Book review
http://killology.com/art_buckeye.htm
Lt. Col Dave Grossman’s Bullet-Proofing the Mind – A MUST for every
concealed-carrier Chad D. Baus Buckeye Firearms Association February 15,
2008
EDITOR’S NOTE: The events of the past two weeks, including the latest
multiple-victim public shooting on the “no-guns” Northern Illinois
University campus Thursday afternoon, make the following information all
the more critical to our nation. Please share it far and wide. It is far
past time to allow students their right to bear arms for self-defense on
campus.
“Amateurs talk hardware. Professionals talk software. It doesn’t matter
what’s in your hand or between your legs. It matters what’s in your
heart and in your head.” – Lt. Col. Dave Grossman The story of concealed
handgun license-holder Jeanne Assam’s brave actions to stop a murderous
rampage killer in Colorado Springs, Colorado’s New Life Church won’t
soon be forgotten.
From CNSNews.com: “She probably saved over 100 lives,” the Brady Boyd,
the pastor of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, said on Monday.
The female guard, a church member dressed in plain clothes, killed the
gunman after he opened fire at the mega-church. Boyd said she “rushed
toward the attacker and took him down in the hallway” as he entered the
building.
But most Americans are totally unaware of what happened with the two
other concealed handgun license-holders who confronted the killer that
day.
From the Denver Post: Larry Bourbonnais, a combat-tested Vietnam
veteran, said it was the bravest thing he’s ever seen.
Bourbonnais, who was among those shot by a gunman Sunday at New Life
Church, watched as a [fellow- church member], a woman later identified
as Jeanne Assam, calmly returned fire and killed the shooter.
“She just started walking toward the gunman firing the whole way,” said
Bourbonnais, who was shot in the arm. “She was just yelling ‘Surrender,’
walking and shooting the whole time.”
Bourbonnais, 59, had just finished up a hamburger in the cafeteria on
the sprawling church campus when he heard gunfire, he recalled.
He headed in the direction of the shots as frightened people ran past
him looking to escape to safety.
“Where’s the shooter? Where’s the shooter?” Bourbonnais kept yelling, he
recalled.
Near an entryway in the church, Bourbonnais came upon the gunman and an
armed male church [member] who was there with his gun drawn but not
firing, he said.
Bourbonnais said he pleaded with the armed [man] to give him his weapon.
“Give me your handgun. I’ve been in combat, and I’m going to take this
guy out,” Bourbonnais recalled telling the guard. “He kept yelling, ‘Get
behind me! Get behind me!’ He wouldn’t hand me his weapon, but he
wouldn’t do anything.”
There was an additional armed [churchgoer] there, another man, who also
didn’t fire, Bourbonnais said. All of the details about the their
failure to engage the attacker are not given, and we shouldn’t presume
to second-guess anyone in this type of situation. But the incident
brings to mind something that I believe every concealed handgun
license-holder needs to consider:
It is every bit as important to spend time and money getting training
for the mental aspects of defending oneself in a deadly force encounter
as it is to spend time and money on preparing for the physical aspects
(i.e. obtaining the right equipment and learning how to use it).
Enter Lt. Col Dave Grossman’s powerful mindset-oriented seminar,
“Bullet-Proofing the Mind.”
Speaking from Experience Lt. Col. Dave Grossman is a West Point
psychology professor, Professor of Military Science, and an Army Ranger
who has combined his experiences to become the founder of a new field of
scientific endeavor, which has been termed “killology.” In this new
field Col. Grossman has made revolutionary new contributions to our
understanding of killing in war, the psychological costs of war, the
root causes of the current “virus” of violent crime that is raging
around the world, and the process of healing the victims of violence, in
war and peace.
He is the author of On Killing, which was nominated for a Pulitzer
Prize; is on the US Marine Corps’ recommended reading list; and is
required reading at the FBI academy and numerous other academies and
colleges.
He has testified before U.S. Senate and Congressional committees and
numerous state legislatures, and he and his research have been cited in
a national address by the President of the United States.
Col. Grossman is an Airborne Ranger infantry officer, and a
prior-service sergeant and paratrooper, with a total of over 23 years
experience in leading U.S. soldiers worldwide. Today he is the director
of the Warrior Science Group, and in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks he is on the road almost 300 days a year, training elite
military and law enforcement organizations worldwide about the reality
of combat.
Buckeye Firearms Association Leader Linda Walker and I attended Col.
Grossman’s course on February 5, along with about 100 other men and
women – what I estimate to have been about a 60/40 mix of Fulton County
(Ohio) Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #135 Members and fellow Buckeye
Firearms Association supporters from all over the state.
