9/2 Challenge
To keep my blood pressure down from the malfeasance of the NYC administration, I shot the Langdon Tactical 9/2 Challenge yesterday. There are two videos, one First Person Shooter. and the other 3rd person perspective. It’s a good drill and I enjoyed shooting it.
Here is the First Person Shooter. The 3rd person perspective is linked in the end screen.
I like to think of it as practicing the destruction of the enemies of our great Nation. My BP was only 117/71 this morning so I guess it worked.
The Langdon Tactical webpage with more information about the Challenge is here.
5 + 1 Drill
#fridayfundamentals
Last night’s IDPA match at Johns Creek Indoor Gun Range concluded with a Standards stage. It was a simple drill that we can call 5+1. Some variation of this drill is the last stage of every match there. It began loaded with five rounds and an available reload of at least two rounds. Since I was shooting my Model 65 revolver, I used a full speedloader for the reload. A single IDPA target was placed at 7 yards.
The drill was to: draw and fire four shots to the body, one shot to the head, reload, and fire one more shot to the head.
The drill is timed and scored. Although it seems simple on the surface, it includes a number of marksmanship components.
- Draw to a good first shot
- Three splits (successive shots to the same target, in this case the eight inch – 0 zone of the body)
- A transition (shot to a different target, in this case the four inch – 0 zone of the head)
- A reload
- One shot to a precision target (in this case the four inch – 0 zone of the head)
- Follow through on the last shot
It also requires the shooter to remember the drill while being timed. This may seem straightforward but every match several shooters make some kind of Procedural Error, such as shooting too many shots, forgetting where the shots are supposed to go, or riding the slide stop so the slide doesn’t lock back. Not having the slide lock back doesn’t incur a Procedural Penalty but if you look at the gun for a bit before initiating the reload, there’s additional time on your score.
For many shooters, the trip ups come at three places; the first shot, the shot after the reload, and following through on the last shot. Missing the first shot is the single most common marksmanship error. Missing the first shot after a stoppage clearance, e.g., a reload, is the second most missed shot. Not following through after the last shot is the source of many dropped shots.
Those two shots, first and first after a reload, require the shooter to ‘Shoot better,’ as Bill Rogers https://rogersshootingschool.com/ says it. It’s easy to let the trigger finger get ahead of the sights but that’s a mistake. In 1893, Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, wrote in his book The Wilderness Hunter:
“No possible rapidity of fire can atone for habitual carelessness of aim with the first shot.”
Some concepts are timeless, regardless of what gun you’re shooting or what sighting system it has on it.
Ill-Annoy Practice Session and Tune-up
#wheelgunwednesday
I’m going to shoot my Model 65 tomorrow at an indoor IDPA match, so I did a little practice and tune-up yesterday. The Ill-Annoy Concealed Carry License Qualification is a nice little tune-up vehicle. Good thing I did because the locally procured reloaded ammunition didn’t perform 100%. Remington UMC 130 gr ball is 100%. Testing one’s equipment is always a good idea.
If you would like to read more in-depth articles about self-defense and personal protection, please consider subscribing to my Patreon page.
Silhouette Torture
#22Tuesday
Decades ago, David Blinder created a 50 round drill for focused practice loosely based on Dot Drill 101 from the Brian Enos Forum. The late Todd Louis Green, who founded pistol-training.com, expanded on it, and codified it into a practice session containing most relevant defensive pistol marksmanship skills. He called it Dot Torture and put it up on the pistol-training forum.
ETA comment from Simon Golub of Pistol-Training
Dot Torture came to us as is. We simply photocopied the target and Todd liked it a lot, giving Blinder the correct credit on the target. –Simon
ETA 2 from the source, David Blinder, himself
I got shooting dots from John Shaw at Mid-South which I believe he got from IPSC. I am also the one who named it dot torture. Todd did some modifications and definitely popularized it.
