Thoughts about the Rangemaster 2016 Tactical Conference – Part II
The Rangemaster 2016 Tactical Conference was held March 11-13, 2016 in Memphis, Tennessee. I’m continuing to coalesce my thoughts and observations about the Conference.
A friend emailed me today with this question.
For 30 years I have heard the term Dry-fire. The term has been used in articles, in classes, on training videos. Now it is called Dry-Practice. Have we gone politically correct?
Since dryfire is something I work on quite a bit, that’s a question worth addressing in the context of the Conference. Dry Practice, to me, expands the boundaries of what we can work on beyond trigger manipulation. For instance, if you practiced clearing your house with an inert gun, there wouldn’t be any firing, so it would be dry practice.
I considered including a decision-making component, using decisional flash cards I’ve been developing, in my presentation. Due to time constraints, I had to leave it out. That would also be a form of dry practice even though there wouldn’t be any weapons, live or inert, involved; purely a thought exercise.
So, dry fire is actually a subset of dry practice. When it’s used that way, I can accept both definitions.
My class for the Conference was Developing a Dryfire Practice Regimen. I focused the class on fundamental manipulation skills of a pistol that were parallel to what could be seen on a square range. For instance, practicing trigger manipulation, presenting from ready or a holster, malfunction clearance, etc. Fundamental skills should be practiced until we are Unconsciously Competent at them. The more repetitions we have at a task, the more likely we are to develop the UC necessary to free our minds for situational input and decision-making.
Other classes at the Conference refined, extrapolated, or demonstrated the need for dry practice. For instance, John Hearne’s presentation Dry Practice: An Evidence Based Approach included several items of physiological theory about why dry practice is an effective form of practice. John’s Master’s degree concentration was in Research Methods so he was very thorough about his research and how he applied it to our Art. Larry Lindenman’s Managing the Don’t Shoot was taught using inert weapons. The students undertook a significant number of progressively complex exercises with multiple repetitions about how to take a threat at gunpoint without firing. Tom Givens’ Low Light Equipment class included considerable material about flashlight technique. All the techniques Tom presented could be practiced dry without going to the range. Low light livefire should simply be a verification of the manipulation skills developed in dry practice. That is the approach used at the elite Rogers Shooting School.
One attendee was so kind as to bring a set of Dry Fire flash cards he had purchased. It was interesting to look at them. While they might have some long term viability for a few shooters, there were some serious barriers to using them for skill development. Most notably, the cards assumed the user was familiar with the drills indicated on the cards. I.e., the creator took his subject matter knowledge for granted. Second, there really was no information provided about how to use the cards as part of a practice regimen. It’s important that we either have a logical sequence for building our skills or that we deliberately work, at random, skills we have already developed to maintain instant recall of our UC. Without a program for doing one sequence eventually followed by the other, the cards’ usefulness is limited, in my opinion.
Caleb Causey and I had an interesting conversation about non-verbal communication. It made me realize how powerful non-verbals can be between an instructor and a student. Chuck Haggard and I have discussed the non-verbal communication that goes on between predators and potential prey. One of the most important components of interacting with predators is to ‘fail the interview.’ Predators frequently observe whom they wish to prey upon in order to make a decision about whether to proceed with the predation. This observation is the initial component of the ‘interview.’ Appearing to be uncooperative from a distance may avert the need for a verbal or physical interaction at all. Being uncooperative is something that can be practiced dry, as well, and doesn’t necessarily require equipment.
More about the Conference next time.
Initial thoughts about the Rangemaster 2016 Tactical Conference
The Rangemaster 2016 Tactical Conference is now in the record books. It was held March 11-13, 2016 in Memphis, Tennessee. The gathering included 200+ attendees, almost 30 instructors, and the fine facilities and staff of the Firearms Training Unit, Memphis Police Department Academy.
There was a great deal of material presented, more than could be attended. The Conference focuses on an inter-disciplinary approach to personal protection, so there is a lot more than just firearms and shooting involved. There was a challenging pistol match that could be shot, though; 158 people chose to shoot it.
