Handgun Defense: Psychological Stops vs. Physiological Ones

Most defensive pistol stops are psychological stops. All right? Your name, sir? Bill. Bill, Bill, can you stand up?

All right, so let's say Bill is a bad guy. Bill reaches into his knife pocket and pulls out a finger knife. All right, so he's got his finger knife. He says I'm gonna get you. And he starts coming to get me but he starts coming to get me very slowly, 'cause I'm talking'.

So start coming to get me, but go slow. As he's coming to get me, I get very scared, I go ah! I reach down, I grab my gun. It's not a real gun. I pointed at him and I panic and I shoot the ground.

But Bill didn't know I had a gun, right? Bill says, oh, well he has a gun? He's not a victim. He drops his finger knife, turns around and runs away. That's a stop, right?

That's gonna get written down as a successful defense. Don't sit down yet, I'm not done with you. That's gonna to get written down as a successful defensive use of a firearm. Right? But that was a psychological stop.

I changed his mind. Let's say he pulls out his knife, comes up towards me. You can come a little faster this time. I'm kind of ready for you. And I draw my gun out and I drive out right into his chest.

Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Keep coming, keep coming. He doesn't care. And he stabs me. Let's pretend he was taller and he stabbed me right in the throat.

All right. There you go, all right. So, I thought you would come up the stairs, but that's okay. So, all right, what happened there? I hit my target.

I got into the right position. I put five, six, seven rounds in his chest but it didn't have the physiological effect I needed. Right? And he stabbed me and now I bleed out. Maybe he bleeds out later, but I'm not interested in later.

I want to stop the threat. Right? All right. You can go pick out a book out there later for being my demo guy. Thank you.

All right. So what's the lesson from that. Sometimes we're gonna to hit our target. We're not gonna get the desired result. Sometimes we're going to not hit our target.

We're gonna get the desired result. In the real fight, luck counts. Right? But you can't count on luck, right? We're gonna have to count on using the gun as efficiently as we can, because the other example of the psychological stop is that they'll get shot twice in the chest and runs away and bleeds out an hour later.

And what you have to remember is that that's how we usually find people with pistol stops. And that's why we say most people are stopped by pistols psychologically. They may eventually be clearly unable to hurt us but usually there's a psychological change. This is why sometimes you hear people say, well you could carry a 22 and it's not going to matter because most of the bad guys are gonna run away. And in fact, if you watched the dash camera videos and if you watch the surveillance camera videos you will see that that does happen quite a bit.

But remember when you're seeing these statistics about it only took two shots or 45 StA has more one shot stops than a 38 special does or any of this kind of stuff. Remember that if I just shot Bill with one round and he ran away and we found them two hours later, all that energy he used to run away, he could have used to continue running at me and stabbing me if he didn't change his mind. So be careful about the statistics, right? That context piece, because a lot of people will look at these statistics on the shot spot, shot number fired or what caliber people use and that kind of stuff. I don't think that's as valuable a piece when we know that we can't predict the psychology.

And so many of those statistics are twisted by the psychology.