3X3X3 – Level One
Three Shots, Three Seconds, Three Yards has been discussed in the context of gunfights since the 1970s. It is the most commonly cited statistic about gunfights.
Practicing to hit the silhouette every time using the 3X3X3 basis is Level One of learning to shoot the drill well. It is a good baseline for entry level shooters and those who have never measured their performance.
Level One – hit a silhouette consistently
Level Two – hit a sheet of paper consistently
Level Three – hit a half sheet of paper consistently
Level Four – hit a quarter sheet of paper consistently
The dry practice drill was discussed in a previous post.
Here’s the live fire version.
When I wrote Real Shootouts of the LAPD, I wasn’t surprised that NYPD Lt. Frank McGee was pretty much on the mark when he first described it. Almost all of the off-duty shootouts fit into that statistic.
A related note is that I fired about 100 .22 Long Rifle rounds through my 317 snub with a standard (8.5 lb) mainspring. There was not one Failure to Fire during the session. Ammunition for my .38 is precious and hard to come by so I used the .22 for demo purposes. For those who think that was cheating, I also shot with my SCCY CPX-2 9mm.
If you would like to purchase my book about actual shootouts that are not a figbar of someone’s imagination, click on the image below.
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.’
If you would like to purchase my book about actual shootouts that are not a figbar of someone’s imagination, click on the image below.
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/
If you would like to purchase my book about LAPD Shootouts, click on the image below.
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.”
If you would like to purchase my book, click on the image below.
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.
If you would like to read about some real shootouts and learn from them, please click the image below to purchase my book.
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.
TacCon 2021 Match
The Rangemaster 2021 Tactical Conference is in the books. A small part of the Conference is the shooting match. Of the over 200 attendees, 161 elected to shoot the match. I didn’t bring a gun because of my flight situation, so I borrowed a 642 from a friend and shot with it. Only three of us shot with revolvers.
All shooters have the opportunity to shoot the first two parts of the Course of Fire.
The first part of the match is shot as a standard exercise using turning targets. This was my target for the Standards. My score was 198. The 99 percent score meant I was able to shoot the tiebreaker.
For those who score 95 percent on the standards, a five round tiebreaker is shot on a B-8 target using Comstock scoring (points divided by time). I shot this well, scoring a 49 but using a lightweight snub nose revolver meant I was slower than I needed to be to get into the shootoffs on Sunday.
The top 16 shooters then enter a man v. man shootoff using a double elimination ladder. The shootoff format uses falling steel targets. Each shooter has an array of three clothed steel target with an eight inch steel circle [Correction about the target: The plate is a vertical rectangle, 5.5″ X 6″. If you run a vertical centerline down the mannequin, and a line across at armpit level, the intersection of those lines is the center of the 5.5″X6″ plate] that has to be hit to make the target fall. After knocking down all the shirt targets, the shooter must knock down the mini-popper in back. The popper that ends up on the bottom determines the winner.
It was a fun match and I’m glad I was able to shoot it.
I’ll be recapping the Conference in the next few posts.
Rangemaster Course of Fire
This is the Course of Fire for the Rangemaster Tactical Conference 2018. It’ somewhat different each year but usually has similar elements to this.
It’s not complicated yet is a good test of marksmanship ability.
Decisions and experience
Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from bad decisions.
Although incorrectly attributed to Will Rogers, the concept of learning from other peoples’ experience rather than our own still has value. We can use the Intelligence community’s technique of ‘walking back the cat’ to de-construct an incident. This allows us to visualize it and learn from the experience of someone else.
The concept of ‘Decision points’ has been emphasized by both Gary Klein, PhD., a noted expert on the decision-making process, and President George W. Bush. Any drama contains not just one, but a sequence of decisions and decision points we can study.
The Don’t Shoot/Shoot decision is the one most commonly focused on the training and firearms communities. However, any Defensive Gun Use, whether shots are fired or not, contains a plethora of decisions and decision points. These occur before, during, and after the shooting or display of a firearm takes place.
