Pre-election Day product blowout sale
I don’t know what going to happen on Tuesday but I do know that if The Evil One is elected, a lot of people will be buying guns. Some of them will be your friends and family.
Since many of them won’t be familiar at all with firearms, I’m making a special offer. The Pistol Practice Program and Serious Mistakes Gunowners Make combo set is only $20 now on my webstore. Very few people are interested in training and they often won’t listen to you but maybe they’ll listen to me if you give the CDs to them. I’m discontinuing production of physical products, so when these are gone, that will be the last.
I’ve also reduced the price of Glock 17 ALS holsters to only $20, so if they buy a Glock they don’t have to use a crappy holster.
Doing some cleaning, I found a few more copies of my Secrets of the Snubby DVD. These have been reduced to $15 on my webstore.
Maximum shipping for any order is only $10, so this offer is a great way to get some Christmas shopping done and promote firearms safety for your friends and family.
To order any or all of them visit my webstore.
Chinese Whispers and the FBI (Part I)
Chinese Whispers is the game in which a short message is whispered from person to person and then the beginning and ending stories are compared. Often what begins as “I like that girl’s dress” ends up as something like “her Grandmother slept with Batman!”
The FBI released its annual report Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) report on October 17. LEOKA will eventually be the starting point for numerous Chinese Whispers in the firearms and law enforcement communities. Whispers will circulate about statistical data such as distances of ‘gunfights,’ lighting conditions, weapon disarms, etc. Often, these claims will not even be based on current data but ‘commonly cited information,’ ‘well known statistics,’ or other such dubious sources.
What can we actually learn from LEOKA about how to be safer? The best single source in the Report is the Summaries of Officers Feloniously Killed and a recent addition, Selected Summaries of Officers Assaulted and Injured with Firearms or Knives/Other Cutting Instruments. Rather than relying on tabular data, which is interesting but not instructive, reading the Summaries provides us clues about circumstances, positioning, and actions. The FBI uses the term ‘The Deadly Mix’ to describe the combination of officer, offender, and circumstances. Reading the Summaries can give us insight about how that mix occurs and its outcome.
The circumstances of incidents in LEOKA are categorized as:
- Disturbance call,
- Arrest situation, including pursuits
- Civil disorder,
- Handling, transporting, custody of prisoner,
- Investigating suspicious person/circumstance,
- Ambush,
- Unprovoked attack,
- Investigative activity,
- Handling person with mental illness,
- Traffic pursuit/stop,
- Tactical situation.
While LEOs have interest in all the categories, Private Citizens can learn from incidents such as Investigating suspicious persons/circumstances and Handling person with mental illness, too. For those who think intervening in others’ affairs is a good idea (I do not), looking at the incidents in the Arrest category is a worthwhile exercise to see how easily things can go bad.
The West Virginia incident in the Summaries of Officers Assaulted and Injured is an entertaining, if somewhat macabre, example of just how weird and unpredictable the life of a police officer can be. The rookie involved certainly got a baptism of fire that day.
On January 1, a lieutenant and a patrol officer with the Lewisburg Police Department were both shot during a traffic stop at 4:20 p.m. The 36-year old veteran lieutenant, who had 15 years of law enforcement experience, and the 20-year-old patrol officer, who been on the job for 1 month, were both wearing body armor when they stopped a man driving a vehicle that had been reported stolen by a law enforcement agency in Texas.
More about LEOKA in the next Part.
Pride and fear
“when pride arrives, logic [leaves].” –Samurai Rising
I would say the same is true of fear, which is one reason I don’t care for the “I was in fear for my life” mantra. When we in the industry teach fear to our students, I am concerned we are setting them up to make bad decisions.
Fun Facts About the AR-15
I don’t even know where this list came from but it contains some important, yet little known, information that people need to be aware of about the AR-15.
- The inventor of the AR-15 was Satan, though his patent has since expired.
- Scientists have confirmed the deadly effects of an AR-15 by giving it to a chimpanzee who then murdered them.
- Scientists agree that each year the AR-15 will grow more deadly until it kills everyone in the entire world.
- Some believe that both Hitler and Stalin were, in fact, AR-15s in rubber masks.
