Gun Knowledge and Demystifying the Gun

I want to talk about the reality of firearms and how they can be used to hurt people and sort of demystify them a little bit. You know, if someone's living in an environment where they have never shot a gun they aren't familiar with guns. Maybe it's you, maybe you've never shot a gun. Maybe somebody loaned you. This DVD said, hey, take a look at this video chapter on demystifying the gun because you need to understand that guns aren't magic.

When the guns in the room it doesn't instantly mean that everyone's going to die. And in fact, you're really not in any danger at all 99.99999% of the time that you're around a firearm. Only when someone purposefully takes the firearm and tries to hurt you with it. And they know how to hurt you with it. Or if someone who doesn't know how to use the firearm has access to the firearm and uses it negligently, could you be put in any real danger for any practical purposes?

I want to compare the firearm to this everyday item that most people are familiar with. Certainly in the corporate environment in the educational environment, we use this quite a bit. It's a stapler and the stapler isn't scary. And in fact, the stapler is probably pretty frustrating for some people when it isn't working properly or when it runs out of staples. Well, the firearm is very, very similar in a lot of ways.

First of all, you have to know how to use the stapler. If you hand this stapler to someone who's never been trained, how to use it never been taught how to use it, you give this stapler to a three-year-old, they may or may not be able to successfully staple paper with it. They might get lucky. You give this to a gorilla and put paper in the cage and you put this in the cage. They might get the paper and the stapler together and actually be able to staple paper to each other, put two or three pages together.

But it's incredibly unlikely. If someone isn't trained to use the stapler which is relatively simple to use, they simply can't use it. If someone isn't trained to use the firearm, if they haven't figured out how to use the firearm they simply cannot use it on purpose. All that really leaves us with is negligence. Now, right away, people are going to throw a flag and people are gonna say well, worst case scenario, if someone negligently uses a stapler is they get maybe somehow a staple in their finger probably just pinched between the plastic and the metal.

And no one can die. Absolutely true. Someone uses this negligently. Someone just starts messing around with this and happens to pull the trigger. And the muzzle happens to be pointed at someone or themselves.

Someone could die. The stakes are much higher with a firearm than they are with a stapler. That's not the comparison we're trying to draw but as mechanical devices they both require knowledge in how to use them. They also can only be used in one specific way. If I put a piece of paper on top of the stapler and I close it, I'm not going to get stapled paper.

The paper is sitting up here the paper underneath the paper behind how many of us have ever inserted the paper into the stapler gone to put a staple in it and then realized that we didn't have the paper in the right position. The paper wasn't actually in deep enough or the paper was in too deep or whatever the staple ended up in the wrong place. Same exact thing for this gun. If the thing that I want to hit isn't directly in front of the muzzle. Of course, this firearm is unloaded.

You can see that's a relatively small opening. It's a relatively small projectile. It's even smaller for this rifle. Believe it or not. It's about half the size of the projectile is going to be coming out of most handguns.

When you're talking about this type of rifle if the thing that I want to hit isn't directly in front of the firearm. If I move the firearm just this much I wouldn't hit the camera right now. Just that much, two, three degrees, four degrees at the most I can be away from even at only 10 or 12 feet hurting that person in front of me, just like if we insert the paper into the stapler two or three centimeters or millimeters, even in the wrong direction or at the wrong angle, the staple isn't going to go where we want it. So we have to have the knowledge of how to use it. And we have to be using it properly.

We have to be directing it properly. Now, one thing that people may not understand is that firearms are not 100% reliable. Every time you pull the trigger it doesn't mean that a bullet's going to come out and the firearm is going to cycle properly. When you pull the trigger there's a lot of mechanical connections inside of the gun pulling the trigger sets in motion a series of things that result in the back of the bullet being struck. This primer, initiating, lighting the powder that's inside of this cartridge and then causing an explosion that pushes the bullet out the barrel and pushes back on the slide.

And the slide, and you'll hear the springs move, the slide has to move back fully into this position which allows the empty case to be ejected and allows the slide to be in a position so that it is behind the next bullet coming out of the magazine. So that once it's behind the next bullet it can push that bullet forward and up and into, obviously, the chamber. So it's going to be contained, it's not going to pop out. It's going to pop out and go into this chamber. This is going to complete the cycle and then the gun can be fired again.

Now, that can happen a couple of times a second with a skilled shooter, but if someone allows the frame of the gun to move if you've ever been around shooters, and you've heard about unsupported platforms, you've heard the term limp-wristing, limp-wristing is referring to shooting a gun and letting the frame move. So when you shoot a semi-automatic gun and the frame moves, it absorbs some of the energy and you don't get a complete cycling of the firearm. A lot of other things could happen. You could have a glove or some heavy coat or someone who threw something at the gun interfere with this cycling, anything that blocks this injection port that blocks the empty case from coming out from being popped off of this little spike that's on the inside called the ejector and popping out can cause it to actually interfere with the ability of the gun to complete its cycle, if something gets stuck in there. So there's a lot of ways his firearm can actually fail.

