Author: James Williams

Last week: Friday, Feb. 3, 2017. Waupaca County Sheriff’s Deputy Clint Thobaden saved a life using training conducted on our SWAT Team years ago, and reinforced by ongoing training since then. Clint was my friend and colleague when I worked in the Waupaca County Hospital ER, and I had the honor of serving on the County SWAT Team with him.

Last Friday Dep. Thobaden responded to a call from neighboring Portage County to aid in intercepting a stolen car fleeing from police. He set up his squad vehicle at the county line, and soon the fleeing car appeared. He turned on his light bar, and as the suspect realized he was cornered the pursuing deputies executed a felony car stop just up the road from his position. Clint advanced his vehicle to render aid to his brother officers. 

Unbeknownst to the deputies, the fleeing felon had threatened suicide to friends and family during the pursuit. He refused to exit the vehicle when instructed to do so, took out a knife, and while horrified officers watched, sliced his neck open from the angle of his jaw to his trachea. Clint tells me that the bleeding was instantaneous and profuse, which strongly suggested the man had severed at least one major blood vessel in his neck. 

One of the Portage County deputies rushed forward, pulled the suspect from his vehicle, and applied direct pressure to the man’s neck with his hands. However, blood continued to flow freely from the wound. Clint recognized the signs of a major and possibly life-threatening hemorrhage, and rushed forward to assist with lifesaving equipment he carries on his person every time he suits up to go on patrol. 

Rewind the clock ten years, to a classroom on the upper floor of the Waupaca City Police building. A group of 25 or 30 members of the SWAT team were gathered there to learn Combat Lifesaver techniques from their SWAT Medical Officer, Dr. James Williams (yeah, that’s me). We had a pretty good time kidding around with each other as we put tourniquets on ourselves and each other, trained in techniques of needle thoracostomy using packages of vacuum-packed pork ribs, and so on. One of the techniques we discussed and mocked up was the use of synthetic clotting agents. Quikclot Combat Gauze, a relatively new product at the time, was one of the products I had on hand. I showed the Team some videos demonstrating the use of this product on anesthetized pigs that were hemorrhaging from major surgical wounds. The guys were pretty impressed. 

Our department didn’t have the money for “blowout kits” at that time, but many of the guys on the Team made up their own kits. The need for our Team to be prepared for the worst in the Hot Zone was manifestly obvious to us all. Basing his selections on recommendations I passed on from TCCC experts I had trained with, Clint, like many of our SWAT operators, took to carrying his lifesaver equipment on his person not just on SWAT ops, but whenever he was out on Patrol thereafter. That equipment was never required on any of the SWAT ops conducted during my tenure as Medical Officer with that Department, which ended in 2011 when I moved to Texas. 

Fast forward to last Friday night. 

Dep. Thobaden recognized the life-threatening nature of the suspect’s wound, as previously described. He sprinted forward to the bleeding suspect and the contact officer, retrieving his Combat Gauze from his pouch. He deployed the gauze as it was designed, stuffing it into the gaping wound in the suspect’s neck, then applying pressure on the gauze-stuffed wound with both hands. EMS personnel arrived shortly thereafter and secured the dressing per protocol, but by that time the bleeding had been stopped. 

The suspect was transported to the region’s nearest Level II Trauma Center, where trauma docs removed the dressing and found that the suspect had lacerated his carotid artery, which they then surgically repaired. 

The trauma docs told our guys in Portage and Waupaca Counties that without the effective application of Quikclot Combat Gauze, the suspect would have bled to death in minutes at the scene. In my experience as a certified trauma physician, I can only concur with the doc’s statement that “he would have bled out in less than 3 minutes” without the Combat Gauze.

That misguided and depressed young man is alive today thanks to Deputy Thobaden’s quick action, and has a shot at turning his life around, thanks to his willingness to prepare for such an eventuality by having lifesaving equipment on his person ready for deployment in a rapidly developing life-or-death situation. 

I was contacted by Sheriff Hardel and SWAT Team Captain Todd Rasmussen this morning, at which time they informed me of Clint’s lifesaving action. Better yet, they informed me they intend to equip every deputy in the County with a blowout kit modeled on Clint’s, so every man and woman on the force will be able to act to save a life if called upon to do so as Dep. Thobaden did last Friday. My hat is off to the command staff for taking this step! 

Here at Tactical Anatomy, we have been offering training in critical lifesaving skills for officers and civilians in the Hot Zone using proven TCCC doctrine for the past 10+ years. Several police departments have adopted this class as basic training for all their cops, most notably the Metro Nashville Police Department in TN, one of the pioneering agencies in this area.  Our Tactical Anatomy Combat Lifesaver class is POST-certified in several states, including MN, TN, and WI. But it is only one of many tactical first aid courses offered around the nation. There is truly no excuse for anyone, police or civilian, to remain ignorant of these techniques and equipment training.  

Do yourself a favor: whether you’re a cop or a concealed-carry private citizen, you owe it yourself to find a tactical combat lifesaver class in your area, lay your money down, and learn how YOU could save somebody. The life you save just might be your own!

As most of you probably know, I make my living as an Emergency Room physician. This fact defines me; not just as a physician, but also as a person. As much as I try to leave “the job” at the ED when I leave the hospital at the end of each shift, it remains a part of me. The ER doc in me comes out at unexpected times and unexpected places, often when folks around me least expect it, and without any conscious thought on my part. 

I’m not unique in this. Most ER docs I know who truly love this work and live their calling to Emergency Medicine are the same way. Which makes us pretty much a bunch of odd ducks. Doctors as a rule don’t fit in all that well with most of society, in part because we are a bunch of science nerds (you have to be, to succeed in the educational process), and in part because we know things that the rest of society doesn’t know. And I mean know, in the sense that we’ve lived through the ugly truth of those things in our clinical training and experience. 

But if all doctors in general are half a bubble off top dead center, ER docs are without a doubt a full bubble off, and then some. We don’t even fit in with other docs. How do I know this? Because they tell us so. Last week one of our hospitalists–an internal medicine specialist, a really nice guy, a really smart guy I enjoy working with–came down to the ED to see a patient I had worked up and needed admission to his ICU. At that moment we were slammed. All 12 rooms were full: a child screaming in one room as the lab tech tried to stick her for blood tests, a batshit crazy psychotic screaming in another room because I’d been too busy to order another dose of Haldol to put him back into La-La Land, nurses rushing down the hall to the Trauma bay to attend to a cardiac arrest we’d clawed back from the brink of oblivion, ambulance crews streaming in and out of the bay doors. And me, in dirty scrubs with blood and God knows what else on ’em, hammering away at a barely functional keyboard in an attempt to input the complexity of a patient’s case into the archaic EMR (electronic medical record) our hospital system bought back in the stone age and refuses to update because of the expense of doing so… in other words, it wasn’t an environment that most people would consider anything close to normal. 

But it actually was normal. 

