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| Weapon training, responsible self-defense and the consequences of lethal force |
Before Weapon Training: Are You Prepared for What Comes After?
Weapons training usually begins with technique.
How do I safely handle the weapon?
How do I use it effectively?
How quickly can I access it?
How accurately can I use it under pressure?
These are legitimate questions. Anyone who owns or handles a potentially lethal weapon has a responsibility to understand it and to prevent negligent injury.
But there is another question that receives considerably less attention:
What happens if you actually have to use it against another human being?
The physical confrontation may last seconds.
The consequences can last for the rest of your life.
That should be considered before weapon training begins, not after violence has already occurred.
Owning a Weapon Changes the Problem
Weapons can radically change the consequences of violence.
A confrontation that might otherwise end with injuries can become fatal.
This applies particularly to firearms, but edged and other potentially lethal weapons can create the same fundamental problem.
Once lethal force enters a confrontation, the possible consequences expand far beyond whether someone “wins” the fight.
There may be:
legal consequences,
medical consequences,
psychological consequences,
effects on family members,
effects on employment,
financial consequences,
and the possibility that another human being dies.
Weapon training that considers only the mechanics of using the weapon addresses only one part of this problem.
Safety Comes Before Fighting
There is an important distinction between owning a weapon and being capable of responsibly managing one.
Training matters.
But before defensive applications are considered, a person should understand basic safety, lawful possession, secure storage and the prevention of unauthorized access.
This is particularly important with firearms because the consequences of a mistake can be immediate and irreversible.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention specifically identifies secure firearm storage—such as safes and lock boxes—as a measure that can help prevent unauthorized access and use.
There is another uncomfortable fact that responsible firearm ownership requires us to acknowledge.
Access to firearms is associated with substantially increased risk of firearm suicide. A major New England Journal of Medicine study followed 26.3 million California adults and found substantially higher suicide rates among handgun owners, driven overwhelmingly by firearm suicide.
That does not mean that every firearm owner is suicidal.
It means that responsible weapon ownership includes thinking about circumstances in which the owner—or another household member—should temporarily not have access to the weapon.
That belongs to weapon safety just as much as muzzle discipline or safe storage.
Can You Actually Use It?
There is another uncomfortable question.
A person may be physically capable of using a weapon on a target while being psychologically incapable of using it against another human being.
Those are different abilities.
Shooting accurately at paper does not tell us exactly how someone will react when confronted by a real person.
Training can improve technical performance.
Realistic training can expose people to decision-making under stress.
But no training exercise can perfectly reproduce the psychological reality of an actual lethal encounter.
And carrying a weapon does not automatically create decisiveness.
A weapon in the hands of somebody unwilling or unable to use it under extreme circumstances may create additional problems rather than solving them.
Your Own Weapon Can Become Part of the Fight
My original version of this article claimed that as many as one-third of American police officers killed in the line of duty were killed with their own weapons.
That claim was wrong.
FBI statistics provide a much clearer picture.
Between 2006 and 2015, 491 American law-enforcement officers were feloniously killed. Twenty-four were killed with their own weapons. Twenty-two of those had been disarmed by the offender.
That is approximately 5 percent, not one-third.
But the corrected number still demonstrates something important.
Weapon retention is a real problem.
Police officers receive professional training and routinely operate while armed, yet situations still occur in which an officer is disarmed and the weapon is turned against them.
For a civilian carrying a weapon, this raises a serious question:
What happens if somebody else gains control of it?
Carrying a weapon therefore introduces responsibilities that do not exist when the weapon is absent.
Surviving the Fight Is Not the End
Most weapon training concentrates understandably on surviving the immediate event.
But survival is only the beginning of what follows.
Imagine that the defensive use of force was completely justified.
You were attacked.
You genuinely believed that your life or somebody else's life was in immediate danger.
You acted lawfully.
The attacker died.
Legally justified does not necessarily mean psychologically insignificant.
Taking another person's life can affect people in profoundly different ways.
Some experience relatively little lasting psychological disturbance.
Others develop intrusive memories, sleep problems, anxiety, depression, guilt or PTSD.
Still others struggle with something that has increasingly been studied under the concept of moral injury.
Moral Injury
Moral injury is not the same thing as PTSD.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs describes it as lasting psychological, behavioral, social or spiritual distress following experiences that violate deeply held moral beliefs or values.
Killing another person can be one such experience.
But importantly:
It does not happen to everyone.
The circumstances matter.
The person's beliefs matter.
Whether the killing was perceived as justified matters.
What happened immediately before and after matters.
Previous experiences matter.
Social support matters.
The VA specifically notes that killing in self-defense may be perceived very differently from killing somebody later discovered to have been innocent or unarmed.
That distinction is important because it prevents us from replacing one unrealistic idea with another.
It is wrong to assume:
“If the shooting is justified, I'll be perfectly fine.”
But it is equally wrong to assume:
“Anyone who kills another person will inevitably be psychologically destroyed.”
Human responses to violence are more complicated.
