You're right, you should wait for the police, because when seconds matter, the police are minutes away.

In what situation do you imagine a civilian legally using a gun for self-defense is not “panicked”?

Well, at a range, sometimes can't properly rack the slide and still hit everything I wanted to hit. I got used to doing lock/release instead due to that skill issue.

I probably spoke imprecisely. I meant rushed, which has a similar but different meaning than panicked.

In addition to the lost time, you'll have a hard time racking the slide from the adrenaline dump. Also, the bad guys always have first-movers advantage and you're always playing catch up.

After watching thousands of violent encounters on John Correia's "Active Self Protection" channel, I agree that round-in-the-chamber is absolutely necessary if you're carrying for self protection.

https://www.youtube.com/@ActiveSelfProtection

Most states prevent you from drawing without firing, because it is considered brandishing / threatening.

So you either draw and fire and call the police and tell them what happened, or you don't and just... deal with the consequences of whatever happened instead.

This just in: you don't get to pick the category of the emergency when SHTF.

That's like saying "I only wear seat belts on the freeway" or something equivalently vapid.

> pistols at dawn duel in front of an old west saloon

Probably not much less likely than a lot of the scenarios people are fantasizing about in here.

well, again, let me preface this with I don't conceal carry nor do I feel in my day to day life unsafe to the point I want to conceal carry. However, I got interested in IDPA, as a hobby, which is a shooting competition that does time trials through a practical scenario. For example, move to a station, fire at 4 targets from behind cover, move to another station, reload, move to another station and fire at 3 targets. Your score is determined by speed through the scenarios and the accuracy of your shots. i'm no stranger at all to shooting firearms having spent a large portion of my childhood hunting and years of going to the range. During my intro to IDPA class I was shocked at how hard it is to keep everything straight in your head and operate a handgun safely and effectively under the very minor stress of a time trial and a group of people watching.

Now, in my 49 years i've been in only one situation where i was attacked, beat up, robbed and would have been justified to use lethal force in my defense. Had i been armed I would not have had it together enough in the amount of time i had to chamber a round, aim, and fire. Unless your brain is trained to respond there just isn't time to think through anything, it's like your mental capacity just grinds to a halt in those moments. If you have it together enough to chamber a round, aim, and fire you have it together enough to use run-fu and escape the situation.

finally, once again, i don't conceal carry and thank my lucky stars my job doesn't involve making decisions like draw and fire or don't. Maybe someone with more training and experience will weigh in in this conversation, i'm just giving my two cents.

This might be the impression one gets from watching movies or television shows, but its not reality. Anyone who has either trained with a handgun, or even just viewed videos of real-world confrontations will know that this isn't the case. In many encounters you have almost no time. Racking the slide and acquiring the target adds a massive amount of time (its even worse when you are under pressure).

Most defensive uses of a firearms occur at a short distance, less than five yards. It takes very little time to cover the distance. For those who are interested, here is a video covering what it looks like when someone with a knife runs straight at someone at 21 feet, you will see why the idea that people have time to rack the slide is absurd (https://youtu.be/_2zfw_4DYdQ?t=79).

> if the attacker misses a shot at you you have time to chamber a round

Is that based on recorded personal times, or are you just assuming?

Because I can shoot the mozambique in 1.9 seconds. Chambering a round is much slower than that.

> I've been in my fair share of sus situations in my life and they've been either telegraphed (people starting with yelling, then intimidation, then getting into personal space) or ambiguous.

The problem is that in a "sus situation" you would not be able to chamber a round without brandishing the firearm, which in many situation would be illegal in a merely "sus" situation where you don't have a clear threat (brandishing laws, intimidation, etc). This is why many self-defense advocates encourage people to carry with a round chambered while also carrying something like pepper spray for situations where lethal force is not necessary.

> So I personally think people with good situational awareness have plenty of time to act appropriately in a variety of common dangerous situations.

Most people I've encountered who carry concealed would agree that you should try to keep yourself from being in common dangerous situations. The reason they carry is not for the avoidable situations, since they'd obviously just avoid them, but for the unavoidable situation. The vast majority of people who carry concealed never need to use their firearms, the point is to be ready to defend oneself and others if the situation should arise.

Pretty much everyone I know in the gun community would say that all the situations you mentioned are ones where you better not draw your gun.

As another commenter pointed out, drawing your gun in those situations is usually a pretty serious crime (supposedly even showing that you're carrying a concealed gun to ward people off is a crime in some jurisdictions - I haven't verified).

So not sure what the point of your comment is. You're describing scenarios that are irrelevant to the thread.

