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This book is not about techniques of shooting firearms; it is about Decision Making, specifically Bad Decision Making. Our Mindset leads to our Decisions. Our Decisions lead to our Actions. Our Actions lead to our Outcomes. This sequence controls our destiny in everything we do, including using a firearm for Personal Protection. Unfortunately, decision making in the firearms community tends to focus on the tool, the firearm, instead of the desired outcome for owning it. Endless debate goes on about caliber, action type, ammunition capacity, and other material oriented aspects of ownership. In the broad context, these are extremely minor considerations as long as the owner can operate the firearm adequately.

Where the discussions don’t go nearly enough is the circumstances involving the usage of firearms and the decisions about our internal software that we have to make. “Usage” doesn’t always mean shooting the gun, either. There are a host of other issues, such as storage, legalities of carrying, and even possession, that aren’t often discussed. But those internal software issues are much more likely to determine the difference between a Positive Outcome and a Negative Outcome than hardware issues like type of gun and caliber. The amount of misinformation that runs rampant within the gun community leads many new owners down the wrong path in their Mindset and potential Decision Making.

Owning a gun definitely falls under the saying “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” While the firearms industry tends to tiptoe around it, the fact of the matter is that, now, most guns are purchased or acquired for the purpose of protecting ourselves and those important to us. And that’s for good reason. A gun gives a small or frail or elderly person the same power to inflict damage on another person as a young athletic male possesses in his bare hands and shod feet. Without that leveling of the playing field, our society would inevitably return to the law of the jungle, i.e., the survival of the fittest. A gun then is the instrument and tool of equality in American culture. As Colonel Samuel Colt said in the 19th Century, the gun is ‘The Great Equalizer.’