The internet reached its verdict in minutes. She panicked. She wasn't up to the job. Some made it about her sex.

I've spent more than three decades across law enforcement and SWAT, Army Special Forces, and counter-terrorism work, and I serve as a use-of-force expert witness. So let me tell you what the people typing those verdicts don't understand.

Your brain was built for exactly this decision — and that's the problem.

Picture an ancestor walking a dark path. Something long and squiggly lies across it. In a single footstep, the brain has to decide: stick or snake? The bloodlines that guessed "stick" and were wrong got bitten out of existence. The ones that flinched — assumed "snake," and were relieved to be wrong — survived to become us. Under mortal stress, with no time and no information, the human brain seizes the most threatening interpretation, deals with it first, and sorts out the details later. That's not cowardice. That's the operating system every one of us is running.

Now put yourself behind that planter. Your partner is dead a few feet away. Rounds are still coming. And a shape closes distance on your position in nearly the same way the gunman does moments later. Stick or snake?

Her brain answered the way human brains have answered for three hundred thousand years.

Here's why this matters at your kitchen table: someday you might be the one running toward the uniforms — or toward an armed neighbor coming to help — and two right instincts collide again. The good news is that this is trainable. But it has to be decided before the moment, because the moment doesn't leave room to think.

It starts with three words I drill in every seminar: Hands up. Open. Empty. Nothing that reads as a weapon in a quarter-second glance — not a phone, not keys. Then you use your voice, loudly and repeatedly. You understand they may literally not see you. And you never, ever surprise anyone with a gun in their hand.

None of it is complicated. All of it has to be decided this week — not in the parking lot.

Want the complete system? There's an entire section on the stick or snake in The Everyday Defender . Order it directly in PDF and get every future update free, plus downloadable checklists and bonuses → [THE EVERYDAY DEFENDER]

Be responsible, capable, and confident.

Trevor Thrasher | Threatprooflife.com

I saw it firsthand running most of a law enforcement agency through a use-of-force decision simulator. The single biggest jump in performance didn't come from a new tactic or a faster draw stroke. It came from getting officers to set their readiness state before the flashpoint. Better decisions. Faster responses. More accurate when it counted. The fixes were simple, and the payoff was huge.

Most instructors never teach this. The training defaults to tactics — the cool technique, the thing that photographs well — and the human being who has to execute it under survival stress gets almost none of the attention. That's backwards. The state you're in is the variable that decides whether the tactic gets attempted at all, let alone done well.

In The Everyday Defender I call that state your TEMP state — Tools, Emotional, Mental, Physical. Four things you can set on purpose before a sudden, close-range, high-danger encounter:

Manage all four and you have options. Miss them and you have a problem, regardless of what's in your pocket. The best part: you can learn to read it in others, and set it in yourself — civilian in a parking lot or officer at a door, the rules are the same.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THE FULL ARTICLE:

Read the full article on Substack → [LINK TO FULL SUBSTACK ARTICLE]

Want the complete system? There's an entire chapter on Readiness in The Everyday Defender — the full TEMP framework, the tool-deployment system, covert readiness, and the four stress checks. Order it directly in PDF and get every future update free, plus downloadable checklists and bonuses → [THE EVERYDAY DEFENDER]

Be responsible, capable, and confident.

Trevor Thrasher | Threatprooflife.com

I have spent over thirty years in this work — law enforcement, special operations, counter-terrorism, instruction. I have buried a partner who was murdered in the line of duty. And while there is real difference between what an officer faces and what a civilian faces, the patterns that get people killed are the same. The damage is the same. The lessons travel.

Here is what 549 American officers feloniously killed between 2014 and 2023 actually tell us, if you read the LEOKA data carefully and pair it with the research that explains the mechanism.

Sixty-seven percent of officers killed by firearms died at ten feet or closer. Over forty percent died inside five feet. That's conversational distance. Arm's reach. Not the distance most of us shoot at on the range. The fight that kills people happens between four and fifteen times closer than where most shooters train.

Sixty-two percent of fatal wounds were to the head or neck. The offender doesn't have to be skilled to land them. A 2015 study by Lewinski and colleagues at the Force Science Institute, published in the International Journal of Police Science & Management, showed that untrained shooters naturally aim at the head at close range. Where you look is where you aim. At three feet, an untrained shooter hits the head about sixty percent of the time. The criminal across the counter from you doesn't need training. He needs to be close.