Oh, and just BTW, lots and lots of cases of people acting like you ending up dead. Acting appropriately in dangerous situations doesn't mean you will come out on the better end.

there are plenty of videos online showing situations where it did matter.

if you google around for "Ring camera video appears to show man shoot assailant in self-defense" you can find one.

some people do live in legitimately very dangerous places. whether one should carry chambered is a function of that.

> If you're going to live in a society you just kind of have to accept that you could hypothetically be killed in broad daylight by a very-motivated someone with no real opportunity to defend yourself.

This is absolutely true, but security in depth, right? Just because it's easy for you to die in public, whether from a premeditated attack or an accident, doesn't mean it's pointless to add on a few layers to make that less likely. After all, everything happens in the margins.

Completely agree.

But let's extend the distance to 5 yards. Or 8 yards. Or whatever. There is a distance threshold where racking vs not racking makes a difference. It's not a thin threshold. You probably gain a decent number of yards by not having to rack.

Lots of things can go wrong while carrying a handgun (with or without a round in the chamber). I don't recommend people do it unless they are aware of a specific threat. But once you are under a specific threat, then it doesn't really make sense to carry it without a round in the chamber.

> What pray tell is this hypothetical threat?

I said "if you have good reason to believe someone is after you". That precludes hypothetical threats.

People sometimes make enemies who threaten to kill them. Some of them actually try to kill them. Some of them are people who know them and their house/apartment intimately. Start looking around. Lots and lots of cases of people who get out on bail and kill the person in the next few days.

> They’ve cased the joint but they’re not going to wait until you come out to get in your car in the morning?

If you're going to kill someone, are you going to do it that openly, when it may be easier to do it in the home?

> If you believe someone is after you, your resources would be better spent getting support from others, or physically securing your living space, or getting the hell out of dodge.

I actually agree, with the caveat that only the last one works, and is not feasible for many.

im curious where you live where home invasions dont happen. i live in one of the safest states in the US and home invasions happen here.

people actually do commit random violence in home invasions by the way. your having chosen not to look into it at all or read the news ever doesnt negate this. its to say that random violence in home invasions is common, but the point is that it does happen. and i think people should have a very effective means to defend themselves.

theres even been a serial killer that committed home invasions by claiming to be police upon breaking in. this also happened recently with those politicians that got assassinated.

if you dont want to have a firearm thats your choice. dont see why you think this is necessary for other people though.

You're both right :-)

The reality he mentions is very much a reality. Lots of concealed carry folks obsessed with always being vigilant. Good idea not to hang around them, because hypervigilant people are prone to see threats that aren't there.

2.8% is even worse than I’d have guessed.

2.8% of an already rare event is technically non-imaginary, but also definitely rounds down to imaginary.

[edit] on top of that, is it even a one-digit percentage of that 2.8% of a rare event in which having a round chambered made any difference? Yet there are people confidently posting as if it’d be absurd to carry without a round chambered. That’s plainly nuts.

Estimate, if you can, the fraction of the "good guy" episodes that critically hinged on the 1s it takes to rack the slide.

Personally I believe it's a good feature if a guy has to give it a think for 1-2 seconds before blowing away the guy in front of him in the line at Whataburger.

Plenty of people spend time and money preparing for low-probability but highly catastrophic events. Purchasing insurance that covers your home for fire damage is one such example.

The fact that the chance of a well-maintained home burning down is vanishingly small doesn’t make this an imaginary risk.

Thinking about how to protect yourself from violent crime and deciding to purchase and carry a gun doesn’t seem fundamentally different.

Lots of live action roleplayers

This is a genius idea. Sell on-base housing to safety-minded civilians. The HOA fees will generate a tidy profit.

Or living in a country like Japan.

There are tons of incidents with intruders on military bases where I am from. They are atrractive targets for criminals like thieves, too. Guards aren't a very effective deterrent.

Also, everyone I talked to who found suspicious activity while on guard duty confessed to me that they were terrified in the moment even though they were trying to project authority on the outside.

The Royal Marines of 43 Commando guarding the nukes at Faslane have loaded weapons.

The Security Forces at the base in question guard strategic nuclear weapons. The other USAF command most concerned is USAFE, where the threat of terrorism against a USAF facility is greater than in the mainland US.

If a vehicle fails to stop at a base entrance, the gate guard hits the button that raises a barrier some distance past the entrance. Then they go for a weapon, if necessary. Post 9/11, that will be something with more power than a pistol.[1]

The barrier solves an old problem - what action to take when a vehicle fails to stop at a checkpoint. Most of the time, it's drunks or minor crazies. Lethal force is excessive and car chases on base are dangerous. Barriers became standard for DoD installations around 2005.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iW79PLFuUGw

Many police carry a secondary handgun in case they lose their primary or whatever.