The good survivalist shouldn’t really be getting into shoot outs, although some violent confrontations may be avoidable post TEOTWAWKI. The truth is that most so-called survivalists will spend more time and money of firearms and gunfighting training than they will on food storage and learning what wild edibles will can be harvested in their areas. This creates the Survivalist Paradox, as I like to call it. When all these supposed survivalists run out of food they will fall back on what they “know” (shooting people) to try to get a hold of the food you’ve worked so hard to learn how to procure. Ergo we survivalists end up having to train not just in the essential skills (farming, trapping, hunting, building, nursing etc) but in the mall ninja dominated arts of “combat” shooting, counter sniping and small unit tactics.

I have never been in a gunfight per se but I have had guns pulled on me several times and had a guy empty a clip at me one late night in Newark, New Jersey. I will no doubt scandalize the legions of Internet pistoleros when I say that with my limited experience being on the wrong end of guns I find Shooting to Live by Fairbairn and Sykes to be the most realistic tome on gun play by badmen. Of course, my experiences are from living in a crime ridden inner city so Shooting to Live (written based on the authors service in 1930s Shanghai which put the worst American ghettos to shame in terms of criminality) speaks to my personal observations of how these things unfold. I know nothing of full on force on force conflict and thus cannot recommend any trainer or material.

I will relate a story however I read about Wild Bill Hickok that I read reprinted in an old outdoor magazine. Buffalo Bill Cody once told a reporter that Hickok actually wasn’t a particularly fast draw, but that if he thought would have to shoot you he simply did it before the other party had even decided whether or not there would be trouble. Learning to recognize the intentions of others, and acting on those intentions rather than re-acting to actions may be the best advice for post-TEOTWAWKI gunfighters to think on.

Here Rob Pincus from Personal Defense Network runs through the mechanics of how to engage a aggressor with your firearm when you’re seated. Books and videos don’t replicate training, but if you’re surfing the web in the middle of the day or night chances are you don’t have a few hundred to slap down to take a course so this is better than nothing: