Having raised seven children on one income, I’ve never been fond of spending money unnecessarily. I believe in being careful with what I have and making sure anything I buy is worth the investment. So when I stumbled across a video from the Tactical Anatomy Summit discussing the effectiveness of Dr. James Williams’ course for law enforcement officers and armed citizens dealing with an imminent lethal threat, I didn’t rush to pull out my wallet.
Instead, I did some homework.
I read a couple of his blog articles1 and immediately recognized principles I’ve been teaching for years. In my own courses, I’ve used an anatomically correct medical-model skull, complete with a removable brainstem, along with models of the heart and spinal column. I’ve long believed that understanding anatomy is essential to understanding defensive shooting.
Humilitas First booth at the National March for Catholics, September 29–30, 2022, in Peoria, Illinois.
What caught my attention was Dr. Williams’ background: a full-time emergency room, intensive care, and trauma physician with more than 35 years of experience who also takes firearms, tactics, and the realities of stopping a lethal threat seriously.
Then I purchased his Tactical Anatomy Instructor Manual for $39.95.
Seeing Anatomy Differently
Williams’ Shooting With X-ray Vision approach aligns with a concept I incorporated into my own curriculum years ago.
When developing that material, I picked the brains of close friends who are serious deer hunters. I tell my students that hunters develop a mental picture of an animal’s internal anatomy that lets them understand what lies beneath the surface, even when the animal stands at an unfamiliar angle.
The heart, brain, and spine don’t change locations just because the animal turns. An experienced hunter understands that the animal’s presentation changes what you can see from the outside, not the anatomy inside.
That kind of three-dimensional understanding is valuable well beyond hunting. Learning to visualize anatomy rather than thinking only in terms of what’s visible on the surface can deepen our understanding of the most efficient and effective ways to stop an imminent, unjust deadly force threat.
That’s one reason Williams’ work caught my attention. He has devoted substantial time and medical expertise to a specialized subject that deserves serious study.
Still Learning
I’m working through his instructor’s manual, highlighting passages and making notes in the margins. I’m only about a third of the way through, and I’ve already encountered details that have added to my understanding of thoracic anatomy and the potentially catastrophic consequences of injury to major blood vessels.
That’s what I appreciate about finding someone who has put in the work: even when the underlying principles are familiar, there may be details, explanations, or clinical insights that sharpen your understanding.
After years of teaching, I don’t expect every new resource to overturn what I know. I do expect a worthwhile resource to challenge me, teach me something, or help me explain a concept more clearly. So far, this one has done that.
If you’re interested in studying the subject for yourself, you can find Dr. Williams’ instructor’s manual and three PowerPoint presentations here:
One final point: I’m not an affiliate, I’m not friends with Dr. Williams, and I’ve never met or spoken with him. I receive nothing for sharing this information. I’m simply passing along a resource I’ve found worthwhile.
From what I’ve seen so far, Dr. Williams appears to be a craftsman who has devoted years of medical experience, study, and effort to a highly specialized area of defensive training. That kind of work deserves a closer look.
I’m still reading, still taking notes, and still learning. And when I find someone doing serious work in an area I care about, I think it’s worth letting others know.
Even in a twenty-minute video, there are only so many angles you can cover. There will always be things you don’t think of, things you overlook because your own brain fills in the blanks. You may unconsciously assume that everyone already understands the principles involved in legitimate self-defense, or, more broadly, in dealing with a violent and unjust aggressor.
In antiquity, a teacher would present a subject, and those who wanted to understand it more deeply would ask questions, debate the underlying assumptions, and challenge how and why the subject was believed to be true. They would examine the subject closely, turning it over, looking beneath it, and considering it from every conceivable angle.
Ultimately, it is difficult to beat experience when it comes to violence. But experience often comes with the highest risks.
In the 1980s, after roughly two dozen street fights, I was nearly killed after I started a fight with a varsity football player at Academy of Our Lady Spalding in Peoria, Illinois. He was a senior; I was a sophomore. He was much bigger, faster, and stronger than I was.
He choked me unconscious.
This was long before terms like vascular neck restraint or Brazilian jiu-jitsu rear-naked choke were part of my vocabulary. It was simply a stranglehold that cut off my airflow. When I regained consciousness a minute or so later, I was genuinely surprised. I remember wondering how I was still alive.
That experience ultimately saved my life nine years later.
As a rookie, I found myself in a one-on-one, life-or-death fight following a foot pursuit. The humiliation and reality of being choked unconscious as a teenager had changed my relationship with violence. The willingness to use the highest levels of force without hesitation that existed nine years later was not present in that alley when I was fifteen.
