Occupational Hazards
#mindsetmonday
The training community is often obsessed with and overestimates the value of what we do and say. The Most Dangerous Man in the World cautioned me about becoming too enthused about hearing myself talk (not me personally but rather as an occupational hazard) as a firearms instructor. More and more, I appreciate his wisdom in that regard.
Is training a substitute for practice and experience? Even bad practice will generally lead to some action.
Doing anything, even the wrong thing, is better than doing nothing.
Ranger saying
I’m not sure the same is true for training, especially when it occurred more than 30 days ago. That’s the half-life of hands-on training, according to Army Medical Department studies.
If you would like to purchase my book, click on the image below.
I’m working on the next volume, Tales of the Gauge, about LAPD shotgun shootouts. It’s very interesting.
Practicing the First Shot
This really should be #fridayfundamentals but I feel compelled by some recent conversations to send it.
As I mentioned previously https://tacticalprofessor.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/the-importance-of-the-first-shot/, the importance of the first shot shouldn’t be underestimated. How to practice that remains a bit of mystery when people are shooting. Shooting multiple shot, often full magazine, strings of fire is the most common way people practice. Unfortunately, that masks the result of the first sight picture and trigger press.
For new shooters, we also need to keep in mind the concept of ‘progression,’ which is a fundamental concept of two of the world’s elite shooting schools, the Rogers Shooting School https://rogersshootingschool.com/ and the Mid-South Institute of Self-Defense Shooting https://weaponstraining.com/ .
The concepts of First Shot Drill and progression can be easily combined. Consider a series of Levels for hitting with the first shot. Start out at the 3 yard distance.
- Level 1 – hit a silhouette consistently
- Level 2 – hit a sheet of paper consistently
- Level 3 – hit a half sheet of paper consistently
- Level 4 – hit a quarter sheet of paper consistently
Shoot each Level using a progressively difficult start position; Low Ready, Midpoint of the drawstroke, and from the Holster.
You can use any silhouette you like. Having a face, a weapon, and an aiming point is more important than the type of silhouette used.
For those who don’t have access to or don’t wish to purchase a silhouette, a perfectly acceptable substitute can be made out of posterboard.
Start by doing dry practice. Level 1 would look like this.
My colleague Lee Weems https://thatweemsguy.com/ made an incisive comment at the Tactical Conference.
Enough Force used soon enough means less force used later.
Lee Weems
That could also be paraphrased as ‘a good enough hit with the first shot means less shooting later.’
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Every Day Skills
While there are plenty of posts about ‘Every Day Carry’ for personal protection, there are very few about Every Day Skills for personal protection. Tools are only useful if they are used with some degree of skill. Also many of the skills we use for personal protection don’t involve tools at all, other than the one between our ears.
I am now undertaking a long term project for a Fortune 500 retailer that involves being in their stores. So, I’ve taken my own advice and ‘gotten a real job.’ Dear Instructors, Get a Real Job Being back in ‘The Real World’ is an interesting experience, especially because I’m on the road, working different hours, and staying in motels.
A few of the things I’ve had to work on are:
- Surveillance Detection
- Situational Awareness (consider it in the context of changing a tire in the rain, for instance)
- Securing my tools repetitively
- Camouflage
- and numerous more
Chronicling my experiences with what personal protection for normal people really involves will be quite interesting. I am quite looking forward to it. It will be an adventure.
Breaking Contact – Our Objective
#mindsetmonday
An interesting aspect of reading Use of Force reports by different POlice departments is seeing their varying views about how to interpret the incidents. While the LAPD provides a very detailed analysis of officer marksmanship for each incident, the NYPD has a quite different view, at least in its public releases.
“Objective Completion Rate
The [NYPD] does not calculate ‘hit percentage’ when describing ID-AC [Intentional Discharge – Adversarial Conflict] incidents. The NYPD uses an ‘objective completion rate’ per incident to determine the effectiveness of police firearms discharges. When a uniformed member properly and lawfully perceives a threat severe enough to require the use of a firearm and fires properly and lawfully at a specific threat, the most relevant measure of success is whether the member ultimately stops the threat. This is the objective completion rate. Regardless of the number of shots that strike a particular subject, the objective is considered completed when the actions of the subject that threaten imminent serious physical injury or death are stopped by a member’s use of deadly physical force, i.e., a subject stops their threatening actions after being shot.
In 2019, uniformed members of the service successfully stopped the threat by discharging their weapons in 24 of the 25 ID-AC incidents, with at least one subject shot in each of those 24 incidents, for an objective completion rate of 96%. The objective completion rate is used for statistical and informational purposes, and is not a factor considered in the investigation of the individual incidents.”
In other words, when the officer actually hit the “subject/perpetrator/assailant” with at least one round, the objective of stopping the Violent Criminal Actor’s action was achieved.