The class I gave was Developing a Dryfire Practice Regimen. I was very gratified by the turnout of 50+ students. As the saying goes, ‘The best way to learn something is to teach it.’ Over the course of creating my presentation, my dryfire techniques became even more refined. One attendee also gave me a new training aid I wasn’t aware of. As in every class I teach, I also learn from the students.
The other classes I attended were:
- Managing the Don’t Shoot – Larry Lindenman
- Gaming the Streetz – Eve Kulczar
- Low Light Equipment – Tom Givens
- Optimizing Classroom Instruction – Tiffany Johnson, Esq.
- Metro-Tactical – Julie Thomas
- Urban Insurgency – Dr. Martin Topper
- Lasers, Red Dots, Iron Sights – Karl Rehn
- FBI Research: The Deadly Mix – John Hearne
- International Terror Operations – Gary Greco/John Holschen
- Dry Practice: An Evidence Based Approach – John Hearne
One of the pleasures of going to Conferences is getting to talk and catch up with my peers. Some of the conversations I had were:
- Cecil Burch – the Venn Diagram of Realization, instructor goals in attending conferences
- Paul Sharp – human gun interaction
- Skip Gochenour – Homicide trials
- Caleb Causey – Non-verbal communication
- Tom Givens – Standards that replicate incident skills
- Richard Jenkins – Dry Fire Flash Cards and skill development
- John Farnam – Attitudes of older fighters
- Gary Greco – American soccer team development, American Mindset (competition and confront/dominate)
- John Murphy – immediacy of action
- Mark Luell – I won’t let you take this from me
- Chuck Haggard – performance of .38 Special and .22 LR in gel and adversaries, S&W metal autoloader maintenance
- Karl Rehn – iron sights, lasers, and red dots
- Julie Thomas – tuning a class presentation
I’ll have more to report about the Conference in future posts.
Serious Mistakes now available as a download
There have been many requests for the Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make recording as a download. Despite being something of a Luddite, I figured out a way to do it.
The recording is now available as a download for $9.95. Link
Serious Mistake Again
I harp on Serious Mistakes because I get sick of reading about this kind of incident. Needless and completely preventable tragedy. In this case, an ounce of prevention would have been better than a lifetime of no cure.
The Serious Mistakes research I’ve done over the past two years has completely changed me in terms of how I prioritize things. Bad things happen too often, frequently because carelessness and incompetence.
If you own guns, you need a plan to secure them when children are around. Even if you don’t have kids, people bring theirs over to your home, especially your grandchildren.
Like many aspects of firearms, this needs to be thought of ahead of time. If you’re not willing to spend a little bit of time, money, and effort to keep firearms out of unauthorized hands, then get rid of your guns.
Knowledge
I’ve had several parallel annoyance tracks running this week.
1) .22s for personal protection
2) .38 snub nose revolvers for personal protection
3) The ‘OODA Loop’
4) The value of knives versus guns for personal protection.
Here is my advice to the gun community:
Unless you have primary source information about a topic, meaning you have personally seen it, or better yet experienced and tested it, then don’t talk about the subject. Just keep your piehole shut and don’t spread misinformation. Everything you have been TOLD about the subject by someone else was TOLD to them by someone else, who HEARD it from someone else, etc, etc, etc. The ‘information’ was either bad in the first case, got badly distorted by six degrees of separation, or both.
This applies to gunshop commandos, law enforcement officers, gun manufacturers, firearms trainers, Internet Lounge Lizards, and anyone else who has ever seen a gun or seen a picture of one.
I know this will fall on deaf ears but I’m going to put it out there anyway.
The importance of gunhandling
Over the course of the holidays, I had several short notice taskings, one of which was to provide initial firearms training to a woman who has a stalker problem. Although it was a short session, she and I were both pleased with the outcome, so I shared my notes and outline with a few of my colleagues.