And here is the stat that should make every concealed carrier stop and reread it: fifty-one percent of officers killed never even attempted to draw their weapon. Over half. Their weapon stayed in the holster for the entire fatal encounter. The recognition didn't resolve in time. The deployment never occurred. The fight was over before they got their hand on the gun they carried every day overtly on their hip.

If trained officers — with uniforms, radios, backup on the way, and the legal authority to detain and search — go down at the rates this data shows, the implications for a civilian carrying alone are something every responsible armed citizen has to sit with.

This article walks through what the data says, the four critical errors present in nearly every fatal encounter, and how those same errors translate to the everyday defender's life. It uses recent incidents — including the Correspondents' Dinner shooting and the Las Cruces stabbing — to show the errors in real time on video, and it closes with the system I teach for putting yourself on the right side of these statistics.

It is the most important piece I have written for armed civilians this year. Share it with anyone in your life who carries — and with anyone who hasn't decided whether to.

Tuesday morning, April 14, 2026. A 3-year-old boy at a Walmart on 72nd and Pine in Omaha, Nebraska. A 31-year-old woman named Noemi Guzman shoplifted a large kitchen knife from inside the store, took control of his shopping cart, and forced his caretaker at knifepoint through the store and into the parking lot. The first 911 call gave dispatchers almost no usable information — a woman's voice, and in the background another voice saying "Stop. Keep walking." That was the caretaker. Buying time with the only tool she had.

Officers arrived seven minutes after that call. They responded with exactly the professionalism and precision the situation demanded. I can speak to that directly — I spent years training Omaha Police on active threat response and high-threat contacts. What those officers did in that parking lot reflects the training. They made sure luck was no longer a factor.

But the knife had already reached that child's face before they arrived. He survived. By centimeters and inches.

Less than two years ago, a nearly identical situation in an Ohio grocery store parking lot ended with a 3-year-old boy named Julian Wood dead and his mother stabbed. I covered that case in detail months ago — the same warnings, the same hybrid threat environment, the same pattern. Nobody wanted to believe it would happen again this close to home.

Same setup. Different outcome. One child survived. One child is buried.

What made the difference?

That question is what this article is built to answer — and the answer is not simple, but it is actionable. It covers the hybrid threat environment that puts dangerous, mentally ill individuals in the same Walmart as your children on a Tuesday morning. It covers the three things every victim says afterward and how to replace that mindset before you need it. It covers the protector's role — what happens when the man is not there, which is most of the time. It covers the violence dial and the on/off switch, the legal framework, and the everyday tools that change the equation entirely.

And it introduces two women — a Victress is the term I use — who refused to be defined by what was done to them. A nail salon full of improvised weapons. A shotgun, a pistol, a pacifier, and a 911 call on New Year's Eve. Both refused. Both won.

This is the most important article I have published this year. Share it with every woman in your life who is responsible for a child's safety. That is all of them.

Two Jersey City police shootings. Two body cameras. Less than four minutes of footage combined. And enough material buried inside them to expose nearly everything wrong with how we train people to survive lethal force encounters — and what actually works when survival stress shows up uninvited.

I do this kind of analysis professionally as an expert witness in use-of-force and self-defense cases. Most people watch these videos once, form a quick opinion, and move on. What I want to show you is what a real deep dive looks like — because the lessons here don't belong only to the officers who lived them. They apply to every member of a protective team and every everyday defender who has decided to be the protector in the room.

The first incident involves three Jersey City officers responding to a man displaying what appeared to be a firearm on a public sidewalk. The weapon turned out to be an air pistol. The ambiguity alone — not knowing whether it was real — compounded every decision these officers had to make under stress. One officer advanced on the suspect holding a handheld radio in his gun hand. He had to set it on the ground to get both hands on his firearm. In a lethal-force encounter, the window between communicating and shooting is measured in fractions of a second. You do not want your gear competing with itself in that window.

Watch the officers' posture before the first shot. Upright, soft, standing behind cars rather than in a true fighting platform. Then watch what happens the moment the suspect raises the weapon. Both officers drop immediately into a combat crouch and seek cover more aggressively. That shift — the startle drop — is nearly universal. The problem isn't that it happens. The problem is starting from a position that requires it. I teach a concept called TEMP State — Tools, Emotional, Mental, and Physical posture — because your posture before the fight is already a decision.