Unlike the LAPD analysis, NYPD data doesn’t provide us information that’s useful in terms of developing physical skills. However, it does provide us with an interesting philosophical viewpoint on what’s important in Defensive Gun Uses. Our ‘objective’ as Private Citizens is exactly the same as for officers of the NYPD, whether we call it “stopping the threat,” “breaking contact,” or use some other term.
The initial post about Breaking Contact (Part I) is located here:
https://tacticalprofessor.wordpress.com/2021/04/10/breaking-contact-part-i/
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Someone thought their car was a holster
Investigators said initial reports indicated the 9-year-old had found a handgun inside the car.
9-year-old believed to have fatally shot 11-year-old boy in car in Pleasant Grove, Dallas police say
My tolerance for this kind of idiocy gets lower and lower with every one of these incidents I read about. Anyone who leaves an unsecured gun in a car is a fool. People who do it can sugar coat their reasons all they want and I’m still going to say:
If you leave an unsecured gun in your car, you’re a fool. If you consider this an acceptable practice, please unsubscribe from this blog; I don’t suffer fools gladly.
When a child gets shot because of an adult’s carelessness about securing a firearm, it’s no different than if the child was killed while the adult was drinking and driving.
Mommy and Daddy, where’s my older brother?
He’s not with us because you killed him when we left you alone in the car with an unsecured loaded gun.
Think about having that conversation any time you feel like leaving your gun in the car.
Breaking Contact (Part I)
CCW Safe is doing a series about our ultimate goal in Personal Protection. I am happy that I have been able to make a contribution to the literature of our Art.
Our goal in personal protection is to force a break in contact [with a criminal attacker]. We want them to go away, or we want to go away. One or the other.
https://ccwsafe.com/blog/breaking-contact-pt-1
This philosophical fundamental is the true meaning of “Get off the X” for the Private Citizen. Sidestepping or whatever method is taught to get off the X isn’t the end or even the important part of the process. Forcing the attacker to withdraw or making our escape is the end objective.
It’s nothing new. Military units have probably been doing this since before the Roman Empire existed. It’s easily overlooked at the moment of an incident, though. For some folks, escaping is a natural response but for others it is counter-intuitive and needs to be practiced.
In some cases, what we’ve learned needs to be unlearned and replaced with a more appropriate tactic. Assaulting through the kill zone of an ambush toward the enemy is a prime example. Infantrymen are taught this from Day 1 of their military training. However, it’s often not a viable response in civilian life. Sadly, the LT Dwain Williams incident https://tacticalprofessor.wordpress.com/2021/02/26/using-cover-effectively/ is an example of how wrong this tactic can go.
As Shawn points out in the Breaking Contact article https://ccwsafe.com/blog/breaking-contact-pt-1, POlice officers are especially vulnerable to falling prey to the subconscious instinct to chase when they are off-duty. Several incidents in Real Shootouts of the LAPD https://realshootoutsofthelapd.com demonstrate this. However, private citizens are vulnerable too and he cites several cases where this occurred.
Practicing, using an inert replica of your tool, a simple Battle Drill of Breaking Contact with an attacker is worth actually doing rather than just thinking about. We learn physical skills through repetition.
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The Importance of the First Shot
#fridayfundamentals
Some principles are just as fundamental as is technique. One of the unintentional themes of the 2021 Tactical Conference was the importance of the first shot. One class even had that as its title. Several other instructors touched on it as part of their classes and presentations.
Rolf Penzel and Mike Treat titled their class Making the First Shot Count.
John Murphy made the comment “It’s not a ‘one shot drill,’ it’s a ‘first shot drill’” in his class.
During his presentation Secrets of Highly Successful Gunfighters, Darryl Bolke stated “training efficiency means using the sights.”
Chuck Haggard used the term “Target Picture” to illustrate the concept of placing the sight picture on the part of the target we want to hit initially.
In his AIWB Skills class, John Daub instructed his clients to “think about where you want the muzzle to end up” at the conclusion of the draw.
Scott Jedlinski’s comment “The original 1911 sights were suggestions” in his class was a humorous illustration of why point shooting was so common in days gone by. Tom Givens has also written about the dismal quality of factory sights on pistols and revolvers of yesteryear and how that affected technique training of a century ago.
One of trends that is apparent in the Categorical Use of Force Reports by the LAPD is how often one or two shots solve the problem. This is true through the entire database of over 1,000 incidents, not just the off-duty incidents chronicled in my first book about LAPD Shootouts. LAPD’s emphasis on marksmanship and frequent scored qualification is no doubt responsible for this difference from other large departments that have minimal standards.
In a gunfight, the shooter who first scores a hit above the diaphragm of his opponent is the one who seizes the initiative in the incident. Making a good hit with the FIRST SHOT fired is key to seizing the initiative and then retaining it until the incident is over. No one’s performance improves after he gets shot in a vital area.