That’s normal where I work, where I live and breathe. And it’s normal for the men and women like me who have chosen this specialty–or fell into this specialty, as I did. We do other non-normal stuff, too. For instance, as you probably know I got involved with TEMS many years ago, and eventually ended up wearing armor and toting a rifle on my county’s SWAT team. You don’t see many pediatricians or dermatologists following that career path. ER docs, however, seem to gravitate to it like flies to… well, let’s just leave that metaphor unfinished. But you know what I mean, if you know what I mean. 

Anyway, back to this encounter in my ED last week: my colleague looked around at the chaos of my Department and said, “You guys are really special, I could never do this”. I took a moment to consider whether he mean “special” in the sense of belonging on the short bus with the window-lickers, but decided he meant it in a good way.

“Thanks,” I said, and meant it. “You have to be something of a Cro-Magnon to work here, but once you get used to the saber toothed cats and giant cave bears, it feels like home.”

He laughed, and patted my shoulder with what might have been affection, or appreciation, or maybe because he thought he had to calm me down the way you calm down a pissed-off junkyard dog, and he backed out of the department at record speed.

But that’s how it is with us ER docs. Even if we come out of the department and attend meetings (we HATE meetings) the other docs smile and treat us the way you’d treat the aforementioned junkyard dog (“Nice doggie, good doggie, want a nice doggie treat, don’t bite me, okay?”). At social events like dinners and Christmas parties (assuming we even get invited!) it’s even worse.  I generally end up in the corner chatting with the security guards who feel just as ill at ease as I do. 

Which brings me to my friend Lamar, and the point of this blog. 

Lamar is an ER doc. And he’s a damn good one. He’s the medical director of our system’s busiest hospital and ED. Like me, he’s worked in the trenches long enough to be put in charge of a Department. Unlike me, he actually chose this specialty when he was still in med school, which by definition makes him even crazier than guys like me who fell into it after they started practice. 

Anyway, I was out fishing for speckled trout down the Laguna Madre with Lamar last week, and we got onto the topic of security in the ED. Which, if you’ve ever looked, is virtually nonexistent. Lamar confided that he is working on getting into a TEMS class that would put him on track to join a nearby Sheriff’s Office, but his real goal isn’t to practice tactical medicine (although he’d like that, you betcha!). His goal is to get his LE credential so he can carry a firearm when he’s at work. 

He doesn’t want to carry a firearm at work because he’s afraid. He wants to carry a firearm at work because like most of us he’s a guy who takes his personal security as his personal responsibility. But the law in Texas (and just about everywhere) prohibits carrying a firearm in a hospital unless you’re a LEO. So he wants to become a LEO for that express purpose. 

Now, I know a few docs who are active/part-time and/or retired LEOs who carry concealed firearms on the job. And they’d be crazy not to. Because the insanity of Gun Free Zone thinking is nowhere more evident than in hospital Emergency Departments. Think about that. The local ED has a large stock of narcotics, benzodiazepines, and other juicy drugs. Its doors are wide open, so the sick and injured can gain access to critical medical care. There is almost always at least one doped-up felon in the department being treated for injuries sustained while resisting arrest, or a prisoner from the local Crossbars Hotel being seen for a routine medical complaint, which tends to attract their friends and family like flies to, well, you know.  (Why does that metaphor keep popping up? Could it be that we just had a Code Brown here in the department, and the aroma will hang in the air for the next 10 hours thanks to the inadequate HVAC system apparently required by law in all ED’s?) And there is almost always nobody present with the means of resisting or countervailing an armed attacker who might want to steal our narcotics, or spring their buddy out of custody, etc, etc, etc. 

America’s ED’s are the front line of our trauma system, and the retail store-front for our medical system. In a minor disaster, such as a multi-victim MVA, the ED is quite literally the gateway to preserving lives that hang in the balance, and in a major disaster, such as a refinery explosion or a school fire, the ED is the focal point of an entire community’s response. Take out your community’s ED, and your community’s emergency response system shuts down. Not slows down; it shuts down cold. 

Yet America, in its dumbfuck politically-correct lawyer-bound risk-management gun-free-zone mentality, provides little or no security to these critical zones of care. Most ED’s have minimal or no physical security… they can’t even lock the doors to keep a bad guy out. Most ED’s in America are in smallish community hospitals, laboring under tight budgets, and they can’t afford to even have an unarmed security guard on hand 24/7. As for armed security? Don’t make me laugh! Even if it was available free of charge, most hospital administrators and risk managers would throw up their hands in horror if you suggested putting armed guards in their ED’s. I know of hospitals that have had gunfights break out in them, with armed gang members of one stripe blasting away at their rivals of the other stripe in the waiting room and parking lot while other injured gang members are being attended in the ED. And those hospitals STILL refuse to hire armed guards, or do anything to provide a safe and secure workplace for their docs and nurses and techs.

Because it would “send the wrong message to our community”.  

I had an incident about 10 or 12 years ago in another state where I came face to face with the grim side of this reality. It was on a sunny Sunday morning in July, about 0900. A great day to go fishing, or have a picnic, or do anything outdoors. The department was quiet, and I was sipping my second cup of coffee and catching up on signing charts. My triage nurse, a great guy named Clay, came back to the nursing station to tell me, “We have a problem out in the waiting room. You’d better take a look.” 

I went up front and peeked around the corner, and my heart sank. A tall 50-something man I knew well, a “frequent flier”, a big man with serious mental health issues, was in front of the desk, shouting disjointed gibberish and gesticulating wildly. In one hand he had a small heavy-duty satchel, something like a bowling-ball bag, and it clearly had something heavy in it. Call me paranoid if you like, but I was 99% certain that bag contained a handgun. Speaking of paranoid, the guy happened to be a known paranoid schizophrenic, and he was off his meds, a not-uncommon problem with people who depend on the VA for their psychiatric care; I knew this because I’d seen him 2 nights before, at which time he’d taken a swing at me before he left AMA. 

The man caught sight of me peeking around the corner, and his actions escalated dramatically. He began to hammer on the (thankfully heavy) glass and he began to scream he was going to kill us all.  I told Clay to grab a syringe with 10 mg of Haldol and 5 mg of Valium in it (that’s what we used at that time for such emergencies, but not what we use now… I use a waaaaaay better coctail now!) and in short order we entered the waiting room. I tried to distract the guy while Clay tried to circle around behind him to stick him in the butt with the sedative. No dice. This guy had his head on a swivel, and we did a long, slow, 3-way dance–circling counter-clockwise like Hurricane Katrina making her lazy way across the Gulf of Mexico– all the way out to the main entry foyer and then back to the ED without Clay ever getting a chance to stick him.