The suspect was shot, went down, got back up, and charged. There was a window to respond offensively. What was missing was a trained response to fill it. The takedown that followed — three officers on one suspect — turned into a scrum because nobody had a defined role. One high, one low. That's it. It's not complicated. It just has to be practiced.

The second shooting is over in four seconds. I call it the WTF Shooting — because that's exactly what the officer says afterward, repeatedly. One officer drives into an exposed flank and wins. One officer sprints for cover as prey. Same encounter, same breath, completely different positional reality. What carries an officer through a moment like that isn't training they remembered. It's whatever their nervous system had stored deep enough to fire automatically.

Between 60 and 80 percent of lethal-force encounters are resolved by decisive action, primitive survival response, and ingrained rudimentary skill. Nearly zero percent of traditional law enforcement training is built for that reality.

You've trained for years. Threat indicators, use-of-force law, tactical movement. Your family knows none of it.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: your spouse and kids haven't learned personal protection through osmosis. Living with a cop doesn't make someone tactically competent any more than living with a surgeon makes someone a doctor.

The first is assuming your family absorbed your skills by proximity. They didn't. They don't know threat indicators. They haven't thought through what to do if someone forces entry while you're at work.

The second is believing you'll always be there to protect them. You won't.

Officer Ruben Ruiz was there when his wife was shot at Robb Elementary in Uvalde. He was armed. Trained. He was detained by other officers, had his gun taken, and couldn't get to her. She died before reaching the hospital.

Officer Donald Sahota confronted a robbery suspect in his own driveway while protecting his family. A responding deputy shot him in the back within four seconds — mistaking him for the threat. The suspect ran into the house where his family was.

Your shift, your jurisdiction, your assignment — any of these can put distance between you and the people you'd die to protect. And when you are there, off-duty response operates under completely different rules. No radio. No backup. No one knows you're the good guy.

Then there's doxxing. Ask any Border Patrol or ICE agent if it's caused off-duty problems. Ask if their spouse worries when they answer the door. The threats don't clock out when you do — but somehow we pretend families don't need preparation.

That's why I wrote The Everyday Defender. It's built on 30+ years as a Green Beret, street crimes and SWAT officer, and counter-terrorism contractor. Several reviewers have said it should be a handbook for all new police officers.

If your family pays attention to the awareness section alone, they'll likely identify threats before the average officer you work with.

Austin. New York City. Old Dominion University. Temple Israel. Four attacks. Multiple dead. And in every single case, the people who stopped or limited the violence had one thing in common before the shooting started.

At Old Dominion, ROTC students subdued and killed the shooter — in the classroom he targeted specifically because it was an ROTC class. At Temple Israel, trained armed security engaged the attacker immediately as he drove an explosives-laden truck through the front doors. At Club Q in Colorado Springs, Army veteran Rich Fierro tackled the gunman, beat him with his own pistol, and held him until police arrived. At STEM School Highlands Ranch, 18-year-old Kendrick Castillo charged the shooter three days before his graduation. He was killed. No one else in that classroom was.

Veterans. ROTC students. Law Enforcement. Trained security. The pattern is not a coincidence.

These people didn't act because they were braver. They acted because they had already resolved three things before the crisis arrived. First: accept that it might actually happen to you — not theoretically, but genuinely. Second: accept that it's your responsibility to act, not someone else's. Third: give yourself permission to use decisive force to protect innocent life.

Military training forces you to internalize all three. Most people never have that conversation with themselves. And under extreme stress, that unresolved question is the gap where people die.

The second-tier threat is also confirmed. NCITE — the counterterrorism center at UNO — is warning Nebraskans specifically about Iranian cyber attacks targeting power infrastructure. If the grid goes down for 48 hours in your area, does your family have a plan for communication, water, food, and medication? Most don't. That's a solvable problem if you address it now.

The Bottom Line

The attackers are not slowing down. The ideological trigger from the Iran strikes is still active. But you don't need a military background to be prepared. You need a conversation, a framework, and the willingness to stop hoping and start preparing. One hour at your kitchen table tonight makes your family 100% more prepared than the families doing nothing.

Let me be blunt: Event Number One has already happened.