Four Steps to a Bullet-Proof Mind Grossman spent the day walking us
through the four steps to a Bullet Proof Mind:
Understanding the magnitude of the threat. Grossman struck hard on this
theme from the minute the all-day seminar began, setting the stage with
two powerful questions:
“Can we take the lessons learned in blood and lives at Columbine and the
World Trade Center and apply them so we’ll never take this [path] again,
or do we have to wait until our kids die?”
and
“Could we agree our responsibility is to keep our kids and grandkids
safe?”
To set up his next theme, Grossman delivered the first of what became
throughout the day a host of riveting real-life case-studies, recounting
the story of a Secret Service agent who took a .22 round in a non-vital
area during the attempted assination of President Ronald Reagan, yet
collapsed, not because he was incapacitated but because Hollywood had
taught him that he was supposed to fall down when he got shot. Thus his
second step to a Bullet-Proof Mind:
Don’t focus on the minority who were hurt. Grossman advised that “stuff
you think you know about combat can destroy you. …Basing what you
think you know about combat on Hollywood is like basing what you know
about eloquence on Disney’s ‘Dumbo’.”
“Hollywood loves the pity party,” Grossman observed. “Don’t fall for it.
Chew it up, and spit it out.”
Grossman’s next complaint about Hollywood leads to the third step toward
Bullet-Proofing the Mind:
“Hollywood creates the macho man myth.”
Don’t be a macho man This third step toward a Bullet Proof Mind takes on
a bit of a dual meaning. “Every good cop knows there is no shame in
calling for backup,” Grossman noted. He used that truth to encourage
people who have survived a deadly-force encounter to call for back-up in
dealing with any level of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Grossman spent 75% of the all-day seminar on the fourth and final step
toward a Bullet-Proof Mind:
Hunt down and eliminate every bit of denial in our lives “Denial is the
enemy,” Grossman repeatedly warned. Citing examples ranging from the
9-11 terror attacks to a litany of school shootings, including one in
his hometown of Jonesboro, AR. Grossman’s own son was attending the
school at Jonesboro that day.
“The worst thing that can happen is someone coming to kill our kids.
Folks, someone is coming to kill our kids.”
In effort to shake his students from their denial, Grossman noted that
we are facing both Internal and External Threats The Internal Threat is
that “kids and perverts are coming to kill our kids.” The External
Threat is that “terrorists are coming to kill our kids.”
Citing the horrific attack by Islamic terrorists on the Russian school
in Beslan, Russia, where after more than three days of rape and murder,
more than 350 people died – half of them children.
(To get over a little more of your own denial, watch the following
footage from the 2004 massacre)
To illustrate the level of denial in this country, Grossman noted that
when HBO did a special on the Beslan terrorist attack, they completely
omitted any mention of rape.
Grossman posed the question of how many kids have been killed by school
fires in the past 25 years in all of North America. The answer, ZERO.
He then noted that in 1998 alone, school violence has resulted in 35
dead, 250,000 injured. And lest you think 1998 was an anomaly, Grossman
noted 48 died from school violence in 2004.
The reason fire doesn’t kill school kids, Grossman explained, is that
“fire guys have set up multiple redundant, overlapping layers of
protection.” No one calls such extravagant fire prevention efforts into
question, “yet we try to prevent violence,” Grossman observed, “and
people think we’re crazy. DENIAL!”
“Denial has no survival value” became a repeatedly used phrase
throughout the day, usually to punctuate another case study example of a
place where the lack of preparation for a potential deadly force
encounter (no one prepared because they were in denial) got people
killed. Thanks to denial, “teachers aren’t prepared for violence. …If
they had done a fraction of preparation for violence [at Columbine] as
they had done for fire…”
“Why did we have to wait until after Columbine to change our training
and coin the word “active shooter?” Denial!
Observing that the Virginia Tech mass-murderer chose the building he
attacked because it had no ground-floor windows and only three
double-doors that could be chained from the inside, Grossman asked “how
many kids have to die before every class has two exits and a securable
door?”
“If teachers can be fired for failure to do fire drills, how much more
mean and ugly should we be to those who refuse to prepare for violence?”
The NEW Factor Grossman noted that every one of the actions the
Columbine kids committed was a felony. Yet many of their actions had
been illegal for 100 years before that, with no problems. “Something is
going on, and it ain’t the guns,” he warned.
Whatever is going on, it is world-wide phenomenon. We medicate
ourselves, police ourselves, secure ourselves and imprison ourselves at
rates unprecedented in history, and yet aggravated assaults and other
violent attacks are at their highest. What the hell is going on?
“It is a myth that most school killers are on Ritalin,” Grossman noted.
“It is a lie. Only two were prescribed, and we’re pretty sure they were
off their meds [when they attacked].”
UPDATE: Indeed, consider this quote about the Northern Illinois
University Saint Valentine’s Day massacre: “Apparently he had been
taking medication,” [NIU police chief Don] Grady said. “He had stopped
taking this medication and he had become somewhat erratic in the last
couple weeks.”