Two things you need to know here: First, the front desk clerk had hit “the panic button” early, which is supposed to bring every squad car in the city screaming to our location. When there was no response, one of the nurses called and learned that they were on their way, but by some weird circumstance all 4 cars on duty were on the other side of the river, and BOTH bridges in town were closed, one for construction, and the other due to wrecked semi which was blocking all 4 lanes. The squads were on the way, but they had to drive 10 miles south to the next bridge. So we were on our own for the next 15-20 minutes. Second thing: this guy was known to us as a violent man, a paranoid schizophrenic, and Viet Nam vet.

(If you want to strike terror into the heart of any ER doc in America, whisper in his/her ear, “There’s a paranoid Viet Nam vet off his meds in the lobby.”)

Anyway, Clay and I danced this guy back to the ED doors, at which point he told us he had a shit-load of rifles in his truck, and he was going out to get one, and then he was going to come back and blow us all to hell. He turned and bolted out the door into the parking lot. I wish I could tell you how frightened I was at that moment. Then Clay kicked me back into gear.

“You know what the top story on CNN is gonna be tonight?” he said, in a voice more like a croak than his usual pleasant baritone. “‘ER doc and nurse, fathers of seven children, gunned down by crazed Viet Nam vet.'”

Like I said, that kicked me back into gear. “No,” I said. “That’s not what the headlines will say. They’ll say, ‘ER doc and nurse defend their lives and ED from crazed Viet Nam vet, who was pronounced dead at the scene.'”

Clay turned to me, eyes wide. “Look,” I said, “This guy is probably not lying. He probably has rifles in his truck. And if he comes back with one, he will kill everybody here. But it doesn’t have to go that way.” 

“What?” Clay asked, but I saw the glimmer of hope in his eyes. 

“I shot a cowboy match yesterday,” I told him. “It ran late, so I didn’t have time to bring my guns into the house. I’ve got two rifles in the trunk of my car. I’m going to get one of them. If he starts to come back at us with a rifle in his hands, I’m going to defend myself. And if you want to, I’ll bring a rifle for you, too.”

Clay’s face began to color. “You’re damn right I want to,” he said firmly. 

“They’ll fire us,” I said simply. “The hospital will fire us, and we may even lose our licenses.”

“I don’t care,” he responded. “At least my children won’t grow up without their father.”

And that was that. I ran through the department and out the back door to the doctors’ parking lot, popped my trunk, and grabbed my two cased rifles. They weren’t black rifles, they weren’t even hunting rifles. They were Winchester Model 1892 lever rifles, one chambered in 45 Colt, the other in 357 Magnum. Both were legally “unloaded”; they had 10 rounds in the tube magazines, with an empty chamber. The ammo I use in Cowboy matches is full-power black powder loads, which means a flat-nose lead bullet loaded over a full charge of black powder, which was the authentic load used by “real” cowboys back in the 1800’s. Plenty of power to kill an attacker in 1892, and plenty still in 2002. 

I ran back to the doors and handed the cased 357 to Clay. We pulled our rifles out and jacked rounds into the chambers. My heart was hammering, and my mouth was dry. We didn’t say anything. We just stood on either side of the door, watching the man in the parking lot, who was less than 30 yards away, fumbling with a large ring of keys. He seemed to be having trouble opening the tailgate-topper of his truck. We could hear him shouting wildly even through the double glass doors. 

And then the cavalry rode up. Two squads with lights and sirens screamed into the parking lot, and in short order the officers had our boy in cuffs and in the backseat of one of the cars. Clay and I wasted no time in sliding the Winchesters back into their cases, and I slipped out back to put them in my trunk just as the supervising sergeant–who I knew well, of course–rolled up. His look told me he was damn near as scared and relieved as I was. He looked over the parking lot and confirmed that the situation was in hand, then strolled over to me and spoke softly.

“Hey, Doc, those things you were putting in your trunk, are they what I think they are?”  

I looked at him and nodded at Clay. “We figured we had no choice. I’m sure glad your boys arrived when they did.”

The sarge blew out his cheeks and shook his head. “Me, too, Doc. Me too. The other woulda been a lotta paperwork. A lotta paperwork.”

And then he put his hand on my shoulder, but not like my hospitalist colleague did last week. He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed in a way that said more than words could say, in a language that warriors all know. And that was that. Nobody got shot, nobody got killed, and we all went home at the end of the shift. Well, except the Viet Nam vet, who went to the psychiatric hospital. Which was probably the closest thing to home he knows, so I guess we really all did go home after all.

As it turned out, the deranged man had a truckload of rifles and shotguns, mostly AR’s, and all of them locked and loaded. There is no doubt he came prepared for the war he had never managed to leave behind in southeast Asia. 

The situation could have gone a lot differently. Clay’s imagined CNN headline might well have happened, if the cops hadn’t arrived on time, and if I hadn’t serendipitously forgotten to take the rifles out of my car when I got home from the previous day’s Cowboy match. But because of the idiots in charge of our hospital, idiots who think that guns are bad and visible security sends “the wrong message” to the community, we came within a whisker of being cheerfully sacrificed on the altar of Almighty Political Correctness and Risk Management.

Lest you think this was a one-off situation, let me disabuse you of that notion. ED staff are assaulted and injured in America with depressing regularity, and we are threatened many, many times every day. All because of the risk managers’ mindset that we “must not offend the community”.  

This idiotic do-not-offend mentality is insane. We put armed guards in our capitols, in our banks, in our securities houses. Armed guards patrol gated communities, industrial complexes, shopping malls. We sanction the use of armed guards to protect these things, because we recognize they are precious, and they are vulnerable to predators. Yet we do not provide armed security to our most vulnerable: our children in their schools, and our sick and infirm in our hospitals. The shooting by the ISIS-wannabe-nutjob in Ft. Lauderdale the past weekend would never have happened if armed security personnel were posted in adequate numbers in our airports. 

Are our children, our hospitals, our clinics and places of healing not at least as precious as our stocks and bonds and piles of gold bullion? If not, then what IS precious in America?

When is America going to wake up? It’s time to take the sheepdogs off the leash and let them do what they do best. America could be the safest country in the world in short order if we would simply use the tools that are at hand: trained men and women who are warriors at heart and background, but who serve as helpers, teachers, healers in their current life. But the risk managers don’t think we can be trusted with that. They don’t think we are worthy of protecting. Not yet, anyway.  

In the meantime, guys like Lamar will quietly take their own route to securing themselves and their staff and patients. There are a lot of docs like Lamar. I thank God for them. They may not fit in with the other docs in the hospitals and clinics of America, but I think that’s a good thing. Because they are quite literally the last line of defense against true chaos. 

My good friend Eric, who I refer to in this blog as Bluedreaux, is a kind, polite, gentle, and thoughtful man. He brought this article (click on the link at the bottom of this blog entry) to my attention.

Bluedreaux is a guy who thinks a lot. He comes up with different ways of looking at things, and I appreciate that about him. But he’s also a practical man. And he is also a violent man at times. 

You see, violence is part of Bluedreaux’s job. He is a police officer. Like all cops, he’s learned how to employ violence to bring people who choose to act in violation of Society’s laws back inside the bounds of those laws. He does so at Society’s behest, with Society’s permission; in fact, he is obligated to do so!