I’ve made my own version of it using the target employed for the Swiss Concealed Carry License live fire test. Today was an opportunity to shoot it with my LCP II .22. It was fun. A .22 understudy for your carry pistol is a concept that can be very useful. Shooting .22s is inexpensive and has some benefits that centerfires don’t have, minimal recoil and Over Pressure Event being the principal ones.
The demanding nature of the target requires the shooter to know the zero of their pistol very well at whatever distance is being used. In the case of the LCP .22, at three yards the hold was about halfway up on the white circle in the chest of the silhouette.
I recently mounted a Ruger ReadyDot on my Taurus TX22 Compact. https://thetacticalprofessor.net/2026/08/03/readydot-on-tx22-compact/ It zeroes quite well at both 10 and 20 yards.
Although I started to shoot Silhouette Torture with it today, rain set in and I wasn’t able to finish. I was able to shoot it enough to learn that the hold at five yards was on the head. The 15 MOA dot completely covers the head at that distance but it’s not hard to hold. Knowing your pistol’s zero at different ranges, whether using iron or Dot sights is useful.
The Silhouette Torture target is attached. Its instructions are on the 2nd page of the 2 page PDF.
My Red Dot Adventure series is available on my Patreon page for those who are interested in exploring what Dot Sights can and cannot do.
ReadyDot on TX22 Compact
#mousegunmonday
As an experiment, I installed a Ruger ReadyDot on a Taurus TX22 Compact. The efficacy of this combination was surprising. Although the ReadyDot’s zero cannot be adjusted, Point of Impact was really close to Point of Aim at both 20 and 10 yards.
Body shots at 20 yards from a benchrest and headshots at 10 yards offhand were the test for zero used. No complaints whatsoever.
At 20 yards, the dot perfectly covers the four inch circle on the body of the target. For me, this made it very easy to aim without over-aiming. At 10 yards, it is slightly smaller than the head circle. Once again, I found this advantageous. This intrigued me so I shot the IDPA 5X5 Classifier. I didn’t time it but still shot at my normal cadence. Two Points Down.
I’ve created a drill I call the McGee, Shootist, Big Iron Challenge. It is a combination of the McGee Paradigm (3/3/3), Wild Bill Hickok’s shootist test from the American Mercury article about him, and Marty Robbins’ song Big Iron. The Challenge tests marksmanship at three separate distances; 3 yards, 8 yards Primary Hand Only, and 13 yards. It is 18 rounds total, six shots at each distance. In terms of proxemics https://thetacticalprofessor.net/2014/10/16/situational-awareness-and-positioning-part-iii/, marksmanship in the far phase of Social Space, and the near and far phases of Public Space are assessed.
McGee’s Challenge consists of three strings at three yards. One shot from the holster, two shots from the MidPoint, and three shots from Low Ready. The time limit for each string is three seconds. The standard is all six shots in the USPSA Metric target A zone in the head (2 inches x 4 inches).
The Shootist’s Challenge https://thetacticalprofessor.net/2024/08/02/gunfighter-challenge/ comes from the standard Wild Bill Hickok used in the Old West to see if a shooter was ‘good.’
The Big Iron Challenge was inspired by Marty Robbins’ song Big Iron.
“There was 40 feet between them when they stopped to make their play.”
The Big Iron Challenge consists of six shots at 40 feet/13 yards. It’s shot with Two Hands, Untimed. The standard is all six shots must hit in an eight circle, the IDPA -0 body zone.
The TX22/ReadyDot performed well on the Challenge. I’m very pleased with this combination of gun and dot.
Last Thursday, I shot an IDPA match that had a Pick Up Gun theme. I provided the TX22 Compact with the iron sights for one stage. Fifteen shooters fired six rounds each without any malfunctions. The match combined with the ReadyDot test totaled 143 rounds with no malfunctions. MiniMag solids were the ammunition used. This confirms my experience that the TX22 is a very reliable gun when fed decent ammo.
FTC Note and author disclosure: I purchased everything used in these experiments; gun, holster, ammunition, sight, and targets, with my own money. I receive no compensation whatsoever for anything mentioned.