“They’ve all trained on the video games,” Grossman observed. Citing
research conducted for his book Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call
to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence, Grossman advised
that “the average kid has practiced over 1,000,000 kills in a
simulator”. Video games these days are “total virtual reality
simulators”, “simulating rob, kill, steal for hundreds of hours on end.
Grossman displayed a series of brain scans showing that kids of violence
have underdeveloped forebrains and overdeveloped midbrains. In other
words, there is scientific evidence proving that video games shut down
the portion of the brain that is logical and predictable. “The safety
catch is turned off.”
Not willing to allow anyone to think violent media is the only factor,
Grossman warned students not to “get caught in a single-cause model”. He
stressed that while the violent media is definitely not the only factor,
it is most definitely the NEW factor. “take existing factors, add one
new factor, and you double or triple the risk. Take the factor away, you
reduce the risk by two or three times.”
Adopting the Warrior Mindset
“As the fire-firefighter knows fire, so you must know violence.”
Grossman noted that in Normandy, after 60 days of consecutive combat,
98% of soldiers were temporarily insane due to combat. Citing an analogy
that he would use throughout the discussion on the warrior mindset,
Grossman explained the Normandy statistics. “1% of people are wolves.
98% are sheep in denial. 1% are sheepdogs. …Only a predator can face a
predator.”
“Sheep have only two speeds – graze and stampede. They quickly sink back
into denial. …At Virginia Tech nobody put up a fight,” said Grossman.
“They waited to die. The only survival trick they knew was ‘Freeze’.
We’re raising a nation of sheep. …Once upon a time, America was full
of sheep dogs.”
It is important to note that “sheep are leery of predators. …Sheep
can’t comprehend the mindset of a warrior sheepdog. Sheep wake up every
day like it’s 9-11.”
Grossman said that the great destroyer in combat is stress, and the way
to defeat stress is mental readiness. ” The most complex fine motor
skill you’ll ever need is to shoot a human being who is trying to shoot
you,” the veteran advised. “If we train so much for sports games, how
much more should we for our lives in combat?”
“In World War II,” Grossman continued, “20% admitted to losing control
of their bowels in combat, 50% to losing control of their bladder. How
many more lied?” Grossman said the healthy response to extreme fear
response is not to be embarrassed or humiliated. “Just change your
drawers and move on.”
So how does Grossman recommend we avoid the symptoms of extreme fear
response?
“Inoculate. Expose yourself to the ‘disease’ in a controlled manner.
Firefighters face fire to train, we must face stress and fear. Through
force on force training. The first time you go through a force on force
scenario, your heart rate can jump to over 200 bpm. The more times you
do it, your heart rate comes down. Inoculation.”
When under stress, Grossman explained, the human voice shows stress.
There is a loss of blood flow to the vocal cords, to the hands, etc.
“You need to get to a place where we call for help after combat and
sound like a pilot [during an emergency landing].”
To insulate the point of how simulating stressful or fearful encounters
can inoculate against the destroyer of extreme fear response in combat,
Grossman told the story of deputy sheriff Jennifer Fulford. When she
surprised three home invaders in a garage, she took incoming fire from
all three, and was shot ten times (the bad guys were hitting her with
about one in ever four shots). All the time, however, she was returning
fire, and hitting with every shot. She killed one, lost use of her
strong hand, did a left-handed, one-handed reload, killed a second one,
and the third ran away. Today she has recovered and back on the beat.
Fulford said “I am the product of my training,” and went on to say that
the whole incident was less stressful than her simulation training.
Having this kind of “steely determination is about having made the
decision ahead of time” to kill or be killed, Grossman explained.
Grossman went on to expand on his earlier advice to seek help in dealing
with the emotional aftermath of a deadly force encounter, and then
examined four things held in common by people who don’t get PTSD:
1) previously stress inoculated 2) internal locus of control (predator
vs. rabbit)
- predator feels no combat stress, predator IS combat stress – predator
on his own turf has enormous advantage – optimistic/ confident
Grossman advised that “one of the best things you can do to prepare for
combat is to hunt”, calling it “the ultimate predator neuron training
for combat.”
3) Faith 4) Controlled emotions
- courage is grace under pressure
Grossman noted that the goal of stress-inducing training is to avoid
PTSD. “If there is no extreme fear response [feelings of intense fear,
helplessness, or horror], there is no PTSD”
Surviving Gunshot Wounds
All things are ready if our minds be so”
Grossman taught the following tips for surviving gunshot wounds:
- If the threat is no longer viable, and if you’ve been shot, get
yourself out of the line of fire. “Don’t make your friends expose
themselves to get to you.”
- If the threat remains, stop the threat. “You can take a bullet to the
heart and have 5 to 7 seconds before you will be out of combat. You’re
not dead! Keep going!”