Of course, we all know there are plenty of ways that a stapler can actually fail, right? We've all had the stapler get stuck in the down position, right? If we were to jam down on the stapler and not release obviously we can't staple anything else, it's exactly the same thing. There are times when the staples themselves will get jammed up inside of the area where the staple is supposed to come out. You'll get two of them trying to get out at once and they'll jam just like the firearm can jam when the bullets don't get out of the way when they don't do exactly what they're supposed to do.

And again, we've all had that experience. Of course, another way that we have probably been frustrated by staplers at times is realizing they're inside of this mechanical device are staples, ammunition. If we run out of staples we're not going to get any stapling done. And eventually that happens. And quite often it happens right in the middle of when we're trying to get a whole bunch of stapling done and we realize, okay, I've got to open this up.

I've got to get the staples. I've got to put them in. I've got to close this back down and now I can resume my stapling again exactly the same parallel inside of the handgun or inside of the semiautomatic rifle. At some point, these magazines will run out of bullets. We will not have any more ammunition.

And there's nothing that we can do with this firearm until we hit the button, pull this out, find a new magazine put it in, and then push this slide back forward release it from the stop mechanism that was there or it may have gone forward. And we had to pull it back and recharge the gun again putting another round into the chamber. And until we go through that process we can't do anything else with this firearm. Now, certainly if we had multiple staplers we could move from one stapler to the next and we could drop this stapler and reach into our pocket pull out our second stapler and go right on stapling. Same thing for the bad guy.

If he has multiple firearms he can shoot this one until it's empty, drop it put in his bag, put it in his pocket, pull out another one. But what happens during that time? What happens in that moment? When the gun can't be fired. When the bad guy is switching from one gun to another is really important.

And that could be one of your stimulus response patterns that you set up, knowing ahead of time that eventually the gun is going to stop shooting. The faster the bad guy is shooting bullets, the faster he's going to run out of ammunition. And when he runs out of ammunition and he starts that process of reloading, even if he's very, very fast when he goes to pull that out, push this in, reload the gun that gives you a second or two or three or four when the bad guy is not actively shooting people. When you can get involved, just like the pause that occurs when you have to stop and reload the stapler, the pause that occurs when you have to stop and reload the gun or get a second stapler or second gun is a pause during which you can take action. And if you've been frozen in terror and you've not been able to control yourself, you've not been able to take action, you've not been able to respond.

You need to program into your head right now, if you're ever in an environment where someone is shooting and that shooting stops, they either have a malfunction because the gun didn't function properly or they ran out of ammunition and they have to change guns or put new ammunition in a gun. That is your moment to act. The last thing I do want to talk about is that moment to act and what you're going to do when you take action. Now, clearly a firearm is incredibly dangerous. It's much more dangerous than a stapler, but again we can draw some parallels.

If I wanted to stop someone from being able to use this stapler and I were to be able to control where the stapler was, I'm gonna have to take it from their hand. If I can just keep the paper out of the area where the staples go I can keep them from stapling paper. If I can control where this gun is pointed. If I can grab the gun and pointed up into the ceiling if I can drive the gun against the wall if I can grab the hand and the gun and the arm and two or three people pushing this gun down into the ground, it can't hurt anyone. If the good guys aren't in front of this hole if the good guys aren't in the direction the bullets are going, they can't be hurt by this firearm.

It's incredibly simplistic. And I know to a lot of people they see the gun as this talisman of death and there's no way we could defeat it. And how can a schoolchild defeat an armed gunman? Well, to be honest, it's pretty easy to disable their ability to use the firearm. If you understand how it has to be used.

So the first thing we can do is deal with direction. The second thing we can do again is interfere with that functioning. If we think about the functioning of the stapler if we could interfere with that if we can pop the stapler open, we can knock it open push it open, grab the top of it, pull it open. Well, no one can staple at this point. It's not going to work.

We can't get the stapling done in this position. Same thing here. If we can get our hands on this gun and pull this slide back, pull it open. Even pull it partially open to where we cause that malfunction or that jam. They are disabled.

We have disabled the tool of the attacker. If we can move that slide relative to the frame. If the person is in a position where we affect their hands that they can't push down on the stapler. If we grab their thumb, pull their thumb back. If their hand is up on top of the stapler and we grab their wrist and pull back.

If we keep them from being able to actively staple they can't use the stapler. If we can grab the trigger finger, pull the trigger finger back, break the finger, hold control of it. Maybe jam our finger into the area behind the trigger. Maybe get into the position where we cover the trigger area and the person can't get their hand on to it because we've dragged this gun into the ground and we're blocking their access to the trigger. They can't fire the gun.