Training Cannot Guarantee Your Psychological Response
Professional militaries spend enormous resources preparing people to operate under extreme conditions.
Police organizations train officers to make decisions under threat.
Training can improve performance.
It can develop habits.
It can reduce some forms of hesitation.
It can teach people to function while experiencing physiological stress.
But training cannot guarantee how someone will psychologically process an event afterward.
The VA's research on combat-related moral injury shows that killing or harming others can be associated with guilt, shame, depression, PTSD symptoms and suicidal thinking, particularly when the event conflicts with deeply held values.
There are now even specialized interventions dealing specifically with the psychological impact of killing.
That fact alone should tell us something.
Learning how to perform an action and learning how to live with having performed it are different problems.
The Veteran Suicide Argument Needs Care
My original article pointed to veteran suicide as evidence of the psychological consequences of killing.
That connection was too simple.
Veteran suicide is a serious problem, but it cannot be explained merely as the consequence of having killed people in combat.
Veterans differ enormously in combat exposure, injuries, mental health, social circumstances, substance use, relationships and experiences after leaving military service.
Combat itself can involve many forms of trauma:
being wounded,
watching friends die,
believing you are about to die,
killing,
failing to save somebody,
civilian casualties,
and experiences that violate deeply held moral beliefs.
Research does show that perpetration-related experiences such as killing can be associated with distinctive guilt, self-blame and moral-injury outcomes.
But we should not turn that association into the simplistic claim:
Combat killing causes veteran suicide.
The evidence does not justify it.
Legal Justification Is Not the Same as Moral Resolution
There is another distinction that weapon owners should consider.
Law and personal morality answer different questions.
The law asks whether the use of force was legally justified.
Your conscience may ask something else.
A court can decide that somebody acted lawfully.
That does not determine how the person will feel when remembering the event five years later.
Likewise, somebody may feel intense guilt after an action that was objectively necessary to save another person's life.
Human psychology does not operate like a legal judgment.
This is one reason psychological preparation should not be reduced to telling somebody:
“If the shooting is justified, don't worry about it.”
Nobody can promise that.
The Fantasy of the Defensive Encounter
Popular culture gives us a very simple model of self-defense.
The criminal attacks.
The good person responds.
The criminal is defeated.
The good person goes home.
Real violence does not necessarily provide such a clean ending.
Even a successful defensive action can involve blood, injury, death, police questioning, witnesses, frightened family members and memories that remain long after physical wounds have healed.
None of this means that people should refuse to defend themselves.
It means that self-defense should not be romanticized.
The purpose is survival and protection—not the opportunity to demonstrate fighting ability.
Before You Choose a Weapon
Before choosing to own or carry a weapon for defensive purposes, a person should therefore think about more than technical competence.
Ask yourself:
- Do I understand the laws governing possession, carrying and defensive force where I live?
- Can I store the weapon securely?
- Can I prevent unauthorized access by children, visitors or vulnerable household members?
- Am I willing to train consistently rather than merely buy equipment?
- Do I understand that displaying a weapon can change the dynamics of an encounter?
- Have I considered the possibility of losing control of the weapon?
- Have I seriously considered what it would mean to injure or kill another human being?
- Do I know where I could obtain legal, medical and psychological support afterward?
These questions cannot tell you exactly how you will react.
Nobody knows that with certainty before the event.
But refusing to consider them is not preparation.
Avoidance Is Still Self-Defense
There is a tendency in martial and weapon-training communities to concentrate on the moment when physical action becomes necessary.
That is understandable.
It is also incomplete.
The best defensive outcome is often the encounter that never becomes violent.
Situational awareness.
Leaving.
De-escalation when possible.
Avoiding unnecessary confrontation.
Improving physical security.
Calling for help.
None of these methods looks particularly impressive in a training video.
But self-defense should be measured by outcomes, not spectacle.
If you protect yourself and your family without anybody being injured, the defensive problem has been solved extremely well.
Before Weapon Training
I am not arguing against weapon ownership.
Nor am I arguing that somebody facing an immediate lethal threat should hesitate because they are worried about how they might feel afterward.
When lethal force is genuinely necessary, survival takes priority.
The point is much simpler.
Preparation should begin before that moment.
Learn the law.
Learn safety.
Store weapons responsibly.
Train realistically.
Understand weapon retention.
Understand de-escalation and avoidance.
Think seriously about the consequences of lethal force.
And recognize that psychological consequences cannot be predicted with certainty.
Weapon training teaches us how to use a tool.
Responsible self-defense requires something more:
understanding when not to use it, what can happen when we do, and how we may have to live with the consequences afterward.
The confrontation may last seconds.
Responsibility begins long before it—and may continue long after it ends.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this article cited older sources suggesting that a substantial proportion of officers killed in the line of duty were killed with their own weapons. More recent and accessible FBI data do not support applying such a high figure generally. For example, from 2006–2015, 24 of 491 U.S. officers feloniously killed were killed with their own weapons. The broader point nevertheless remains: weapon retention is a genuine concern whenever a weapon is introduced into a physical confrontation.