Who the hell is teaching your self defense class? The first rule of gun safety is that when a gun is pointed at a person, you have an extremely dangerous situation. No exceptions!
And what part of being in an extremely dangerous situation prevents one from taking control of that situation? I was taught by a pair of retired marines and a krav maga instructor. Yes, its dangerous, but no less dangerous then any other action you might take, and potentially less dangerous if the person isn't expecting resistance.
No less dangerous than any other action you might take? In a kidnapping situation, you
may be right. Statistically, if you allow yourself to be kidnapped for any other reason than ransom, you're virtually guaranteed to be raped and/or murdered anyway. Cooperating with a kidnapping is extremely dangerous.
But if we were talking about anything less than kidnapping -- say a robbery, with a gun to your face -- this would be one hundred percent wrong. I stress this not out of a desire to win an argument, but because we are discussing a self defense issue with life and death consequences, and many people have died because they did something stupid in a situation like this.
The fact that you are being merely threatened with deadly force indicates that the person threatening you is attempting to avoid the need to use it. It does not mean that they are not prepared to use it. In fact, it is
extremely likely that if they are carrying a loaded gun, they are fully prepared to kill you if they have to. In this situation, the most dangerous thing you can do is to make them decide to pull the trigger. The moment they have decided to pull the trigger, you are infinitely less safe. It doesn't matter how good you think you are at fighting --
even with a gun in your face, you were not in a fight before you decided to start one.
Your instructors are all fighting specialists, which is only great so far as learning to protect yourself from violent assault is concerned, a distinction they should be actively emphasizing. But self defense and combat are very different beasts, and learning to fight only helps you in the rare nightmare situation where all other measures of self defense fail and someone is actually trying to hurt you -- and knowing how to fight can get you killed in anything less, if you do something stupid because of it. Real self defense is not getting into a fight in the first place. And that is not just high school karate teacher gum flapping.
Self defense is not about winning -- it's about surviving. Intentionally escalating the situation to the point where they now intend to shoot you, just because you
think you're in a situation that is "relatively easy to defeat", is not self defense; it is the naive mindset of someone who is prepared to literally commit suicide because they refuse to believe that some asshole got the better of them and is going to get away with it.
If someone is pointing a gun at you, and demands your wallet, you don't react by deciding that you learned about this in class and you can get control of the situation. You just give him your wallet. If they demand you lay down on the floor and let them steal your TV, you lay down on the floor and let them steal your TV. Nothing you own, not even your pride, is worth even the slightest
risk of getting killed yourself.