Victoria Davison was going to her car when she was attacked by  brazen carjackers that had been terrorizing citizens in Milwaukee and Wauwatosa, Wisconsin.

The difference between Davison and the previous victims is that she was able to get her hands on the concealed weapon she kept in her car.

Victoria Davison said two boys came up behind her and one of them shouted for her to give up her keys.

According to Davison, one of the robbers told her, “I want the keys, car, everything.”

Davison said when she didn’t produce the keys fast enough, one of the boys said, “Go get the cannon.”

Thinking it meant a gun, Davison managed to unzip her gym bag, produce her own concealed gun, and fired at one of the boys.

“I shot the one that was in front of me. The one in the back of me, he said a curse word, and then he looked at his friend, and then he ran off while his friend was on the ground,” Davison said.

The 15-year-old carjacker that Davison shot fell to the ground, paralyzed. He remains hospitalized following the June 23 incident, and apparently gave authorities plenty of information about his fellow criminals. Law enforcement is tying the wounded teen thug and his gang to dozens of crimes, including other carjackings and robberies. They’re charging the injured carjacker as a teen, perhaps as part of a deal not to charge him as an adult if he provided information about his accomplices and bring down the criminal ring.

“Snitches get stitches” is the thuggish gang saying, but the reality of the matter is that they get much shorter sentences than their fellow criminals, and the majority of criminals will tell the police what they want to hear about their fellow criminals if it means they face fewer charges and a shorter sentence in trade.

Ms. Davison is very lucky, as the video at the top of this article makes clear.

She is not a large person, and yet she was able to somehow overpower two carjackers, retrieve a zippered gun case from her car after the attack began, retain possession of the case, unzip it, and retrieve her weapon without it being taken from her, and then use the weapon to shoot one of the carjackers and stop the attack. It appears that they didn’t consider her a credible threat, and she used that to her advantage.

Most people are not going to have the opportunity to successfully obtain a weapon from off-body carry once an attack begins.

Criminals rely on surprise, fear, and/or overwhelming force, and typically use that to overpower the defending inside two seconds.

In many of the force-on-force scenarios I witnessed this past Saturday as Trace Armory Group trained a class of 18 students from Carolina Shooters Club, many of the confrontations—from the aggressor committing to the attack to either the defender or aggressor taking hits—was over in just a little more than a second. The “action” phase of these attacks where the defender had the legal right to draw and use a firearm was over so fast that I failed to capture the moment of attack on film, even though I attempted to do so more than a dozen times.

It happens fast, far too fast for off-body carry to be viable in most situations.

We’ll have a pair of stories about the Trace Armory/Carolina Shooters Club event later this week. In the meantime, I’d strongly suggest that you practice on-body carry. Most of us won’t be as lucky as Ms. Davison.