More of my Red Dot Adventures are chronicled on my Patreon page. For those who are considering putting a Red Dot Sight on their pistols, I’m exploring my testing criteria and outcomes, both yea and nay.
Competition – Alternate POV
Greg Ellifritz recently made a post about Andy Stanford’s book Gunfighter U https://www.activeresponsetraining.net/gunfighter-u that a few of us were fortunate enough to receive an advance copy of at TacCon 2026.
Andy and Greg make some good points. I’ve been deficient in my reading, so let me present an alternate Point Of View based solely on what Greg posted.
Greg’s comment was:
“After seeing more than a few shooters obsessively chasing performance at Tac Con (with what Col. Cooper described as ‘Preoccupation with Inconsequential Increments’), I wanted to share some of Andy’s advice from the book:
‘Shoot at least twelve matches total, not more than one a week, no fewer than one a month. If you wish, shoot until you reach a “B” classification in USPSA, or Expert in IDPA. Then throttle back to one or two matches a year at most. At this point, spend your spare time learning tactical medicine or applied combatives. Or conversing with your significant other. Or playing with your kids.
To get a Grandmaster card or win a major match requires many esoteric skills that have nothing to do with gunfighting.”
As with most things in life, competition yields what you put into it. This includes not only effort but philosophy. After taking a 10 year mostly hiatus from competition, I’ve started competing regularly again but with a much different attitude and personal philosophy. I’ve unlocked my Patreon post about my change in attitude. https://www.patreon.com/posts/discipline-for-138437533
Something I try to be very cautious about as a trainer and educator is assuming that all gunowners have access to the same resources and opportunities that I do. One of the most important of these is availability of a gun club where I can draw from a holster and practice most of what I’d like to. Since I’m a numbers nerd, years ago I calculated how many gunowners in the Atlanta Metro area had that resource. The number I came up with was 1 in 1,000. Hardly any indoor range in the Metro area allows shooters to draw from a holster or do any moving. Outdoor gun clubs are private and require a membership. What I gather from talking to shooters in other parts of the US is that we are exceptionally fortunate here in Atlanta. Some areas in the Northeast, the number is an order or two of magnitude higher.
What that means is that the other 999 shooters have only two venues where they can draw from a holster; at a match or at a training event. The match I go to costs $20 to enter and has an ammunition cost of about $25. It takes about 5 hours, starting at 11AM, and is a 45 minute drive from the city. The resource requirements for a training event obviously exceed that by a large margin. And such events are only occasionally available.
Another aspect of competition that I think is useful could be described as legally and morally defensible performance standards. In a competition, the bare minimum standard is to hit the silhouette with every shot. Experienced shooters will rarely miss the entire silhouette. Even Novice competitors will hit the entire silhouette somewhere in the 80-90% range because they know that misses dramatically hurt their score. This far exceeds the most common Qualification standard of 70% and the general ~50% average seen at indoor ranges. We all agree that the only safe place for bullets to land is in the body of a criminal attacker so I think getting that hit average up is a good thing.
Although there are numerous other positives to competition, the one I will finish this post with relates to Empty Chamber Carry. We all roll our eyes at people who think ECC is a good idea. Empty Chamber Carry is rooted in the fear of having a Negligent Discharge, period. People who do this are either afraid they’ll shoot themselves or shoot someone else they shouldn’t. Why? Because they are inexperienced gunhandlers. They haven’t yet developed confidence that they have an adequate level of skill to carry a loaded gun. In the 25 years and hundreds of matches I’ve shot, the only competitors I’ve seen who believe in Empty Chamber Carry are Cowboy Action Shooters and bullseye shooters. That doesn’t just mean Single Action revolvers, either. Competitors who are used to carrying a 20th Century gun in a holster and drawing it to shoot don’t carry empty chamber.