When I was being choked unconscious, I hesitated because I was afraid. Despite nearly two dozen street fights leading up to that encounter, I still had a kind of governor on my willingness to cause great bodily harm or death. Of course, at fifteen, pride and ego would have had me arguing that I would have no problem breaking bones, or even killing, to save my own life.
But when the moment of truth arrived, reality was different. I hesitated.
Nine years later, there was no hesitation.
He lived, in part because the deadly force I applied was by hand rather than with a firearm, and because he very quickly demonstrated clear and convincing signs of surrender. I stopped when the threat stopped.
That experience also gave me a perspective on how and why many young men who have been stabbed or shot and survived may subsequently possess a willingness to escalate to extreme levels of violence almost instantaneously. They have learned, through experience, that hesitation can have consequences. But experience alone does not necessarily produce sound judgment. A person can become extremely willing to use violence while lacking the moral, legal, or ethical restraints necessary to distinguish between justified and unjustified violence. The ability to act decisively is not the same thing as the judgment to know when decisive action is justified.
Today, most young men, particularly those who did not grow up in a high-crime or highly violent environment, have far less exposure to even mundane physical violence than many people of my generation did in the 1980s. At the same time, they can face substantially greater legal, administrative, civil, and social consequences when violence occurs.
Experience can also come through the military, law enforcement, corrections, security work, or bouncing. We also have to confront the cultural and institutional pressures that can sometimes produce disproportionate concern for the person initiating unjust violence while failing to adequately account for the person who has to stop it.
That is part of what I see as a broader leadership problem.
You can overdevelop your hard skills and knowledge until you understand a subject from one side to the other. But if you lack the willingness to act decisively when confronted with an imminent, unjust, lethal threat, those skills and that knowledge may not matter when the moment arrives.
The Orland Park Incident
You’re not going to know what level of experience your adversary possesses.
Has he previously used deadly force? Under what circumstances? What does he expect to happen? What do you expect to happen?
Are you assuming this is merely a robbery?
What if it isn’t?
What if, regardless of what you do, the other person intends to shoot you anyway?
That happens. It’s rare, but it happens.
Another dimension is easy to overlook: human beings communicate extensively through body language. What are your intentions communicating? How good is your adversary at reading those signals? How good are you at recognizing his? Can you recognize changes in posture, movement, attention, or behavior that tell you the situation is changing?
High-stakes gambling provides a useful analogy. How good is your body-language poker face? How well can you recognize the other person’s tells while preventing your own from giving away what you’re thinking?
Competence comes from doing the work. There is no shortcut to competence when it comes to firearm handling and shooting hard skills. Confidence, in part, comes from competence. Experience is another major contributor.
So how important are expectations, experience, and confidence?
All three matter. None provides a guarantee.
At very close distances, a violent encounter can unfold extraordinarily quickly. Sometimes milliseconds separate life from death. Sometimes both people are seriously injured or killed.
Nobody in their right mind wants to square off against Goliath.
Where possible, the better approach is to avoid fighting on Goliath’s terms. Look for ways to create distance, improve your position, use your strengths, and avoid allowing the other person to dictate the circumstances of the encounter.
Even gaining an advantage can be complicated. Attempts to manipulate the social dynamics of an encounter can backfire, particularly if the other person is better than you at reading subtle behavioral cues.
Did you grow up in a high-crime or violent area?
Did you learn, through experience, how to be the giver of violence rather than the receiver of it?
Do you understand initiative, relative superiority, and momentum?
Are you listening to instructors who are excellent at marketing themselves but compromise the truth, tickling their students’ ears?
These things matter.
If I see someone approaching me with a hood up and a mask obscuring his face, my first choice is to leave. I want no part of the physical, legal, civil, or social risks that may accompany an unnecessary confrontation.
If I can’t leave immediately, my priority becomes improving my position and creating options. I want to increase the distance, buy as much time as I can, and force the other person to demonstrate that he intends to pursue me. That distinction matters, not only tactically, but legally. I don’t want to manufacture a confrontation; I want to create enough separation and observation that his continued pursuit becomes clear. A long funnel, gangway, alley, or similar space can sometimes let me see him sooner while staying behind cover or concealment and preserving an escape route. An obstacle between us can serve a similar purpose: if he wants to continue after me, he has to maneuver around it. In either case, I am trying to make his pursuit visible rather than letting him close the distance on his terms.
