Are you ready to protect your family from a real-life carjacking? This is what they look like! This off-duty Brazilian officer practiced excellent Active Self Protection, and shows us all how it is done!

News story on the shooting (Google Translate from Portuguese required): http://get-asp.com/izgg

How do I protect myself from carjacking?

1. Situational awareness and threat assessment is the foundation of covering your ASP. There is nothing that will allow you to protect yourself if you do not have any advanced notice of the threat coming your way. This officer saw that something bad was coming his way, and that gave him the second he needed to act.

2. You will not rise to the occasion; you will fall to the level of your training on your worst day. Have you drawn from concealment from the driver’s seat of your car? Have you practiced getting your seatbelt off in that moment without getting fouled in it? Have you worked on exiting YOUR vehicle if you needed to while fighting a gunfight? I hope so!

3. Capacity matters! This guy went through ten shots in the space of a second. Does your firearm have that much capacity? Had he only had ten, he was out. Had he had a 6-shot revolver, he was in trouble. I prefer at least 15 rounds in my defensive handgun for this reason, but in some places the law allows 7 or even fewer. (I’m looking at you, New York!) If that’s the case, a reload is mandatory in my opinion.

4. Marksmanship matters, and this fight took both point shooting and sighted fire to navigate successfully. He shot the first carjacker 5 times, and shot at the others 2-3 times. Putting effective shots on target is incredibly important, because what we see again and again is that usually the first person to get a shot on target wins the fight, not for it being over but for the psychological effect.

5. The carjacker who was shot 5 times died, but notice how long it took him to die. He ran all the way off screen and for who knows how long afterward before his life expired. Don’t expect a handgun to incapacitate someone immediately, even if your attacker is mortally wounded.

6. Self-defense is a matter of counter-ambush. The bad guy ambushes his or her intended victim, and the defender then needs to launch a successful counter-ambush to turn the tide and win the encounter. This officer did so immediately and magnificently.

Attitude. Skills. Plan.