My response to some reasonable criticsm


In the recent post on using vertical cover there were a few comments fixated on the fact that the corner I chose for the photos was concealment not cover and others questioning why I was standing or why I left the master bedroom.

These are all great questions and I thought they deserved a real response.

The first question (even raised by Says Uncle), is that the interior wall is concealment not cover.  This is absolutely true for nearly all hand guns, however… the discussion was about the body positioning and mechanics and they are exactly the same regardless if you are standing behind cover or concealment.

It is important to know what your gun can penetrate, so that you can identify a good backstop (when the situation permits) and when you can punch through concealment.  It is also a good idea to consider what you are behind to estimate how much protection you have. But if you are shooting, the mechanics are the same.  If you get too hung up on the details, you can miss the message.

As a matter of fact if I had a transparent barricade I would have used it, because it would have shown the positions better than I was able to in my house.

The second set of questions revolved around the tactics.  Once again they aren’t really germane to the topic, because the subject was using vertical cover, not deciding if you should use cover…

However, my home is a split bedroom floorplan with a downstairs master and my kids rooms are upstairs on the opposite side of the house an other than the bedrooms my house is an extremely open floor plan.  If there is a suspected intruder in the house they would be between me and my kids and my “defensive” plans involve significant offense as I move to my kids.

If I were to kneel in the doorway I would lose a significant amount of mobility (bad knees) and visibility to the main living area of the house. For me that corner only represents a bit of concealment as I scanned the room before stepping through the door, not a strategic fighting position.

This does lead to another great topic however… the importance of elevation.

 

No problem.

Problem. (And you’re telling my wife)

About

Ron is the Founder and President of When the Balloon Goes Up! He competes regularly in IDPA as an ESP/Expert, his focus is on concealed carry, home defense and analyzing equipment to find “Gear that Just Works!”

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  • http://gravatar.com/n4aof n4aof

    Good reply. I agree on the points you made about abandoning the ensconced defender strategy to move to the kids bedroom and about the mobility issues that some of us face with the kneeling position — those points were beyond the scope of the original article, but go a long way to demonstrating the complexity of home defense and the absolute need for serious planning to consider many factors that you cannot wait until you hear the back door crash in before deciding on your strategy.

    As for concealment vs cover issues that I and several others raised, yes I grant that your article was supposed to be about the use of vertical cover and that your comments and illustrations were valid in that context. On the other hand, I think it would have been appropriate to include at least one sentence pointing out that there was no cover in the illustrations.

    The reason that I (and others) tend to beat this dying horse is that we see so much abuse of so-called “cover” in training and competition that we now have an entire generation of shooters who do not understand that two sheets of 3/8″ drywall or one 1/4″ sheet of plywood is NOT cover. I cringe every time I see an IDPA or other so-called “tactical” match where the scenario demands that shooters “utilize cover” but all that is provided is a sheet of plywood or cardboard. Hell, with the exception of 2010 Crown Victorias WITH the ballistic option package, even a car door isn’t really cover – certainly not against a major caliber pistol round or any rifle round.

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