You know that we’re big fans of concealed carry for personal protection, but we also stress that we never want to have to resort to a firearm to protect ourselves. Rather, we spend a lot of time teaching you how to keep yourself safe without having to go to the gun, because pulling a trigger is the absolute last line of defense—not the first.
One of the biggest ways we teach readers to stay safe is to keep themselves out of harm’s way in the first place. After all, trouble can’t find you if you’re not around when it happens because you spotted it coming a mile away. And the easiest way to see trouble developing in advance is by simply paying attention to what’s going on around you—what we usually call “condition yellow” or “situational awareness.”
Situational awareness, however, is a double-edged sword. It’s dosage-dependent—too little of it and it’s worthless; too much of it and you’re living in paranoia and creating new self-defense problems because of it. What do I mean by that?
Situational awareness is externally focused. It’s all about the things that are happening around you and the people who are moving in and out of view—who they are, what they’re doing, what feels “off.” And while you absolutely should be taking notice of these things, situational awareness is not the only tool in your mental personal protection toolkit. When you hyper-focus on it, you start looking for bad guys around every corner and your whole self-defense plan becomes outwardly focused. The trouble with that is that you spend so much time worrying about what you’re looking for that you forget to look at yourself and what you’re doing that might be putting you in jeopardy.
Threats are indeed mostly external, but your own behavior is a potential threat as well, and you don’t want to neglect other good, common-sense practices because you’re wrapped up in looking for and assessing external threats. You must look for threats while also looking for ways to avoid threats, some of which you might never see. As an obvious example, if you’re distracted or on your phone in public, you’re not really practicing situational awareness in the first place.
As a more subtle example, if you are leaving a building in the dark and headed to your car at the far end of a mostly-abandoned parking lot, you will probably practice good situational awareness—you’ll check around the door for people who might follow you, you’ll take note of anyone loitering in the parking lot alone or in a group that’s not acting normal, and you’ll generally be on alert for any signs that something is out of the ordinary. Those are all good things. But if you then get to your vehicle safely and spend 5 minutes sitting in your car, especially if it’s unlocked, fiddling with the radio or checking your email or whatever else and paying no attention to what’s going on in the parking lot, you’re engaging in potentially risky behavior. You looked for external threats and decided the situation (walking to the car) was safe, but you failed to realize your own behavior is creating a whole new situation (sitting in the dark, in a transition zone, distracted by a task) that might open you up to danger.
In that case, you looked for threats, didn’t find any, and subconsciously decided that the safety box was checked and you could move on from it. You paid attention to external threats but didn’t pay attention to your own potentially risky behavior.
Situational awareness is not a one-and-done item on a safety checklist. While it’s a vital tool, you need to learn to look for threats but also to look for ways to pre-emptively avoid threats, even if you’ve determined that there probably aren’t any. Looking for threats is playing offense; looking for ways to avoid threats is playing defense. You need both to consistently give yourself the best odds of staying away from danger and not having to resort to your gun to solve a self-defense problem.
