Cover and Concealment can make a huge difference in your ability to defend yourself. Here’s a quick overview for those who are new to shooting - and a refresher for everyone else:
Couches, without a doubt. Oh, and dining room tables.
Any aisle at a convenient store. Unless those muffins on the shelf are really that stale.
Car doors.
That was my first thought too, @45IPAC!
Walls, doors, desks, and cars.
It should however be noted that in most shooting encounters it’s hard to distinguish between the two because the bad guys/gals have no real concept of shooting through concealment to get to you, they’ll just wait for you to expose yourself.
My advice would be to never put yourself at greater risk to move from a good position of concealment to a better covered position unless bullets start coming through your concealment.
Unless you’re behind the engine block. That can be cover as well.
Gonna go with the hotel wall right next to the door… where people stand with their back against that door jam waiting for the bad guy to stop shooting the door before they kick it in.
Also going with a shot up bad guy or a hostage… holding that person up in front of you really might not stop bullets, unless they’re wearing plates. Over penetration is A Thing.
Engine blocks don’t even provide real cover for rifle rounds these days since most of them are aluminum or sleeved with aluminum. You can put a standard .308 FMJ through most modern blocks.
Handguns, different story but even there you have a very small window of protection.
Tires with steel wheels can stop many handgun rounds but a rifle round will slice right through them as well.
I cringe every time I see a shootout on TV or movies where the good guys are hiding behind an open car door and it’s absorbing all the rounds being fired at them.
A human shield is not a bullet stopper, it’s just a way to get the good guys to stop shooting while you back out of the danger zone.
One of the ethical training dilemmas we used to discuss a lot was would you shoot through a hostage to kill the bad guy if you knew you could place the shot in a non fatal location on the hostage and still put down the bad guy given no other opportunity to save the hostage and stop the bad guy?