There’s a prevailing mindset in the defensive instructor community to bring what they’ve learned in military and police settings into the civilian self-defense sphere. After participating in many of these classes and observing still more, I’ve found that the wide bulk of these skills are not only unnecessary, but also impractical—and occasionally dangerous—for people who don’t have the world’s largest military complex … or an entire department to back them up.
What follows here is not necessarily a critical assessment of self-defense instructors, but rather an evaluation on a topic in which technology is rapidly outpacing the base skills needed to succeed in a life-and-death situation.
A MASTER’S DEGREE IN ARMED DEFENSE
At a recent media event, I was talking with industry colleagues about AR rifles. I brought a couple: one a Brownells Retro M16A1, and the other a fully modernized gun with all the goodies.
One of my friends made the statement, “You need a master’s degree to know how all this stuff works these days. How many batteries does this thing take?”