I’m back to shooting one local match a month now and I probably won’t shoot another Major Match. My Classification is down to Sharpshooter and I don’t care. The attitude I approach competition with is very different from the past when I was a Four Gun Master with 36 Major Match wins. Where I place in the scores is completely unimportant to me. What is important to me is to test myself and my equipment, have some fun, and see folks I haven’t seen in a while. I learn something about shooting in every match. Oddly enough, because I shoot Compact Carry Pistol, I still usually win my Division because almost everyone else is shooting Optics now.
There are a lot more benefits that I’ll share on my Patreon page but this post is food for thought for the community.
Friday Fundamentals – Getting Started
#Fridayfundamentals
Shooting To Live for the 21st Century – Concealed Carry Skills and Drills
Session 1
This session derives from two contemporary Courses of Fire, the original Michigan Council On Law Enforcement Standards Basic Pistol Safety Training Assessment and the New York State Concealed Carry License Live-Fire Proficiency Assessment https://troopers.ny.gov/minimum-standards-new-york-state-concealed-carry-firearm-safety-training to mimic and expand on the Recruit Training Programme described by Fairbairn and Sykes in their classic text Shooting To Live. Together the Assessments mimic the first live fire Practices of the RTP. To expand on it, the distance is increased from two yards used by F&S to 4 yards, the boundary in Proxemics between Social Space and Public Space.
The target consists of three sheets of printer paper stacked vertically in landscape mode. Fold one in half and use it as the top sheet. Put this array on whatever target backer is convenient. The Shoot-N-C is an optional addition on the middle sheet, used as the ‘aiming mark’ mentioned in STL.
This session can be done either at an outdoor range or almost all indoor ranges. The draw for the NYS Assessment is dry, i.e., no ammo in the gun, and most indoor ranges will permit it. There is no time limit so even ranges that require shooting no faster than one shot every three seconds can be placated.
Part I – MCOLES Safety Training Assessment
- String 1
- Load five rounds in the pistol and come to Low Ready.
- Bring the pistol to eye level, acquire a sight picture, and fire one shot.
- Return to Low Ready.
- Repeat four more times for a total of five shots.
- String 2
- Repeat String 1 for another five individual shots.
- String 3
- Load five rounds in the pistol and come to Low Ready
- Bring the pistol to eye level, acquire a sight picture, and fire two shots.
- Return to Low Ready.
- Bring the pistol to eye level, acquire a sight picture, and fire three shots.
The passing standard established by MCOLES was hybrid. Of the three strings, two had to have all five shots hit anywhere on all three sheets of paper. So it’s basically a 100% standard but you get to throw out your worst String.
The second part of this session is the New York State Concealed Carry License Live-Fire Proficiency Assessment. It uses the same target as the MCOLES Assessment. The distance is also four yards.
Part II – NYS CCL Live-Fire Proficiency Assessment
- Verify that the pistol is unloaded.
- Safely holster without loading.
- Draw the unloaded pistol, acquire a sight picture on the target, and dry snap one time.
- Safely holster without loading
- Draw the pistol and load with five rounds.
- To load, use the push method of loading as described by Fairbairn and Sykes.
- “To load the pistol, turn it over, grasping the slide firmly with the thumb and forefinger of the left hand.”
“Push forward with the right hand until the slide is felt to be open to its fullest extent.”
“Immediately that point is reached, release the hold with the left hand. The slide flies forward, taking with it and forcing into the breech, the topmost cartridge of the magazine, the pistol pointing to the ground meanwhile.”
- Achieve a proper firing grip and come to Low Ready.
- Bring the pistol to eye level, acquire a sight picture, and fire five shots.
- Verify that the pistol is unloaded.
- Safely holster
The passing standard for the NY State Proficiency Assessment is that 4 of the 5 shots (80%) must hit somewhere on the three sheets of paper.
The total round count for this session is twenty rounds. While that may seem low by some people’s standard, it is as much as many owners of snub nose revolvers and small pistols like the Ruger LCP will want to fire at one session. As a beginning, shooting this session provides some familiarity with shooting the pistol, what its concussion and recoil feel like, and an indicator of the shooter’s capability within a distance envelope that most criminal victimizations take place in.