On March 1st, a gunman opened fire on a bar patio in Austin, Texas, killing three people and injuring thirteen more. The FBI is investigating potential terrorism ties. The shooter was wearing an Iranian flag undershirt with photos of Iranian leaders found at his home. This happened one day after the strikes on Iran.

That's the threat landscape right now. These attackers are already primed. They just need a trigger—and the strikes on Iran certainly provide one.

But here's an important distinction: the threat doesn't come exclusively from Iranians. Extremists of any background who oppose the U.S. and Israel could use this moment as justification. The trigger is ideological, not ethnic.

I assess the current threat environment across four categories, ranked from most likely to least likely:

For your family, focus on threats one and two—the most probable and immediately relevant to your daily decisions.

Most importantly: have an alternate means of communication with your family. We've become dangerously dependent on phones. If those go down—whether from cyber attack or infrastructure failure—most families have no backup plan.

At first thought, you might ask yourself how someone ends up dead after successfully disarming an attacker. That's exactly the point. The disarm is just the beginning. What you do next, what the people around you do, and how you communicate with arriving police—that's what determines survival.

In all four of these incidents, the attacker was successfully disarmed. In all four, the hero still died or was gravely wounded. Each person found the courage to act decisively—something many would fail to do. They are heroes by any definition.

If you disrupt or disarm an attacker, you must assume three things until proven otherwise:

An older gentleman named Boris Gurman confronted a gunman and wrestled the firearm away. The disarm was clean. Both men separated and got back to their feet. Gurman charged after the terrorist using the captured firearm as a club. His wife Sofia was nearby, maneuvering to his side. The video cuts, but it appears the terrorist obtained another weapon and killed both Boris and Sofia.

Later, Ahmed al-Ahmed rushed the same gunman, disarmed him, and took cover behind a tree. The gunman walked away—and his son and accomplice shot the hero from a nearby position.

Two cases stand out: Brandon Durham and Christian Diaz. Both called 911 reporting home invasions. Both successfully disarmed their attackers. Both were shot and killed by arriving police.

The common thread? The 911 call was the last best opportunity to set conditions for a good outcome, and in both cases the communication fell short.

Here's the formula. Take a breath. Then get out:

• Address. Where are you?

• Nature of the event. What is happening?

• What you need. What kind of help?

• Description of the attacker. What do they look like?

• Description of the innocents. What do the good guys look like? If a good guy is holding the suspect, make damn sure that's crystal clear.

Compare: "They've got him over here!" versus "The suspect is down, he's been disarmed. My dad is holding him—my dad is in a blue shirt, the suspect is in a black hoodie."

Set a timer on your phone. Simulate a 911 call for a home invasion at your house. See how much vital information you can clearly communicate in the first 30 seconds and the first minute.

If you're good, the first minute can solve nearly all of your problems.

Then practice this: How would you direct a family member to greet arriving police? If you're the one holding a suspect down, what have you told the person on the phone to relay?

Walk through it. Out loud. Even once. It will be awkward and feel silly. Do it anyway.

Before you form an opinion, understand the physics and human factors involved — from the officer's perspective, in real time.

Most people understand that it takes time to perceive a threat and respond. What they don't understand is that it also takes time to stop a response once it's started. The average reaction time to a simple stimulus is around 0.25 seconds under ideal lab conditions. On a snowy street with a vehicle accelerating toward you, complex decision-making under stress takes longer. And once you've committed to pressing a trigger, your brain still needs time to send the stop signal — and your body needs time to process it.

Human attention under stress narrows — a phenomenon called perceptual tunneling. Officers cannot see and process everything happening around them. Armchair analysts watching video can pause, rewind, zoom in, and analyze frame by frame. An officer in the moment cannot. He's processing movement, sound, shouted commands, and potential threats — all in fractions of a second. The question isn't what the video shows. The question is what the officer reasonably perceived in real time.

Here's the survival principle at work: in a threat situation, humans react to patterns before they verify. If you see a curved shape in tall grass, you jump before you determine whether it's a stick or a snake. That's not a flaw — it's millions of years of evolution keeping you alive. Officers confronting a vehicle moving toward them are operating on that same wiring. The legal and tactical question is whether the perception was reasonable given the circumstances — not whether it was correct in hindsight.

This isn't a defense of every officer in every situation. It's a call to engage your high brain instead of your tribal brain. Both sides of this debate deserve better than the analysis they're getting.

