Good Post...

...over at Tam's View From the Porch:

There's always that one person who gets a toter's permit and seems a little, well, Barney Fife about it. Now they're a sheepdog! They run scenarios past you: 

"What if you're in a convenience store, and you see a guy in a hoodie with his hands in his pockets, looking around at the security cameras?" 

"I leave."

Definitely read the whole thing! Reminds me of my later years in a dojo when newbies would start with the "what if you're sitting in a bar?" meme, and they were always so disappointed when I said I'd get up and leave. Then I'd patiently (or sometimes not so patiently) explain that it was not a question of who could kick who's ass, but rather the indisputable fact that any violent encounter was a pure chaos event...once it starts, none of the participants have any idea where it's going. There are simply too many factors acting on the system for us to predict its direction with any success, and the whole process if full of anomalies, black swans and just plain weird s&^t.

Once we're in a chaos event, our survival depends on our mental flexibility, our ability to respond, to shift directions, morph tactics, to read the wind, whatever. Go back and reread Bruce Lee's Tao of Jeet Kune Do and The Art of War (this is my favorite translation). One of the greatest unseen dangers we as trained civilians face is the belief that we can drive the event. We think that if we are inside the aggressor(s)' decision-making loop, we are in control of the situation. And we may be, for a second or so. We need to fix firmly in our minds the sense that the clock is always running! The longer a chaos event runs, the more factors acting on the system, the greater the uncertainty. Our mindset as trained, armed civilians must always be on ending the threat. And to that I would add as quickly as possible. Removing ourselves from the scene ends the threat as certainly as a bullet. We're always looking for that option, but if we have to use a bullet we do so with the absolute certainty that we are in the right, that the bullet was the last option our aggressors left us.

As I've said before, I don't think the Florida case is the "poster child" for gun control that our enemies think it is...I think the local police are perfectly capable of sorting out what happened without the help of Eric Holder's Department of (Racial) Justice, POTUS, Al Sharpton, the Nation of Islam, the Brady Bunch, Snowplow Bloomberg, a million misguided people in hoodies, the Huffington Post and the rest of the freak show that's currently spinning up. To be sure, what happened in Florida was a tragedy, but before we throw the rope over the tree limb we ought to know what really happened.