Left of Bang

Being aware of your environment–of what is happening around you–is one of the self-defense skills that is very important to master. Paying attention to what’s happening around you is called situational awareness. In this article we share with you several key points about situational awareness from a book titled Left of Bang: How the Marine Corps Combat Hunter Program Can Save Your Life by Patrick Van Horne and Jason A. Riley.

Being “left of bang” means identifying a threatening person before he or she attacks you. If the first time you realize you are under attack is when a pistol is aimed in your direction you have lost the initiative. Getting left of ban requires two things:

Actively searching your surroundings to identify people who don’t fit it (situational awareness)
Developing the knowledge to know what causes someone to stand out.

Basic situational awareness is insufficient. You must learn to practice informed situational awareness, which means that you need to pay attention to several behavioral cues about a person’s intentions. The challenge of informed situational awareness is that people usually don’t have enough time or enough information to make quick decisions when facing a threat. Therefore, you need a process to help you collect relevant information and make quick decisions. This process is called behavioral profiling.

Behavioral profiling requires you to develop the following skills:

Informed situational awareness
Identifying behavior that is out of the ordinary
Critical thinking to assess a situation
Fast decision-making

Personal Defense Decision-Making Heuristic

Because basic situational awareness is not enough you need a heuristic to help you make a defensive decision when you don’t have:
1. enough information and
2. enough time.
A heuristic is a mental shortcut for making quick decisions. The heuristic for staying left of bang is structured as Baseline + Anomaly = Decision

The baseline is what’s normal for the surroundings you are in.

An anomaly is something that is out of the ordinary that stands out as different from the baseline. Anomalies above the baseline means something has been added to the surroundings. Anomalies below the baseline means something is missing from the surroundings.

Once you perceive something out of the ordinary, then you must consider possible decisions; that is, you need to decide what to do quickly. The most important element of this heuristic is establishing the baseline; that is you must know what is normal for any given situation. Once you know what is normal then it becomes easier to perceive what is out of the ordinary.

Once you learn to size up a situation using the baseline + anomaly = decision mental shortcut you will be better prepared to anticipate and avoid a dangerous situation (the bang).