The gun's not gonna fire itself, they can't magically get their finger past your hand. You may be able to disable this gun simply by blocking their access to the trigger. Well, I've so far just talked about this handgun. I haven't talked about this rifle. Now this AR style rifles, commonly in the media referred to as an assault rifle.

This is one particular version. It happens to be the first version I grabbed here off the shelf at the Scottsdale gun club. There are many different variations of this style of firearm. And again, it's not magic, just because it looks like the one the military uses, or it looks like the one the SWAT team uses it may not even have the same capabilities. In other words, it may not be a fully automatic firearm.

It's probably just a semiautomatic firearm not technically an assault rifle, but we understand that that term has sort of been hijacked. Well, let's think about that, let's demystify this thing. First of all, if I'm coming through a room with this firearm it is very easy for someone within arm's reach to grab towards the end of this gun and steer it towards a wall, steer it up towards the stealing or steer it down to the ground. If you can direct the shotgun or the rifle in to being pointed in an area where they can't hurt somebody, it's pointed at the wall, no one's going to get hurt by this firearm. Leverage also comes into play.

When you talk about grabbing a long gun, as opposed to grabbing a handgun, it is going to be much harder for someone to be able to control this handgun. If I'm keeping it close to my body and I'm protecting it it's going to be much easier for someone to control the direction that this rifle is pointed at because they have more leverage. They can get down here on the end and they can twist and push and pull. You put a 30 pound kid on the middle of this rifle pushing on it while three or four other kids and a teacher or throwing things or hitting me in the head. I'm not gonna be able to do much with this rifle.

And it's a lot better than hiding and hoping. What else can we do with this rifle? Well, here's the ejection port area. This area right here has to remain open. This door has to be open and empty cases have to be able to come out of that area.

So just smothering the side of the rifle. Of course this rifle doesn't have an injection port on this side, rifles are only going to have an injection port on one side or the whole top area may be open here where the round comes out. So if you simply think about clasping or smothering or throwing a coat or anything, even your hands you might get a little cut, you might get a little burn, but obviously that's much better than having someone actively using this rifle to try to hurt people inside of your work environment. So just smothering this area of these modern sporting rifles these ARs type rifles, will cause a malfunction. They may get one more shot off, but it's very unlikely they'll be able to get more than one because of the inability of this area to function and clear empty cases so that the next round can get into the chamber and actually be fired.

So demystifying these is very simple, point it in a direction where no one can get hurt. Again, this gun is unloaded. You can lock it open and you can see how small that hole is. If that bullet isn't pointed directly at the person. If I move this again, about two degrees off to the side you can't be hurt by it.

If I can push it down into the ground no one's going to be hurt by it. Push it up into the ceiling, very unlikely anyone could be hurt unless the person was able to shoot through the ceiling, which is going to be very unlikely in most circumstances with these types of rifles. Also, we have the same issue we did with the stapler and with the hand gun, the magazine. Eventually, this firearm is going to run out of ammunition and we're going to have to reload it. This is a more cumbersome process than it is with the handgun.

So it actually takes more time to reload a rifle and a lot more time to reload most shotguns than it does with a handgun. So even more opportunity for that pause and also if you grab this in the right way, you might actually hit the button that ejects the magazine. If you can get the magazine out of the gun, there may be one more shot that can be fired, but that's it. You may have just taken 28 or 29 shots away from the bad guy. Of course, the more time you spend studying this stuff the more time you spend around firearms to learn more about how to use them either for your own defense or just to deactivate them, you may learn exactly where that button is and it may be very easy for you once you get your hands on the gun, just like it is for me to find that button and inject that magazine, again the same thing with the handgun I can control the trigger finger, right?

I can control the direction the gun is pointed. I can attack the bad guy's vision. I can attack the bad guy's head and distract him and cause him to have to pull his hand off of the gun, to protect himself. There's a lot of ways to make it impossible for someone to use a firearm to hurt you. And that's really the point of this discussion.

Demystifying the firearm is an important part of personal defense, because if you believe that the minute this shows up in the room, you're instantly going to die, you're going to be less able to defend yourself. If you believe that the minute this thing is just simply laid on the table it's going to go off and people are going to get hurt. You don't understand the realities of the failibility, the vulnerability of the handgun. Again, think about the stapler. Think about your car.

Think about your coffee machine. Think about anything in your world that's mechanical that you have to know how to use that has expendable; either ammunition, staples, coffee grinds, whatever it is, water, any expendable issue like gas in a car any mechanical thing that can fail like your alternator or the hinge or this slide moving back and forth. Guns are not magic. Bad guys with guns are not magical. The gun is a weak point.

The gun as a tool has things you can do to stop it from being used against you. Understanding that is a big part of being able to defend yourself against an armed spree killer in that worst case scenario.