Unless you live in northern Alaska and its summertime, at some point today, the sun is going to set and it’s going to get dark outside. Darkness increases the ability of the bad guy to hide before an attack, which in turn reduces the distance you can see them coming and helps obscure the number of attackers and their position relative to you. Reduced light levels also provides increased security of the bad guy, as there are usually fewer bystanders around, and the darkness provides the bad guy (or gal) with an easier means of escape.
We humans rely on our eyesight more than the other sense to gain information about our surroundings, and darkness reduces the amount of information we can soak in about what’s going on around us. We can overcome this limitation by carrying around a portable source of illumination with us, namely the modern tactical flashlight.
What is “Low Light?”
The Department of Energy has two standards for its reduced-lighting firearms qualification. “Dim light” is considered to be approximately .2 foot/candles, and “Dark light” is anything less than that. For our purposes, though, we’re going to define “low light” as any encounter where additional illumination is needed in order to achieve your desired goal.
How Often Do Armed Citizens Truly Low Light?
Darn good question. At the present time, Tom Givens’ students have a 68-0-3 record in gun fights, and none of them needed a flashlight or a weapon-mounted light (WML) to come out ahead in their encounters with the criminal element. There’s a good reason for this. The bad guy needs enough light to make a PID (Positive ID) that we’re suitable prey. This also means that we have enough light to make a PID on the bad guy.
This fact changes the role of the weapon-mounted light and tactical flashlight for the armed citizen compared to how military or law enforcement uses them. Law enforcement officers chase after bad guys. So does the military. They do it as part of their jobs, and that job requires them to make a PID on the target before using lethal force.
Our Mission, Should We Chose To Accept It…
However, chasing after the bad guys is not our job. Our job is to avoid contact with the bad guys (or girls), but if contact is made, we need to stop the threat using an appropriate level of force. If the bad guy runs away, the threat is stopped, and we call in the cops to handle it from there. We are not tasked with chasing down a suspect. Our encounters are reactive, not active. Our PID is going to be a bad guy who popped out of the shadows and is now threatening our lives with lethal force. If we end the encounter in our favor and he runs away, that’s a win for us. Let the police handle it from there, that’s their job to chase down the bad guy, make a positive identification and then put him or her in cuffs.
So how should an armed citizen use a flashlight? To begin with, flashlights are a device to gain or deny information. If we increase our visual information concerning a potential threat, we increase our chances of dealing with it promptly and correctly.
Light = Information
Flashlights can be used to gain information about a potential threat, such as where they are, what they are doing with their hands or who is around them. However, the light from a flashlight can also tell others where we are and where we are going. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing.
It’s a good thing if we use a flashlight to inform potential bad guys that you know it’s dark outside and that you have taken steps to deal with this fact. In a bad guy’s world, only two types of people walk around with bright flashlights: Security guards and law enforcement officers, neither of which represent prime targets for a bad guy. The more you can reinforce that thought in the mind of the bad guy, the smaller your chances of becoming a victim that night.
However, the information you gain by using a flashlight comes at a price, as the bad guy now has more information about you and where you are. We’ll talk about how and why you can mitigate this in the second article.
Blinded By The Light
Flashlights can also be used to deny information to others. When it’s turned on, you are broadcasting your location to others, however, when it is off, that information goes away, allowing you to move and act with increased secrecy. A bright flashlight can also be blasted into the eyes of an attacker. This action closes the pupils and overloads the retina, causing temporary blindness, creating time for us to respond that we otherwise would not have had. The time available after this action is nowhere near as long as other less-less choices such as pepper spray.
I set up a simple test to find out how a blast of bright light to our eyes affects our ability to process information. I stapled a common eye chart to the wall in a dimly lit environment and had four people read as many letters as they could in three seconds from twenty feet away. One did so under ambient light, and the other three were blasted for two seconds in the eyes with tactical flashlights of varying strengths and then asked to read the same chart.
Test Results:
Dim Lighting Conditions: 10 letters correct
2 Seconds of a 300 Lumen Light: 8 letters correct
2 Seconds of a 600 Lumen Light: 4 letters correct
2 Seconds of a 1200 Lumen Light: 1 letter correct
Clearly, more lumens is more better. However, the effects of this test wore off quite quickly compared to other less-lethal options such as pepper spray. This means that if this wasn’t enough to stop the threat, we need to either quickly move to someplace which gives us more time to react or choose another option in order to deal with the threat in front of us.
In Part Two, we’ll talk about how to use a tactical flashlight with your defensive pistol.
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