Last holiday season, I took my family to our local Christmas parade. Kids, floats, candy, lights — all the normal stuff. And within minutes of arriving, my brain had already mapped every unprotected entrance, every channelized road feeding into the crowd, and every back turned to the most likely attack vector. Not because I was paranoid. Because I was prepared.

Here's what I observed: a large dense crowd, mostly unaware. Multiple straight roads feeding directly into the parade route. Zero hardened barriers, bollards, or even parked police cruisers blocking vehicle access. Hundreds of backs turned to the most likely approach. Every ingredient for a high-body-count ramming was present.

My fear level was near zero. But my awareness was elevated, and I had briefed my wife before we arrived. I reminded her of the near rally points, told her to pay attention to her six, and gave her the three key indicators of a vehicle attack — engine revving, sounds of a collision, people screaming and running. I told her: move laterally, jump the railing, do not run straight back.

She got a great photo of the tree lighting. We all had a great night.

That's the whole point. You don't have to be paranoid to be prepared. You just have to take 60 seconds before the next event and run through the basics with whoever is with you.

Two safe havens. Two escape routes. Two areas of likely threat. Two trauma kits — one in the car, one on your person. This framework, drawn from special operations planning, takes minutes to brief and applies to any crowd event. It's not about fear. It's about having a program in your brain before you need it.

ISIS publishes holiday attack guides. That's not a conspiracy theory — I have the receipts. Don't be an ostrich.

Read the full article and watch the video on Substack

Most executives respond to this one of two ways: they hire a protective team they can't afford, or they do nothing and hope 911 arrives in time. Both leave you exposed.

A single professional protective agent costs a minimum of $250,000 annually. A small competent team exceeds $1 million. That puts full-time protection out of reach for most — even high-wealth individuals. And even when you have a team, there will be moments when you're alone and vulnerable. External protection without personal capability is a gap every serious attacker will find.

The answer isn't to train like a commando. It's to stop treating personal security like the fitness program you keep putting off.

The same frameworks used by Special Operations, counter-terrorism units, and executive protection professionals are learnable. Not all of them — but the parts that matter most.

The OODA Loop — Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — is a decision-making framework built for high-pressure situations. It trains you to read your environment, recognize developing threats, and act with calm precision instead of panic.

Counter-terrorism tradecraft teaches something equally valuable: most targeted attacks follow a predictable pattern. Surveillance. Planning. Rehearsal. Learning to recognize early-stage indicators — the same face in different locations, unusual behavior near your office or vehicle — gives you the ability to disrupt a threat before it materializes.

Situational awareness, route variation, behavioral tests for surveillance detection — none of these require a dramatic lifestyle change. They require a system and a small investment of time.

A minimal, 1% effort in personal security can produce a 100% increase in confidence and preparedness. That's the standard the OSS coaching program is built on — practical, discreet, one-on-one executive security coaching that fits your life without turning it into a tactical operation.

Security doesn't stop with you. Your family — especially your children — needs age-appropriate preparation too. Code words, safe havens, what to do when separated in a crowd. These aren't paranoid measures. They're responsible ones.

You already lead with decisiveness at work. Your personal security deserves the same standard.

If you carry every day, these rules are non-negotiable.

John Farnam's framework is the foundation. Don't go to stupid places. Don't associate with stupid people. Don't do stupid things. Follow these and you eliminate 90% of avoidable problems before they start. Stupid varies by person and context — but ignoring these rules is how good people end up in bad situations with a gun on their hip.

When police give a command — lawful or not — your priority is survival, not winning the argument in the street. That argument gets resolved later in court.

This is where people get it dangerously wrong. Some states allow reasonable resistance to clearly unlawful arrest — but the threshold is narrow, the legal exposure is enormous, and the lawfulness of an encounter is never judged on the street. You can be dead and innocent. Or alive and in prison. Neither outcome serves you.

I carry nearly every day. I've never worried about getting shot by police because I follow these basics and make it unmistakably clear that I am the good guy. That's not luck. That's a system.

A firearm is a tool. Knowing how to use it in a gunfight is one skill set. Knowing how to survive a police encounter while carrying it is another — and most people skip the second one entirely.

it isn't about hwo to blame after an event; its' about something more important. Your survival in that encounter is your responsibility. Not the officer's. Not the legal system's. Yours.

Check out the full article and the video on Substack