In terms of operationalizing this principle, the fact that most common autoloaders don’t have a second strike capability during dry practice becomes irrelevant to the fundamental of making a good hit with the first shot. Your dry practice should mostly focus on the first shot anyway.
During live fire, the majority of our practice should be ‘first shot drills.’ Do a little recoil management practice but don’t overestimate its priority relative to the first shot in the real world. As John Farnam put it, “Our desired range product is victory.”
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Tactical Conference 2021 Shootoff
The Shootoff at the Tactical Conference saw some great shooters competing on a simple but challenging Course of Fire. It was well worth watching.
Most people, including gunowners, really don’t understand the capabilities of the handgun. The Shootoff is a good demonstration of what can be done when you know how.
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What is the Tactical Conference?
The Rangemaster Tactical Conference started as an International Defensive Pistol Association Major Match in the late 1990s. The IDPA Indoor Winter Championship, as it was then called, was held at Rangemaster’s facility at that time in Memphis, Tennessee. The organizer was Tom Givens, the owner of Rangemaster, a long time pistol competitor, and the leading trainer for Tennessee Concealed Pistol Licenses in Memphis. It was a large enough event to be featured as a segment on Shooting USA.
Typically, a shooting match consists of a few minutes of shooting and hours or days of idle time. However, the Winter Indoor Championship presented a unique opportunity because it was held at an indoor range with classrooms. Tom Givens’ relationship with the training industry meant that he was able to host various trainers who could present concurrent lectures about Self-Defense and Personal Protection. Some of the earliest presenters were well known names such as Massad Ayoob, Marty Hayes, and John Farnam.
The Pistol Match is still an integral part of the Conference. All attendees are invited to shoot the Match to get an idea of the strengths and weaknesses of their skills. Not everyone shoots it, though, because of the wide variety of other training opportunities that are also available during the three days.
Eventually, the demand for the tactical lectures and training necessitated moving to larger venues. The Memphis Police Academy, US Shooting Academy in Tulsa, and DARC in Little Rock have all been sites over the years. The larger venues allowed a wide variety of instructional blocks, including lectures, live fire shooting classes, and unarmed hands-on training. As the Conference grew, trainers held classes such as Managing Post-Shooting Stress and Trauma, Snub Nose Revolver Skills, Tactical Medicine for the Prepared Citizen, and Home Defense Shotgun Skills.The 2021 Conference was held at the excellent Dallas Pistol Club.
Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make was inspired by lessons learned in an Experiential Learning Laboratory session conducted by Craig Douglas of Shivworks at one year’s Conference. The Experiential Learning Laboratory has become a staple each year as a well-structured Force on Force exercise specifically for Armed Private Citizens.
Starting from just a few lectures at its inception, the Conference has grown to an extravaganza of educational offerings attended by hundreds of people over a period of three days. A vast number of training opportunities are made available for the prepared individual. The 2021 Conference featured 54 different blocks of instruction by dozens of different trainers. Some of the sessions repeated to allow attendees access to them because there is so much going on at the Conference.
There is no other opportunity like it available for the Armed Citizen who wishes to be prepared to prevent criminal violence against themselves and their families. The Conference is held in late March each year. The 2022 Conference will be held at the Dallas Pistol Club in Dallas, Texas. Registration opens in May and sells out by October every year.
Avoiding Errors
Dr. Gary Klein, one of the world’s foremost authorities on decision-making, created the above model about performance improvement. Since much of my work is helping clients develop physical skills, I add ‘Knowledge and Ability’ to ‘Insights.’ Not enough effort is placed on ‘Avoiding Errors’ in our training despite the fact that Self-defense and Personal Protection are riddled with minefields we have to navigate.
Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make is all about avoiding errors. To gain different perspectives about the topic, I posed a question to several of my colleagues at the 2021 Tactical Conference. “What single piece of advice would you give to new and inexperienced gunowners about ‘avoiding errors’? ” The condition I imposed on their answer was that it couldn’t be a platitude such as ‘Get some/more training’ but had to be something that a gunowner could actually understand and do.
A fight avoided is better than a fight won.
Don’t think you’re better than you are. If you have no metric to measure your performance, you don’t know what you can or can’t do.
Kevin Creighton related his takeaway from John Murphy’s class:
When in doubt, don’t shoot.
Dr. Klein’s little model has stimulated my thinking a great deal lately, so I’m going to be pursuing this line of inquiry more in the near future.
One of my colleagues who has retired from two different POlice agencies made the following comment when he finished reading Real Shootouts of the LAPD.
It’s interesting how even highly trained cops screw up when they get out of their familiar environment.
Thinking ahead about how to Avoid Errors is an important part of our defensive skillset.
tacticalprofessor 
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