The Florida Conceal Carry Gun Owner Mindset

Knowing Violence, The Essential Key to Successful Lawful Self-Defense

Please go to the FGSD Article Intro page to read the main objective for this weekly article, my disclaimer, and to review the Four Rules for Safe Gun Handling, and introduction to this article. 

My hope is that you will find this article to be thought provoking enough to incentivize you to further your ability to know the law and to effectively run your gun in self-defense. To receive the full article in your email please consider becoming a paid subscriber at $6 per month or $60 per year on my Substack website FloridaGunSelfDefense.net. 

Today’s Lawful2Shoot? Focus:  The Florida Conceal Carry Gun Owner Mindset. The moment in which a lawful Floridian chooses to carry a concealed firearm they choose to embrace ‘violence’ with deadly force.  And the question is, when the time arrives where you choose to go to your gun will your act of self-defense violence be successful in saving your life and will it be lawful or unlawful?

There is a major difference between an unarmed person and one who is armed in that the armed person has assumed responsibility for the safety of others and themselves should they ever use their gun in defense against violence directed towards them.

It’s ok if there’s some lawful shooting going on as long as the right people get shot. Luck doesn’t produce this outcome, hard consistent work does. Every lawful armed individual should be physically and legally capable to shoot the right people i.e. the ones which unlawfully inflict deadly violence on lawful people.

The conceal carry gun owner’s life requires physical work to master the skills necessary to execute an act of violence when under extreme duress. The work required must expose your vulnerabilities and subsequent failures. For when it comes to overcoming violence with violence you’re only as good as the failures you have fixed. And the process of ‘fixing’ must occur in the same settings in which violence happens in real life. Shooting a ‘bad guy’ paper target every week will not suffice.

To determine your current level of ability to operate your gun to violently stop a violent threat against your life, you need to have learned what your own violent capabilities are. Do you know that you can pull the trigger when it’s time? Do you know when it will be the right time, every time? And do you know when it will not be the right time?

You’ve heard the expression I’m sure, that ‘Timing is Everything’. Well, I assure you when it comes to fighting violence with violence this expression could never be more true. Unintentional discharges occur when a gun owner is unsure of their physical ability in the moment of duress, in the heat of extreme violence imposed on them. And usually produces an unintended result, which most often results in the death of a person you mistakenly thought to be a deadly threat, or unintended victims down range. Both outcomes result due to not having mastered the physical ability to run a gun, and or not knowing the how to implement lawful violence effectively.

You certainly don’t want to ‘jump the gun’ and shoot when there wasn’t a real deadly threat. This type of mistake occurs because you didn’t have the physical discipline to maintain trigger control when your adrenalin was jacked sky high, and you were operating out of fear. And frankly I would argue that your fear was reasonable given that you did not have the proper training to prevail under the condition imposed on you, name that you believed a simple non-deadly threat appeared at the time to be deadly.  

Mistaking a non-deadly situation for a deadly situation is the most common reason law abiding people spend their lives in prison for murder, or for a lesser charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.

For most armed Floridians, their training starts by shooting one shot at a time, per gun range rules, slowly and methodically into paper targets. To be able to put all your shots in the bullseye is a good starting accomplishment. But you’ll need to advance your abilities.

Your shooting range might not permit what this article asserts as necessary training experience, but I’ll continue anyway for the purpose of your education. Most of the content can be implemented by dry fire.  

When you’ve advanced enough to know you can shoot rapid shots within a six-inch circle on more than one moving target while moving quickly in any direction, that experiential knowledge becomes the foundation for quick decisive tactical thinking under duress, thereby reducing mistakes which could result in much higher odds of your death, or your life in prison.

Therefore, physical knowledge of running your gun tactically in dozens of real-life scenarios should be your objective if you conceal carry a gun in the public domain. But until you advance to the level of experiential knowledge, at the very minimum you should be able to draw from the place of concealment, shoot two shots from the ‘low one-hand retention’ position, then two shots from the high two-hand retention position, followed by two more shots from the high two-hand traditional extended arms position. And you should be able to do a fairly quick reload and know what to do to clear a malfunction. And all six shots should be within the width of a human body from the pelvis to the shoulders.

I have talked to conceal-carry gun owners over the past twelve years and asked them how good they are at shooting when the time comes that have to shoot someone. I repeatedly heard replies similar to, “I feel good about my chances of stopping anyone when the time comes…...”. When I inquired about where they’d shoot their attacker, some said center mass, some said in the legs, and a few insisted they were good with head shots and that they’d only need one bullet.

I could write a book on the responses I’ve heard when I’ve made this statement-question, “So you’ve had a lot of experience shooting and you’re confident you can defend yourself with your gun, and put shots where you want them?”

I’d say after the twelve years of engaging in discussions that fifty percent do have more than basic elemental training and have shot moving prey when they hunted. And of range shooters, many of which are hunters and carry concealed, fifty percent again are persuaded they’d perform very good. The rest admit they are in the process of learning and desire to become better at knowing when to use their concealed gun and they expressed hope that they’d successfully get everything correct when the time comes.

Shooting at paper targets and becoming good at putting rounds in the bullseye produces a feeling that you could defend yourself successfully if you needed to do so. “I’m a good shot, I can carry now”, is often the thought and feeling a gun owner experiences before they choose to begin to conceal carry.

But there are individuals who carry concealed that believe it is better to be armed just in case rather than not be armed. Practice or no practice. They believe erring on the side of armed self-defense is everyone’s personal basic God-given right, and they are correct. However, I would argue there is a God-given responsibility to become proficient in ‘knowing’ how to accurately shoot in the moment of violence, and knowing the correct answer to, is it Lawfull2Shoot?