Stuck in the Second O

Stuck in the Second O

My brother’s VW Beetle wouldn’t start.

He and his friends had moved out of the house they’d been renting in Tucson, but the Bug was still there. He asked if I would tow it to his new place across town. My friend Ray and I went over there with a tow strap. Ray’s girlfriend Dorothy—we called her “Dot”—came along for the ride.

Back then, in 1984, there was no lawful concealed carry in the state of Arizona, but open carry was legal, and not entirely uncommon. I was heading to my job at a pistol range after we towed the car, so I was wearing my work rig, a Sam Browne belt with a Bianchi 5BHL holster.

Smith Model 19 in a 5BHL. This one is for 6″ barrels; mine was for 4″ and black instead of tan.

I didn’t know anyone who still lived around there. If a nosy neighbor (not always a bad thing to have) reported to police that strangers were taking the Volkswagen next door, the last name on the VW’s registration matching the last name on my license should corroborate my story to any officers who pulled us over.

If, on the other hand, the caller added “and one of the car thieves has a gun,” I figured that might make for a longer time face-down on the pavement than we wanted to spend. So before we got out, I took my Smith & Wesson 586 from its holster and put it in the glove box. I didn’t want any trouble.

Wish I still had that S&W 586

We poked around the Beatle, but we didn’t find a key in the ignition, under a seat, on a tire, under a floor mat, or by the gas cap. Without a key, we couldn’t unlock the steering wheel. We had no cellphones in those days to call my brother with.

We were about to get back in my car, muttering something about failure to plan being planning to fail, when a pickup truck pulled up in front of my ’72 Pontiac. Three men stepped out. They looked to be in their mid- to late-30s. Despite their “advanced” age they were fit, hard-looking hombres. They were also what we called tomando, perhaps even borracho. They’d obviously been drinking.

One of them said something to me in Spanish.

Tucson began as a Spanish presidio in 1775. Our soil was part of Mexico till the Gadsen purchase.

Tucson on an unusually cloudy day, from near the top of Sentinel Peak, AKA “A Mountain.” Spanish soldados used to keep watch from atop Sentinel Peak. The Presidio de Tucson was near the taller buildings on the right side of this photo.

Latin Americans are a huge part of our culture, and most gringo Tucsonans like me speak at least a little “Spanglish.” I had taken Spanish in junior high and high school, but I didn’t catch what he said. “Despacito, por favor, señor,” I requested apologetically, “porque mi español no es muy bien.

In English, he replied “You understood perfectly well last Saturday.” This put me into a state of confusion psychologists call cognitive dissonance. It’s the uncomfortable disorientation you feel when the input you are receiving or the facts you are confronted with don’t align with a previously held world view.1 I could not recall ever having met that man before in my entire life.

Then he grabbed me by the collar and started smacking me around. That confused me even more.

 

OODA / PADE

Most of you reading this have heard of OODA, the Observe – Orient – Decide – Act cycle. The Navy calls it PADE, Perceive – Analyze – Decide – Execute.

It’s not a checklist. OODA is an unavoidable, subconscious process. I’m breaking it down here, but I didn’t consciously think of these steps while it was happening.

I Observed that a stranger was striking my face.

Orient, in the OODA context, means analyzing your observations till you draw a conclusion, hopefully a correct conclusion, about what they mean. What exactly is going on here?

I could easily Orient to having my face beaten. I had boxed in school. Having little stubby tyrannosaurus arms forced me to “take my licks getting in.” I’d been punched many, many times before. Several of my opponents were quite good at it . . . so I already knew what that was like.

If we’d been wearing gloves in a boxing ring, it would’ve been easy for me to completely Orient to the situation, so I could Decide what to do next. I had also taken Judo classes, so I knew a little about how to get away from someone holding me by the collar, and I had some idea how to fight without gloves. But I couldn’t get to the D of OODA, because my brain was still churning around in that second O.

Saturday? What were we doing Saturday? I thought. Didn’t we have a party at our place? Is this old guy a friend of Wendy’s?  When I was in my early 20s, a guy in his 30s seemed old to me (Wendy was my girlfriend).

Wendy, who didn’t know him either

Dorothy was getting into the front passenger seat when the man attacked me. She may have been nearly as startled as I was by his sudden, inexplicable, unprovoked aggression. But Ray, who later flew strike missions in F-15Es over Iraq, was already through his own OODA cycle. He’d Decided what to do. From where Ray was, he needed Dot’s help to place his Decision into Action.

“Dorothy, give me the gun.” The seriousness of his tone was underscored by his use of her full first name. Dot ripped open the glove box and handed Ray the .357.2

Ray stepped around toward our side of the car in what Jeff Cooper called the Guard position, with the muzzle of the revolver pointed down at about 45 degrees.3

Modern Technique Guard as taught at Gunsite in the 1990s

He didn’t point it directly at anyone. I don’t remember Ray saying anything. The other two “old” guys, who had been sniggering at my misfortune, saw Ray holding the 4” barreled L-frame Smith and pulled their friend off of me. It was over seconds after it began. They scrambled out of there. We got back into my Pontiac and split fast too.

