When it comes to personal protection against an active threat, having a defensive action plan is not a luxury but a necessity. The advantage of such a plan is you’re not waiting around to be caught in the middle of an attack and forced to come up with a solution on the fly. It is, instead, to widen your scope of awareness prior to the attack.
Your intent should be to predict or prevent your involvement in any violent physical threat. However, if you have no choice but to engage a threat, you must consider your response options based on realistic expectations.
Most people, without ever having attended any formal training, think “Well, I’ll just shoot him.” The fact is that should you even consider going to guns to “shoot yourself out of a bad situation” in self-defense, it means that you’ve been pushed back on your heels reacting to that situation. Being reactive means you’re already behind the action-reaction power curve and are forced to take immediate physical action to regain the initiative.
Who takes control wins. The bad guy will always hold the initiative at the onset of an active threat. He is the one who decides, when, where, and how the attack will go down. He/ they also determine what weapons will be used, and who will be their victims. Because the bad guy(s) set these battle parameters, they have complete control of the action-reaction power curve. When challenged with an active threat, your objective is to take back that curve. To do this, you need to accomplish only one task – make him/ them react to you. There is a very simple three-step formula you can follow to take the curve:
- Bad guy has control
- Good guy makes bad guy react
- Good guy takes control
Although a simple objective, it is not an easy one. You’re starting at a tactical disadvantage. Engaging a threat reactively means that you didn’t see it, hear it, or smell it coming and have been taken off guard. You’re starting at the bottom of the hill and you must scramble to the top to take control as quickly as possible. What are some vetted climbing tools you can use to take the curve?
First and foremost is to acquire a clear picture of exactly what’s going on around you. Snap your attention from wherever it was (perhaps buried deeply into your text messages?), to your immediate environment. Instantly scan your surroundings using visual and audio sensory input for threat indicators such as gunfire, explosions, screeching tires, etc., and determine the source of the threat. Once you’ve identified the source, your very best tactical option is to create space as distance from any threat is always your friend.
One of the most effective methods to help you take the curve is to make yourself a more difficult target. If you can’t change your distance you can certainly change your physical position relative to your threat such as movement behind cover or to higher ground. To change your distance or position and to make yourself a more difficult target, stay mobile. A moving target is always more difficult to hit than a stationary target.
Becoming a more difficult target by changing your physical position and staying mobile forces your opponent(s) to react. Your actions have pressed them to ask themselves two critical questions: “Is this difficult target really worth it?” and “Are there softer targets?” it may very well be the case that you may not be worth their continued efforts. If so, they will hunt for lower hanging fruit (softer targets).
Bottom line is that by your decisive actions, you’ve changed the game. You’ve caused them to react. The split second you cause them to react is that exact moment in time you take control of the action-reaction power curve.