When I arrived at the classroom, clad in industry-standard black suit and Ray-Bans, I half expected to find bearded and inked former commandos doing close-quarters combat drills and fine-tuning their choke holds. That’s because in the cottage industry of security-content creators, former soldiers are overrepresented. But in reality, military as well as law-enforcement experience can come with ingrained habits that would be a liability for a protector. Cops and soldiers are often trained to meet force with force; bodyguards are judged by the sole metric of whether they get their P to safety and protect their reputation.

People tend to know how to spot danger instinctively, according to the books of Gavin de Becker, 71, whose firm has provided security services to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and who’s considered the father of modern executive protection. He explains how to hone these instincts into action in The Gift of Fear and Just 2 Seconds, which are read like scripture in this world. In them, he argues that acts of violence are usually preceded by observable “pre-incident indicators” and that gut feelings, far from being spiritual premonitions, are actually a form of rapid pattern recognition. In The Gift of Fear, de Becker, who declined to be interviewed for this story, describes his childhood memory of watching his mother point a gun at his stepfather and later hearing the gunshot go off in their home. One of his earliest jobs was as a teenage personal assistant to Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. His company, Gavin de Becker and Associates, which runs a respected training academy out of Texas, notes that “military, law enforcement, or security background is great, though not a requirement. Our most successful Protectors come from a variety of backgrounds and have succeeded because they are willing to learn.”

“As former cops, we think the world is ours,” another Icon trainer, Kevin Ghee, admonished the class. “We think we got arrest powers, but you’re just a civilian with a job. You gotta let that ego go.” (It was six-foot-six Ghee who could be seen subduing Brad Pitt’s red-carpet attacker during the 2014 Maleficent premiere.) The critical skill that all protectors need to learn is to defeat an attack well before it happens. But those kinds of wins don’t grab headlines, and so the demand for protection ebbs and flows. “After the UnitedHealthcare CEO was killed, everybody was afraid and everybody was calling and they needed security. But that lasts about six months, and then they go back to what they had. The fear in the moment makes them give me the full package,” Ghee told me later. “Six months later, when it’s not in the news cycle anymore, they want to start turning it off.”

Among protectors, the gold standard of care seems to be the US Secret Service’s Office of Protective Operations. And a textbook response that protectors hold up as their aspirational ideal is the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, which occurred outside the Washington, DC, Hilton. At the sound of gunfire, agent Jerry Parr shoved Reagan into the presidential limousine while agent Tim McCarthy—a former strong safety at the University of Illinois—stepped into the line of fire, where he was hit in the abdomen. Press Secretary James Brady (the namesake of the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act) was hit in the head, sustaining lifelong injuries, and a round that bounced off the limo punctured one of the president’s lungs. Nobody died. The attacker, John Hinckley Jr., fired six shots in less than two seconds and was tackled and subdued with the help of civilian bystanders and local police.

That 1981 attack illustrates a dozen best practices and operational realities. Ambushes occur most often in and around vehicles, people tend to hit the ground at the sound of gunfire, and the Secret Service relied on their training to stay focused and get the P off the X. (If you’ve ever had a handgun fired near you without ear protection, you know just how impressive this is.) Though Reagan’s detail was armed, the attacker was still neutralized the old-fashioned way.

“I know there’s a lot of gun talk in this industry,” Ghee told the class. “But 90 to 95 percent of the time you’re going unarmed.”

“Overseas?” Shaw added. “Forget about it.”

While many of these guys might prefer to be armed, as civilians traveling between jurisdictions with jet-setting clients, they can’t necessarily maintain all the relevant licenses, even where reciprocity between US states exists. When protection details do need armed agents, they typically outsource the risk by hiring them through local contractors. And even that’s no guarantee.