 

CALL FIRST

One (of several) things I would have done differently today is, I would have immediately called the police to report it. The first person to dial 911 usually gets listed in the “Victim / Complainant / Reporting Party” data field. If one of them had called the cops, saying we had pulled a gun on them for no reason, I might have needed a lawyer and bail money, fast—only one of many good reasons to have Concealed Carry insurance.

But as with many armed encounters, there was never a report or paper trail or official statistic to be counted. Such incidents were probably even more underreported back in ‘84, before the widespread use of security cameras, smartphones, and social media.4

Later, my brother told me he had no idea who those guys were, or what their beef with me was. In retrospect, it was not a very newsworthy incident. But it made a lasting impression on my young mind. I took away a few observations about confrontation that have stuck with me through the four decades that followed.

 

LESSON 1: ANY TIME, ANYWHERE

The first was the realization that:

You can be attacked any time, anywhere, by anybody, for reasons that make perfect sense to your assailant.

It is not required to make any sense at all to you. Time you waste trying to figure out Why is this happening? or Who is this guy? or Why me? is time you are not mounting an effective defense. Assaults can happen suddenly, with little or no warning. The outcome may be decided in a matter of seconds. Your analysis and responses need to be fast as well.

 

LESSON 2: ACCESSIBILITY

The second lesson I learned was about the need to have your chosen defensive tools ON YOUR PERSON. Years later, at Gunsite, Richard Ryan told us that in order for any tool to be effective for personal protection, three conditions must exist:

  1. You must know how to use it,
  2. You must be willing to use it, and
  3. You must have access to it in your moment of need.5

We call that last condition the “Mars” rule:

If it’s not within arms’ reach when you really need it, it might as well be on Mars.6

 

LESSON 3: DETERRENCE

The third thing I learned was about the deterrent power of firearms. When I had no gun on me, I found myself in trouble. Not big trouble, really, but it had the potential to become big trouble.

When the gun appeared, that trouble went away. It’s debatable whether his level of unlawful force (simple assault) legally warranted even threatened deadly force (the defensive display of a firearm) in response, but 40 years after the fact, “might have” or “could have” or “should have” is no longer very relevant.

All I know is, I’m still here today to tell the tale. No blood on the pavement. No arrest. No endless litigation. The mere appearance of the firearm, in the hands of someone who looked determined and skilled enough to make good use of it, ended the assault. It may even have transcended language barriers.

In this era of wanton disregard for the rule of law, such encounters don’t always end that way. All the more reason to have Carry insurance.

 

OPEN CARRY PROS AND CONS (MOSTLY CONS)

This guy with the Beretta AR70 (now called an AR70/223 to differentiate it from later models), on a wildcat range near Tucson, had to carry openly in the 1980s. Although open carry is still lawful in Arizona, there’s no longer much need for it with concealed weapon permits and permitless “constitutional” carry, unless you’re working a uniformed job that requires it.

In business, it pays to advertise. When armed, not so much.

Had I been visibly armed (instead of “armed” only with an empty holster), he might not have chosen to attack me. But if he had, I might have found out about it when he pinned me against the Pontiac and grabbed my gun. Bianchi’s 5BHL was an excellent holster, but its then-state-of-the-art thumb snap retention would’ve been easy for him to overcome.

Hammer straps were state of the art retention in the 1950s, although the AF issued me that Bill Jordan holster (top) in 1986, a few years after this incident. Duty rigs from the 1990s (bottom two) had thumb-snap retention. For some reason, my belts kept getting longer.

I’d had very little retention training that early in my career. A gun grab would not likely have ended well for me.

Practicing outside-the-holster retention in a 21st Century Heloderm Defensive Pistol class

Bad guys don’t try to snatch guns they don’t know are there. Besides, if an active killer is planning to shoot a place up, the first people he’s going to gun down are the ones who are visibly armed.

–George H, Lead Instructor, Heloderm LLC

 

Notes & Selected Sources

1. Social Psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term cognitive dissonance in the 1950s. Jay Braun and Darwyn E. Linder, Psychology Today, 4rth ed., pp. 573 – 75.

2. Ray and I shot frequently, but Dorothy was not a “gun person.” If she’d had more training, she could have done the same job just as well, maybe even faster, stepping out with the Smith & Wesson herself. Ray’s decision to take the revolver was skills-based, not ego- or gender-based.

3. See Greg Morrison’s The Modern Technique of the Pistol, ch. XI, pp. 75 – 76. We were starving college students. Neither of us were Gunsite grads in the ‘80s, but we practiced what we knew of Cooper’s methods. And of course, we also watched Miami Vice.

Gun handling in Miami Vice was heavily influenced by IPSC, which was heavily influenced by Jeff Cooper’s Modern Technique of the Pistol. Image © Michael Mann Productions / Universal

4. Professor Gary Kleck of Florida State University estimated that citizens used guns defensively 691,000 times between 1985 (the year after this incident happened) and 1990. This statistic from Kleck’s landmark study Point-Blank was cited by Sanford Strong in Strong on Defense, pp. 205 – 06.

5. Course Notes, Gunsite Edged Weapons, 14 – 15 Mar 1998.

6. I don’t remember who first told me about the Mars rule. I frequently pass it on to my students. It was previously published in the September 2024 electronic September 2024 electronic edition of Dillon’s Blue Press (“Where to Put It: Tourniquets and other TacMed TTPs,” pp. 46 – 48).

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