A rich source for walking back the cat is the Categorical Use of Force reports by the LAPD Board of Police Commissioners. The following is an analysis of one incident by an off-duty LAPD officer. The analysis will use the phases of an incident as described in my book Real Shootouts of the LAPD. http://realshootoutsofthelapd.com
The incident began as an Aggravated Assault on an LAPD off-duty officer. The full report by the Board of Police Commissioners, including its Findings about Tactics, Drawing and Exhibiting of a Firearm, and Use of Lethal Force can be found here. http://www.lapdonline.org/assets/pdf/011-11_Harbor-OIS.pdf
Incident Summary
The Situation
Officer A, who was off-duty, walked to his vehicle parked in the driveway of a residence. He did not see anyone around at the time. His duty weapon was in the right front pocket of his pants. After driving out of the driveway, he backed his vehicle up and left the lights on. He then walked back to the gate to close it.
- Decision point — Leave home armed with his weapon on his person or at least accessible? Even for POlice officers, this is not as absolute a decision as it would seem, as can be seen in other LAPD off-duty incidents.
- Decision point — Close gate (initial entry barrier to home) or not? As mundane as this decision seems, many people leave their garage doors open when they drive away from their home.
The Buildup
Officer A saw the Subject walking on the sidewalk coming toward him. The Subject then began to run toward Officer A. As the distance to the Subject became closer, Officer A saw the Subject had a handgun in his hand. The Subject pointed the handgun at Officer A.
- Decision point — Maintain awareness of surroundings or focus on telephone or other attention divider?
- Decision point — Maintain surveillance on the suspect or not?
- Decision point — Recognize and accept that an armed attack is imminent or not?
Drawing and Exhibiting
Officer A drew his service pistol from his pocket.
- Decision point — Draw own pistol or not?
The Gunfight
Immediately after drawing his pistol, Officer A fired one round at the Subject.
- Decision point — Don’t Shoot or Shoot?
- Decision point — Fire in place or Shoot on the Move?
- Decision point — Obtain an adequate sight picture to make a hit or fire without visual reference?
The Subject seemed unaffected, so Officer A fired a second round at the Subject.
- Decision point — Don’t Shoot or Shoot a second time?
- Decision point — Fire in place or Shoot on the Move?
- Decision point — Obtain an adequate sight picture to make a hit or fire without visual reference?
After running past Officer’s A car, the subject collapsed on the sidewalk behind a short block wall.
Post Gunfight Actions
Because he could not see him and wanted to wait for responding officers to arrive, Officer A did not approach the Subject.
- Decision point — Approach the suspect or not?
Officer A retreated to cover at the house and called 911.
- Decision point — Hold position or retreat to cover?
- Decision point — Call 9-1-1 or do something else?
While he was calling 911, Officer A observed another male come over to the Subject, squat down, then stand up and adjust his shirt. The second male then walked away.
- Decision point — Interact with/challenge the secondary suspect or not?
Two other males walked to the fallen Subject, leaned over to look at him, and then walked away.
- Decision point — Interact with/challenge the tertiary suspects or not?
There are also implied decision points subsequent in the drama but were not elaborated on by the BOPC.
- Actions on approach of responding officers.
- What statements, if any, should be made to responding officers and then to detectives.
- Whom else to notify about the incident; Significant Other, etc.
- Retain an attorney or call pre-paid legal assistance plan.
At least 21 decisions/decision points are readily discernible in this incident. There are perhaps even more, despite this being a relatively uncomplicated DGU. Also note that of the 21, only six (Don’t Shoot or Shoot [X2]), (Fire in place or Shoot on the Move [X2]), and (Obtain an adequate sight picture to make a hit or fire without visual reference [X2]) can be readily practiced with live fire. Those and another, (Draw own pistol or not) can be practiced dry. The other two-thirds of the decisions are more in the nature of ‘soft skills’ that are best decided upon in advance and then practiced away from the range.
“Best decided upon in advance and practiced away from the range” represents our opportunities during the current ammo shortage. Rather than sit on our hands because ammo has become so precious, we can begin developing and practicing a more complete repertoire of the skills we need for Personal Protection. If you would like to read my analyses of the rest of the incidents described in the book, please subscribe to me on Patreon. Patreon link I will be posting the rest of them there.
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