to name off some examples, and then enjoy watching them cope and seethe
Over the last week I had a few shooting posts go viral, so I got dozens of that one type of comment that we've all seen before: Variations of the MINDSET thing, where whatever you are doing is useless, because unless you are a hardened warrior bad ass like them who has been tested in combat, when the time comes you regular people will freeze, choke, and fail, because you are unable to take a life.
So that got me curious. This gets said a lot. So surely, with millions of regular Americans carrying guns, and thousands of defensive gun uses every year, this must happen all the time right?
And I'll go ahead and put a TL/DR summary now for the semi-literate whine babies with no attention spans who need their food digested for them like baby birds- No. Regular people who carry guns do not freeze up, unable to drop the hammer on other human beings. Statistically, that almost never happens. That platitude is a myth, usually barfed up by dudes with self-esteem issues trying to feel special.
Now for the rest of you who can read good, here's the details, some nuance, and some possible explanations.
So after the 20th variation of this dumb ass platitude showing up on my page I decided to see how many cases I could find of regular people who carry guns getting into a violent encounter, and not being able to pull the trigger on the bad guy out of some moral/courage/feelings failure.
Luckily for me, I've been a huge gun nerd and training dork for decades so I know a lot of really smart people who do this stuff professionally. And I started asking a bunch of them if they knew of any cases where a regular person went all Upham from Saving Pvt. Ryan in real life, in America, in modern times?
I asked professional face shooters, guys who train cops, guys who train regular citizens, guys who study the psychology of applied violence and human performance, and people who collect and analyze information on gun fights for a living. I asked in private groups made up of professional instructors and training junkies, and then messaged a dozen other people. (and apologies to any of you guys who feel left out because I missed you, this was a rush job) I'm not tagging them here because FB stomps on posts with name tags, but many of you will know exactly who I'm talking about and I'll talk about them in the comments. (just heading off the dumb ass detractors who are going to claim I made all these people up)
Specifically, I wanted cases with regular people who had decided to carry guns who'd gotten into a violent encounter. Not police officers in duty related events. And not military combat. Those situations tend to be way different, and I'll talk more about that in the findings.
So, having bugged people with a combined couple thousand years of experience on this topic, you know how many shootings they came up with where that thing we get screamed at happens all the time is confirmed to have happened?
One. Between all of them we came up with ONE confirmed incident. In 2005.
I asked the man who has the world's largest collection of videos of shootings, and analyzed like 50,000 of them how often he has seen this. He hasn't. He couldn't think of any videos showing that. In fact, the big problem was the opposite with people being too eager to shoot when they probably shouldn't.
So no video and almost no cases anyone could recall. Now, to specify. There were other cases where that might have happened, but we don't know, because we couldn't ask the armed citizen what was going through his mind at the time unless we held a séance.
However, even if we toss in every event where the good guy died and the cause might have been because he choked and just couldn't pull the trigger, we're really having to scrape the barrel because that just doesn't happen very often. And keep in mind, this is out of thousands of defensive gun uses every year.
If we take every single case where a regular person got disarmed by the bad guy and shot with his own gun, and assumed the reason why was that they just couldn't shoot the bad guy, and assume moral choking is the reason-which speaking as a guy who has done force on force wrestling with sim guns that is a really bad assumption to make-that's still a tiny percentage, because that hardly ever happens with CCW. Weapon retention is a lot bigger deal for cops than regular people, because their guns are visible and their job requires them to go hands on with bad people. Regular folks don't usually do that.
Could there be more cases this group just wasn't aware of? Yes, very possibly. But could it be a statistically significant number? Absolutely not.
Are there cases where people hesitate to shoot for reasons other than a moral/courage one? Absolutely yes. Especially in regular citizen self-defense, where the goal isn't "destroy the enemy" or "arrest the perp", the goal is "survive". In the majority of regular DGU's no shots are fired. Bad Guy does something that makes Good Guy think he needs to shoot, gun comes out, Bad Guy decides to stop doing whatever bad thing it was, so he no longer needs to get shot. Yay. Problem solved.
In talking to all these smart people, they all had examples of hesitation, many of them personal, and it had nothing to do with they COULDN'T but rather if they SHOULDN'T. I had guys tell me about going to shoot someone and then stopping because they realized there were innocent bystanders in the backstop. I had guys tell me about going to shoot someone, but then stopping and holding fire because the bad guy suddenly broke off, surrendered, or turned and ran away.
