There are things that criminals know that you don’t, but here are some lessons that will help really keep you safe.
I recently attended the Crime and Criminals seminar presented by John Hearne of Two Pillars Training, an annual update he delivers through Citizen Safety Academy. It reinforced something most armed citizens intuitively sense but rarely see laid out this clearly: Much of what we believe about crime in America is either incomplete, misleading or simply wrong.
Hearne holds a master’s degree in criminal justice with a concentration in research methods, a public safety career stretching back to 1986 across fire, police, EMS and more than a decade as a federal law enforcement officer. He’s a published author and rangemaster instructor since 2001. What followed over two hours was one of the most grounded and practically valuable presentations I’ve sat through in years of firearms training.
His seminar isn’t about tactics or gear. It focuses on something more foundational: the reality of crime, how criminals think and how ordinary people become victims. For anyone serious about personal defense, this is where the conversation should start.
The First Hard Truth: The Data Isn’t What You Think
Most people assume FBI crime statistics offer a reliable picture of reality. Hearne makes a compelling case they do not. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports rely on “crimes known to police,” which excludes everything unreported—and according to Bureau of Justice Statistics survey data, less than half of violent crime is ever reported to law enforcement.
In 2023, the FBI published data suggesting violent crime dropped roughly 2 percent in 2022. Revised 2024 figures quietly revealed an actual net increase of about 41/2 percent, a swing of more than 6 points that never got a press release, discovered only when a criminologist noticed something odd while downloading fresh data. Cities like Washington, D.C., have been caught classifying gunshot-wound transports as routine EMS calls, effectively erasing violent crimes from the record.
By comparing FBI data to CDC homicide records, Hearne showed the FBI misses roughly 17 percent of homicides. If the agency is missing 1 in 6 murders, he asked, what percentage of rapes and aggravated assaults are going uncounted? His rule of thumb: Take the FBI’s violent crime numbers and multiply by 5. You’ll still probably come up short.
The Criminal Justice System Is Not Your Safety Net
Only about 3 percent of all violent victimizations and property crimes ever result in a prison sentence. Clearance rates hover around 15 to 20 percent for property crime and roughly 40 percent for violent crime, and clearance doesn’t mean conviction. Many cases end in diversion, plea agreements or minimal consequences.
Hearne illustrated the dysfunction with the case of Eliza Fletcher, a Memphis pre-K teacher murdered in 2022 by a man who had served 20 of 24 years for a prior kidnapping and robbery, received a new conviction for indecent exposure inside prison just one month before release, and then kidnapped and raped another woman almost immediately after getting out, but the sexual assault kit from that crime sat untested on a shelf. The system had multiple opportunities to intervene and did nothing with any of them.
He also pushed back on the narrative that American prisons are full of nonviolent drug offenders. In state prisons, only 16 percent of inmates are serving drug-related sentences, and fewer than 1 percent are there for low-level charges with no history of violence. More than half the non-federal prison population is locked up for violent crimes. Hearne’s conclusion is blunt. If you want to meaningfully reduce the prison population, you are, by the numbers, talking about the possibility of releasing people convicted of murder, rape and kidnapping.
Criminals Choose You Faster Than You Think
Hearne referenced a landmark 1981 study in which convicted criminals were shown videos of pedestrians and asked to rate their ease of victimization. The inmates showed striking consensus, and they weren’t evaluating victims by size, dress or apparent wealth. They were reading gait, stride length, weight shift and arm swing. These indicators signaled vulnerability more reliably than anything else. Subsequent research using point-light kinematics confirmed it. People form accurate assessments of vulnerability from movement alone in under 2 seconds.
What criminals are asking is simple: Can this person fight back? Are they paying attention? Is the reward worth the risk? Most are rational actors running a rapid cost-benefit calculation, and their default when uncertain is to move on to an easier target. Hearne called inducing that hesitation a “restraining judgment.” As he put it, quoting Clint Smith, “If you look like food, you will be eaten.”
It’s Not the Odds—It’s the Stakes
The statistical likelihood of violent crime in any given year may feel low, but over a lifetime that risk compounds, and when violent crime materializes, the consequences are often permanent. A better framework balances likelihood against consequence. Property crime is common and highly deterrable. Most residential burglaries are opportunistic, local and conducted during daylight by offenders seeking the easiest target. Simple measures like reinforced entry points, visible deterrents and limiting outward signs of valuable property shift the calculation in your favor.
Violent crime is less frequent but categorically different in consequence. As Hearne put it, borrowing from his late colleague William Aprill, “Your understanding and consent are not required for someone to take your life, kill your loved ones and destroy all that you hold dear.” That is not fear-mongering. That is the correct framing for how seriously to take preparation.
Where Firearms Actually Fit
Hearne was careful not to deliver a “go buy a gun” pitch. His framework builds in layers: general de-selection through awareness and not projecting vulnerability; specific de-selection through verbal skills when someone is running the pre-attack interview on you; and forced de-selection when the first two have failed.
The numbers on armed resistance are worth knowing. Complying completely in an armed robbery still leaves a 25 percent chance of injury, and the robbery succeeds 90 percent of the time. Resistance with a firearm drops injury odds to 17 percent and rarely allows the crime to complete. Resistance before injury drops that to around 6 percent. For rape specifically, armed resistance is the most effective deterrent to completion and does not increase physical harm to the victim. Research also shows defensive gun uses frequently occur without a shot fired. The presence of a firearm alone can stop a crime in progress.
A gun is not the first solution. It is the last. But as Hearne noted, “Most of the time, you don’t need a parachute, but when you do, nothing else will substitute.”
The Bottom Line
Personal safety begins long before any confrontation. Crime is underreported. Risk is local and situational. Criminals make fast, rational decisions, and the system most people trust to protect them is working at a fraction of the capacity they imagine.
For the armed citizen, this knowledge is not academic. It is the foundation on which every other preparation rests. The objective is not simply to be armed. It is to be prepared, aware and genuinely difficult to victimize.
Hearne offers this seminar annually through Citizen Safety Academy, and additional training through Two Pillars Training. If you get the opportunity, take it. It is not the most fun class. It is the necessary one.
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the June 2026 issue of Gun Digest the Magazine.
More Knowledge For The Armed Citizen
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- Tips For Communicating With Police After Shootings
- Concealed Carry: After the Shooting
- Q&A: Massad Ayoob On Self-Defense In 2020 America
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