The idea that violence is sometimes necessary to the preservation of one’s life or the preservation of social order is ancient. NO society that has ever survived long enough to have records of its existence has ever pretended otherwise. But we have a growing sentiment in America (and to a lesser degree, western Europe as well) that pretends to believe that violence is always bad.  

This alarms me. For people to actually believe such a thing, they have to commit the most incredible contortions of logic and understanding I can possibly imagine. Yet they are doing it, in increasing numbers, and their viewpoint has become a serious factor in social discourse in our day and age. 

Now, my regular readers (all 3 of you, thanks for that!) know that I am a physician. My training and temperament, unlike Bluedreaux’s, are not geared toward rapid deployment of force or violence when a difficult situation arises. (And believe me, such situations are not uncommon in the ER!) My first instinct in such a situation is to try to de-escalate the situation as rapidly as possible so we can make sure that people who need care can get it in a timely manner. Almost all the time that works. But sometimes it doesn’t, and in those circumstances, I call the police to settle it down. 

But if the police can’t get there before some bad stuff is going down, I will not stand down nor run away. If my people are at risk, I have to act in my (and their) own defense. I once had to fetch a loaded rifle from my car and bring it into the ER–thank God I didn’t have to use it, but if the situation had devolved as I felt it was likely to, it was either send rounds downrange or die. Fortunately,  none of my staff mentioned my action to the Corporate Pukes who ran that hospital, or I’d likely have been fired and God knows what other bad things might have happened (even though at the time I was a sheriff’s deputy, you never know with Corporate Pukes!)  But my staff made it clear that they appreciated my willingness to face the wrath of the CP’s in defense of their lives, so that was nice… but truth to tell, I could not have done otherwise and continued to look at my face in the mirror every morning. 

Violence–or the threat of violence, the willingness to use violence–is not always the answer. But sometimes it is the only answer. And when it is the only answer, no other answer will serve. 

 

http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2011/03/violence-is-golden/

Greetings from the surface of the sun! Well, maybe not exactly, but late July and most of August in west Texas feels like it could be… 

So, in my Kit-Derp blog a while back I promised to write about the whole competitive shooting vs tactical training issue. Looks like it’s still pretty much a hot topic, judging by the bullshit being spouted by internet ninjas on various websites lately! Not to mention what I hear from cops I hang out with here and there. 

Speaking of hanging out… I have to say my choice of people to hang out with lately has been gravitating toward a very different demographic… they’re not just folks who like to shoot guns, but people who like to shoot who also like to fly airplanes (they’re called pilots).  Part of the reason I think I like hangin’ with pilots is that the bullshit level is REALLLLLLLLY low. And I’ve concluded that part of the reason for that is that you can’t become a pilot by reading books and magazines and by hangin’ out on the internet. You actually have to DO stuff. Stuff that’s pretty hard to do, that requires critical thought, coordination, planning, and expenditure of your hard-earned cash. And after you do all that stuff, you actually have to PROVE IT. You have to pass a series of really difficult examinations to demonstrate that you can actually fly an airplane competently, safely, and not kill yourself or your examiner. 

Funny thing: having to do all that stuff seems to reduce the Idiot and Bullshit Factor  (which I will hereafter refer to as the IBF) by about 99% in any discussion I’ve had with pilots, not just on the internet, but also in Real Life.

Now, I’m not saying that we should have a federal regulatory body like the FAA to regulate all gun owners and firearms users… but if we did, I expect the IBF would go waaaaaaaaaaaay down on internet firearms discussion boards!

But to get serious for a moment here, there is a parallel to this pilot competency reducing IBF in the shooting world as well, but among my tactical friends it’s not recognized very well. It’s called competitive shooting. 

“Nonsense!” my tactard acquaintances bark, puffing out their kevlar-clad chests. “If you shoot competition, you’ll do that same stuff in a real fight and get yourself killed!”

Uh-huh. I see that happen all the time, folks.

NOT!!

Despite the fact that I hear this criticism almost every time the competition discussion comes up, I’ve never once seen a tactical shooter get into a jam because he did something stupid in a real fight that he’d learned in competition. On the other hand, I have seen (and heard of even more) cases where a tactical operator made a blunder in the Hot Zone because he had a training deficiency and/or an equipment malfunction that could have been eliminated easily by regular shooting “under pressure” (i.e., shooting in competition). 

Here’s a short list of things that competitive shooting will do for you as a shooter:

1. It will make you shoot more.  Totally true, bro. If for no other reason than to avoid looking like an idiot in front of “civilians”, everybody who shoots competitively practices more. Maybe not regularly, but 3 or 4 days before the match you’ve committed to, you’ll drive out to the range to put a couple boxes of ammo thru paper just to shake the cobwebs out. If you do that, even if it’s only 4 matches a year, you’ll likely double the round count of the average cop in America.  And guess what? Shooting more is good for your competency with your firearms!

2. It will make you shoot faster and more accurately.  Nobody who ever got into a gunfight said, “Man I wish I’d been slower and more inaccurate when I returned fire on that wannabe cop-killer.” And while folks sometimes quote Bill Jordan’s “Speed is fine, but accuracy is final,” quip. Which is true, but remember that he was the guy who could put a bullet in the bull in 0.27 seconds! Listen up: the guy who shoots fastest and most accurately wins every match. EVERY MATCH. Even if you don’t want to win the match, the atmosphere of competition rubs off on everyone, and so everyone strives for faster, more accurate shooting. You can’t help it… it just rubs off on you! And when you couple this desire to be faster and more accurate, guess what? You will actually get faster, and more accurate.  Which means that if you ever get caught up in a gunfight–God forbid, you should strive to be in an Officer Involved Shooting, not a gunfight, every time–you’ll default to your baseline level of training, which will be faster and more accurate than it was before you got into competitive shooting. 

3. It will make you “one with your gun”.  Shooting in competition trains you to deal with gun-pukes under stress. Listen, if your gun malfs when you’re out plinking with your buddy on the back 40, you can say to hell with it, throw the thing in the bed of your pickup and get out another gun to play with. In a gunfight, not so much. And ditto in competition. Example: I took my Remington 11-87 tactical shotgun to a 3-gun match one time and it “larned me a lesson”. The ammo I’d brought was the new low-recoil stuff my agency had just issued us. I loaded up and started runnin’ and gunnin’ with my pistol, then my rifle; I was smokin’ the targets and feelin’ fine. Then I picked up my shotgun, chambered a round, nailed the first target, and had a jam. Wham-bam, I cleared it, fired again, and it jammed again… the gas generated by the low-recoil shells wasn’t sufficient to cycle the action fully, and I was stuck with a single-shot shotgun, and 6 more shotgun targets remained! What did I do? I dealt with it! After each shot, I rolled the shotgun, cleared the stovepiped case, manually loaded a fresh shell, blasted the target, rolled the shotgun, cleared the stovepiped case, etc. When I was done, I had cleaned all 8 targets with 8 shots, and my time was still faster than some of the guys in that match. (Needless to say, I switched back to regular shotgun loads after that stage!) Talking with my buddies after that stage was done, we were all asking ourselves what might have happened if we took that ammo in our shotguns on a hot entry? Can you imagine the pucker factor, trying to clear that jam in a narrow hallway with bullets flying at you? My point is this: every gun is capable of puking, and they tend to do it when you really need them not to. If you learn how to deal with gun-pukes under the stress of competition, you’re far more likely to be able to deal with a gun-puke in the middle of a firefight. 