A colleague made the following comment:
One, it’s your usual excellence, and most likely as good as it gets for focused firearms training for the civilian … I do notice that the vast majority of what you present is focused on manipulation, handling, live fire, and some lecture/interactive discussion about legal aspects.
He is a very high level thinker and we exchange thoughts regularly with no reservations about defining and challenging each other’s views. My response to his query was that I have been immensely changed by my Negative Outcomes research over the past two years. I have come to question much of what I thought was important before. One thing that I have become sure of is that at the raw beginner level, which is where this lady was, teaching students how to avoid Serious Mistakes is of primary concern. My list of firearms incidents with Negative Outcomes, gathered over the past two years without even a serious research effort, is seventeen pages long single spaced. That’s a lot of Serious Mistakes.
In addition, I have become even more aware of how dangerous complacency is. The more often the gun is manipulated, the more it is likely to discharge. This has its basis not only in statistical reasons but also in the natural human process of ‘familiarity breeds complacency.’ When complacency is combined with incompetence and/or ignorance, the seeds of disaster have been sown.
The story mentioned “His injuries are not life-threating but he is receiving treatment from a hand surgeon.” Shooting oneself in the hand at close range with modern service ammunition carries a high probability of being permanently crippled. One of the things that I notice in the Self Inflicted Gunshot Wound section of my database is how often the person involved is a high level Law Enforcement Officer, either Sheriff or Police Chief.
There are two possibilities for this strong correlation: 1) it’s just more newsworthy when a higher up experiences a Negligent Discharge, or 2) higher ups, who are administrators, tend to be not that interested in firearms and perhaps a little more complacent than line officers whose gun is a tool of their work. It could be either, there’s no way for me to say.
Firearms ownership is somewhat like a minefield. You might take one step and get blown up, you might negotiate it quite a while before getting blown up, or you might get lucky and make it through. Putting your fingers in your ears will not protect you one bit from the consequences, that’s for sure.
When using a firearm, regardless of the circumstances, always follow the Four Rules of Safe Gunhandling
- Treat all guns as if they are ALWAYS loaded.
- Never let yourself point a gun at something or someone you don’t want to be shot.
If the situation forces a choice, point the gun at something not someone. - Keep your finger out of and above the trigger guard until the gun is pointed at your target and you are ready for the gun to fire.
- Be sure of what you are shooting at and what is behind it.
In addition,
- Store weapons where they are not accessible to unauthorized persons
- Know the law
- Immediately check the readiness status any weapon you handle
Whether in a morning Private Lesson or in my six month Total Immersion Program, I find that both new and experienced gunowners frequently don’t have an appreciation for the nuances of the mechanical complexities of firearms manipulation. A firearm is a mechanical device that has more moving parts in it than almost anything else you can hold in your hand. There are definite sequences and multiple conditional values that have to be observed with them. Some people dread hand tools as much as Kryptonite. Folks like that need to be shown, and then practiced, on how to operate complex mechanical devices, such as firearms.
In addition, smart people tend to assume there is logic involved in the making of laws. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consequently, the vagaries of the legal system are an alien concept to many well educated and intelligent people. I have personally known of several very smart people who got into a fair amount of legal problems in the course of trying to apply logic to both the Code of Federal Regulations and the Official Code of Georgia Annotated. Some things we can figure out ourselves; the law is not one of them. It requires research and/or specific education.
That’s why I am currently prioritizing my training efforts the way I do. It’s also why I created the Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make audio presentation. Many of the events in Serious Mistakes did not happen to novices but rather to gunowners of long standing who became complacent or finally ran into a situation they had never encountered before. The link for Serious Mistakes is at the top of my page. It’s now available on a Flash Drive, for those who prefer that format.
Friday Fundamentals: Know the law
At least as much as it can be known.
John Farnam once quipped that if he was read his rights and then asked if he understood them, his reply would be:
The Supreme Court hasn’t yet decided what my rights are; how am I supposed to understand them!
That being said, the level of willful ignorance many people are comfortable with regarding the guns they own is disturbing. Would any of us consider driving a car without having at least some cursory knowledge of the Rules of the Road? I certainly hope not.