In 2020, Matt Dolloff, hired by Denver’s 9News through security giant Pinkerton, fatally shot a spray-can-wielding right-wing protester named Lee Keltner during an altercation between dueling demonstrations, a Patriot Muster and a Black Lives Matter–Antifa soup drive. Prosecutors dropped the second-degree murder charges; however, local news reported that because Dolloff was not licensed to work as a security guard in Denver, the subcontractor that employed him, Isborn Security Services, agreed to surrender its operating license for five years. Pinkerton’s own license was also temporarily revoked by the city.

Shaw told his class they’d be hard-pressed to show him an incident where the protector had prevented an attack on a principal using a firearm.

In Just 2 Seconds, de Becker explains, “In most incidents we studied, it was the gunmen who decided when to stop shooting.”

In my own research, I came across three cases where a firearm may have preempted an incident. The first was when two Puerto Rican secessionists stormed Blair House, where President Truman was living while the White House was being renovated, on November 1, 1950. Before they could enter the building, one of the attackers, Griselio Torresola, was shot and killed, and the other, Oscar Collazo, was critically wounded. A White House police officer, Leslie Coffelt, died from three rounds to the abdomen. The second two incidents involve President Trump.

Fewer than six seconds into the 2024 Butler, Pennsylvania, attack on the then candidate, Adams Township sergeant Aaron Zaliponi fired what’s come to be known as “the ninth shot,” which is believed to have struck the gunman’s rifle. The FBI has reported that there is no forensic evidence to support this belief, but the gunman never fired again, and, within seconds, a Secret Service countersniper had killed the attacker. In the third case, also in 2024, a Secret Service agent at the Trump International Golf Club noticed a rifle barrel poking through the foliage and fired several shots. The suspect fled before being apprehended.

Research from Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training suggests it’s nearly twice as common for bystanders without weapons to intervene, as was the case in the shooting of then congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, in 2011. Patricia Maisch, one of several people who tried to intervene, was in line to take a picture with Giffords when she grabbed the magazine as the shooter went to reload. De Becker calls it “projective” interruption, a responsibility given to protectors on the perimeter. For protectors who spend the vast majority of their working hours unarmed, there comes a moment of realization that being a bodyguard is less about guarding a body and more about being one. Kendra Geronimo, a mixed martial artist and firearms instructor who works Icon details out of Miami, said, “I am a bodyguard. That means I have to literally put my body in harm’s way to protect you.”

Another of Shaw’s Icon agents, DeMarcus Merritt, told me “the protection part” comes easily to most of them. “I am a big guy. It doesn’t take much for me to bring the intimidation factor. But most of the job is being at the hands and feet of the client, whatever they may need,” said Merritt. “The way I’ve learned from Elijah and the Icon family is that we are basically oversized butlers.”

A student at the Vegas course, a former football lineman who’d worked club security in Los Angeles and was trying to break into executive protection because bouncing is notoriously dangerous, put it most succinctly: “We’re like a meat shield.” Bodyguards Who Made News

Shaw likens his upbringing on Chicago’s South Side to the ’70s sitcom Good Times. “I lived in the housing projects like that—single-parent home, had a great mom, had a great support system.” He trained in aikido and karate and in the early ’90s went to film school at Columbia College, a liberal arts school in the South Loop with a good reputation in Hollywood. Like many protectors, he began by picking up nightclub shifts, assigned to bathroom duty. “I had the good fortune that the club was owned by one of the Chicago Bulls,” said Shaw. This was the era when Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, and Dennis Rodman dominated pop culture. “This was the dynasty.”

Shaw worked his way through uniformed security and loss prevention (a fancy way of saying he busted shoplifters) but pretty quickly realized that he could de-escalate confrontations and build deep client relationships. He was tapped to help move Bulls players around the city. The nightclub made him head of security. “Most of my contemporaries came from law enforcement and the military,” he said.

Still in his 20s, he could have gone that route but instead made what turned out to be a well-timed bet. “I said, ‘Well, let me see how I can make it successful in the private sector,’ ” Shaw told me. ...