Barricade Positions

I wanna talk a little bit about the details of where you should position yourself, and why, inside of a barricade location. So if you think about a barricade room, not necessarily a safe room with a vault door and cameras and self-contained breathing apparatus, or anything else you might have in there, but just any space where you are hiding or putting yourself so that it is harder for a threat to get into a position to hurt you, or maybe you and your family, if you're at home. Well, once we decide that we wanna get into the bedroom that has the reinforced door, the deadbolt, or go into the office at the back of a store that's being robbed, or maybe where there's mass killing going on, where do you position yourself inside of that smaller space? Now this is something that comes up in home defense classes, it comes up in active shooter classes, things like that. And we think about a room, let's just do a real basic, simple room, we've got a room, and you say, okay, well, this is my room, and maybe the door is here, and now, where am I gonna position myself inside of this room? Well, we talk about wanting to be 90 degrees off line from the line of travel. Now, the reason I say line of travel is that as soon as I draw this picture, if you've been through any kind of a CQB course, if you've been through in any kind of course with team tactics, if you know people who are involved in SWAT teams or military training, we might start thinking about terms like slicing the pie, or flowing into a room, and people will start asking questions about, well, where's the hinge, and which way does the door turn, and all of that. Well, here's the thing, unless you're being attacked by a SWAT team, or a military special operations team, then the idea that someone is necessarily gonna enter the room in any specific way is a little bit of overthinking it. And certainly I hope you're not gonna be attacked by the military special operations team. So there's someone in your home that means to do you harm and they're able to break through this door, the only assumption I think we really wanna make is that they are going to come through this doorway along a line of travel. So 90 degrees off line or perpendicular to that line of travel is where we wanna position ourselves, generally speaking. So over in this corner would be the best location, theoretically, to be. As they come into this room, you know, we have two decisions, we talk about 90 degrees off line, we could be here or here, well, that's very close to the door and we want more time and space to be able to defend ourselves if we need to. Remember that if you have family members with you, you know, other people in this corner, if it's a barricade situation during a mass killing event, in a office at the back of the grocery store or something like that, you may have people behind you and you may be four, or five, six, seven feet off of the door. If you're in a home defense situation, or off of the corner, I should say, if you're in a home defense situation and you have a rifle, well there's another two or three feet, right? Even with a braced pistol, another two or three feet of extension beyond just body plus the people behind you. So the other factor that we have in addition to 90 degrees off line is we also want to be greater than two arms reach. So greater than two arms reach. In other words, the full extension of my arm and the full extension of the threat's arm, so about six feet, six, seven feet, two meters, we wanna be away from the door. So if we change the door location, let's do that and just take a look at how this plays out. If we get into a situation where we place the door in the middle of the wall, we now have two choices we can make. We could be here or here and still be 90 degrees off line from that direction of travel or normal travel into the room, and this is where it might start to make sense to start asking questions about, you know, are the hinges here, or if the door opens this way, do I wanna be hidden behind the door and give myself more time to prepare for whatever is gonna be seen when the door gets out of the way? Or do I wanna be over here and be able to see as soon as that door starts to open, who's coming through it, for example, is it the police especially in that public space barricade. Do I wanna know right away, is it the police coming through the door as opposed to a bad guy coming through the door? Well, the door opens out, it's not really gonna matter that much either, right? Although an outward opening door, being able to look through that gap if the hinge are on this side, being able to look through that gap, again, gives you the earlier view of the bad guy, or the good guy, or whoever it is coming in, maybe it's somebody else who's trying or hoping to barricade with you, right? Because remember, barricade again, doesn't necessarily mean a safe room, it might just mean the room where you're hiding. We get into the details now of your home. So you start thinking about, okay, you've got a bedroom that has a doorway, let's go back to what we call a corner fed room, right? The doorway in the corner, you're gonna say, okay, well I wanna be here, except you know what? The bed in my bedroom is here, and I've got a dresser, and then I've got, you know, maybe another table here, and the TV on it, you know, I start to think, okay, well do I wanna be standing on the bed? Do I wanna cut this distance down? You know, what, if there's not enough room for me and the family, 90 degrees off line, greater than two arms reach? Well, maybe right here would, and I'll go back to that other color, maybe right here would be an acceptable position because all of these things are conceptual, right? One of the most important things to remember about all the information that I teach at ICE Training company, all of this stuff inside of the Intuitive Defensive Shooting Program, and certainly everything we put out here at Personal Defense Network, you need to remember, you have to take these concepts and apply them to your situation. So what's the idea? When someone comes through this doorway, if they're looking straight in, we want them to have to turn to find us. We don't wanna be right in front of the door waiting for them. So if someone comes into the room, and they can see the far corners of the room from the doorway, now they're gonna look up one wall or the other, and they're going to take a while to find us if we're over here in the corner. And that's why that's a perfect counter ambush position. So theoretically, if I can't be right in the corner, at least being up along the wall if they come in and as you think about that cone of what they can see being very narrow and then widening out as they turn to look, well, it's gonna take them longer to find me than it is for me to find them, because I'm focused on that door, I know where the bad guy's gonna be coming through. He's probably not popping through this wall, he's probably not jumping out of this dresser, he's not coming out from under the bed, he's coming through this door. I'm gonna be able to watch that door from the side of the room, as close as I can, to 90 degrees off line from the line of travel and outside of two arms reach to give me that space and time to process and defend myself. That's how you wanna position yourself in a barricade area.