Unfortunately, this sometimes leads to another of John’s quips:
You’re innocent until indigent.
Legal problems tend to be very expensive, even when ultimately resolved in the gunowner’s favor. The instructor of the Nevada Concealed Handgun Class I took had an interesting take on it. If you shoot someone, or even threaten them with a weapon, and then get arrested, you’re probably going to want to get bonded out as quickly as possible. Unless you have a large amount of cash, say $50K-100K, readily available, you’re going to require the services of a bail bondsman. The bondsman will typically charge 10-15 percent of the bond set by the judge as the bond fee. You don’t get that back, ever. It’s just $15,000 you threw into the financial incinerator of the legal system. It might be a good idea to figure how to avoid that ahead of time.
Firearm and self-defense laws tend to be arcane and frequently illogical. For certain, they vary widely from place to place, even city to city. For instance, a New York State License to Carry is no good in New York City, nor is any other Weapons Carry License. And yet, people periodically volunteer to the police at the entrance of the Statue of Liberty that they are carrying a gun because they have a License from somewhere else. The officer’s response is always the same: “Let me have it and put your hands behind your back. You’re under arrest.”
Usually, after three years of legal wrangling and a lot of burned up cash, the charges will be dropped down to something where the person doesn’t become a felon and doesn’t have to serve time. But you never get the gun back. A little research would have prevented that problem.
Handgunlaw.us is a wonderful online resource to start your research. As Steve and Gary, the curators, say though, verify independently what you find there. If you find value in it, donations are appreciated. I don’t get any cut of that, I just recognize that maintaining such a website is a big and expensive job.
Stay out of as much trouble as you can. Negative Outcomes are definitely possible with firearms. Five of the Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make relate to legal issues. And they’re usually avoidable.
Serious mistakes gunowners make
UPDATE: The recording is now available as a download for $9.95. Link
In the wake of the San Bernardino massacre, there have been increasing calls, even by the police, for legally authorized people to carry their guns wherever and whenever they can. In addition, the FBI recently reported a record number of gun sales on Black Friday.
While I firmly believe that Armed Citizens and off-duty police officers can make a difference in preventing and stopping such massacres, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Gunowners, whether carrying a gun or keeping a gun at home, can and do make mistakes, sometimes very serious ones. I have some concern about brand new gunowners carrying their guns with them everywhere without some education about how to do it safely. That may not be a popular view but that’s the way I see it.
I have often chastised the training community for failing to create non-traditional educational materials that can reach a broader array of gunowners. As a step toward alleviating that, I have created a new audio CD called:
Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make – Real life examples of how they get into trouble and how to prevent it
This audio CD is a refined version of my Negative Outcomes with Firearms presentation at the 2015 Rangemaster Tactical Conference. My Rangemaster presentation was very well received as groundbreaking about issues that are rarely discussed openly in the gun community.
The ‘Concealed Carry Mistakes’ lists I frequently see usually revolve around simplistic issues, such as:
- Equipment issues; gun, holster, clothing, etc.
- Not getting enough training
- Not ‘knowing’ the law
But the really serious Mistakes that gunowners make are things like:
- Shooting yourself
- Shooting someone you shouldn’t have, either intentionally or unintentionally
- Getting needlessly arrested
- Getting shot by the police
- Leaving guns where unauthorized persons can access them, resulting in tragedies
- Frightening innocent people around you
- Endangering innocent people needlessly
The 12 tracks, over 1 hour, on the CD are:
- Introduction
- Brandishing/threatening
- Chasing after the end of a confrontation
- Downrange failures (shot an innocent while shooting at a threat)
- Intervention
- Lost/stolen guns
- Mistaken identity shootings
- Negligent discharges, including self-inflicted gunshot wounds and Unintentional shootings
- Police Involvement
- Poor judgement
- Unauthorized access (generally by small children)
- Unjustifiable shootings, including warning shots
Each track explains the topic and the issue, provides a real life example of an occurrence and the consequence, and gives some thoughts about how to prevent it. My object is to provoke thinking about the fact that firearms are deadly weapons and can be terribly unforgiving of carelessness, incompetence, and stupidity.