Friday Fundamentals for 2026
#fridayfundamentals
Over 10 years ago, I began writing a series called #fridayfundamentals. https://thetacticalprofessor.net/2015/09/25/friday-fundamentals-01-establishing-your-baseline/ It started with ideas from a couple of my friends, Mark Luell and Cecil Burch.
“My friend Mark Luell, the author of Growing Up Guns suggested I provide a ‘Friday Fundamentals’ post weekly. We got the idea from my colleague Cecil Burch who wrote a blog post about Fundamentals. It’s a great idea to stay in touch with the basics.”
The #fridayfundamentals series has continued intermittently ever since. An opportunity has arisen to continue to expand it. As the saying goes, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/10/07/difficulty/
For the past two years, I’ve been writing a monthly column for the digital edition of the NRA magazine Shooting Illustrated. https://www.shootingillustrated.com/ Sadly, we authors have been notified that both the digital and print editions of the magazine will cease to be published at the end of this year.
My 2024 monthly columns were about practice sessions derived from Concealed Carry License Qualification Courses. The sessions were focused on a theme and mostly limited to 50 rounds or less. While highly skilled shooters consider qualification courses to be ‘sobriety tests,’ that’s not true for the majority of gunowners. Especially when a person buys their first pistol, actually having to prove they can shoot it at even an elementary baseline level is intimidating. And because qual courses are designed for ease of administration rather than to have any training or feedback value, they can be segmented into smaller sections that actually do have some training and feedback worth.
First and foremost in my mind when I wrote the series was the Resource Constrained Environment that most gunowners have to practice in. Only a tiny minority of gunowners have access to an outdoor range where movement is possible and shot timers are workable. Almost all gunowners are limited to a booth at an indoor range where universally they can’t move, drawing from a holster isn’t allowed, and a shot timer is useless. Sometimes shooting faster than one shot every three seconds is prohibited. One of the benefits of qual courses is that they are mostly designed with this limitation in mind, so I capitalized on that benefit for the series.
Since Shooting Illustrated is going away, I’ll be re-publishing the series on a weekly basis here on my blog. In addition to the articles, I’ll be creating videos of what each session looks like from a third person POV and the shooter’s POV. YouTube has been taking down some of my videos for vague reasons unspecified other than:
“We think your content violated our firearms policy.
Content that facilitates the sale of certain regulated goods, like firearms, ammunition, or prohibited firearm accessories, isn’t allowed on YouTube.”
As a workaround, I’ll just post a Short of the specified qualification course on YouTube. Then the video of the course with the training enhancements will go up on my Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/TacticalProfessor as a free post because Patreon does not give me a hard time about them.
It’s my hope that gunowners who want to increase their proficiency will find the series useful as practice regimens. There are no shortage of incidents where gunowners find out that the gun they’re depending on doesn’t work or they can’t work it. In the context of personal protection, just knowing you can make the gun go off https://thetacticalprofessor.net/2025/09/17/testing-a-new-gun/ has a lot of value. Being able to hit something with it is even better.
Thoughts On ‘The Distance Issue’
#mousegunmonday
Rich Grassi of The Tactical Wire recently posted an article about distances at which Defensive Gun Uses can be successfully resolved. https://www.thetacticalwire.com/features/a45b09c4-5997-4cd2-b959-a15df74293ac
One of his comments is well put and bears remembering in all cases of personal protection. It applies regardless of the implement used, whether personal weapons, impact tools, or firearms.
“Anyone who tells you that ‘if you shoot beyond (whatever) distance, you’ll have a lot to explain,’ forgets to add, ‘if you ever use deadly force to stop an immediate deadly threat, you’ll have a lot to explain.’”
This is an interesting topic and bears some further testing. Here’s my unlocked Patreon post about it.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/thoughts-on-140908907
To quantify his questions a little further for myself, the LCP II .22 provided a good platform. The standard I chose was well established and very basic, no pun intended. The NRA Basics of Pistol Shooting standard is to put five hits out of five shots into a four inch circle. Coincidentally, four inches is also the size of the -0 head zone on the IDPA target. To apply this standard to the question of ‘maximum effective range,’ two circles were shot at 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 feet. The question was at what distance did I fail to meet the standard.
