Empower Your Family To Protect Themselves
Barret KendrickDescription
What does protecting your loved ones really entail? PDN Contributor Barret Kendrick of Bearco Training gives his point of view. We live in a society where a lot of people take on a protector role. They want to be able to protect their children and their spouse, and Barret is no different.
HELPING LOVED ONES ON THE RANGE
As a firearms trainer, Barret has noticed a trend over the years of people coming to the range with their spouse, kids or other family members, and they (the protector) try to do everything for their loved ones. They load the magazine, they load the magazine into the gun, they hand the gun to their family member so that person can concentrate only on the actual shooting.
The result is that the person knows how to fire the gun and nothing else. How useful is this in the bigger picture of self-defense concepts? Barret believes our attitude should instead be to empower our loved ones to protect themselves by being able to do as much as possible on their own.
EMPOWERING IS MORE THAN HELPING
Why? Because you cannot be with your spouse and/or children at all times. For example, while Barret is filming this video, his wife and young sons are out shopping. His wife needs to protect them in the event of any number of situations, from an attempted robbery to carjacking, kidnapping, or an active shooter in the mall. Barret is not there to do it.
That means Barret – and you – need to set your loved ones up for success by teaching them how to do things, not spoon feed them selected information and skills. They should know how to perform all the handgun manipulations like loading, reloading, clearing malfunctions, as well as accurate shooting.
LET PDN HELP
PDN’s handgun training videos are a great resource, as we cover every topic related to manipulating and firing a handgun. Same goes for rifles and shotguns. However, spouses taking training classes is the best solution, as they can learn by doing.
DECISION-MAKING
Barret believes teaching his sons how to make decisions on their own is very important, again because he can’t be with them 24/7 and because the ability to make decisions is a valuable skill for the boys to develop. He has talked to his sons about active shooter response in school in order to empower them to make decisions in the moment if necessary.
If we don’t empower our loved ones, we are setting them up for failure – and that’s not being a protector.