4. It’s a great way to make sure your kit works.   Most tactical guys who refuse  competition will sooner or later give me this line: “That’s game-gun gear. I use real-world gun gear.” Well, duh, Fred Flintsone! There’s nothing in the rule book that says you can’t shoot with your duty rig. One sport, IDPA by name, has a special category for cops who shoot their duty rig in matches, and I’ve seen guys in both 3-Gun and IDPA matches do it! When I shoot a 3-gun match, I usually use the same guns I carried on duty, set up the way I carried them when I wore a SWAT uniform.  I wear a chest-rig that duplicates the magazine placement of my tactical armor vest. I’ve even shot a couple matches in full SWAT gear. And by doing so, I learned in a hurry what kit and which modifications were good, which were bad, and which were going to get folks killed. A couple of these lessons I learned were passed on to the other cops on my SWAT team, and after they tried them out, they spread to the entire department. 

There’s more, but I won’t labor the point any further. 

Here’s the take-home message, boys and girls: people who do real stuff in real time when there’s real consequences on the line tend to learn very quickly what is IBF versus what truly works. It applies to FAA-certified pilots, and it applies to firearms professionals. The Derp-addicted wannabe’s will never get this. 

Do yourself a favor: if you haven’t tried competitive shooting, give it a shot. You won’t lose anything, and you just might gain a whole lot of knowledge, experience, and competency. It’s a win-win!

Last week I shared a post on Facebook by Massad Ayoob in which he stated that your choice of defensive handgun caliber does matter.  I strongly agree with Mas on this, and said so, which caused heads to explode all over the interweb… so as promised, here’s the full explanation.

First, this is what I have been saying in my lectures/classes/training (and in my book) for 16 years: “If you are putting your bullets into your adversary’s critical anatomy, it doesn’t matter whether you’re shooting a 9mm or a 45.”  This is NOT THE SAME THING as saying, “a 9mm is as good as a .45 any day, any way,” which some people claim I have said.

I’ll tell you how this misunderstanding came about.

In the late 90’s, most PD’s were transitioning from 9mm handguns to .40 caliber or even .45 caliber. The thought process was that bigger had to be better, because the results in officer-involved shootings with 9mm handguns were so appallingly poor. Rather than blame bad shooting–which comes from bad training–these departments blamed the 9mm cartridge, and hoped to fix the problem by changing hardware. Such thinking is sheer lunacy, and the results have been predictably poor! 

I have always maintained–and the data bear me out–that the caliber you shoot the bad guy with is far less important than what part of the bad guy you shoot. Shot placement trumps caliber, when we’re talking about service caliber handguns. Rather than investing in new guns chambered for a bigger cartridge, I have continually advised PD’s (and civilians) to invest their money in better training so that the guns and bullets you’ve already paid for will be more effective. Unfortunately, the general mentality among PD’s and most gun-carrying civilians fails to acknowledge the need for good training.

In other words: if you are highly and effectively trained, it doesn’t matter a whole lot what caliber of handgun you’re required to carry for duty or personal use. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of people have ignored the first half of that statement: “if you are highly and effectivley trained…” The corollary is this: if you are lazy and untrained, your performance in a gunfight will suck no matter what caliber you’re using.

Anyways, the upshot of all this nonsense is that now we have folks saying that the experts (which apparently includes me) say there’s no difference between a 9mm and a 45 ACP bullet/handgun. Which is a huge misrepresentation of the case!

Look:  there are very real differences between the more powerful handgun calibers and guns and their less powerful brethren, and if you ignore those differences, you may do so at your peril. It is simply nonsense to say that a 9mm is equivalent to a 45 ACP, or vice versa. The physics alone should tell you that. And there are significant differences in performance between them which are very real.

For example, I have known for years that, generally speaking, a heavier .45 caliber bullet will perform much better than a lighter caliber/bullet after passing through a hard intermediate barrier than will a lighter 9mm bullet. The greater momentum of the heavier 230 gr bullet, among other things, is the main reason for this performance difference. This is one of the reasons I hunt deer, feral hogs, coyotes, and other critters with a .45 caliber handgun: they punch through hair & hide better than lighter, smaller bullets. I’ve proven it to my satisfaction on game, and on the firing range, shooting water jugs through windshields, and paper targets through automobile doors and windows in law enforcement firearms training.  And I’ve seen it demonstrated by ballistics experts in the lab, too.

A few years ago I was at the annual SOTA (Special Operations Training Association)  conference in Minnesota. Federal/ATK had sent their ballistics testing guru, Johann Boda, to offer a class in ballistics testing, and the conference organizers asked me to sit in as adjunct instructor. We had a lot of fun busting caps into gelatin blocks, and more than a few eyebrows were raised by some of the results. (Just as an aside, I refuse to recommend any 380 ACP pistol at any time for personal defense, largely on the basis of the appalling performance of EVERY factory round I’ve ever tested, and all of those we ran in that class.)  We shot gelatin blocks under all manner of circumstances that day, including intermediate barrier tests. By the end of the day, it was readily apparent that while some smaller caliber bullets will pass through tough intermediate barriers and still do the necessary ballistic work on a gelatin block on the other side, all .45 caliber projectiles tested (200 gr and 230 gr) performed to the FBI standard every time.

This is a very real difference in performance, my friends. It’s not made-up internet mall ninja bullshit. It’s real, it’s verifiable, it’s reproducible. But the crucial question that begs for an answer is this: will it make a difference to you should you get into a real-world deadly force situation?

And that, my friends, is anybody’s guess.

Because, as a friend of mine who has been to “the dance” more than a few times, you get the gunfight you get, not the gunfight you’d like to have. You have to fight with what you’ve got, no more, and hopefully no less.  

There are obvious advantages to carrying a 9mm pistol rather than a 45 caliber pistol. A small 9mm pistol can be really, really small, and really, really concealable. My teeny-weeny 9mm “always” gun is a Kahr PM9, which is so small and light I don’t even pay attention to it, the same way I don’t pay attention to my belt or my shoes after I put them on in the morning. Also, the 9mm will hold more rounds in the same weight/size gun as a larger caliber pistol, which means you can fire more times without reloading if necessary. This won’t matter in the “average” defensive shooting, which supposedly involves one good guy, one bad buy, fewer than 5 bullets, and elapses in about 3-5 seconds. Under such circumstances,  just about any ol’ gun will do. The problem is that in this day, the age of terrorist action,  the likelihood of having to defend against multiple assailants, at variable distances, with the possibility of having to fight through intermediate barriers, is a lot higher than it used to be. So most of us are making the decision to carry something better suited to a complex tactical situation than a 5-shot pocket revolver.