- In the Garden of Eden, God gave Adam and Eve access to every firearm out there except for the AR-15 which he told them not to touch because it was too evil. But then the NRA, in the guise of a serpent, told Eve that the AR-15 is really fun to shoot. So then Eve took the AR-15 and started shooting all the animals in the garden because she is one awesome chick.
- The part that makes the AR-15 so extra deadly is the handle on top. The AR-15 would be used in less murders if it were more inconvenient to carry.
- It was an AR-15 that told Miley Cyrus to dance like that.
- Bullets that are normally harmless will kill instantly when fired out of the AR-15.
- The reason AR-15s have that prominent handle on them is because the most requested feature for an assault rifle was to be able to carry it like a Hello Kitty lunch box.
- If you find yourself surrounded by AR-15s, know that they will fire automatically if they sense fear.
- The AR-15 is easily concealable and can fit inside a matchbox.
- The AR-15 is the leading cause of global warming from how its bullets shoot holes in the ozone.
- A very small percentage of gun deaths are attributed to the AR-15 because it is very good at disguising itself as other guns to frame them.
- What are the differences between an M16 and an AR-15? Scientists agree that it is something.
- The AR-15 can be rendered harmless by giving it only a 10 round magazine as people always miss with the first ten rounds and an AR-15 takes an hour and a half to reload.
- The AR-15 can shoot through schools.
- In a battle between Aquaman and an AR-15, Aquaman would break down and buy it so people might think he’s more manly.
- There were no shooting deaths until the invention of an AR-15. No one even considered using a gun to shoot another human being until someone saw an AR-15 and said, “I bet I could use this to kill a lot of people.”
- There was an assault musket similar to the AR-15 used by the world’s most evil pirates, but it was pronounced “Arrr-15.”
- The Assault Weapon ban was needed because it is well known that an AR-15 with both a pistol grip and a flash suppressor would be unstoppable by any modern military.
- In Europe there is no such thing as an AR-15 and thus also no such thing as murders. Instead of being violent, people there just drink wine and smoke cigarettes all day.
- If you are shot by an AR-15, you become one and kill others.
- The AR-15 is responsible for 95% of all deaths each year. The rest of the deaths are from obesity and drone strikes.
- Both of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, Fat Man and Little Boy, are jealous of the destructive power of the AR-15.
- Abraham Lincoln said the AR-15 is the finest battle implement ever devised.
- Viagra is made from ground AR-15 parts.
- The AR-15 is as heavy as 10 boxes that you carry.
- Some AR-15s shoot a .50 caliber bullet “that don’t belong in our streets.” These are known as AR-50s.
A rant about rants
In the past week, friends have pointed me to several rants in the blogosphere about ‘deficiencies’ among gunowners. “They’re not physically fit enough,” “their technique sucks,” “there should be some training requirement before they can carry a gun,” etc. (I had a little they’re, their, there wordplay fun with that. 🙂 ) I’m no different; my Serious Mistakes articles and audios are my own rants about gunowner deficiencies.
The problem with rants is that they immediately turn off the target audience. No one likes to be told they’re a buffoon or inept. Serious Mistakes has been the second poorest selling information product I’ve ever created. So, ranting is just an exercise in futility. This post will be no different; “ranters gonna rant.” But if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem, so I’m going to offer an alternate viewpoint.
My colleague William Aprill periodically says that I tend to create ‘actionable’ material. That is indeed what I try to generate, material and programs that people can actually do step by step. Indoor Range Practice Sessions and the Pistol Practice Program are examples of that. Even Serious Mistakes has some ideas in it about how to not shoot your finger off or forget your pistol in a public restroom.
For those in the blogosphere who feel like tearing off on a rant, here’s a possible structure for your rant.
- Here’s the problem. (No more than two paragraphs).
- This is a possible solution. (One paragraph)
- The first step to implementing the solution is….
- Further steps in the solution are….
- It’s going to take XXX amount of time and XXX amount of resources to make the solution work long term.
- A journey of 1,000 miles (or 1,000 Days) begins with one step (or one practice session.) –Lao Tsu
While you’re crafting your rant, also keep in mind the limitations your audience has that you might not. If someone’s been overweight all their life, they’re unlikely to drop a bunch of weight just because there’s a rant about them needing to. (More their, they’re, there wordplay fun.) Keep your solution within the realm of reachable reality. (Some alliteration wordplay.)
