There are many scenarios where there might be a reason to defend life and family, but there are just as many where the smartest move is to conduct a strategic retreat.

Every scenario must be considered individually with the best course of action being determined by the situation. Many factors come into play to determine your course of action such as the number of assailants, the location and whether family members or innocent bystanders could get hurt. And all this has to be done very quickly.

A great example of this was on Personal Defense TV. On the show, host Tom Gresham conducted a force-on-force drill where an armed man walked into a store to conduct a robbery. This was a training exercise to determine the best course of action. They conducted the scenario multiple times with changing factors to eliminate any prior knowledge of what would happen.

In the first scenario, Gresham shoved back from the counter, drew his air-soft sidearm and shot the bad guy. Unfortunately, a second bad guy in the corner got him from behind. In the second try, once again, Gresham ended in a bad way. However, in the final try, Gresham assessed the situation, realized he couldn’t win and rushed out the door to safety herding bystanders with him. I asked Gresham about this show while on a prairie dog hunt in Wyoming last year. He told me that this scenario had been designed specially to help people realize that sometimes fighting isn’t the best course of action. In this case, the only time he “survived” was when he retreated.

Now this is just one of the many scenarios where retreat might be the best course of action. Every situation has multiple factors that can change constantly. If you’re going to carry a gun for self-defense, you have to continuously assess everything that is happening around you to determine the best course of action, and remember, just because you have a gun, doesn’t mean the smartest move is to use it.