Whether you choose a hi-cap 9mm, a single-stack 1911, or something else in between (or outside the box entirely!) is, in the year of our Lord 2016 in America entirely up to you. It’s up to you to know the strengths and weaknesses of any weapon system or ammunition you might choose to carry, and since it’s your life on the line should the flag go up, I strongly urge you to study hard and choose wisely. Pick a platform that works for your real or anticipated mission profile, then train to use that platform/system to the highest standard of proficiency. Whether it’s 9mm, 40 S&W, or 45 ACP, take your pick and live with it.  

So let’s recap.

The most important weapon you have is your defensive mindset. Second priority is to ensure you’re trained to a level of at least conscious competence with your chosen defensive weapon(s). Choice of weapon and caliber is your third priority.

The first and second priorities boil down to training. You need to be trained at the beginning of your defensive life, and you need periodic retraining to stay current & proficient. Know the circumstances under which you might anticipate an attack, and have a pre-planned defense in place to meet it. Know your adversary’s vital target anatomy, so you know where to place your bullets. And be proficient with your firearms, so you can reliably place your bullets where they count.

Only after these priority challenges have been met should you concern yourself with what firearm, caliber, or ammunition you will carry.  

 

 

 

 

 

Unbelievable. 

Apparently there is some mall-ninja bad-ass-wannabe out there in cyberland, tapping away at  his keyboard in his Mommy’s basement, making claims that snipers should deliberately target the kidneys of their targets. I’ve run across references to this claim here and there, but this morning I was blown away by the following email:

Dr. Williams:

I am a nursing student  and one of my assignments is to explain why a sniper would want to shoot the kidneys (keeping the focus on the short term). My research has revealed that hemorrhage and pain are the major reasons to target the kidneys directly, with cavitation of the abdominal cavity as a secondary effect. If you have any input on the matter it would be greatly appreciated.

J.A.

Yep. That’s a real email. Somebody actually sent that to me. I won’t print the writer’s name, in case he isn’t just some internet whack-job, but is actually a real nursing student who is honestly seeking knowledge. But I will print my reply to this young seeker of knowledge:

J.A.:

I have no idea who would advise making the kidneys a target for snipers. It makes no physiological or tactical sense whatsoever, and as such I suspect it’s a fiction made up by poseurs who have little or no tactical training and almost certainly no actual killing experience, either animal or human. 

Military snipers train to incapacitate their targets with a single shot. Incapacitation on the battlefield is highly congruent with rapid death of the target. Centerfire rifle bullets are designed to produce incapacitating injury as quickly as possible. Incapacitation by GSW entails putting the bullet into the primary or secondary target anatomy. The primary target is the CNS, and the secondary target is the cardiovascular system that supports the CNS. The kidneys are part of neither. The kidneys are small, deep in the body, and in anatomic locations that medically-untrained snipers would have significant difficulty visualizing in the 3D human body. As such, deliberately targeting the kidneys is so far from practicable I actually laughed out loud in disbelief when I first read your email. 

Let me be perfectly clear: shooting an enemy combatant anywhere other than the CNS/CV bundle target zones would be, first, a failure to fulfill the tactical mission (incapacitate your target asap), and second, wanton cruelty. This is at best comic-book mall-ninja material, and should be rejected out of hand. 

I strongly urge you to tell whoever gave you this “assignment” that it is nonsense and should be rejected as complete and utter bovine excrement.

Sincerely, etc. 

Now, I do not believe that J.A. is actually a nursing student, nor that s/he was given this assignment by an instructor. I expect that in most non-violent gun-free-zone universities in the USA today, giving such an assignment would get an instructor shit-canned by the Dean of Faculty in record time.

But since there are untrained wannabes running around the internet advocating “the kidney shot” as a legitimate tool for the tactical toolbox, let me underscore my letter, above, once again:  THIS IS UTTER BULLSHIT.

J.A., tell your pals to buy a copy of my book and read it. If you have any questions when you’ve done that, I strongly urge you to go down to your nearest U.S.M.C. recruiting office and enlist. Complete a 4-year tour of duty, and when you get back home if you have any further questions feel free to come to one of my classes and ask me face to face. Until then, stop propagating bullshit.   

Over the past 17-18 years or so I have been a member of more than a few internet gun forums. As an active recreational shooter, hunter, and part-time police officer, I quickly learned that the majority of the people who post on these forums have little or no practical experience in shooting, hunting, or police work. Apparently I was not alone. Within a few years better internet sites popped up that either had a highly critical membership that verbally beat the shit out of the stupid folks, or restricted membership to folks with some real-world credibility that could be verified by other real-world folks. 

But a lot of these high-end end-user sites didn’t last. I was really, really disappointed when Hilton Yam’s 10-8forums.com closed up shop, as the most prominent example. It was obvious why these closures occurred: the high-quality end users are mostly too busy doing real life shooting, hunting, and policing to be online several hours every day.

The reason some gun boards–like AR15.com, AccurateReloading.com, and 24Hourccampfire.com–thriving is equally obvious: a lot of people are using them. Not just to exchange information. No, no: contrary to the intent of the people who invented it, the internet is not about exchanging information. It’s about posting pictures of guns and cats, and getting into pissing matches over things that may or may not be important in the Real World. 

You see, what keeps internet gun forums going is “hits”… users open pages, write posts in response to other posts, piss on other posters’ posts, and so on. Every hit is recorded, and this translates into what, in ancient times when information was printed on paper and sold on the streets in newspapers, used to be called “circulation”. Circulation drives advertising revenue, and advertising revenue is what keeps websites up and thriving.

Capitalism at work, my friends. 

Which brings me to the point of this blog entry. 

In the past year or so I joined what was supposed to be a fairly stout forum for people who do real-world tactical stuff. I have to admit that I stopped going there after a few weeks, because it was getting little use. But I “liked” their Facebook page, and I get several updates from this site every day. And most of these updates aren’t worth the pixels used to post them, I’m sad to say. 

I don’t think the main Forum would have survived, except that the Facebook side of it generates lots and lots of pissing matches. They’re polite pissing matches, which is refreshing, but they’re still pissing matches. 

Case in point: I got sucked into replying to a thread on the Facebook side started by a guy who’s having problems with his red dot sight because he’s developed astigmatism, a problem many of us deal with. He was asking if there were other sights out there that had “better” red dots than his Aimpoint T1. I saw a lot of posts supporting the Aimpoint T2, but also a couple other RD sights like Vortex, and so on. In other words, the focus was on kit, not training/experience.