Note that I can’t possibly explain nor control every way to avoid the Mistakes so I don’t assume any liability for those who listen to the recording and still end up having an issue. Life is not fair; if you want guarantees, buy a toaster.
This could be your most important purchase of the year. Making any one of the Mistakes almost inevitably leads to tragedy or significant legal expense. The price of the CD is miniscule in comparison.
The CD is available on my mobile friendly webstore.
Final note: Because I want this information to be widely distributed, I am granting a limited re-distribution license to anyone who purchases the CD. People do it anyway but I will make it formal and encourage it.
Purchase of the CD includes a license to reproduce five (5) copies of the CD for distribution to fellow gunowners. This is a limited license. It does NOT include posting copies of the CD or any of its tracks on the Internet in a downloadable format. Nor does the license include widely broadcasting the CD nor its tracks via email.
Please be safe and encourage fellow gunowners to do the same. I hope I can make a contribution to that with this CD.
Friday Fundamentals – Biases and Changes
My colleague Grant Cunningham posed two interesting questions on his blog, which led to a lengthy Facebook discussion.
Question #1: “what are your biases or preconceptions?”
Question #2: “what have you changed your mind about in the last year?”
I gave a brief answer to #2 but I think they both deserve some elaboration.
Question #1: “what are your biases or preconceptions?”
I am very reluctant to design training for myself or others that is rooted purely in hypothesis or conjecture. I.e., I am very biased toward following the scientific method, as much as possible, when developing training paradigms.
The overall process of the scientific method involves making conjectures (hypotheses), deriving predictions from them as logical consequences, and then carrying out experiments based on those predictions. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
It’s important to note that testing is an inherent part of the scientific method. Testing implies some form of measurement. As a result, I believe that having performance standards is an important part of training. I think of training as ‘outcomes based’ rather than ‘input based.’
We have at our fingertips, via the Internet, an enormous amount of data available to us. At the top of this blog are links to a number of sources that I regularly read to gather information about armed encounters, shootings, gunfights, and gunbattles. I use each of those terms in a very defined way because I consider many terms used in the training community to be fuzzy and ill-defined. Fuzzy and ill-defined terminology does not fit particularly well in the scientific method.
One of the often parroted phrases I hear about gathering information from the Internet is “The plural of anecdote is not data.” I rebut this with the words of one of my accounting professors, “Accounting information is expensive to gather and is sometimes not worth it.” What he meant was that, at some point, you have to accept whatever information you have been able to collect and work with it to form an opinion.
Something I try to avoid is ‘cherry picking’ data that supports my hypotheses. Cherry picking is not always an intentional process, either; it can require a significant amount of intellectual rigor to avoid. I learned this years ago when I was Research Director of a large commercial real estate brokerage company. The brokers all worked specific geographical areas and the Vice President asked me to analyze the Zip Codes of their contact lists. As it turned out, only about 20 percent of the brokers actually had the majority of their contacts in their assigned areas, even though they thought they did. That was when I became a believer in writing things down and checking them periodically to eliminate unconscious errors. A while later, I created a database of five years of data from the Armed Citizen and found some patterns and trends I hadn’t anticipated.
To sum up my bias, I might say:
I’m not interested in conjecture. Tell me where your hypothesis originated, what data supports it, and how you measure the outcome(s) you expect your students to achieve as a result of this training.
Question #2: “what have you changed your mind about in the last year?”
My short answer to this question on Facebook was “The importance of manipulation skills vis–à–vis decision-making.”
I’ve been thinking about this for many years. In 2011, my presentation at the Rangemaster Tactical Conference was entitled The Myth of the Lone Gunman: Working with Family, Friends, and Significant Others.
At the Conference in 2014, my colleague Craig Douglas made the suggestion that I do a presentation about ‘Bad Shootings’ for the 2015 Conference. The results of my research changed me forever.
