OSD 324: The gun library of Alexandria
On Active Self Protection and similar knowledge bases.
Years before Slate Star Codex, Scott Alexander had a LiveJournal. There’s a post from 2011 about charity work he did as a physician in Haiti. One of his big takeaways is deep failures in the country’s schools (bold emphasis added):
It has proven hard for me to appreciate exactly how confused the Haitians are about some things. Gail, our program director, explained that she has a lot of trouble with her Haitian office staff because they don’t understand the concept of sorting numerically. Not just “they don't want to do it” or “it never occurred to them”, but after months and months of attempted explanation they don’t understand that sorting alphabetically or numerically is even a thing. Not only has this messed up her office work, but it makes dealing with the Haitian bureaucracy — harrowing at the best of times — positively unbearable.
Gail told the story of the time she asked a city office for some paperwork regarding Doctors Without Borders. The local official took out a drawer full of paperwork and looked through every single paper individually to see if it was the one she wanted. Then he started looking for the next drawer. After five hours, the official finally said that the paper wasn’t in his office.
Part of it is Haitian education. Even if you’re one of the lucky ones who can afford to go to school, your first problem is that the schools can’t afford paper: one of our hosts told stories of Haitian high schoolers who were at the level of Western 5th graders because they kept forgetting everything: they couldn’t afford the paper to take notes on!
The other problem is more systemic: schools teach everything by uninspired lecture even when it’s completely inappropriate: a worker at our camp took a “computer skills” course where no one ever touched a computer: it was just a teacher standing in front of the class saying “And then you would click the word FILE on top of the screen, and then you’d scroll down to where it said SAVE, and then you’d type in a name for the file…” and so obviously people come out of the class with no clue how to use an actual computer.
What does the bold text remind you of? Some nominees:
Martial arts before the UFC
Business advice from people who have never run a business
Self-defense advice before the internet
Some types of knowledge are mostly useless until you’ve applied them. Once your ideas meet reality, you quickly figure out which half of your knowledge was actually useful, and which half you need to forget.
Let’s dive more into that third bullet. It might seem like fake self-defense advice is just a troublesome corner of the internet, waiting to trap people who wander away from good advice that has actually been tested in real life. It seems that way because it’s true. But it’s not how things used to be. Before the internet, everything was bullshido. There was no tarpit waiting to trap you, because you were already in the tarpit. Born in it. Molded by it. The tarpit encompassed the entire known universe of self-defense advice. Good advice was out there too, of course, but it was mixed in with the fake stuff, and there was no way to tell the two apart. The same famous guru that could teach you pistol accuracy or a legit takedown would in the next breath tell you about pressure point attacks.
The internet changed that. Self-defense advice changed from “If someone approaches you on a dark sidewalk, you would turn to face them, then they would place their hand on your shoulder, then you would judo chop the pressure point on their neck, then they would collapse…” to “Well let’s look at real life and see what actually works.”
Active Self Protection has led the way on that. Not because they have secret knowledge or the most gunfight experience. John Correia and team have just done an incredible amount of grunt work to compile over 4000 videos of real-life self-defense encounters, and to analyze each of those videos for what went right and what went wrong. Building a database like that is a unique contribution. It moves us from a world where everyone’s making their own discoveries and noting them privately, to a world with a library where anybody can learn from everybody else’s discoveries. That’s a step change in how quickly we can figure out what actually works.
Here are three lessons ASP has drawn from their videos:
John has never seen a private citizen use a reload in a gunfight.
Off-body carry is a bad idea.
Empty chamber carry is a bad idea.
#1 is still controversial. #2 is in the middle. And #3 used to be controversial 15+ years ago, but by now it’s settled.
The point isn’t which lessons you agree with or not. The point is just that grounding all lessons in real-life experience informs the discussion in a way that would be impossible if everyone still had to speculate about what would, theoretically, work best.
Our Discord subscriber @Hoffnung pointed out some more areas where content creators and the hivemind generally have been driving revolutions:
GWOT combat footage
Peer conflict combat footage due to cameras being absolutely ubiquitous in the Ukraine war.
Navigating the rules of gun carry and (as Massad Ayoob, the godfather of this type of content, would say) judicious use of deadly force.
Navigating gun laws themselves. Note how quickly Freedom Week spread, or pistol braces, or the recent flurry of interest in forced reset triggers.
How can you apply all of this to your own training? We’ll leave you with an excerpt from a previous piece on that question:
On one end of the spectrum you have, say, Brazilian jiu jitsu, which you can practice full-bore, with an opponent who’s resisting as hard as humanly possible. On the other end you have, say, aikido, which is practiced in theoretical terms with a compliant opponent. And gunfighting is somewhere in between.
It’s not quite that techniques you don’t practice full-bore can’t work. They might. It’s that you can’t know if they work. The definition of expertise is that your efforts predictably lead to positive outcomes. The better your expertise, the more predictable and the more positive the outcome. That’s why experts get paid well. So if you can’t accurately predict that your techniques will work, you’re not a real expert.
Put all that together and the conclusion is pretty broad: the only valid experts are those whose techniques can be practiced for real.
So where does that leave all the gun instructors on Instagram?
In BJJ you can roll with a buddy and tap if he gets you in a good choke. But you can’t go to the range and tap when he Mozambiques you.
There are a few workarounds for this.
The first is to break “gunfight” down into smaller pieces. True, you can’t fully simulate a gunfight. But a gunfight will include a holster draw or a ready-up. It’ll include fast target acquisition. It’ll include fast, precise shots. All of those subcomponents are things that you can practice at 100% speed.
The second is to include an “opponent”. The test for a technique is if it can overcome a fully resistant opponent. That could be a human, but it could also just be the surprises inherent to a real-life emergency. Get a couple airsoft guns and try out scenarios (a mugging, a home invasion, an old west standoff, whatever) with a friend. You’ll be surprised how quickly your fundamentals — day-one basics like grip and sight alignment — go out the window when you’re not the only person with a vote. And over time, as you practice, you’ll be able to navigate surprises without losing your fundamentals.
The third is to let others’ real-world experiences be your practice. Keep an eye out for defensive gun uses in the news, whether they go well or poorly. They all have lessons to teach.
This week’s links
Kostas Moros thread on “the first-ever Supreme Court brief filed by the United States in full support of petitioners challenging a gun law as unconstitutional under the Second Amendment”
Challenging Hawaii’s Bruen response law that banned carry in most public businesses unless those businesses post signage that carry is allowed. New York and California have similar laws.
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Thank you. I've been kind of debating signing up for a shivworks class. I think this article seals the deal for me. Much appreciated.
I appreciate how this article underscores the value of learning from others' experience with firearms in real world situations. One must practice hands-on, lest he end up like the hatian computer students. However, precisely because there is no 1:1 analog to safely practice realistic firearm self-defense, we must recognize the value of the lessons others have learned in blood. Your point is very well articulated, as usual.