Another option is to move laterally, potentially ninety degrees or more from his original direction of travel, rather than simply continuing straight away from him. If he changes direction and follows, that pursuit tells me something about his intentions while also creating additional distance and buying me a little more time. Ideally, I want to draw the encounter toward terrain that favors observation and predictability: a funnel, chokepoint, hallway-like space, blind corner, or other area where I can anticipate where he will have to appear if he continues pursuing me. The objective isn’t to charge into a confrontation; it is to avoid being surprised, preserve my ability to disengage, and, if he refuses to disengage, make his continued pursuit increasingly predictable while retaining the advantage of stopping him before he stops me.
The priority is to see early and strengthen my position.
If I have family with me, it’s not about me anymore. Their presence changes everything. I have to account for their safety, their position, and the potential consequences of every movement I make.
When family is present, the stakes are higher, and the risks to my own safety may have to increase. Protecting those entrusted to my care means accepting risks for myself that I might not accept if I were alone.
The larger lesson is that self-defense isn’t simply about what you can do once violence begins. It is also about what you recognize beforehand, what you expect, what you are prepared to do, and whether you can avoid the fight altogether.
In law enforcement, we were taught that incapacitating head shots are an option in a hostage situation, but only when you are close enough and confident enough to take that extremely narrow shot. For most of my career, we carried Sig Sauer .357 semi-automatic pistols with a hammer you could cock for single-action. Moving from the long, heavy double-action first pull to single-action gave a light, short trigger press. That was a good option if the hostage taker and hostage were standing still.
Once the unjust aggressor and the intended victim (citizen or officer) are entangled, grappling, moving, or being moved, the situation changes. At that point, a precise shot is usually no longer a good option. Someone has to close distance and get their hands dirty. A violent separation can involve tackling, shoving, or jerking away with momentum. Even a temporary separation can create the space the legitimate defender needs to deliver incapacitating shots and stop their continuing imminent deadly threat.
The two parties may also separate on their own through pushing, pulling, or maneuvering. When that gap opens, a composed officer or citizen protector can exploit it with one or two well-placed shots. This is not, and cannot be, a mag-dump solution born of panic. Composure under those conditions is usually earned through enough “wild and woolly” experience to see opportunities as the violence develops. If you lack the experience to have and maintain composure, the only other reliable hedge, in my opinion, is to over-develop pure shooting skill so that even a high-volume response remains exceptionally accurate.
Know your adversary and know yourself. Deliberately strengthen the areas where you are weak rather than continuing to polish only the skills that already make you feel competent. Do the hard work necessary to expand your capabilities so those skills run in the background under stress.
Videos show officers making rear, very close, or contact shots to stop the threat. In today’s confused legal environment, especially in dense population centers, you will want as much of the encounter as possible captured on CCTV or doorbell cameras. You don’t get to pick the time and place where ol’ boy breaks bad, so realize these kinds of solutions carry higher risks on the legal battlefield. This isn’t legal advice; I’m not an attorney; I’m simply sharing how I looked at this kind of problem during my career and still do today.
The best solution for almost all of these problems is still early recognition. See what is developing, get ahead of it, and dominate inside the moral, legal, and physical windows of opportunity before the parties become entangled. Once they are locked together, the required solution carries far higher physical risk and will look ugly to anyone who does not understand real violent encounters.
One thing I learned during my law enforcement career is that bad guys are liars and manipulators. They will say whatever they need to say and act however they need to act to put themselves in a position of advantage – a position from which they can escape, which was the most common course of action I encountered, or a position from which they can attack you if that’s their intent. They stall, they distract, they negotiate, and they wait, sometimes patiently, for an opportunity to exploit a vulnerability.
Over time, I learned to pay far less attention to what someone was saying and far more attention to what they were doing. For a human being, talk is cheap. Actions really do speak louder than words.
After a tragic event like the one in the video above, mainstream news outlets will often bring on a mental-health professional to discuss whether better treatment, closer monitoring, or earlier screening might have prevented the attack. Another dimension of reality that mainstream media rarely, if ever, discusses is spiritual reality. In a general sense, it shouldn’t surprise us that many contemporary psychological and psychiatric professionals do not give substantial weight to spiritual explanations. In my opinion, that can lead us to neglect the more important questions about the soul, morality, evil, and human nature.
But here is the practical point: if I’m visiting New York City and someone pulls a knife and begins attacking people, does it matter to me in that moment whether the person has a diagnosed mental illness, an undiagnosed mental illness, a substance-induced condition, some spiritual affliction, or no identifiable condition at all?
No, not when the question is whether I am facing an imminent deadly threat.
