Humilitas first, llc Helping you stack the odds

Arguably, one of the biggest law enforcement training errors that we, as concealed carriers, must never imitate is what are called “goofy loops.”

What’s a goofy loop? Repeating substantially identical verbal commands over and over again while an imminent deadly-force threat remains unresolved.

“Drop the gun! Drop it! Put it down! Drop the gun, do it now! I will shoot you!”

Again. And again. And again.

At some point, this stops being meaningful communication and becomes an exercise in wishful thinking. It is an abdication of responsibility when someone has accepted a leadership role and responsibility for protecting others. It is excessive hope at precisely the moment when sound judgment, decisiveness, and moral courage are required.

Perhaps if we give him sixteen more warnings, he’ll finally do the right thing and put the firearm down.

That is not a sound strategy when an innocent person’s life is hanging in the balance.

If there is a hostage, you’re gambling with the hostage’s life. If you’re alone with an armed, unjust aggressor who has initiated an imminent deadly force threat, you’re gambling with your own life.

We cannot escape the fundamental reality that, in a lethal encounter, the person who initiates an attack generally possesses an action-reaction advantage. We cannot wish that reality away.

When an innocent person is facing an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury, every unnecessary delay deserves serious scrutiny. Where a person has a genuine moral and professional responsibility to protect others, that responsibility cannot simply be transferred to the aggressor through inaction.

Think about what repeated, ineffective commands can communicate through conduct:

“I lack the courage or resolve to make the difficult decision that this situation requires. Instead, I am going to surrender the initiative and leave the next consequential decision in your hands. I am willing to gamble with an innocent person’s life, and perhaps my own, in the hope that you will voluntarily decide to stop threatening them.”

That is a profoundly dangerous way to approach a potentially lethal situation.

The unjust aggressor has no moral, ethical, or legal entitlement to threaten innocent people with death or serious bodily injury. Nor does an officer’s moral and professional responsibility to protect those people disappear simply because the aggressor refuses to cooperate.

What Is the Aggressor Communicating Through His Conduct?

Psychologists and communication researchers have long recognized that human communication extends well beyond spoken words. Conduct, positioning, gestures, and other observable behavior can communicate important information about a person’s intentions.

Consider the video in question.

When the officers arrive, what does the armed aggressor do?

He positions his ex-wife, whom he has taken hostage and refuses to release, between himself and the responding officers. In other words, he places another human being in the position of a human shield.

That is an enormously significant observable act.

It is not merely a failure to comply with police instructions. It is conduct that must be evaluated in the context of an armed hostage-taking situation.

What does that positioning tell us? At a minimum, it demonstrates that the aggressor is deliberately using the hostage’s physical presence to complicate the officers’ response and protect himself from their intervention.

That conduct must be taken seriously.

Likewise, when officers exit their vehicles, draw their firearms, and issue commands, those actions communicate the seriousness of the situation and the consequences of continuing to present an armed threat.

The aggressor can see the officers. He can observe their response.

Someone who genuinely intends to end the immediate danger has an opportunity to show that intention through observable compliance.

But what if he doesn’t?

What if he retains the firearm? What if he continues using the hostage as a human shield? What if his conduct continues to present an imminent threat to her life or the lives of the officers?

Feasibility

Feasibility matters. A warning that can reasonably be given without compromising the ability to protect innocent life is one thing. An inflexible demand for additional warnings when doing so would create an unreasonable risk to an innocent person’s life is something entirely different.

During my career at my former department, verbal warnings before using deadly force were required only where feasible.

That qualification was important. Feasible means capable of being accomplished under the circumstances. It does not mean that an officer must undertake an action regardless of whether it is practical, safe, or consistent with the immediate demands of the situation.

One of our best instructors during active-shooter training would position himself near a doorway so that responding recruits initially obtained a line of sight to his back.

If a recruit encountered him and issued a warning to drop his firearm rather than immediately addressing the simulated active-shooter threat, the instructor would briefly move into the room, return to the hallway, and place a paint-marking round in the center of the recruit’s face mask.

He would then explain the consequence of that decision.

Because the recruit had unnecessarily delayed, additional simulated victims had been killed. The recruit had also been taken out of the fight, and another officer would still have to resolve the threat that the recruit had failed to address.

It was an intentionally memorable lesson.

The point was not that warnings are inherently inappropriate. The point was that warnings must be evaluated in context. There are circumstances in which they are feasible and appropriate, and circumstances in which they can create an unacceptable delay.

A training program that fails to teach that distinction is doing its people a disservice.

Every Second of Continued Threatening Conduct Matters

A failure to act when action is required can surrender the initiative to the very person creating the danger.

Consider the sequence in this video.

From the moment the aggressor sees the officers arrive, his subsequent conduct becomes part of the totality of the circumstances.

He retains the firearm.

He refuses to release the hostage.

He positions her between himself and the officers.

He continues to present an armed threat.

These are not meaningless observations. They are facts that must be evaluated together.

The continued possession of that firearm in the context of an armed hostage-taking, coupled with conduct that maintains an imminent deadly force threat to another person’s life, demands action to stop the threat.

We must stop treating the passage of time as inherently evidence of progress toward a peaceful resolution.

Sometimes time is an opportunity for de-escalation. Sometimes it is an opportunity for the aggressor to continue controlling the situation, maintaining a lethal threat, and sometimes it is an opportunity for them to destroy innocents.

The distinction must be made through an objective assessment of what is actually happening.

The Moral Responsibility of Leadership

Another dimension of this discussion deserves equal attention: moral responsibility.

When someone accepts responsibility for protecting others, that responsibility carries weight.

