Many people find it difficult to dryfire every day because they don’t have access to a firearm. Airline pilots and business people whose job require frequent air travel have a hard time of it. There are different ways of dealing with it.

The first would be to practice every day you do have access to your firearm and start counting. Doing that means you wouldn’t have a consecutive progression of the 1,000 Days but you would still get in 1,000 Days, it would just take longer.

Another approach would be to broaden the focus of your practice, as I mentioned in Part I. That’s one reason I entitled this series 1,000 Days of Practice.

Other skills appropriate to personal protection could be included as part of your mission statement for the 1,000 Days. This wouldn’t be 1,000 Days of Dryfire but it could be 1,000 Days of Personal Protection practice. Many of the most important Personal Protection Skills are soft skills that don’t require equipment to practice. Some that come to mind are:

• situational awareness
• the decision-making process
• incident analysis
• wargaming and decision exercises
• proxemics, and
• human communication and interaction

The memory aid I use for personal protection is RADAR.

• Ready – being prepared, mentally and physically
  • knowledge,
  • skills,
  • tools
• Aware – eyes on the horizon, ears not plugged up
  • Where am I?,
  • Who is around me?,
  • What are they doing?,
  • What is going on?,
  • Points Of Likely Concealment
  • What is wrong in my right world?
• Decide – based on your decision criteria
  • options,
  • priorities, and
  • the situation
• Act – do what you need to do
• Ready Again – be ready for your plan to need adjustment or the police to arrive.

Dryfire is one component of the Ready stage but it’s certainly not the only one. Understanding the criminal mindset and their methods of operation is also key. How about spending a few minutes periodically reviewing criminal victimizations that occurred to others and wargaming how to either avoid or deal with the situation? I have taken this so far as to go on a field trip to the location of a particularly bad incident and actually observe the lay of the land.

Moe’s Package store robbery 

There are games that smart cops used to play to tune up their situational awareness. How common they are anymore, I don’t know. For instance, when in a waiting area, look around the room, then close your eyes and try to describe everyone in the room; clothes, height, weight, etc. That would be Aware practice.

Or, let’s say you encountered something that caused your to Alert and then realized it wasn’t a problem. You could mentally wargame what you thought the original problem and your solution. Take it all the way through to Ready Again, including your interaction with the authorities afterward.

There are many different ways to approach the 1,000 Days and tailor the focus to your personal needs and circumstances.

I’ll be going through a more in-depth explanation of RADAR, including some decision exercises, in the Violent Criminals and You class that William Aprill and I are teaching next month. William will be giving his extensive presentation on the criminal mindset and how differently criminals think.