I cannot know what motivated the attack, or what is ultimately happening in that person’s heart. Those things are hidden from me. What I can observe is conduct.
What is the person doing? How close are they? What is their posture? Where are they moving? Are they advancing? Are they armed? Are they attacking someone? Have they demonstrated the ability and apparent intent to cause death or serious bodily harm? Is the threat imminent?
Those are the questions that matter when seconds count.
And there is an important distinction here. Recognizing that someone may have a mental illness does not make the person less dangerous. In my experience, it may make them more dangerous because that person may be far more experienced at doing the least expected things. Odd things. Awkward things that reset my OODA loop to observe and orient as I ask myself, what am I seeing here? When an individual is actually committing an imminent violent attack, the existence or absence of a psychiatric diagnosis does not erase the immediate danger created by his or her conduct.
The same is true of the spiritual questions.
What if someone has immersed himself in the occult? What if their problem is that of diabolic oppression, obsession, or possession? What if there is no mental illness whatsoever and the simplest explanation is that the person has chosen to do something wicked?
I cannot know the answer to those questions in the middle of a deadly-force encounter.
And that is precisely the point.
I don’t need to know everything or anything, for that matter, about a person’s heart before recognizing what his hands are doing.
I don’t need to understand every cause before responding to an imminent threat. We ought to be soft-hearted but not soft-headed. False compassion is a curse and pox upon the land in the same way that political correctness is a curse and a pox upon the land. If you haven’t ever seen Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s talk on false compassion, it is pure gold:
And I don’t need to determine whether someone has a mental illness, is spiritually afflicted, morally corrupt, or some combination of those things before recognizing an imminent deadly threat.
Those questions may matter enormously afterward, to investigators, physicians, courts, families, clergy, and ultimately to God. But they are not mine to answer in the fraction of a second in which someone is trying to kill me or someone I’m responsible for, like my wife and children.
Christianity teaches that God alone ultimately knows the heart. “…man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)
That should produce humility, not passivity.
I can refuse to presume to know another person’s soul while still taking their actions seriously. I can have compassion for human brokenness without confusing compassion with surrendering an innocent person’s life to an unjust aggressor. I can pray for the person who is attacking and still recognize that the attack must be stopped.
Because when an unjust aggressor initiates an imminent deadly threat, my responsibility is not to diagnose the soul of the aggressor.
Watch the officer in the video. He is ambushed, shot multiple times at close range, and still has to fight. Several seconds pass before he can get his firearm into the fight, establish a shooting platform, confirm his sights, and stop the threat. That is the reality of a sudden deadly-force ambush: you start behind, wounded, surprised, and scrambling for any chance to win.
One reliable way to build the ability to keep fighting when everything in you wants to quit is to practice not quitting on smaller hard things every day. As a Catholic, I know I am supposed to pick up my Cross daily. Life already offers plenty of opportunities to do hard, uncomfortable, virtuous things. If we spend our ordinary days chasing comfort and ease, we should not be surprised when we fold the moment the stakes become life-and-death.
If you are being shot or stabbed repeatedly, something has already gone terribly wrong. Once the initial shock passes and you regain even a little composure, your only job is to stop the person trying to murder you. Fear of death, the pain of the wounds, the blood loss: all of that has to be locked in a box and dealt with later. In those few seconds, focus only on the next action that moves you closer to ending the threat.
Hits to the central nervous system (“switches”) can end the fight instantly; either you die on the spot, or you lose the use of limbs. Hits to the heart, major vessels, or liver (“timers”) usually leave you with seconds, not minutes. You will rarely know which one you just took. What you can know is that the aggressor will keep trying to kill you. Expect no mercy. As long as you still have breath and any strength left, your sole focus is winning the fight.
That is a winning mindset. Winning must come before thoughts of survival. A pure survival mindset has its place, after you stop the threat. Inside the fight itself, treating the encounter like a competition or a fair fight is a loser’s mindset. Professionals do not look for fair fights. They stack the odds with surprise, speed, and violence of action. King David understood this. He refused to play Goliath’s game on Goliath’s terms. He remembered how he had already defeated lions and bears, then used the tools and tactics that gave him the advantage. He did not care what onlookers thought. He humbled himself, identified what it would take to win, and did that.
Deadly-force encounters are not combat sports. Sport techniques and the competitive mindset that goes with them will not save you here.
God forbid you or I ever face this. But if we do, decide now: do not quit. Resolve to keep working the problem until you stop the unjust, imminent, deadly threat. If time gives way to eternity, you’ll know because you’ll be kneeling before the just Judge, the Lord of all lords, and the King of all kings.
