Thanks to everyone for their responses, and yes, I'm glad everything turned out alright as well. Actually, I'm quite proud of her for her situational awareness, but I think she got stuck balancing tactical positioning vs. 'covering the most expensive stuff in the rear of the store'. There were better tactical options, and we've discussed them since the incident, but given the situation (not knowing at the beginning if they were planning to maneuver her or not, not knowing at the beginning that Thing 3 would enter, etc.), she opted for the balancing act, and admit she made the best decision with the information available at the time.
That's the challenge...definitively predicting when the situation moves from "I should be giving good customer service" to "this is moving the wrong direction and I need to forget customer service altogether" is more of an art than a science. With two employees in the store, it's always easier but with only one, it is harder to decide when to make that transition.
I posted this story on here because I think that every situation like this should be a learning opportunity, not just for her and me, but for all of us. The learning opportunity I'd like to highlight (especially for our newer forum members) is the idea of
Jeff Cooper's color codes.
If you're not familiar with Cooper's color codes, please stop and read the article I linked above.
I'm reminded of a key section in the
article posted just this morning by GeekWithAGun:
Preparedness is the situational awareness that something may happen and “prepares” the mind by thinking out the what-ifs, i.e. if this happens, I will do that. This little saying is one of the best thoughts to have before an event actually occurs. Human reaction times to a stimulus are as fast as .25 seconds. These reaction times are achieved when a person can think thru the actions needed to accomplish a task before it is needed.
This is a mental rehearsal.
My collegiate wrestling coach was a big advocate of the mental rehearsal. The night before matches, I would lie in bed and mentally picture the match in my head. I would visualize the actions I was going to do first and think to myself, “If this or that happens, then I will respond like this…” I wrestled the match mentally/virtually many times before I wrestled it actually/physically.
Side topic: I love that last sentence, "I wrestled the match mentally/virtually many times before I wrestled it actually/physically."
I've conducted Monte Carlo simulations on major capital projects for the last 12 years, and this is a fantastic explanation of what Monte Carlo does, using a real life example.
</math geek>
"I wrestled the match mentally/virtually many times before I wrestled it actually/physically."..I know that she has done this in the past in her store, because we've talked about it occasionally. But I also know she's doing it a lot more this week than in the past, and she's putting more variables into the simulation based on what happened last week.
This is exactly what we should all be doing, virtually all the time. No, I'm not suggesting that we spend our life in Condition Orange, but I do believe that in order to be in a proper Condition Yellow, we should always be aware of the potential variables and options available to us. Failing to do so relegates us to being in Condition White status, which is not a good choice, armed or not.
My wife is no spec ops operator. She has very little tactical training. She is a mom, a wife, a jewelry store owner, and an immigrant to the US. Until 7 months ago, when I lost my job, she was virtually a single mom, due to my (at the time) heavy international travel schedule - so she never had the free time to get more just 'time at the range' (hopefully, that will change when I get employed again). At only 4' 12" tall, she would appear to be an easy target for a not-so-large assailant. So no, she's no operator, but she's NEVER in Condition White.
Last Thursday, she was there in her store, happily working in
Condition Yellow when Thing 1 and Thing 2 walked in
Thing 1 and Thing 2 separated, and Thing 2 was trying to distract her, and she moved to
Condition Orange.
Thing 2 obscured himself by the column, and Thing 3 walked in to help Thing 1 keep her boxed in, and she moved to
Condition Red.
Red did not require her to draw and engage in this instance, but it did require her to move from being viewed as a "potential victim" to being viewed as a "potential threat". Luckily, that was sufficient in this case, and the Things scurried off.
Her actions when transitioning from Yellow to Orange to Red were not altogether unrehearsed. Of course, she didn't know exactly how it was going to unfold, but she had a general idea of how she was going to react - because of the mental rehearsals she had done in the past.
In this case, it worked, and the threat left immediately. If the threat had continued, would her follow-up actions have been sufficient? I hope so, but we'll never know, and I'm glad we didn't have to find out this time. But either way, the mental prep that she had done in the past served her well in this instance - and I'm glad she is using it as a continued learning opportunity.
I hope all of us here can do the same.
1911 10MM wrote:Just a guess but by the way things went down I bet if she had been open carrying they never would have entered the store.
You're probably right, but if she open carried regularly in the Houston Heights area, she'd end up closing her doors forever. The political climate (and customer base) there would never support a business owner who did such a thing.
