Seeing The Elephant

Many years ago, I attended a two-day training class with a rather famous firearms trainer who was also a veteran law enforcement officer. Not only that, but he had served many years on his agency’s SWAT team and was the survivor of a number of gunfights.

Cool, right? Sounds just like the sort of guy you’d want to train with. As the class continued, though, we found out that he fought those gunfights with a long gun, not his duty pistol, and each of them was during a callout where he was actively seeking a suspect rather than reacting to a bad guy.

This brings us to one of the biggest differences between law enforcement and the armed citizen: It is the job of the police to go chase down the bad guys. It is our job to avoid dealing with the bad guys as much as we can, but if we can’t avoid it, our goal is to either break contact or stop the threat using only the amount of force required for the task at hand.

I followed this instructor on social media for a few months after I had taken his class, and I noticed that he judged the effectiveness of any technique he came across through the lens of his encounters, and only through that lens. So what if most civilian encounters start because the bad guy got through our defenses? That didn’t happen to him, so therefore, that data was irrelevant. He knew everything there was to know about gunfighting because dammit, he had seen the elephant.

Does taking a class from someone who’s had to use a firearm in an armed encounter help us understand how we should act when everything is on the line? Sure, that insight into the mindset and thought processes involved can be invaluable. However, it’s more important to seek out trainers who rely on a number of sources and adapt what they know to the needs of their students. The bad guy gets a say in dictating how a defensive encounter might happen. We need to be prepared to counter his arguments in the most effective way possible, no matter what that may be.