A widely respected study concluded that if you have a gun in a holster and an assailant is within 21 feet of you with a knife, the assailant will be able to stab you before you can draw and fire two rounds into that assailant. If taken to an extreme, one could conclude that anyone who may appear as threatening and is within 21 feet of you should be immediately shot. While interesting, that could be problematic both with how to carry a sufficient supply of ammunition and with some people who may look threatening but have no interest in you until you start shooting.

Is there some usable distance rule when you do recognize a real threat, you see a knife and the bad guy charges? I don’t think there should be any rule at all. Obviously, if you are attacked, the fight is on and you kill your adversary. But there are so many factors that come into play, I’d hate to focus on distance when other issues are of much higher importance. For example, if the fight starts at 5 feet, you won’t be in a gunfight because you’ll have to fight your way to gain enough space to get your gun running. If you are threatened at 50 feet, getting to cover and marksmanship become paramount.

It’s all those “in the middle” distances where your skills, your shooting ability, how you carry your gun, what you do when you draw and how fast you are willing to act will determine whether you win. For example, if you are carrying your gun behind your right hip and the holster has some kind of strap to retain the handgun, you may be slower into action than if the gun were carried just to the right of your belt buckle. Have you had any training in close range gunfighting? Shooting and hitting without having to extend the gun all the way out to see the sights? If you need further work in any of these areas, then your critical distance needs to be much greater than someone who is confident with extremely fast maneuvers up close. Consider all of these and decide where you need to concentrate to improve your skills.

People don’t have to end up dead if attacked at 21 feet. And, most fights start at much closer distances than that, anyway. If, after the attack starts, your defensive plan is to remain in place, draw and fire two rounds and then see what happened, you may find that you’ll be too dead to notice. Please reconsider that tactic and find some other methods that actually do work.