As many people know, I was part of the Rogers Shooting School for ten years, culminating with being Chief Instructor for five years. Rogers is the most elite and difficult shooting school in the world. Many police and military special units go there to train every year and get to eat a piece of Humble Pie every day of the five day Course. “We’re the best shooters in our Department, by far. Then we come here and find out we suck!” The Handgun Testing Program has no peer for difficulty in the entire training community. It is training on a level that only a select few shooters will ever get to experience. I am enormously proud of my association with the School and maintain a relationship to Bill and Ronnie to this day.
That being said, once I started doing my research on ‘Bad Shootings,’ which eventually morphed into ‘Negative Outcomes,’ I saw a vastly different set of priorities were important. Although I still believe performance standards are important, the level of those standards has changed in my mind. The NRA Defensive Pistol standards, probably at the Sharpshooter level, will suffice to solve almost every confrontation I have been able to find between an Armed Private Citizen and a marauding criminal. Truth be told, those standards would work for most police shootings also. The kicker about the NRA standards is twofold; 1) competence must be demonstrated repetitively and 2) the standard is 100 percent hits.
Once a person can shoot a pistol to a reasonable standard, it’s time to move on to thinking about the circumstances of personal protection and becoming proficient at decision making in that context. Decision making can be a very difficult task, especially when we are armed. Lack of proficiency, not just at marksmanship, but at gunhandling under stress, complicates this. Persons who are not Unconsciously Competent can easily become focused on the firearm rather the situation. Focusing on the wrong thing can lead to Bad Decisions, which in turn can result in Negative Outcomes.
These are the Negative Outcome categories I identified in my research. There are probably more.
- Brandishing/showing
- Chasing and shooting
- Downrange failures (shot an innocent while shooting at a threat)
- Intervention
- Lost/stolen guns
- Mistaken identity shootings
- Negligent discharges
- Self-inflicted GSW
- Unintentional shootings
- Police Involvement (arrests for non-shooting related incidents)
- Poor judgement
- Unauthorized access (generally by small children)
- Unjustifiable shootings
- Warning shots
As an example of one category, Unintentional Shootings, here’s a screencap of some of the stories I have collected.
Bad decisions have serious consequences and end up being punished in a variety of ways, some legal and some social. The legal consequences are obvious; the shooter goes to court and sometimes thence to prison. The social consequences of Negative Outcomes are less obvious. If a person accidentally shoots a family member, whether the criminal justice system gets involved or not, I doubt that family relationship will ever be the same. The particular incident I am thinking of occurred when a police officer shot his daughter, thinking she was an intruder.
Decision making has many aspects to it that people don’t often consider. Where you point a gun anytime you handle it is a decision that has to be made. Consider that the next time you’re in a gun shop; where are you going to point the gun as you pick it up to ensure that you don’t muzzle anyone? This relates to another reason I am not fond of the overhand method of slide manipulation. During administrative gunhandling, which happens far more than shooting, the overhand method simply does not give the same level of muzzle control that the slingshot method does. I regularly have to correct students about muzzling themselves when using the overhand method. Using the slingshot technique, not at all.
Note that the Decision Making Process starts long before an incident. For instance, having a flashlight and then practicing with it is a decision. Not having one and/or not practicing with it is a Bad Decision. There are many other possibilities too. Failing to devise emergency plans and then discuss them with your family is a Bad Decision.
Look at the list of Negative Outcomes. The category ‘Downrange Failures’ is the only one that is marksmanship driven. All the rest relate to Decision Making and gunhandling. That’s why I changed my mind.
Snub Revolver DVD Special
Sometimes, you’ll be surprised what you find when you clean.
–my Mother
And she was right. Another box of Secrets of the Snubby turned up. I’m running a package deal on Secrets and Fundamentals as a combo. Only $24.95 for both when purchased as a package.
I like snubs and I like to push the performance envelope with them. Once you know what you’re doing, snubs are a lot more than an “arm’s length gun.”
tacticalprofessor 
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