But in each of those THE ABILITY TO DROP THE HAMMER ON THE BAD GUY DID NOT ENTER INTO THE MENTAL EQUATION AT THE TIME.
In talking to one very analytical person who writes books about how the human brain processes this stuff he pointed out that when a surprise bad thing happens all humans have some mental freeze while they process that information. It's just that the more training people have the faster that process is completed, and if they're well trained enough it seems like there is no process at all.
He said that it is possible that some people do hesitate over moral grounds while going through that process, and just don't recall it afterwards, but there's zero way to really tell. He talked about one infamous mass shooter event where there were a few armed people nearby, but one of them reacted a lot faster than the other two. Could their hesitation have been from this alleged choke freeze or something else? Maybe? But it's also possible the first guy was just better trained and more tuned up, so he reacted faster.
Also, I'm not saying that everybody reacted WELL. Or that they made the best decision possible. Oh no, people screw up all the time. But cases where they didn't react or froze and didn't make any decisions at all are virtually non-existent.
Now, my guess on the reason we're not seeing large numbers of this legendary choke freeze that self-righteous cockwombles on the internet assume happens all the time to everybody but them, is that people who have made the conscious decision to go through the effort of carrying a firearm have self selected out of the group of people who would be morally hesitant to shoot someone.
Are there people who actually carry a gun, who haven't thought about ever using it on someone? And they've just got it like some magic talisman to ward off evil? Very possibly. Is this common? Apparently not.
Back when I was teaching CCW a zillion years ago I was a young father, so the cheesy analogy I used in class was that it was like teaching our kids about drugs. You don't wait until somebody offers you some cocaine at a party to decide if you're going to do drugs or not. You make the decision beforehand. Then in the moment of testing that decision is already done. There's no big moral temptation. You put on a gun, same thing. Moment of testing comes you already know your decision.
Next up, you can't compare wildly different things. Having been in the military is commendable. I thank you for your service. However, that's apples and oranges compared to regular self-defense in America in the year 2025.
Keep in mind that the encounters the military get into are extremely different than the encounters cops get into and those are profoundly different than the encounters regular citizens wind up in. That's why when dumb asses do the Respect My Authority because twenty years ago I Qualified Expert, that means jack shit if the topic is regular American self-defense shooting.
One difference on the psychology of taking someone's life is that regular CCW people aren't usually the aggressor. They're the responder. The bad guy is who usually initiates the encounter. So it's the bad guy who has made the moral decision that somebody is getting shot today. The good guy is just like oh man, I don't wanna die, BANG.
That's a lot different psychologically than taking the fight to the enemy, and sometimes initiating it from ambush even and blowing away unsuspecting dudes because it's your job to seek out and kill the enemy. Then you've got people like Grossman making assumptions about how hard to impossible it is for people to shoot other people, because he was studying drafted 18 year olds who didn't want to go to a foreign country at all, who weren't able to shoot a drafted 16 year old once they got there... and thinking that's the same mental hang up as some regular woman who just wanted to be left alone who pulls a gun on a psycho who is attacking her right now and he's not wearing any pants. That lady is like naw, **** this, BANG.
In asking one of the guys who has been teaching regular people for decades, and has had a bunch of students shoot bad guys, he said he didn't know anybody who went full Upham, but he could name some kindly grandma ladies who didn't hesitate to unload on people.
Law enforcement also gets into a bunch of different situations that don't apply to regular people. We aren't kicking in doors, serving warrants, intervening in domestic violence, or doing traffic stops, or any of those other high risk things. With the police trainers I asked they had cases where officers hesitated a lot longer than they should have, but those were because of worrying about legalities or they were trying to avoid starting another riot.
There have been super noteworthy cases of moral/courage failings among cops, but in situations which don't really apply to regular people. There's a big difference between standing around outside a mass shooting you're supposed to be responding to and not doing your job, versus being a citizen who ends up in a mass shooting and your job is to keep the bad guy from killing you so you say **** that guy BANG. Eli Dicken is a better man than the entire Uvalde PD.
So in conclusion, those internet choades are full of shit, and we can stick a fork in that old platitude. They're just compelled to shit all over anybody who puts in any effort at anything in a desperate and pathetic attempt to feel better about themselves because their father never loved them. Next time you run into one of these losers ask him to name off some examples, and then enjoy watching them cope and seethe