Now, I’ve wrestled with astigmatism my whole life, so I get this guy’s problem, big time. And I decided out of the goodness of my heart I would share my experience of late. I said he might want to look at a RD sight that could be switched off to allow use of a non-illuminated reticle at the touch of a finger. I used the example that had worked for me, a Burris Fullfield 1-4X scope with an easy on/off RD feature. I shared my experience in using this sight in 3-Gun competition, using it on my daily-driver M4 (the same gun I carried on SWAT ops for several years, with an Aimpoint Comp3 + LaRue magnifier). 

The reply I received was: “Not a game gun.”

Well, slap my ass and call me Sally. I done got told, didn’t I? 

I guess there’s no way to politelly tell the guy that my M4, with one or the other of these 2 sighting systems, has been through roughly 15,000 rounds of practice, range training, and actual tactical shooting, and that these astigmatic eyes of mine have overcome the problems of astigmatism for more decades than he’s been alive. I guess it’s more important to chew the fat over what latest piece of kit is the best “new” option for the switched-on tactical gunner. And there’s no way I am ever going to convince 95% of the “tactical” guys out there that competition is essential training. (I’ll address this concept in a later blog entry.)

So I decided to delete my hastily-written retort and moved on.

But there’s a lesson here that may be of some use to the folks who follow my Tactical Anatomy blog. And I’m not talking about the lesson that it’s pointless trying to talk about real-world tactical shooting with Equipment Junkies on the internet, as it’s equivalent to trying to teach a pig to sing.

No, the lesson is simply this: you need to shoot your Real Life guns. You need to shoot them a lot. You need to shoot them with all the sights, accessories, and other kit you think will be cool to have on your guns. And you need to shoot them under high-stress non-optimal training conditions to find out if they will work when you’re in a non-optimal shooting environment.  

My primary “tactical” M4 isn’t a sexy uber-cool rifle. It’s an out-of-the-box Smith & Wesson M&P M4 that I acquired 7 or 8 years ago, which has had some minor gunsmith tuning done to its action, but is otherwise box-stock. I actually have a new, sexy, uber-cool carbine in my safe, but it hasn’t been through the grinder that my primary rifle has been through, so I don’t reach for it when I want my most reliable fighting rifle.

I reach for my M&P because it’s got something like 15,000 rounds through it under conditions ranging from great to goatfuck ugly, and it always works. ALWAYS. It’s gone through a half-dozen HRC (high round count) carbine classes of 2-4 days duration without puking on me once. The sight systems on it (AimPoint Comp3 in LaRue QD mount, LaRue magnifier in LaRue tip-off QD mount, and Burris Fullfield in LaRue QD mount, plus the Troy Industries BUIS) have survived those same classes without puking even  once. In the past 4 years, I’ve used the Burris scope for 3-gun training and shooting when I’m shooting matches that require more shots out past 50 yards,  and on the shorter courses I switch back to the Aimpoint. Sometimes. The non-illuminated black reticle on the Burris is much easier on my astigmatic eyes for nailing steel plates at 300+ yards, and for precision head shots on deer at 100-150 yards, but the point  is, I’ve shot my primary rifle with both systems THOUSANDS OF TIMES under stressful training and competition conditions,  and I know that they will absolutely always work.

Real-life trigger time counts, kids. One of the deadliest tactical riflemen I’ve ever shot with was an old fart from Indiana who brought an iron-sighted Marlin .30-30 lever rifle to a tactical carbine class. Yes, he was a cop. Yes, he carried that levergun in his squad on duty. Yes, he had shot real people with it. And yes, he not only kept up with the rest of us in that tactical rifle class, he waxed most of our tails. 

It ain’t what rifle you pick, kids. It’s how good you are with it that counts. 

 

And the only way you’ll get that good is by shooting it. With real ammo, in real conditions. In the rain. In the mud. In the wind and the dust. Thousands and thousand of rounds.

 Yet I am constantly confronted by people who have kindergarten-level shooting experience, on the internet and at matches, too, who will pooh-pooh my experience, or that of other men who’ve BTDT so much that we’ve forgotten most of it. These derps are infinitely more obsessed with having the latest kit than they are on practical experience. And I sincerely hope that these guys’ derpitude doesn’t get themselves or some other good guy killed when that latest bit of untested tacticool kit pukes on them in a really-o and truly-o SHTF gunfight. 

The best way to get that kind of experience with your primary rifle and handgun is to take some tough carbine classes. I strongly recommend Pat Rodgers’ Carbine Operator class, and there are great classes taught by Paul Howe, Henk Iversen, Hilton Yam, Tim Lau, Tom Givens, and many others; there are many other good ones out there. If you take your primary weapons to one of these 3-day classes, you’ll put 2000+ rounds of ammo through them, and by the end of TD-3 you’ll know if your kit is GTG, or if it’s derp. Then take your fighting weapons to competitive matches to keep up the skills you’ve learned in your carbine class. Take a carbine fighting class at least once every 2-3 years. Instead of spending money on new guns and useless shit, spend it on ammo/reloading compenents and on good training courses. 

So, I’m done spitting nails.  My point is simple: test your kit under tough conditions. Shoot a LOT of rounds with your kit. If you’ve got less than 1000 rounds through your primary rifle as it is currently set up, in my opinion your rifle is not proven. And “not proven” means it may well puke on you when your life is on the line.

 

As some of my readers may know, I was a schoolteacher before I became a doctor. And before I was a schoolteacher, I earned a degree in Zoology (a science), and before that, I was pretty much a science nerd my whole life. Makes sense, as my dad and his brothers are all engineers and construction types, guys who like to measure and cut and  fabricate and do it the right way, so that stuff doesn’t fall apart. 

Making stuff that doesn’t fall apart requires science. So does healing people. In fact, the entire fabric of modern civilization is founded on a huge and incredibly solid foundation of scientific knowledge, and its continued progress is quietly advanced by millions of people working to advance technology through the application of science. 

Nations such as China, Singapore, Russia, Germany (well, most of Europe, really) seem to understand this and they stress science education in their education systems from primary grades onward. Kids who do well in scientific disciplines in elementary school advance to special middle schools where they get further education and then they move on to the highest level of secondary education, where science (and math, the primary partner of science) is strongly emphasized. These nations have decided that their national interests, including their economic well-being, depends upon having a large population of persons who understand science. 

Not so in the United States. Science education prior to college in this country is sadly lacking, and it’s getting worse. 

Compared to our neighbor to the north, Canada, our high school science curriculums are pathetic. Canadian students have to complete three years of science class just to get a basic high school diploma. If they want to attend university, they need more than that. If they want to study engineering or sciences at university, they need at least 5 year-long science classes, and many kids will have 9 or more credits in biology, chemistry, and physics at the very least. 

