What does effective Dry Practice actually look like?
#fridayfundamentals
Since many people have never seen a structured Dry Practice session, here’s an example.
This session uses a State’s (Louisiana) Concealed Handgun Permit Qualification Course as the basis for structuring the session. Having a structured Dry Practice session accomplishes several objectives. Among them are safety, avoiding “grabasstic gun clicking,” and effective time management, among others.
Although the session seems simplistic, the way it is structured provides multiple repetitions of at least 10 different skills that are common in Defensive Gun Uses. In his groundbreaking book How to Win Friends and Influence People, https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003WEAI4E/ Dale Carnegie wrote,
“Remember that the use of these principles can be made habitual only by a constant and vigorous campaign of review and application.”
Those words are every bit as true for physical skills as they are for human relations skills. The way we learn to do things competently by practicing them repetitively. As an aside, human relation skills can be very useful in defusing bad situations and Carnegie’s book is well worth reading for general interest.
Skills practiced in the session
- 36 Good First Round Hits.
- Good, for my purposes, means creating a serious enough wound that the shootee has to go to a hospital to seek medical treatment. At that point, the POlice will start asking those uncomfortable questions about how he got the wound. More about that definition in the next #mindsetmonday.
- There are several subsets of getting ‘Good First Round Hits’.
- 36 Presentations into the Eye-Target line
- 36 Sight Acquisitions
- 36 Smooth enough trigger presses
- 36 Follow-throughs
- 33 repetitions of Forming the Grip quickly
- 36 repetitions of Racking the slide in a safe (muzzle downrange) manner.
- 3 Draws to Ready
- 3 ‘Draw but DON’T SHOOT YET’ Decisions
- 3 Safe Re-holsters
- 33 repetitions of Return to Ready
- 3 magazine exchanges
- 1 Reload with Retention
- 2 Tactical Reloads
- 36 Deliberate SHOOT Decisions
- 36 Shot Analyses (Read the Sights)
- 3 Spatial Analyses (6 feet is in the Close Phase of Social space, 10 feet is in the Far Phase of Social space, and 15 feet is in the Close Phase of Public space) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxemics and how they affect your shooting.
The TRT (Tap-Rack-Training aid) mentioned is available on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Pack-Safety-Training-Pistol-Magazine/dp/B07CNBDHSB Using it is much easier the making the UN (inert and doesn’t work) magazines that were its inspiration.
Image Based Decisional Drills https://www.imagebaseddecisionaldrills.com/ provided the face on the target. A face is available for download in the Downloadables section of their website.
Using a Qualification Course as the basis for a Dry Practice Session and Regimen is an effective way of maximizing the value of your effort. For those who plan to obtain a Weapons Carry License in a State that has a Qualification requirement, it is also useful as an introduction to the structure of pistol qualification, even if the Course used is not the same.
Today’s Patreon https://www.patreon.com/TacticalProfessor post will go into more detail about structuring Dry Practice for maximum effectiveness.
FTC note: I receive no compensation for the product links in this post.
Fundamentals of dry practice
Although dry practice (aka dry fire) is often recommended, many shooters are unclear about the specifics of dry practice. Here is a short video, first in a series, to get gunowners started.
This series will include a video about safety procedures and a few sessions. I hope it will be useful to my readers and clients.
If you enjoy my content, please consider supporting me on Patreon. I post more in-depth material there for serious students of Self-Defense and Personal Protection.
Walking Back the Cat
Walking Back the Cat is a term used in the Intelligence community for deconstructing events to learn from them. This is the first in a series I’m calling #Walkbackwednesday. It’s useful just to have an idea of how events unfold even from a simplistic viewpoint. A visual representation often leads to a better understanding of what occurred. Veterans will recognize this as a ‘sand table’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_table#Military_use exercise.
There are a number of lessons to be learned from this incident. These will be discussed in the future. The original story is here. https://myfox8.com/news/juvenile-shot-taken-to-hospital-after-burglary-attempt-in-winston-salem-police-looking-for-2nd-suspect/
Chasing and shooting
Chasing a criminal after they have attempted to break contact is not the way to set yourself up for success. Shooting the criminal at the conclusion of the chase is a good way to end up in prison. It’s common enough to be one of the 11 categories of Negative Outcomes in Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make. https://store.payloadz.com/details/2617872-ebooks-true-crime-serious-mistakes-gunowners-make.html
A Miami man who allegedly chased an unarmed burglar and shot him several times as he begged for his life is facing an attempted murder charge.
https://nypost.com/2020/12/04/miami-man-charged-with-attempted-murder-after-shooting-burglar/
Prior planning prevents poor performance. If you have a firearm for Personal Protection, don’t just think about the incident, plan for the aftermath.
Stay out of trouble
My latest interview on Ballistic Radio.
