My friend, owner and sensei of Battle School in Scottsdale, AZ  (http://www.azbattleschool.com), posted a scenario on Facebook the other day asking readers about distances with an enraged person, and asking how one handles it – this made me think about the 21 foot rule, which is a staple in defensive combat circles.

What, you ask, is a “21 Foot rule”?  This “rule” was developed first by Dennis Tueller to explain the phenomenon of police officers being killed by knifemen without their even being able to present a weapon in defense.  What they discovered was that an average man can cross 21 feet (7 yards) in 1.5 seconds … this is problematic since the average man’s reaction time is also 1.5 seconds, which means that a determined attacker can be on top of his victim, even an armed victim, before they realize they’re even being attacked, even from as far as 21 feet away.  Hence the rule’s name.  Generally, distance favors the shooter, but inside 21 feet, the presumed advantage of a gun virtually disappears.

The 21 Foot Rule has been a buzz for some time in defensive shooting circles, and even made an appearance on the hit television show Justified, in which Danny Crowe (A.J. Buckley) dispatches one of his fellow bad guys, and finally challenges the lead character Raylan Givens, using the rule.  The outcome is predictable, and yet the way it ends defies expectation.  But, as with any fictional interpretation of real combat principles, the 21 foot rule a’la Justified was fraught with problems.  The “rule” assumes an unwary target, first and foremost – once Raylan knows that Crowe is going to attack with a blade (regardless of the distance), the jig is up and the specifications of the 21 foot window are moot.  Especially if the target is an accomplished pistoleer, as Raylon is in Justified.  The “rule” of 21 feet is all about reaction time, not distance, and if one expects a given action, one’s reaction time to it will be significantly shorter.
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This brings up another wrinkle in the 21 Foot Continuum, that being that everyone’s 21 feet is different.  21 feet is an average, and all things being equal, nothing ever is.  The “rule,”  (it’s really a guideline, at best), states that the average man can cross 21 feet in the same time as another average man’s reaction time.  Sadly, reaction times vary considerably and decline with age; my reaction time pushing 50 is not what it was twenty years ago, and so my 21 feet is really more like 27.  

I know this from doing a drill on the range.  Facing the target, a buddy stood beside me facing away from me.  At the bell, I drew and fired as he ran like hell toward the back of the range.  At the sound of my shot, he stopped, and we measured how far away from me he was able to run (remember, he was running away from the direction I was shooting) before I was able to present my weapon and fire.  In multiple attempts, and knowing that I was being tested on the 21 Foot Rule, I never made 21 feet. 

In a couple of weeks I’ll be doing a Saturday seminar on researching for authors, and one of the elements I expect to touch on briefly is “found research,” or that information that one finds when one is not looking for it.  Really, it’s my favorite kind of research, and probably among the most common, because writers are always on the lookout for a fascinating tidbit they can work into their narratives.

In the Ballad of the Laurie Swain, one of my favorite scenes is when Joseph and Samuel are first attacked by the hired shootist Darryl Benson on a wide open prairie.  Joseph’s horse is killed and they are pinned down by the superior rifleman.  Joseph must resort to a shoulder stock on his revolver.  The shoulder stock was a fairly common, though I think seldom used, attachment for many of the Civil War era firearms.  Their utility can be assessed by how few of them continued in production, but still, it gives a better shooting platform than a pistol alone.  Joseph fires at Benson from behind his horse and manages to hit him in the head, unseating him and leaving him for dead.

But Darryl Benson is not dead, and the black hole in his head creeps everyone out for the remainder of the novel.

Who would think a man could be shot in the head and live! But truth is stranger than fiction, and I didn’t make this up. This was “found research” that I came across in a non-fiction book titled The Devil Knows how to Ride by Edward Leslie. 

Pvt. Jacob Miller of the 9th infantry was struck in the head at Chickamauga, and survived.  He sported a gaping hole in his noggin ever after, but lived to a ripe old age nonetheless.  It’s a haunting image, and I was so taken with it that I took the injury, transported it from Chickamauga to Texas and put the man on a horse.

This weekend I finally got around to seeing a new western – Slow West, by director John Maclean.  I liked it, although it won’t make it into my video library.  Like The Homesman, I found it too dark for my tastes, although it’s not nearly as dark as The Homesman.  There is much to criticize about this film (see the review at http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/slow-west-2015), and I can’t kick on any of the detailed missteps that Cheshire enumerates here.  However, for all that, I thought it a worthy western that, as good genre pieces must, both adheres to and deviates from the classic formula of a “western.”

Slow West definitely falls into the category of a “gray western,” as defined by Richard Etulain.  Viewers are definitely going to root for the wispy innocent character of  Jay Cavendish, but beyond him, there is no certain footing.  His “partner,” if you’d call him that, Silas Selleck, is a gray character if ever there was one, cut from the same cloth as the original “man with no name” from Sergio Leone’s famous trilogy.  Virtually everyone in the cast follows a blurred moral compass, and in many respects this is a postmodern western that defies the good guy/bad guy dichotomy.  It overturns many of the optimistic values of the traditional western. This is a tragic western, but unlike other postmodern westerns, the final scene hints at a classically optimistic ending that reifies the values of the traditional western by suggesting that people can still build a rewarding future in this new land, escape their past and build a new life. That is, provided they can avoid falling victim to the senseless violence that rules the land.