American kids have to obtain 3 credits, if that. And the quality of the classes is almost comical. Let’s take chemistry for an example. (I taught chemistry at the high school level in Canada for 8 years, so it’s the subject I’m most familiar with.)  When my kids were in high school in Wisconsin, I reviewed the courses available to them. I was amazed to see that the Chemistry subject material being taught at the highest level was equivalent to what Canadian kids learn in 10th grade. And I know from my training that Canadian kids’ science education is about a year behind that of kids in European schools. And I understand from my teacher  colleagues that this applies to Biology and Physics as well. 

Think about it: this means that American high school graduates are 3 full years behind their European counterparts in the sciences. 

Let’s take it one depressing step farther: I was an adjunct insructor at a Midwest college for a couple years, teaching Pharmacology. This was supposed to be a 3rd-year level class, which means the kids taking it had to have at least 3 credits in sciences already, at least one of which was freshman Chemistry. I had to “dumb it down” for these kids as they did not have Organic Chem or Biochem background; nonetheless, I was amazed to find that most of my students had only a vague grasp of such fundamental concepts as hydrogen bonding, electron valences, and polarity, let alone more advanced (and necessary!) concepts such as chirality!

I concluded long ago that Americans are in large part scientifically illiterate. And it’s only going to get worse. 

The current Anthropogenic Global Warming hysteria is a classic example. The only reason this absurd hoax has gained a toehold in our collective consciousness is that Americans are simultaneously addicted to the greatest swarm of electronic “information” propagation in history (mainstream media and social media) while simultaneously being almost completely clueless about the fundamentals of science. 

Dr. Patrick Moore, a highly respected ecologist, gave a speech recently that I have posted on my Facebook page. In this short speech, Dr. Moore ripped back the curtain of obfuscation and lies perpetrated by the AGW alarmists and presented some very plain, very solid scientific facts that conclusively demonstrate that there is nothing whatsoever to worry about… except that the  powers that be may well wreck the global economy by buying into the lies. Dr. Moore just touches on the fact that the AGW hysteria could never have got off the ground if most Americans were not scientifically illiterate. 

As he points out, the popular view of ecology has gone from viewing mankind as an integral part of the global ecosystem to viewing our species as a blight on the planet which the planet would best be rid of. This is simply insane. If the people who believe this were in any way rational, they would immediately apply the logical solution to the problem and commit suicide. But they are not logical. Their eco-view isn’t based on science, it’s based on what they feel, what they believe. 

In other words, it’s become a religion. And apparently they want the rest of us, the ones who don’t believe as they do, to die first. 

Unfortunately, it may be too late to reverse this trend before disaster strikes. I am deeply concerned that this new anti-human religion is about to take a page out of the Koran and, following the examples of Islamist zealots, spawn a rash of ecoterrorism against the rest of humanity in the name of Gaia.

Troubling thoughts.  

 

I came across a meme on Facebook the other day that said, “Just checked, and I didn’t use algebra once today.”

The implication of this facile message is that algebra–and by extension, any subject you didn’t like when you were in school–was a pointless exercise, a useless time-waster, a needless instrument of torture that you were forced to endure by a cruel and unfeeling education system.

But nothing could be further from the truth!

In the first place, despite the fact that you didn’t notice it, you used the skills you learned in middle-school and high-school algebra dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times today.  I know, I know… you didn’t use a single x, y, or = sign, you didn’t solve a single quadratic equation, you didn’t follow a single identity equation to its logical conclusion even once. But that’s not the point. Multiple times today, you used the skills you learned in algebra unconsciously, because you were busy thinking about other things. And what you really learned in those tedious algebra classes was how to think.

I discovered this crucial fact in 1976, when I was in university. I had completed by B.Sc. degree in Zoology, and realizing that my degree was worthless in terms of finding gainful employment unless I went on to graduate school, I elected to take a second degree in Education. This entailed a single year at the time, which involved a year of Education classes that I thought were ridiculously easy at the time, and essentially worthless except that they would get me to my goal, i.e., a teaching certificate and a decent job. But after only a couple of days in class, I became fascinated by the process of how kids (and adults, to some degree) learn, and what the benefits of learning are.

To cut to the chase, algebra teaches kids incredibly useful skills that they need to function in a complex society. Among these are such essential skills as higher-order pattern recognition and the most critically important cognitive skill of all, logic.

Algebra teaches us, by recognition and repitition, the process of logical thought. If a, then b, and if b, then c,, means that by logical extension, if a, then c. 

“Oh, yeah, everybody knows that,” the simpleton scoffs.  

Well, everybody does not know that. If they did, we wouldn’t be facing a crisis of unemployment and personal economic disaster all over the country. Huge numbers of Americans are not employable because they don’t employ anything above the most rudimentary logic in their lives. Sure, they understand if a, then b. But that’s about it. “If I don’t get some money, I won’t be able to eat.” Which is about as complicated as the untrained mind can function. The extension of logic that gets someone from Premise A to Conclusion C, let alone Conclusion F, G, or Z, is beyond them. So they can’t perform the higher-order functions necessary in any form of skilled labor.

Logic is essential to the application of the mind to complex processes. People who are incapable of using higher-order logic are cognitive cripples. And since our nation has advanced to being a highly technological civilization, we can’t afford to allow our schools to keep spitting out cognitive cripples and falsely calling them High School Graduates.

If every American knew that, and applied that process to life, we wouldn’t be in the mess America is in today. We would have an ample supply of educated, disciplined thinking people to fill our workforce. And we would have ample jobs to employ them. But we don’t have those things, in no small part due to the fact that the ignorant and evil-minded among us have been crying for 50 years that algebra is a tool of the bourgeoisie, or that algebra is not needed in “real life”, or that it is a tool of the white man to oppress the man of color. So we have dumbed down our schools. We have made algebra “optional”. We have eliminated the most important tool for teaching our children logic that we have in our arsenal. And as a result we have a population led by emotion, by impulse, and by the cult of celebrity… all of which would be impossible to imagine if logic had not ceased to be at the core of our collective consciousness.

This is very dangerous for America.

America is supposed to be a nation of laws, and all of us are equal before the law. And by logical extension, if that principle is undermined, the foundation of America is in jeopardy. It’s simple logic. And we ignore that logic at our peril.

Think about this example: if someone violates National Security law with their private communication, that person is by definition a criminal. If a, then b, right? And if someone violates that law, in fact commits a felony by their action, that person is by definition a felon, right? If b, then c, right? Okay: so if that person violates the law, s/he can and should be prosecuted, convicted, and face all the consequences of being a felon, right?

Sure! You say.  And I agree with you. Even if that person is a good person, who has done a lot of good, if they violate such a serious law, they should face the consequences. And that is exactly what happened to General David Patraeus when he violated our National Security laws.

But Hillary Clinton has by her own admission commited the same violation if not worse, and it seems she will not be held to the same law as General Petraeus was. She is by all logic a felon, pure and simple. And our laws say that a felon cannot vote, and cannot hold public office. Yet she is at this time the front-runner for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the presidency. This defies logic!

And this is very, very dangerous for America.

Disparage algebra at your peril, people.