It’s common to talk about constructive criticism but its implementation is often forgotten. Where our own perceptions are concerned, we’re likely to forget we were beginners or uninformed or not up to snuff at one time, too. (Did it again.) Think that there are ways that you can help your target audience achieve their goals instead of just telling them they’re one of the Three Stooges (there, their, they’re and alliteration wordplay fun all in the same sentence.)
Thanks for reading this. I doubt it will do any good but I had fun writing it. As General of the Armies John J. Pershing said “An officer is responsible for his own morale.” Wordplay and philosophy are two things I don’t get to indulge in very much at the keyboard.
And no, I didn’t have a drink for breakfast. I’m saving that for lunch.
Following through
Although this sign was at a church, it’s applicable to many aspects of our lives. Interestingly, I saw it while thinking about the 1,000 Days while driving a surveillance detection route I don’t usually take. Synchronicity, as Jung would say.
Working the 1,000 Days has brought a clarity to me about the value of following through on what we start. One of the things that I have noticed is that training classes frequently don’t include a followup program for students to follow. Insights Training Center and Mid-South Institute of Self Defense Shooting are the only two I can recall that gave me a takeaway. I include the NRA Marksmanship Qualification Program Defensive Pistol I course of fire as a followup for people who take my short classes.
I want to make sure that the students who come to our Violent Criminal Actors and You course have a followup program also. Since it’s not a physical skills class, I have to approach the followup program in a different way.
This is how I’m going to do it: the next 10 people who sign up for the class will get a personal one hour telephone consultation with me about how to develop their individual program. Since everyone’s situation is different, each consultation will be personalized. I ordinarily charge $125/hour with a two hour minimum for training and consultation, so I think this is an offer that has value.
Those who have signed up already will also receive the one hour consultation. I want to get the consultations finished within a month after the class, so that will probably be as many people as I can accommodate. This will be an interesting way to me to followup on what the students gain from the class and how they plan to implement their education.
James Yeager‘s philosophy that training is just a down payment has always appealed to me. So, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and help our students follow-through.
1000 Days of Practice (Part IV)
What have I gained from the second run of 1,000 Days?
Purely on a mechanical level, lots of reps. The average number of repetitions I did each day was somewhere between 30 and 40. Some of the regimens I have used frequently in the final year are:
- My 12 shot drill; two hands, primary hand only, support hand only – 36 reps
- The LAPD Bonus Course – 40 reps
- A two target adaptation of the Federal Air Marshal Tactical Pistol Course (pre-9/11) – 30 reps
- An Enhanced Standard version of the State of Illinois Police Qualification Course – 30 reps
- Defensive Pistol I of the NRA Marksmanship Qualification Program (through Sharpshooter) – 80 reps
- Tactical Performance Center dots – two hands, primary hand only, support hand only – 75 reps
- The Georgia Security Guard Qualification Course – 48 reps
Let’s say the average is 40, which might not seem like a lot on an individual daily basis. However, by the end, I will have seen the sights and pressed the trigger smoothly 40,000 times. Dryfire provides feedback on the quality of those movements in a way that livefire cannot, simply because of recoil. Even if I didn’t already know how to the see the sights and press the trigger smoothly, 40,000 deliberate repetitions of them with quality feedback would go a long way to learning them. Not to mention the difference in cost between firing 40,000 dryfire repetitions ($0) and 40,000 rounds livefire (~$10,000 for the ammunition alone).
Since I religiously check the status of my pistol each day before dryfiring, I will also have completed 1,000 repetitions of correctly determining the load status of my firearm. My procedure for doing that has become completely automatic. I notice it when I go to the range or a gun shop and someone hands me a pistol; I don’t even think about checking it, I just do in a sequence.
On another level, I learned to plan ahead, develop a list of options, and then decide which option to implement in the moment. All of the above regimens have some training aid readily available in my dryfire practice area. For example the TPC dot target and 12 shot drill are two of the targets I have hidden behind a novelty sign in my practice area. The LAPD Bonus Course, Ill-Annoy Police Qual, and FAM TPC are recordings on my phone and in my computer. Defensive Pistol I is a sheet I have on a clipboard in the area.
