The Magic of Knowing that You Can Shoot Quick and Straight
#mindsetmonday
J. Henry Fitzgerald’s book Shooting was published in 1930. Some things in it are dated but most of the book is still very worthwhile. The entire book is available online, courtesy of Sportsman’s Vintage Press.
http://sportsmansvintagepress.com/read-free/shooting-table-contents/
The chapter on The Magic of Knowing that You Can Shoot Quick and Straight is an example of practical mindset. Many times, explanations of ‘mindset’ are vague and nebulous but Fitzgerald’s is straightforward and actionable.
http://sportsmansvintagepress.com/read-free/shooting-table-contents/shoot-quick-and-straight/
Some things related to human nature and performance haven’t changed one bit. Fitzgerald’s commentary on the Dunning-Kruger Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect is a hilarious example.
I have listened to many officers explaining how good they could shoot and when they got on the firing line they couldn’t hit a cow in the head with a snow shovel.
J. Henry Fitzgerald
It’s not necessary to be a great shot to defend yourself but having a degree of demonstrated competence is a valuable asset to your mindset. Drills like 3x3x3 are one way to demonstrate your competence to yourself. Shooting some of the drills from Indoor Range Practice Sessions and Concealed Carry Skills and Drills are another. Click on the images to purchase either or both books.
FTC notice: I am not affiliated with Sportsman’s Vintage Press and receive no commissions from them.
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.
Breaking Contact (Part 2)
CCW Safe continues its series about my concept of Breaking Contact as our primary goal (Mission).
The article is available here.
https://ccwsafe.com/blog/breaking-contact-pt-2
Understanding our Mission and thinking ahead of time about how to fulfill it are critical to our continued health and well-being. Not only are we affected by our attitudes and actions; our families and loved ones are affected just as much as we are.
Even as elite an organization as the Los Angeles Police Department discourages its officers from “taking off-duty enforcement action.” My book contains incidents where the Board of Police Commissioners criticized off-duty officers from taking action off-duty when it was hazardous and exposed the officer’s family to unnecessary danger.
Click on the image if you would like to buy my book and read some examples.
The post about Part I of Breaking Contact is here.
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.’
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.
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/
If you would like to purchase my book about LAPD Shootouts, click on the image below.
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.
If you would like to purchase Real Shootouts of the LAPD, 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.
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