A WINNING ATTITUDE

Software Beats Hardware

• I have stated elsewhere that mental awareness and mental preparedness are the two most important priorities to survive and to prevail against threats to one's well being. These are much more important than either your or your assailant's choice of equipment!
• While an instructor may be able to provide some exercises, mental awareness is very much an individual responsibility. Most instructors offer some variation of the Jeff Cooper's Color Code as a guide:
  1. Condition White: This is lack of awareness, such as not noticing that the person outside the window of the establishment you are patronizing is pulling a ski mask over his face in the middle of summer. Condition white is not a desirable condition!
  2. Condition Yellow: This is relaxed awareness, such as you would demonstrate while driving defensively. You should be aware of who and what is in your environment and of any behavior that seems out of place, like two men entering a business together, then heading to opposite sides of the establishment. You should be able to maintain this awareness without raising your blood pressure or your heart rate.
  3. Condition Orange: This is awareness of a potential threat, like someone who appears to be on a collision course with you on a sidewalk and who matches your attempts to step to the side; it may be a mugger or it may be someone trying to ask you for directions. Your antennae should definitely be up and you should be planning your options, including location of cover.
  4. Condition Red: This is identification of a specific threat, such as when the guy on the sidewalk starts to reach under his jacket and demands all your money. At this point, your mind must go on the offensive or you may lose control of functions of your own mind and body, as well as of the situation.
• I have presented it above as I was originally taught it, as a color code of awareness. Only fairly late in my career did I learn that Cooper actually presented it as a color code of preparedness. In the original version, the progression is from being unprepared to employ deadly force to being prepared to unleash it if an assailant proceeds with his attack. In Cooper's own words:
  • In White you are unprepared and unready to take lethal action. If you are attacked in White you will probably die unless your adversary is totally inept.
  • In Yellow you bring yourself to the understanding that your life may be in danger and that you may have to do something about it.
  • In Orange you have determined upon a specific adversary and are prepared to take action which may result in his death, but you are not in a lethal mode.
  • In Red you are in a lethal mode and will shoot if circumstances warrant.
• Going on the offensive mentally is essential to prevail against a violent attack but it can put you on thin ice legally. This is because your state of mind can be viewed either as a defense to a criminal charge or a necessary element to prove that you committed a crime.

Is your Assailant Human?

• My late friend and mentor, Jim Andrews, who had to kill men while wearing the uniforms of his country and those of a few law enforcement agencies, repeatedly told me that it had been a totally different experience killing men in a military environment and in a civilian environment. When pressed for an explanation, he responded that in the military the soldier has his enemy systematically dehumanized for him in the training process, whereas in civilian life, "a human being suddenly turns into a monster before your very eyes."
• Aside from hunters, anglers and some workers in the meat industry, killing is not a normal activity for most people. In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill In War and Society, Dave Grossman makes the arguable claim that there is an innate reluctance in nature to kill members of one's own species. The book goes on to discuss how we have learned to train our soldiers to do it for military purposes and inadvertently trained some of our youth to do so without the controls which the military imposes on its troops.
• As Jim Andrews pointed out, dehumanizing your opponent in advance facilitates your use of deadly force when you encounter him. I know of several instructors, each of whom refers to violent criminals with his own pet, dehumanizing term. I presume that they do this to facilitate their students' deadly force responses, when appropriate.
• Such dehumanization will not sit well with the legal system. The law will regard your assailant as human. If you are forced to kill him, the act will be investigated as a homicide, the killing of another human being. Any suggestion that you viewed it as anything less than that will only increase your chances of prosecution and conviction.
• If the assailant that you are forced to kill is not of the same ethnic background as you and opposing counsel can paint a picture of the assailant being killed because of his ethnicity, it may be very hard to convince the jury that whatever word you may have used to categorize your assailant was used solely in response to the assailant's threatening behavior.
• In addition, if you can be accused of having acted on the basis of racial bias, you may incur additional liability under "hate crime enhancements," as well as a trip to Federal court on civil rights charges.

