A Lack Of Leading Indicators

Michael Bane recently made an interesting point on his podcast: Firearms training is based on lagging indicators. We study crime statistics and we say “Ah-ha! Carjackings are up 35%, I need to take a vehicle defense course!”

But that desire is based on what HAS happened, not what the trend currently is. Sure, it’s a safe bet, but it falls apart if reality zigs when we expect it to zag.

A case in point: The Kyle Rittenhouse incident. For years, we taught that if you’re in a riot/civil unrest situation, get the gun out and use it to move people out of the way. If you have to shoot someone, the other people will scatter.

Except that didn’t happen. Even though Kyle had an AR, he had to fight off multiple attackers using lethal force. Our lagging indicator was incorrect.

So how do we find leading indicators? If we assume that my Gun Culture 3.0 idea is actually the future, it can help guide our search for leading indicators. How do people protect neighborhoods when the government can’t or won’t protect them?

My suggestion would be to look at disaster relief. How do people come together in groups to respond to a crisis without the .gov directing their movements? The Cajun Navy, Southern Baptist Home Missions and the Amish response to Hurricane Helene would be where I’d start to look for leading indicators. In a Gun Culture 3.0 scenario, it’s not me  vs the bad guy, it’s my neighborhood/tribe vs all things that might do us harm. Things like Zello, Starlink, ham radio and generators become more important than a sub-second draw, and having a team around you becomes absolutely vital. Ellifritz’s stuff about grid-down medicine is important, as does having strapping young men around you to (literally) do the heavy lifting, as I found out after Hurricane Irma.

What are the leading indicators that GC3.0 is upon us? Well, we’d had a few. The BLM riots. The panic buying of COVID. The blackouts in Spain and Portugal. Watch what happens in Canada. If Alberta leaves, it’ll upset what we know about the current state of nation-states, and everything is on the table after that.