For each regimen, I developed the material ahead of time. Then I set it up so I had immediate access to the target, the recording/sheet, or both. This is John Boyd’s true legacy to us about tactics, drawn from the Aerial Attack Study, not some nearly incomprehensible diagram and touchy-feely misinterpretation about outwitting our enemies in the moment.
By having an already developed group of options, we can pick from them and execute immediately even when we are tired, stressed, or simply don’t know what else to do. Getting into the habit of thinking ahead of time, developing options, and then simply picking from the list when needed has been a powerful learning experience for me.
Having a list of options doesn’t preclude me from adapting and improvising for the situation. I don’t have a set regimen for practicing with my flashlight. Instead I pick one of my regimens and do it with a flashlight.
Philosophically, making the commitment to follow a daily process of repetition and desire for excellence has been the most valuable part of the 1,000 Days. Periodically, people ask questions like “Are you really planning to do this for 1,000 Days straight? Although I generally respond with a simple ‘Yes,’ there’s a lot more to it than that. Aristotle said:
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
That applies in many areas of life. While I was developing some sales tools for real estate agents and other salespeople, a friend commented that her firm already had a training program and tools for their people. She said that many of the salespeople didn’t use them though and were always looking for something new or ‘cool’ or simply improvised on their sales calls. Doing so tended to produce mediocre results because they were always improvising.
Improvisation is overrated.
–William Aprill
The really successful salespeople followed the company program and used established tools. As a result, they closed a lot more sales using a limited set of tools and techniques. They had practiced extensively (every sales call is a practice) and could use a small set of tools and techniques to a high standard of excellence.
Bruce Lee is reported to have said:
Colonel Boyd provided us with an example of how right Lee was. Boyd’s reputation as ’Forty Second Boyd’ [Coram, p 88] was gained through his ability to perform one single aerial maneuver with the F-100 fighter better than anyone else in the world. During his years as an instructor at the USAF Fighter Weapons School, he was never bested and only was only flown to a ‘dead heat’ once. He had pushed and tested the F-100 to its absolute limit on one aerial braking maneuver over and over again until he could slow the aircraft several hundred miles per hour in a matter of a few seconds. His opponent, unable to replicate or defeat the maneuver, would then unintentionally fly past him. Boyd would then regain his speed and get on the opponent’s tail, radioing the kill signal “Guns! Guns! Guns!”
There’s a lesson for us from ‘Forty Second Boyd.’ The real estate phrase ‘location, location, location’ can also be paraphrased as ‘repetition, repetition, repetition’ when we need to prepare ourselves for action and achievement.
Indoor Range Flashlight Practice Session
Someone who purchased Indoor Range Practice Sessions noticed a discrepancy in Session 11 (shooting with a flashlight).
I’ve updated the downloadable eBook for future purchases, but I want existing customers to have the update also. Accordingly, I created a downloadable file with Session 11 only.
As most of my readers know, using a flashlight to avoid tragedies is one of my hot buttons. It’s important enough information that I am going to make the updated Session 11 only available as a free download to all my blog followers, as well as previous purchasers.
The link to the updated Session 11 is here: Session 11 – Shooting with a flashlight
1000 Days of Practice (Part III)
Many people find it difficult to dryfire every day because they don’t have access to a firearm. Airline pilots and business people whose job require frequent air travel have a hard time of it. There are different ways of dealing with it.
The first would be to practice every day you do have access to your firearm and start counting. Doing that means you wouldn’t have a consecutive progression of the 1,000 Days but you would still get in 1,000 Days, it would just take longer.
Another approach would be to broaden the focus of your practice, as I mentioned in Part I. That’s one reason I entitled this series 1,000 Days of Practice.
Other skills appropriate to personal protection could be included as part of your mission statement for the 1,000 Days. This wouldn’t be 1,000 Days of Dryfire but it could be 1,000 Days of Personal Protection practice. Many of the most important Personal Protection Skills are soft skills that don’t require equipment to practice. Some that come to mind are:
- situational awareness
- the decision-making process
- incident analysis
- wargaming and decision exercises
- proxemics, and
- human communication and interaction
The memory aid I use for personal protection is RADAR.
