There is a tendency in firearms training to imagine that if we ever need the gun, we are going to have plenty of time and space to use it.
We see the threat. We recognize what is happening. We draw the pistol. We engage the threat. Nice and clean. Violence has a habit of refusing to cooperate with nice and clean.
Sometimes the person is already close enough to touch you before you realize you have a problem. Maybe you get shoved into a wall. Maybe somebody grabs your shirt. Maybe you are trying to protect your head while another person is driving into you. Maybe you are fighting to stay on your feet.
And somewhere in the middle of all of that is the pistol you decided to carry that morning. That changes the problem considerably.
This is where firearms training and combatives begin to run into each other, and I think it is a collision we need to spend more time thinking about. We call that overlap pistol combatives.
The concept itself is pretty simple. If you carry a firearm for personal protection, you should probably have some idea what happens when the problem begins before you have enough time or distance to simply draw the gun.
That seems obvious when you say it out loud, but we have traditionally trained these things in completely different worlds.
We go to the range and stand in front of targets. We practice drawing the pistol, getting good sights, pressing the trigger, reloading and fixing malfunctions.
Then we come to combatives class and work on punches, grabs, clinches, takedowns, getting off the ground and dealing with someone who is physically trying to hurt us.
Then we put the pistol back on our belt and apparently assume those two worlds will never meet.
I have never thought that made much sense.
If somebody is grabbing you, hitting you or trying to wrestle you to the ground, the firearm is already part of the fight whether you have drawn it or not. It is attached to you. That means sometimes the first firearms skill you need has absolutely nothing to do with shooting. Sometimes the first priority is making sure the other guy doesn't get your gun. That is something worth thinking about.
If someone is already chest-to-chest with you, blindly reaching for your pistol may make the situation worse. You may need to protect your head. You may need to regain your balance. You may need to control an arm, improve your position or create enough distance to safely access the weapon.
The pistol may eventually become part of the solution.
It does not necessarily have to be the first part.
That distinction is important because carrying a gun can create a pretty powerful mental shortcut.
If your primary defensive training revolves around the firearm, it becomes very easy to begin seeing the firearm as the answer to every serious confrontation.
But not every confrontation is a deadly-force problem.
Someone shoves you.
Someone grabs your shirt.
A drunk takes a swing at you.
Somebody gets angry in a parking lot and decides he wants to prove something.
Those may all be serious situations. None automatically justify shooting somebody.
If the only defensive skill you really trust is reaching for a pistol, you have built yourself a fairly narrow toolbox. One of the things I have become increasingly convinced of is that carrying a firearm actually makes empty-hand skills more important, not less. You need to be able to stay on your feet. You need to protect your head. You need to understand what happens when someone gets into a clinch with you. You need to be able to control hands. You need to understand how to create space. You need to know what it feels like when another human being is actually trying to move you somewhere you don't want to go. Most importantly, you need to experience some of that against resistance.
Resistance has an amazing ability to destroy really good theories. It is easy to stand on a firing line and believe that if somebody attacks you, you will simply draw your pistol.
Now have somebody grab both of your arms.
Try it while being pushed backward.
Try it while protecting your head.
Try it against a wall.
Try it when you are on the ground.
Things get considerably more interesting.
And that is exactly why we train.
I would much rather discover that something doesn't work while fighting over a plastic training gun in class than discover it at eleven o'clock at night beside my truck.
Of course, this kind of training has to be handled intelligently. When firearms are integrated into physical combatives training, we are not wrestling around with loaded guns. We use inert training weapons, tightly controlled training environments and clearly established safety procedures.
There is nothing tough about making training unnecessarily dangerous.
We are trying to solve problems, not create new ones.
Once people begin working these problems against another resisting human being, one lesson tends to show up pretty quickly.
Position matters.
A lot.
If somebody has good control over you, getting to your pistol can be incredibly difficult.
If both of your hands are occupied trying to protect your face, you may not have a hand available to draw.
If someone is controlling your waist from behind, the problem is different again.
If you are flat on your back with somebody sitting on top of you, the pistol that seemed perfectly accessible while you were standing on the range can suddenly feel like it is in another ZIP code.
That brings us right back to the fundamentals.
Protect yourself.
Stay conscious.
Stay on your feet if you can.
Control the immediate problem.
Improve your position.
Create an opportunity.
Then deal with whatever comes next.
Sometimes what comes next is accessing the pistol. Sometimes it isn't.
There is another part of this that I think gets overlooked. The moment somebody realizes you are carrying a firearm, the nature of the fight may change completely. Now there is a gun in the fight. And both of you know where it is. At that point, weapon retention stops being some cool technique you practiced at a seminar and becomes a fairly important life skill. The other person does not necessarily have to arrive armed to become an armed threat.
You brought the gun. That is one of the realities we accept when we choose to carry one. A pistol also does not create some magical bubble around the person holding it. If somebody is close enough to touch you, they may also be close enough to grab the weapon, interfere with it or redirect it.
Distance still matters.
Position still matters.
Movement still matters.
What your other hand is doing still matters.
The gun did not replace combatives. It simply became another piece of the problem.
That is really why I don't like separating firearms, empty-hand fighting, edged weapons and everything else into nice little boxes.
Real violence does not care how we organized the curriculum.
A situation might begin with a conversation. Then somebody shoves you. Now you are trying to avoid a punch. Suddenly you are in a clinch. You realize the other person is reaching toward his waistband. You create enough space to disengage and the entire situation changes again.
Or maybe you noticed the problem thirty seconds earlier, crossed the street and never had to do any of that.
Still my favorite solution.
The goal is not to become the fastest person at drawing a pistol while somebody is hanging off your neck.
The goal is to understand where the firearm fits within the larger personal-protection problem.
There is also a responsibility that comes with carrying one.
If I am armed, I have even less interest in stupid confrontations.
I don't need to win the argument.
I don't need the last word.
I don't need to teach some loudmouth in a parking lot a lesson.
I certainly don't need to prove how tough I am.
There is a deadly weapon attached to me.
That ought to encourage better judgment.
Walking away becomes more important, not less.
Avoidance becomes more important.
De-escalation becomes more important.
Understanding the law becomes more important.
The presence of the pistol does not give me additional authority. It gives me additional capability and a tremendous amount of additional responsibility.
That is the part of pistol combatives that is probably less exciting to train, but it may be the most important part.
Knowing how to access the gun is useful.
Knowing when not to access it may be even more useful.
At Sentinel Combatives, we are trying to build a system where all of these pieces work together.
Awareness gives us the opportunity to recognize trouble early.
Good judgment helps us decide what to do about it.
Movement gives us options.
Empty-hand skills help us survive when somebody gets close enough to put hands on us.
Weapons give us another level of capability when the problem becomes serious enough to justify them.
None of those things exists by itself.
They are all part of the same problem.
If you carry a pistol, you should absolutely become competent with it. Learn how to handle it safely. Learn how to shoot it well. Learn how to draw it efficiently. Understand the law and understand the enormous consequences that come with using it.
But don't stop there.
Spend some time figuring out what happens when the problem starts three feet closer than you wanted it to.
Because someday the gun may not be the first thing you need.
It may simply be the thing you need to protect long enough to solve everything else.
That is pistol combatives.
The gun is part of the system.
It is not the system.
Peace Through Chaos.