Can Anger Conquer Fear?

• As this is written, there is a significant debate in the law enforcement training community about the degradation of certain skills associated with the traditional operation of a firearm in the face of a life-threatening situation. Not only is there disagreement about the extent of degradation of skill and physical ability when one experiences a "body alarm reaction," there is also disagreement about whether this reaction is inevitable and irreversible in a compressed time frame.
• It is my belief that an offensive, rather than a defensive mental attitude, once a threat has been identified, can curtail the alarm reaction. While there might still be some loss of what are called "fine motor skills," I don't believe that it would be to the same extent as if the quality of the reaction was fear.
• In the simplest of terms, this might be expressed as, "don't get scared, get angry." Unfortunately, this is a simplistic view of a complex problem and it can cause you a great deal of legal trouble.
• If the presence of anger becomes evident, even at the level of police investigation or prosecutorial review, it may be sufficient to result in a criminal charge being filed and argued before a jury. The law tends to regard anger as the antithesis of reason, so it becomes difficult to argue that you made a reasonable decision to fire if you were angry. "Heat of passion" is a phrase commonly used in the definition of voluntary manslaughter.

If Not Anger, What?

• The decision to use deadly force, upon recognition that someone is trying to kill or seriously injure you, must be made in advance. Once the threat occurs you will not have the time to make that moral decision; your mind needs to be free for the best possible assessment of the threat and the choice of tactics.
• I would suggest that you consider that if you are forced to defend yourself with deadly force, it will be the assailant who makes the ultimate decision for you, for you cannot be expected to forfeit your life or physical well being.
• When someone threatens you or those you have a right to defend with deadly force he has, knowingly or unknowingly, decided to gamble his own life. If you have the confidence in your training and ability, you can view his bet as already lost. Depending on the time frame, he may or may not have the chance to withdraw that losing bet.
• This attitude does not mean that you are honor bound to kill or even to shoot anyone who threatens you with deadly force. In fact, the intent to kill is usually an element of the charge of murder. It simply means that if you can combine the confidence in your ability to respond as required by the situation with good tactical sense, you can keep control with those parts of your brain which set you apart from the simpler animals.
• Because "offensive" and "defensive" may be associated respectively with "assailant" and "victim", you may do better to select other words, like "proactive" and "reactive," to describe the mental attitude you must assume when you realize that your life is being threatened.
• You may, in fact, find that in becoming mentally proactive you are able to remain totally rational and unaware of any emotion until the immediate problem is resolved.
• By retaining the ability for rational analysis of the situation you should be able to counter arguments that you acted from bias or anger, so long as you have not expressed any bias or anger.
• By controlling your emotional reaction you are much less likely to suffer degradation of the skills necessary to prevail in the encounter.
• When I speak of shifting your mind out of a strictly defensive or reactive mode I am speaking of those brief moments when you are confronted with an immediate, otherwise unavoidable threat of death or grave bodily harm. I am not advocating that you go about your daily activities in a stalking mode.
• In order for the law to accept your shooting of another human being, he must have placed you in reasonable fear for your life or that of another innocent person. The emphasis is on "reasonable." If the fear becomes an overwhelming emotion it can interfere with both your reasoning and your function. I have tried to help you explore some possible answers to this dilemma.

The Usual Disclaimer ...

While I'm not fond of the repeated need to consult attorneys, it is part of our current reality. It would be very useful to discuss these issues with an attorney so that you can fine-tune the verbal aspects of your own attitude. Andrew Branca's book, The Law of Self-Defense: The Indispensable Guide for the Armed Citizen, may help you prepare for such a consultation.

Also available DEFENSIVE USE OF FIREARMS: Revised and Updated Click image for further details and download

Questions? Comments? Stephen P. Wenger P.O. Box 4227 Show Low AZ 85902-4227 U.S.A.