"awareness" vs. "AWARENESS!"

[Long tom coffin]

-- I can see your way of thinking, but it does differ a little bit from the way I've been taught to think about it. 'Gunhandling' is everything but sight alignment, trigger press, and recoil management. It's reloading, clearing malfunctions (unless you own an H&K, I guess), managing the safety / decocker / finger on the move, the presentation, all that stuff. It's a triad, because as a group, that skillset is as important as marksmanship, and each of those two physical skill groups is (roughly) as important as mindset. They're the three knobs we're supposed to tweak in training and practice, and they're supposed to get roughly equal attention.

Ok, that methodology makes sense. I suppose it's just the way I think, but I still can't help but equate the above mechanics with marksmanship still. I suppose that's just a function of how I've been trained/my mind works. I think it's a semantics, argument really; after all, what does it matter how you call it if you are practicing all the "knobs" like you are supposed to?

[Tamara]

'Gunhandling' is everything but sight alignment, trigger press, and recoil management. It's reloading, clearing malfunctions (unless you own an H&K, I guess), managing the safety / decocker / finger on the move, the presentation, all that stuff.

This.

Even more than shooting effectively and making pretty little groups, I go to gun school to learn how to handle a firearm, outside of the usual static range environment, in a competent fashion so that I do not set myself on fire with it.

[41magfan]

Cooper's Principles of Personal Defense were, in order: Alertness, Decisiveness, Aggressiveness, Speed, Coolness, Ruthlessness, and Surprise. Each builds into the next, and circles back pretty neatly (we surprise the attacker, taking an approach to which he was not alert). It's a pretty skimpy pamphlet, and Amazon wants TEN BUCKS to put it on your kindle, but it's still the best single piece of writing about our topic that I'm aware of.

I have to agree.

I don't want to turn this into a Cooper thing but let me say this; I'm old enough - fortunately or unfortunately - to have been around long enough to the see the progression of "all things guns" to recognize the difference between innovation and renovation. There's a lot of re-branding going on these days that gets passed off as something new. Cooper's Principle's and his comments about most other things have to be taken in context and in aggregate. Cooper believed that one of the most overlooked aspects of self-defense is willingness to act. It's one thing to know how and when .... you gotta have the will to do it at the appropriate time without reservation.

Awareness - as it relates to self-defense - is a dynamic continuum (based on a minute-by-minute risk assessment) that most people in my experience can't really put into practice. They intellectually grasp the concept of Cooper's Color Code, but don't really know how to put it into practical ongoing use.

I've been practicing this little exercise for three decades with my comrades as a way of testing our awareness factor and keeping it sharp. I live in a relatively small community of just under 100k so the chance of running into a "player" varies. If someone gets within your personal space (you decide what that is....) without you seeing them first, you get ragged pretty hard at every gathering. If you let someone get close enough to touch you without being seen first - you gotta give up some coin and you get ragged hard and repeatedly .... sometimes for years. This little game we play points out the obvious ... if you don't see the "known" coming, you sure as heck ain't going to see the "unknown" threat coming in time to respond effectively.

Now having said that, how many of you have been out in public and had a friend or acquaintance actually touch you before you detected they were in your space? If you say that's never happened, then your life experiences must be pretty limited. But either way - you weren't practicing enough awareness to keep yourself very safe by any definition.

Just my 2 cents .... not the last word by any stretch, unless I can come up with a cool acronym for it. :^)