A police officer has a professional and moral or ethical responsibility to protect the community. A husband and father has profound responsibilities toward his family.

None of those responsibilities grants unlimited authority to use force. The law still governs. Innocence, imminence, proportionality, reasonableness, and the applicable legal standards still matter.

But neither should those responsibilities become empty words when a genuine, imminent deadly-force threat materializes.

We should not confuse restraint with indecision, patience with paralysis, or de-escalation with endless repetition of ineffective commands.

We should not teach people to surrender their judgment to a formula that demands more words when the circumstances demand an immediate, reasoned response.

The unjust aggressor is responsible for his own criminal conduct. The innocent hostage is not responsible for it. And those entrusted with protecting innocent people must not lose sight of whose life is actually being threatened.

At first, I thought this was an excellent video to break down because it suggested she escaped out the front door and led him outside, away from her one-year-old daughter, into the driveway. However, after watching her chase him and hold on to him, it seems he’s not really throttling her as he could. If I were investigating this case, I’d dig deep into the suspect’s allegations to figure out what’s what.

He is leading her in the above screenshot. Initially, I thought this was a strong example of a basic truth: sometimes it’s easier to escape quickly than to stand toe-to-toe with someone bigger, faster, and stronger and try to duke it out. If a male is hell-bent on dominating a female, she’s going to get dominated 99% of the time, unless she has a firearm and the will to use it early enough to change the outcome. At fifteen, I fought two young men roughly my age and learned that day that the Tae Kwon Do advanced class that claimed to teach me how to fight two adversaries was pure BS. Unless you’re capable and willing to incapacitate those adversaries immediately, you’re soon going to find yourself in a very bad way. When you’re losing badly, i.e., being punched from both behind and in front at the same time, though, you may still escape to the side and grab a weapon to regain the initiative. In those days, nunchucks were a popular weapon. That was enough, and we all parted ways. That principle of escaping (i.e., think tactical withdrawal to escalate, or fill your hand with a tool to regain the initiative) later confirmed itself for me on a couple of occasions during my law enforcement career, against much bigger and stronger adversaries.

How are we defining winning? For a father or a mother, protecting their child doesn’t necessarily mean surviving. It means protecting the child. If we believe her story, which I’m now questioning, going outside created an imminent problem for him. Screaming and making this public means that if she has any alpha-male neighbors (as opposed to the betas), she may get the immediate assistance she needs. Either way, someone will hear or see the drama unfolding and call the police. The moment she crosses that threshold and makes it public, she starts a clock ticking and completes her mission: protect her one-year-old daughter. In light of her grave responsibility before God to protect her child, she has succeeded in her mission. That also means “bettering her position,” whether she lives or not. This better position isn’t about her; it’s for her child. Why? In law enforcement, we saw it play out over and over: when an unjust killing happens in a public place with potential witnesses, bad guys do not stand around waiting for applause. They suddenly have a long to-do list and very little time. They have to escape (distance is their friend), destroy evidence linking them to the scene, establish an alibi, and figure out where they’re going to lay low while they wait to see if they’re the primary suspect. They are busy, busy, busy for at least the next hour.

The left almost destroyed the word “guardian” for me. It’s madness to suggest that the police must be the guardians of everyone, including the unjust criminal aggressors who are initiating and maintaining imminent deadly threats. I detested that word in the law-enforcement context and preferred only “warrior.” Of course, as a Catholic I still love, respect, and honor my guardian angel, but I had a problem with the term when it was set against the word warrior.

Then I met Kyle Clement, a Catholic rancher, public speaker, and right-hand man to Father Chad Ripperger, at a retreat where we both gave talks. He began unpacking the appropriate uses of the two words and, more importantly, when we might act as a guardian versus a warrior. A police officer with a family is a warrior at work and a guardian off duty. The Guardian par excellence was St. Joseph, leading his family away from Herod’s slaughter of the innocents and off to Egypt. The Warrior par excellence was, is, and always will be Jesus, who was both Warrior and Guardian. As an aside: police are only guardians to bad guys once those bad guys have fully withdrawn any imminent threat of great bodily harm or death toward an innocent. Before that, police and bad guys are, in a sense, at war, and the only logical response to an unjust, imminent, deadly threat is to STOP IT.

The guardian of a family can be forced in an instant to become a warrior. An active-shooter event at a public venue where they have a line of sight on the shooter is one example. Even if their family is with them, this is not about taking material goods; the active shooter’s goal is stacking bodies, so the guardian transitions immediately to warrior until the shooter is stopped, then back to guardian. If they see a clean way to get their family out and have no line of sight, guardian remains the priority. Suppose they want to return after the family is safe and stop the shooter; good on them. In other words, prudence is required.

That brings us to the ordo amoris—or ordo caritatis, the order of charity. JD Vance brought this up in early 2025: “You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country. And then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.” Well said. If I have to choose between my family’s safety and my neighbor’s safety, my family wins every time. Why? Because for a Catholic who strives to follow what the Holy Roman Catholic Church has always taught, there is a right ordering to love: self-sacrificing, agape Christian love. Not a sentiment or a warm, fuzzy feeling. Love is a decision. Love is strong. Love is willing to go to a Cross, suffer, and die for the sake of the beloved. What are we willing to do? There is a right order to how we prioritize those decisions. That’s just me; you do you.

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.

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:

Tactical Anatomy Instructor Manual

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.

1. https://tacticalanatomy.com/the-soulis-incident-and-the-myth-of-center-mass/
   https://tacticalanatomy.com/center-mass-again-come-on-people-wake-up/
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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.