Hi and welcome to: Practical Home Defense.

The practical side of personal preparedness and the commonsense side of home defense, and the need for both.

These blogs will be small snippets of quality information that go a lot farther than 60 minutes of “Oh my God, will you please get to the point!”

Let’s get in get it done and get out. Now go practice and have fun with what you just saw or read.

Everyone likes the romantic idea of being the kingly protector of their domain. And they should. But there are a lot of nuts and bolts we need to put in place to get there.

What? Sure, jumping through the air yelling out your best war cry while dramatically delivering a sweeping blow from a Samurai sword while at the same time firing three or four perfectly aimed shots from your custom engraved combat pistol. All before you ever hit the ground and without tripping or running headlong into the doorjamb at 3 o’clock in the morning — because it’s dark.

How do we perfect us? How do we learn how to be aware of our surroundings? How do we plan for and execute a good plan in keeping our family safe?

One book I recommend highly is Defensive Living. Written by Ed Lovette and Dave Spaulding.

You can find this tremendous work at Looseleaf Law Publications: to make sure you get the correct copy. Looseleaflaw.com

It is the best succinct body of knowledge I have found, helping you put things into practice right now. How to self-aware, aware of your surroundings, aware ahead of time. It’s a short read, only 96 pages.

Why don’t I just tell you all the things in the book?

1 – Why reinvent the wheel?

2 – We will cover topics from the book, but think of it as a textbook, like in college.

The teacher covers the framework, then you get to go home and work in more detail on your own. I am empowering you to take control of where you want to go when it comes to protecting you and your home/family. How bad do you want it?

Stay tuned for more in the next post. Thanks for reading.

Welcome again to:

Practical home Defense

We’ll get into a main topic in the book Defensive Living – “Cooper’s Color Codes”.

Who is Jeff Cooper and why should you care? Jeff Cooper was an American Marine credited with creating the modern technique of handgun shooting. He is also renowned as an expert of history and use of small arms. * And the human response to critical situations * – which is where we’re going.

These Color Codes are covered in a ton of self-defense books, studies on Law Enforcement, even in some Martial arts circles; so what I ‘m sharing isn’t exclusive information. But it is very useful. Useful in knowing how our bodies react in various situations.

Next are two are two charts: The first shows how the colors are defined and the second shows our physiological response via heart rate. Take a minute and look over the different colors and corresponding attributes of each. We’ll cover them in just a minute.

If something catastrophic takes place while you’re in condition White and you haven’t done anything to prepare yourself against any aggression, it’s very likely you’ll to race into condition Black. That’s bad.

What is white? Sleeping, watching a movie with your family, being absorbed in your phone screen. Basically, not too aware of your surroundings or not having the necessary training to handle anything should something come up.

Condition Black: Where you never want to be.

Condition Black loves people who say,

“Oh, that will never happen to me.”

“Nothing like this ever happens in this neighborhood.”

Or, “I’ve been here doing…for 20 years and nothing like that has ever happened…”

Whoops! Wrong. You are a prime candidate for condition Black – and — dead.

Why these charts at all? So you can have an idea of what to expect when you encounter a critical situation. So you’re not surprised when it’s difficult to breathe, your hands sweat and tremble and you face that decision…

The point just this side of the line in the sand you drew: that someone is now crossing over.

With training and adopting the mindset of “When this happens, this is what I will do…” You can be in that place where you come out the winner and the other individual? Well, let’s just say they’ll at least seriously regret the decision to think you or your family was an easy target.

Our world is unpredictable. You can be inert (Foolish) or unconcerned. Or, scared.

Or you can be prepared and confident that you have the skills, foresight and flexibility to confront and adapt to any situation.

Oh yes, the rest of the colors:

Yellow: Where we can be every day. Like a Police officer on the job. Able to be aware for extended periods of time without burnout. Ready to respond. Or, while driving, actively looking for the “out” at intersections, scanning ahead for road anomalies, advanced time to react smoothly and safely.

Orange: Police officer ready for action at a traffic stop. Nothing yet, but an unknown situation calling for much more vigilance.

Kind of like the hand slapping game you may have played as a kid. You hold your hands out, palms up and your opponent places their hands down on yours. You try and flip your hands over and slap theirs while they try to get out of the way without being slapped. You are both on edge just a bit, ready to move.

Red: This is where Fight or Flight takes place. If you have prepared yourself, you can be here, take care of business even while your pulse rate goes up to around 150 or so. Your fine motor skills deteriorate (Natural reaction. Your body is pulling blood to your major muscle groups for large fast hard movements.)

BUT this is where training comes into play. We’ll cover that later.

Black: Shut down and don’t know why. Soiling yourself. Becoming the perfect victim.

Decide right now to be ready – doing what it takes so the outcome favors you, your family, your home.

 See you next time. We’ll start getting into those training things that condition us for the unknown.

Practical home Defense