If you would like to read more in-depth information about shooting and personal protection, consider subscribing to my Patreon page.
LCP II Hogue Handall Grip Sleeve
#mousegunmonday
Many people comment that the LCP and LCP II are not particularly pleasant guns to shoot. Putting a Hogue HandALL® Hybrid Grip Sleeve on my LCP made it much more comfortable. I purchased (with my own money: FTC) a HandALL® Beavertail Grip Sleeve for my LCP II to see if the result was comparable.
The Handalls are rubber and much wider than the naked backstrap of the LCP. Consequently, they spread the recoil across a broader area and reduce its impact on the hand.
The instructions for installing the Grip Sleeve say to warm it with a hair dryer prior to the installation. I found this to be very helpful. As an experiment, I tried putting it on without warming. This didn’t work at all. Warming it with the hair dryer worked much better and I was able to get it on per the instructions.
Note also that the front sight of my LCP II is painted with orange model paint on top of a white undercoat. This makes the sight picture much improved and shooting more accurate.
At my local indoor range, I shot two different courses of fire. The ammo was a mixed bag of different types I wanted to shoot up and I didn’t bother keeping track of what I shot when. The total for the two CoF was 48 rounds, which is a decent practice session for a small pistol.
The first thing I shot was my Old West Shootist’s Challenge. https://thetacticalprofessor.net/2025/02/05/shootists-challenge-the-final-word/ with a second string inspired by Marty Robbins’ song Big Iron. “There was 40 feet between them when they stopped to make their play.”
The Shootist’s Challenge now consists of two strings, one at 25 feet and the other at 40 feet.
1) Six shots, 10 paces (25 feet/8 yards), Primary Hand Only, Untimed. I shot this twice because I obviously need more practice.
2) Six shots, 40 feet/13 yards, Two Hands, Untimed.
The second Course of Fire I shot was a modified version of the Warshington State Basic Covert Carry/Off-Duty Proficiency Course. Because the range doesn’t permit drawing from a holster, I used a bench start for the strings that are specified as holster starts. I didn’t time it because other people were shooting and a shot timer would have been useless. Times for qual courses have never been an issue for me so I don’t worry about them. Unless the shooter is dawdling, I’m not convinced timing is as important as is generally regarded in the community.
There were four modifications added. The first was shooting Sequence 1 as a pair of 3 shot Failure Drills. Failure Drill, as I use the term, is as taught by Larry Mudgett and John Helms to the LAPD after returning from Gunsite. https://thetacticalprofessor.net/2022/12/20/failure-drill/ Two shots to the chest, bring the pistol down to Low Ready at the target’s waist level, a pause to assess, and then a face shot. This Sequence was six shots as I did it.
Sequences 2 and 3 were shot as described in the Course of Fire, except using a bench start for Sequence 2. All the subsequent five shot Sequences were increased to six rounds. The six round Sequences were shot in three strings using 1 shot, then 2 shots, then 3 shots, as taught by Jim Cirillo. https://www.shootingillustrated.com/content/jim-cirillo-s-1-2-3-6-drill/ For the 3 shot strings, I once again did them as Failure Drills and marked on the target where the face shot went for each Sequence.
The end result was that I met the standard for the Course of Fire.
Qualification Courses are structured to efficiently cycle numerous officers through as quickly as possible. We can use them as practice regimens but that doesn’t mean we have to blast long strings of fire that provide little in the way of marksmanship practice. Breaking longer strings down gives us more accountable practice on our sight picture and trigger manipulation.
I found 48 rounds through the Handall equipped LCP II to be much more pleasant than it would have been with the bare gun. It’s a worthy and inexpensive modification.
If you would like to read more in-depth information about shooting and personal protection, consider subscribing to my Patreon page.
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