Grossman’s 5 D’s [for Securing our Kids]
Denial “Denial kills you physical, mentally, and financially. It has no
survival value. Chew it up, spit it out, get rid of it. Moment of truth
today – no more denial. Rid yourself of every ounce.”
Deter “We don’t want to kill anybody. Deterrence is the goal.”
As an example of a failure to use Deterrence, Grossman citing the
example of the school massacre at Red Lake, MN, where a young school
murderer shot his grandparents with the police-issued weapons he had
stolen from his grandfather (a police officer), went to his high school
and shot one of two unarmed guards who was manning the front door. “If
[that guard] had been armed, odds are 10 to 1 he’d never have tried,”
Grossman said. “DETER. Those guards were given a responsibility for
human lives without the tools to do the job! Never call an unarmed man
’security’. Call them ‘run-like-hell-when-the-shooting-starts’.”
Detect “Every time he bounces off a hard target, it’s a chance to
Detect.
Delay The goal is as many hard targets as possible. Once he is in the
school, the only question is how many kids die.”
Destroy (DEFEAT) “We are at war. Our armed citizens and cops are the
front line.”
Grossman preempted any police bureaucrats who were already starting to
add up the cost of the security they were imagining Grossman would
recommend:
“The most important things we can do cost nothing. Our problem isn’t the
money, it’s Denial.”
The First Finger Pointed Back at You: CARRY OFF DUTY
” Every cop should carry off-duty. To the officer who scoffs at this,
Grossman had these words: “There ain’t nothing wrong with a cop who
carries off-duty. It’s you. You’re a sheep. Say ‘baaa!’ Cops who carry
off-duty aren’t psychologically off – you might be! If every cop in
American carries, we quadruple our coverage at $0 cost. Be there with
the life-saving tools of your profession. Plan A is be a good witness
when nobody is dying. Plan B is shoot him dead. But if you have no gun,
you have no Plan B. If you’re legally authorized to carry and you go out
without your gun…everytime you see a fire-fighting sign, sprinkler
system, etc., tell yourself the fire-fighter is more professional than I
am.”
The Second Finger Pointed Back at You: HAVE THE PROPER EQUIPMENT
Get rifles. Cops can be authorized to purchase and carry their own
rifles. Pistols are just pissing at body armor.” Good mindset – “if the
bastards come to my town, our response time is measured in feet per
second.” Bad mindset – “it’ll never happen here.”
- Prepare a ‘go- bag’. “One armed person behind cover with effective
fire can make all the difference. The Long Ranger needs lots of silver
bullets. The average cop will have 3 mags and be empty in a minute. Keep
a loaded bag with mags ready.”
- “Cops could use medevac and media choppers as assault entry vehicles.
If it flies over your schools, it belongs to you. We are at war.
Integrate them into the plan from the beginning.”
- Fire hoses can break windows and not kill hostages, set off
booby-traps, etc. Firefighters have tools to punch through walls, create
climbing stairs in walls, etc. Integrate them into your plan from the
beginning. Use your firefighters as your combat engineers.”
- “Armed Citizens are the militia. Integrate concealed-handgun
license-holders (CHLs) into your plan. We are at war. The idea that cops
can do it all themselves is wrong. Use what is available to you.
Integrate them into your plan from the beginning. One or two people in
the first few minutes are worth 1000 people hours later.”
UPDATE: Indeed, consider this quote about the Northern Illinois
University Saint Valentine’s Day massacre: Police said he reloaded the
shotgun in a shooting that lasted less than five minutes, before he took
his own life. Police arrived on the scene within two minutes of the
first reports, but it was too late to stop the gunman.
Five minutes and at least six innocent lives. If only college students
were allowed their right to bear arms for self-defense on campus.
The Third Finger Pointed Back at You: GET YOUR HEART AND MIND READY -
“Stay in shape. Piss on golf. Real Americans go to the range. Choose a
sport with cardio or survival skill benefit. If you see a cop carrying
golf clubs, do one thing for me. Look him in the eye and say ‘baaa!’”
Plan A is the British Model. Disarm everyone. It’s not working. Plan B
is the Israeli Model. Train/ arm everyone. Israel has few golf courses
and a lot of rifle ranges!”
“Three fingers pointed back at you,” Grossman concluded, “say before you
go ask for Federal money, do the things that can be done for free. Our
problem isn’t money, it’s denial.”
Grossman summarized the goal of his training as being better able to
deter, less likely to panic, and more likely to live. A sheepdog says “I
will lead the way. I will set the highest standards. …Your mission is
to man the ramparts in this dark and desperate hour with honor and
courage.”
This sheepdog hopes for a day when we once again are a nation full of
them. With Lt. Col. Grossman as our Instructor, we are headed in the
right direction.
Chad Baus is a Member of the Fulton County, OH Republican Central
Committee and the Buckeye Firearms Association Vice Chairman and
Northwest Ohio Chair.
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