In the spirit of bringing us back on topic, I'll share an experience that I feel is relevant. It happened little over a year ago.
I was out of town on a work-related trip with several coworkers. After a long, busy day, four of us decided we needed a late night snack, so we piled in my car and headed off to the nearest Taco Bell. It was probably around 11:30 p.m., in not the greatest part of a dingy industrial town that none of us were too terribly familiar with. In hindsight, that was mistake #1.
By force of habit, when eating at a seat-yourself establishment, I tend to try to situate myself at the front of my group so that I can choose a seating arrangement that I feel is tactically advantageous... you know, facing the door, etc. So keeping with my custom, I order first, and sprint off to choose my seat, and I make mistake #2. I find a "great" seat smack in the middle of the restaurant. Now, by my train of logic it was a great seat. It was a swivel chair, and not a booth, so I could access my gun easily. I was on the right end of the table, so my gun arm would be free. Most importantly, I had a) a great view of the door, b) a clear shooting-lane towards the door, and c) a clear isle to the door, and d) my buddy who also carries would be sitting right across from me with an equally advantageous view of the back door, and so he could watch my back, or so I thought.
Now, the reasoning behind my selection of a defensive position was the outgrowth of a fallacy in my picture of what a "hold-up" would look like. I imagined that I would be defending against a hollywood, old-west style stickup where bandits burst into the open door with masks on their faces and guns drawn, shouting "This is a stick-up! Everybody on the floor!" You see, I had no intention of getting on the floor and putting myself at their mercy, so my position was chosen accordingly. I figured, with my clear view of the large glass double-door, I could see threats approaching. With my clear shooting-lane towards the door, I could engage threats freely as they bottle-necked in the doorway. With my clear isle towards the door, I would make a ferocious and aggressive move towards the exit, and would unleash a rain of lead onto anybody who thought about trying to stop me. And of course, I didn't need to be against a wall because my armed buddy was watching my back, as I watched his.
Of course, as the article in the OP points out, most of these badguys don't burst into the room with ski masks on their faces waving Hi-Points in the air like in all the heist movies. The master criminal is an ambush predator. He slinks, shimmies, and oozes his way into your personal space before he pounces. And that reflects the lead-up to my experience (which ends peacefully, without an altercation).
We were sitting there eating, while I diligently watched the door protecting my group from the James-Younger gang or some such nonsense. As I'm watching, a group of four very ghetto banger types walks up to the door. My buddy sees something change in my eyes as I watch them, so he turns around and watches with me. They approach together, stop a moment and converse outside the door, and then they come in...that's when things get downright creepy.
One guy heads straight for the front counter, and stands there like he's going to order, placing him about ten feet directly behind my chair. One guy sits at a table about ten feet behind my buddy, right between us and the door. Of the other two, one peels off to my right and finds a seat on the right wall, and the other veers left and finds a seat over there.
I had made a grave tactical error in choosing my seat...I was surrounded. Instantly my brain flashed back to an article I'd read by Paul Howe about moving to "Points of Domination" when entering a hostile room...move down the walls and to the corners, and control the room. I had been too stupid to remember this lesson, but these street types understood it intuitively. This terrified me.
I looked in my buddy's eyes to see if he had noticed their choice of seating arrangement. Was I overreacting? Was I imagining things? The look on his face told me that he shared my concern. Our other two friends were ignorantly munching tacos in condition white. I, on the other hand, was in red, teetering on black. I noticed the guy behind my buddy staring at me, and it put me over the edge. I physically began shaking. These guys hadn't said a word or even made an overt threatening gesture, but I'm not sure I'd ever been so scared in my life. A 5 shot snubnose .38 suddenly didn't feel so empowering when confronted with a 360 degree quadruple threat environment. The worst part was that they had the initiative. I knew they were not behaving normally, but I could hardly draw on a guy for picking a booth i didn't approve of.
So I did all I could. I finished my taco. It was my second of three. I was afraid abandoning my meal mid-taco would indicate my fear, and possibly trigger a reaction, so I just ate it, all the while looking back at the guy behind my buddy to make sure he knew I saw him. I did not, however, stick around for the third taco. As soon as I'd swallowed my last bite of number 2, I threw the third taco in the sack, me and my situationally aware buddy stood up, practically grabbed our other two oblivious, idiot companions up by the ears, and we marched out the door. Those were perhaps the 10 most frightening steps of my life, as I had to pass between two of the bangers, with as little as three feet clearance to the near one. They watched us on the way out, and while my hand was not directly on the butt of my still concealed revolver, it was hanging in the "ready to draw position" an inch from my hip, like the cowboys do in the movies while the clock ticks down the last seconds to the showdown. I don't know if they noticed it, or if they interpreted it as "weapon", but I like to think they did. We drove straight home, and I poured myself a stiff drink.
I don't know if those guys were actually up to no good, or if they just like sitting in weird chairs and messing with the out-of-towners...regardless, I've taken a few lessons from the experience, and I also think the situation had relevance to the original article.
Generally
1) Getting surrounded sucks...so don't sit in the middle of the room. Duh...idiot mistake. 2) Small guns are fine, but bigger guns are better. 3)Don't go out late at night in bad parts of unfamiliar towns. 4) It's good to have a buddy with a gun.
Regarding the Article
1) My biggest beef is with how early the author wants us to draw. Actually, it's not really a beef. In the circumstances he described, it may be a great idea. Bad guys don't want to call the cops. Suspicious miscreants don't want to call the cops, even if it turns out they meant you no harm.
Here's the thing though... every encounter does not necessarily happen in a dark parking lot where the only people who know what happened are you and the badguy. I would've loved to have slowly backed out of the restaurant, pistol in hand while I kept a close eye on my new acquaintances. The employees of Taco Bell, and Taco Bell's CCTV system, on the other hand, would probably have been very upset if I'd unholstered my weapon just to get up and walk to my car.
2) Bad guys are sneaky, and deliberately ambiguous. We like to imagine how we would respond against known threats; a lot of the time, however, the biggest challenge will be figuring out if the threat is even real. It is by design that they don't want us to know what is going on until it is too late.
*Edit-I'm working on zero hours of sleep right now, so sorry if it's too rambly, or even if there's any non-sensible sentences in there... I really cant tell at this point.