- Ready – being prepared, mentally and physically
- knowledge,
- skills,
- tools
- Aware – eyes on the horizon, ears not plugged up
- Where am I?,
- Who is around me?,
- What are they doing?,
- What is going on?,
- Points Of Likely Concealment
- What is wrong in my right world?
- Decide – based on your decision criteria
- options,
- priorities, and
- the situation
- Act – do what you need to do
- Ready Again – be ready for your plan to need adjustment or the police to arrive.
Dryfire is one component of the Ready stage but it’s certainly not the only one. Understanding the criminal mindset and their methods of operation is also key. How about spending a few minutes periodically reviewing criminal victimizations that occurred to others and wargaming how to either avoid or deal with the situation? I have taken this so far as to go on a field trip to the location of a particularly bad incident and actually observe the lay of the land.
There are games that smart cops used to play to tune up their situational awareness. How common they are anymore, I don’t know. For instance, when in a waiting area, look around the room, then close your eyes and try to describe everyone in the room; clothes, height, weight, etc. That would be Aware practice.
Or, let’s say you encountered something that caused your to Alert and then realized it wasn’t a problem. You could mentally wargame what you thought the original problem and your solution. Take it all the way through to Ready Again, including your interaction with the authorities afterward.
There are many different ways to approach the 1,000 Days and tailor the focus to your personal needs and circumstances.
I’ll be going through a more in-depth explanation of RADAR, including some decision exercises, in the Violent Criminals and You class that William Aprill and I are teaching next month. William will be giving his extensive presentation on the criminal mindset and how differently criminals think.
1000 Days of Practice (Part II)
An implied task, the first time of the 1,000 days, was simply devising a way of getting through it. To avoid boredom and make the process efficient, I recorded cassette tapes of several different regimens. The regimens were all based on my needs at the time, which mostly consisted of improving my competitive performance in IDPA and other shooting sports. I limited them to 10 minutes duration so I had compact practice blocks. When I wanted more practice, I could do more than one in a day, sometimes consecutively and sometimes one in the morning and one in the evening.
Having a specific structure for my practice also helped avoid ‘grabasstic gunclicking,’ which as a friend said, is what dryfire often devolves to. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had inadvertently incorporated one of fundamentals of tactical decision-making; have a plan ahead of time. My decision-making research of the past few years made the value of having several practice regimens available quite obvious to me. John Boyd’s Aerial Attack Study was instrumental in providing me with this moment of clarity.
My regimens of the second 1,000 Days are considerably different than those of the first. Several of the regimens are based on higher level police qualification courses, such as the Federal Air Marshal Tactical Pistol Course (pre 9/11) and the LAPD Bonus Course. While most police qualification courses are easily cleaned by a competent marksman, a few are much more demanding and I prefer that.
In other cases, I took police quals that had a good basic structure but mediocre standards and enhanced them. My favorite is the State of Illinois Police Qualification Couse. For the armed private citizen, the distances and round allocations are good but the standards are so low that some of my friends in Ill‑Annoy can literally pass it with their eyes closed. The enhancements I made were to make the target smaller, cut the times in half, and do parts of it Primary Hand Only and Support Hand Only.
Being a fan of the NRA Markmanship Qualification Program, I developed dryfire versions of both Defensive Pistol I and Defensive Pistol II. The time limits set for these courses are quite generous but they have an accuracy standard of 100 percent. Since we’re accountable for every round we fire, I like the idea of a strong accuracy standard, in general.
In a defensive encounter, every bullet you fire that doesn’t hit its intended target is headed straight for a bus full of nuns and orphans being followed by a limousine of personal injury lawyers on a conference call with the District Attorney.
There are also some improvisations I like to make. My research into Serious Mistakes and Negative Outcomes made me a believer in the absolute necessity of verbalizing and being able to use a flashlight in conjunctions with a handgun. I usually dryfire something like Defensive Pistol I using a flashlight at least once a week.
One of the concepts I retained from my first 1,000 Days was making a good hit with the first shot. There’s too much emphasis placed on shooting fast in the community and not enough on making sure the first shot counts. Based on the incidents in my databases, I came to the conclusion that making a solid first hit above the diaphragm is the way to gain the initiative in an armed encounter.
Then I told myself, ‘Hey, I need to slow down and aim better.’
What if your situation or job precludes you from having access to a firearm every day? Some thoughts about that in Part III.
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