“One of our very favorite guests, The Tactical Professor Claude Werner returns to the show to discuss a myriad of important topics that we should all consider. What is O.O.D.A. and how do people get it wrong? Why is it important to measure personal performance? Has everyone been pronouncing Claude’s 5x5x5 drill wrong? ALL THAT AND MORE!”
Who’s there?
“Who’s there?”
Learn to say it in your sleep.
“When you have a home where you have family members, you have to be even more careful and wait that extra second and do everything you can to make sure you know what you’re dealing with when you’re about to use deadly force,” [Martin County Sheriff] Snyder said.
Well said, Sheriff Snyder.
Many of my colleagues disagree with my assessment that decision-making is far more important than marksmanship and technical proficiency but I’m sticking to my guns on the subject. Every incident like this I read about makes me more of a ‘bitter clinger’ to my opinion.
“Daddy, where’s Mommy?”
“I accidentally killed her before you were even born. I’m so sorry I took your Mommy from you.”
If anyone thinks that man will ever sleep through the night again, they’re wrong. My prediction is that he will also die young, leaving his child without any parents at any early age.
Have a plan
As the late William Aprill was fond of saying,
Spontaneity is overrated.
“That’s what heart surgery is,” he said with a soft laugh. “It’s a script. To you, it probably looked like I was just sewing those collars into Meeko’s chest any old way. But every motion was planned, tested, practiced. Turn my hand eight degrees and poke the needle through; swivel my hand back 22 degrees and draw the needle up four inches; turn my hand back just so and bring it to the left a half inch: a precise number of stitches, pulled just so tight and no tighter. What heart surgery takes is remembering an incredibly long and complicated script and following it exactly, step by step.”
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/no-pulse-how-doctors-reinvented-the-human-heart
The idea of having a script, i.e., a very specific game plan, doesn’t just apply to heart surgery. One of the learned aspects of firearms competition is to develop a plan ahead of time and then follow it through.
The quaint Google translate version of the story’s precis reads:
That’s what it’s about
* On Friday [note that the incident actually occurred the previous Wednesday] night there was an exchange of fire between the owner of a gun shop and burglars who had tried to gain access to his shop in Wallbach AG [Switzerland].
* What the perpetrators did not expect: The owner is a marksman and former Swiss champion in dynamic shooting [IPSC].
* One person was injured in the shooting. The POlice assume that this is one of the perpetrators, as no injuries were found on site.
Whether it’s IPSC, IDPA, GSSF, ICORE or some other form of competition is largely irrelevant. What is important is the concept of having a game plan ahead of time and then putting it into action when you get the ‘GO’ signal.
Before there was an FDIC
In the days before the FDIC, if banks didn’t protect their assets they had no assets.
“They aim to welcome bandits with hot lead.”
https://www.mcall.com/la-me-fw-archives-1928-pistol-training-for-bank-tellers-20171120-story.html
Feb. 18, 1928: Los Angeles Police Chief James Davis, left, with First National Bank teller Madeline Morneau at the police shooting range in Elysian Park. (Los Angeles Times)
Thanks to Michael de Bethencourt of I’m With Roscoe for pointing out the article.
Once you can shoot…
Some instructors, including myself, had an interesting discussion on Facebook about the phrase “once you can shoot.”
My question to the group was ‘What does that mean?’ I asked it as a serious question. The personal journey I’ve made in answering that question over time has been interesting. My answers to myself about it have changed dramatically as a result of some related research I’ve done. The two most significant areas of research were Negative Outcomes and what higher level thinkers in the POlice community had to say. The discussion was involved enough that I wrote a Patreon post about it.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/43213970
I’m making the Patreon post public because I think it’s a much neglected philosophical discussion. At The Mingle this month, I asked the ladies present to write out their personal policy about when to draw or present a weapon. It was the first time that many of them had ever been asked to do that. We need to realize that ‘Have Adequate [Hard] Skills’ is only one aspect of the issues we face.
Marksmanship is a hard skill but soft skills are important too.
Teach your children to shoot
In the current political situation, if you have teenage children and haven’t taught them how to shoot a rifle adequately, you’re wrong, PERIOD.
I have taught a number of teenage boys to pass the Ohio POlice Rifle Course in just a couple of hours. Girls could do it just as easily. It’s not the greatest qualification course but it’s short, easily administered, and someone who can pass it is a force to be reckoned with, especially from a fixed position or support role.
With the exception of the reload in Stage Six, the entire Course can be done even using a tube fed autoloading .22 rifle with iron sights. The reload can still be done with a tube fed autoloader but probably not in the time frame allotted. Although many people think that a .22 rifle can only cause a bee sting, they are sadly mistaken. Rifles in .22 caliber are highly lethal within 25 yards, often even with only one shot.
Our great Nation is in perilous times and it behooves us to be ready for what’s to come.
tacticalprofessor 
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