Quick Draw or Slow
The Situation Affects the Upshot
By Alan Korwin. Dec 24, 2021
JPFO's Bill of Rights Sentinel editor, Alan Korwin, a good friend of Massad Ayoob, has a different point of view about staying armed in your own home. ("Why Wearing a Gun in the Home Is a Good Idea" - see article from 12/20/21)
While Mass' points are well taken, Korwin believes they are unjustified compared to the degree of threat, the frequency of events and what really happens in most armed confrontations. "I have interviewed many people who have had to bring a gun to bear, and it is almost never the instantaneous-draw-to-survive the industry and some experts promote. You hear some suspicious warning sounds or see things, the hair on your neck stands up, your alert level rises, and you prepare." At least that's what his experience showed, so he wrote this piece for USCCA's Concealed Carry Magazine.
Muzzle confrontations fall into two basic scenarios. A significant portion of this magazine and the self-defense industry is built around the first, the quick-draw model. The holsters, sidearms, training programs and related thinking have a built-in skew toward bringing a gun to bear quickly in an emergency.
This is good. It is a valuable skill to learn and cultivate. When it is needed nothing else will substitute. Tons of practice and understanding must precede the ability to perform that task with confidence, and well. Some people are better at it than others, the same as anything requiring a degree of athleticism. Some folks are more concerned about it than others too. The absurd politically correct contingent making trouble in America don’t prefer to hear this, but interest in the quick-response model skews male. It just does. Affirmative free-market efforts to increase diversity here are underway.
On the other side of draw-or-die is the slow draw. Bringing a gun to bear because you anticipate trouble and have decided to adopt an armed posture is a different ballgame. It very well may not involve a holster at all. Arming up at home because of suspicious activity nearby, unexplained noise, environmental factors like power outages, flooding, storm conditions, hovering helicopters or police responders, these are conditions tolerating more thought and reflection. A different mindset and training are appropriate, and firearm instructors have seen increases in both women and men interested in having the presence of a firearm for safety at home, different from immediate response on the street.
The breathing space you may have when you’re not confronted with a quick-draw situation can dramatically change what you face in the police and legal aftermath of a firearm-related incident. Your options are limited just by the urgent nature of a sudden incident thrust upon you, at a place where you have a legal right to be while you’re not doing anything wrong—conditions necessary for a valid self-defense claim.
In an arm-and-prepare, although it may well seem like the coward’s way out, the smart move is to seek the way out, if it’s safe, or the defensible hideout, the avoidance route, an “anything but shoot someone” resolution to the scenario. You never want to have to shoot your way out of your home or a convenience store if you can avoid it. Or do you?
If being a hero or spending your life getting free drinks for killing some dirt bag who really needs killing is your thing, and you’ll take the risk of getting it wrong, offing the wrong guy, survivor’s guilt, getting the wrong lawyer, prosecutor, judge or jury—and spending the rest of your life in jail, then you need different advice.
In a slow draw, your options may be a bigger factor at trial. You heard the noise, you saw it coming, the gun was in your possession minutes or hours early. You could have taken steps and didn’t. Remember, it’s a continuum of force. Even rudimentary training teaches you to gravitate from low levels of involvement and energy to higher ones. The firearm is the last step.
If you perceived a possible need to go to your gun, whether you’re wearing it or have it in a drawer or a safe, you knew you needed to act so you wouldn’t have to dodge a bullet, not just fire one. The prosecutor will ask you about that. And if you’re smart (you read this rag so you must be), you will have taken steps, armed for safety, so you didn’t have to fire. And like most people who read these words, you will have held fire, and survived quite nicely, thank you.
But you lose all that in a quick draw. For all the stories told about people who had to actually rely on the training, especially the gear, and so many grains of powder and lead, nothing goes as planned. Folks who have had the misfortune to get caught in a gunfight—and that’s what it is, caught—learn afterwards what went down, how it went down, and get to consider, for the rest of their lives if they survive, how that compares to what they imagined it would be like. From what I hear, you really don’t want that experience.
Where that hits the fan in the real world is when 12 people you never met think about what you did. Or rather, what they think you did, because they really don’t know. Not only don’t they know you, they only have stories about what you did to go by—the stories your lawyer tells, the ones the authorities tell, the ones the prosecutors hell bent on locking you up tell, plus all the witnesses’ stories and those may be all over the block. You may not even know what to think, and that, guaranteed, will change over time.
Chances are you’ll have an easier time of it if you don’t have to fast draw, because you’ll have time on your side. Chances are better for disengagement or avoidance. Your story may be better afterwards, still exciting, and no lawyer bills. If you’re at home that slow draw may provide an edge, or maybe not, depending on the actors. Did you know the person shot?
By now maybe you’ve come to the obvious conclusion. It’s always better to avoid a gunfight than to win one.
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Alan Korwin, whose 14 books include 10 about gun law, can be reached at GunLaws.com.