In a typical year, KR Training hosts 6-8 courses taught by traveling trainers. In January 2018, we hosted a session of the Deadly Force Instructor class taught by Massad Ayoob and Marty Hayes of the Massad Ayoob Group. This course is typically only offered 1-2 times a year, so it was a big honor to be a course host.
It’s a 5 day course, covering the material from the MAG-20 classroom course from an instructor’s perspective, along with other material related to teaching others use of deadly force concepts, and guidance about being a material or expert witness in deadly force cases.
KR Training assistant instructor John Daub wrote an excellent, in depth AAR with more details about the course content. Before you read the rest of my AAR, click over to John’s blog and read his AAR.
A TEAM EFFORT
Seven members of the KR Training team attended the course, helping with facility support, transporting, feeding and entertaining our guest instructors, and audio/visual/computer setup.
Despite advertising the course with the Texas Concealed Handgun Association, on multiple Facebook groups open to Texas license-to-carry instructors, and getting the course mentioned in multiple national podcasts, only 3 other Texas instructors attended – all KR Training alumni. The other 22 students came from as far as Florida, Washington state, Pennsylvania and California. With over 4000 instructors certified by the state of Texas to teach the License to Carry class, and the direct relevance of this course to the state mandated training, I expected a better response from other Texas trainers, particularly since the course was within a few hours’ drive of Austin, Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio and about half the population of the state.
PROFESSIONAL GRADE TRAINING
The best description I can provide of the course is “professional grade training”. It felt like a college level law school course, complete with mock trial. The short videos below show a student playing the role of expert witness, conduct a demonstration with the defense attorney (Ayoob) of how an unarmed person could quickly disarm an armed person, when the armed person was within arm’s reach. (This was part of the defense team’s argument that the defendant’s decision to shoot an unarmed threat was justifiable.)
I took 30 pages of notes during the 50+ hours of class, and I know others in class whose notes were longer than mine. References to a long list of books to read, court cases to study, case studies and discussion of recent use of force trials in the news, presentations by each student, with a lengthy written exam.
Part of the course included a discussion of what instructors might have to testify to (or about) regarding the conduct of their training: handouts, lesson plans, drills, etc. It’s a topic that wasn’t taught in the License to Carry instructor course put on by our state police academy to certify Texas trainers to teach the state-mandated carry permit class, but it should have been. The subject of potential problems that might occur in court as a result of controversial statements on guns, clothing, bumper stickers, social media posts, and even association with (or attending courses taught by) instructors with questionable resumes or problematic public behavior was discussed.
The one takeaway from the course of value to any armed citizen is derived from Ayoob’s first law: anticipate the attack and have a counter in place. That’s true whether the fight is the physical one, or the one in court afterward. As one student in the course that had been through both the physical and the legal fights commented, the typical armed citizen spends a lot of time preparing for the physical fight, but is usually under-prepared for the court fight that follows. Live fire training is fun; classroom lectures and mock trials not as fun. If you plan to attend training this year (or any year), consider what training you’ve already had, and who you plan to train with, in the context of the value of that training in preparing you for the entire incident, not just the shooting part.
SUMMARY
Gaining a much deeper understanding of the legal defense of use of deadly force will be useful to the KR Training team members, (and all the other students) in the unfortunate event any of us are involved in incidents, or have students involved in incidents that lead to criminal charges or civil cases. The information will also influence how we teach live fire courses, what advice we give students about gear and tactics, how we script and conduct roleplaying scenarios, and how we teach the state carry permit class.
They plan to offer the course in 2019 at Marty Hayes’ Firearms Academy of Seattle. It’s an excellent course. Highly recommended for any instructor teaching armed citizens or police.
If you aren’t already a subscriber to receive this newsletter each month, you can subscribe here or follow this blog. You can also follow KR Training on Facebook or Twitter for more frequent posts and information. In the last 30 days KR Training has been on multiple podcasts and widely viewed youTube videos (full list below).
MARCH 3rd DISCOUNT OFFER
On March 3rd we offer our biannual 3-in-1 training package: Defensive Pistol Skills 2 (live fire), Advanced Training 2 (scenarios), and Low Light Shooting 1. These 3 courses are intended to be taken as a set, as they offer a mix of live fire, scenario and low light training in a single day.
Get a special package price for all 3 classes – $200 ($75 savings!) if you pay in full when you register.
This class combines medical training with lecture on the mindset and behavior of violent criminals and both live fire and force on force scenario training. It’s an excellent choice for graduates of any of our Defensive Pistol courses, any of Caleb’s other medical courses, or those wanting to sample a variety of topics and experiences in a single weekend.
Here’s the AAR from the December session of this course.
MAG-80
March 21-25 we are hosting a session of Massad Ayoob’s “Level 2” class, MAG-80. It’s a mix of handgun, long gun, and weapon retention skills. Graduates of the full MAG-40 (both MAG-20 classroom and range) are eligible to attend.
I’ll be on the road quite a bit this spring: teaching classes in Oklahoma and Florida, presenting at the Rangemaster Tactical Conference and “A Girl and a Gun” National Conference, with more road trips planned for this summer. As those plans get finalized I’ll get the KR Training schedule for classes May-August announced, probably in next month’s newsletter.
2018 SCHEDULE
The KR Training schedule shows most of the classes we plan to offer through early May 2018. Registration is open in everything listed.
We look forward to training you!
Karl, Penny and the KR Training team
The NRA has started up a new program, the Practical Pistol Coach certification, that focuses on the NRA’s Defensive Pistol training Module, taking Basic Pistol level instructors and developing their skills to coach shooters through skills such as drawing from concealment, reloading and malfunction clearing.
In the past use of the Defensive Pistol Module was restricted to NRA Advanced Pistol instructors, a rating that earned by being certified in NRA Personal Protection Outside the Home and providing NRA with proof of completion of private sector training beyond the PPOTH level.
To pass the PP Coach course, participants must re-shoot the NRA Basic Pistol instructor course of fire and the Defensive Pistol module course of fire, and pass both. The Defensive Pistol course of fire, by standards of the typical 2 day “tactical pistol” courses offered by the private sector, still has generously long par times for drawing, shooting, reloading and malfunction clearing, but is much more challenging than any state’s carry permit qualification course of fire. Compared to what it takes to shoot a 100% score on an USPSA classifier stage, the Defensive Pistol Module requires roughly 40% (USPSA low C class or IDPA Sharpshooter) level shooting.
Class attendees interested in being considered for a new national Practical Pistol coaching team have the option to shoot a more difficult qualification course of fire that requires higher skill to pass, probably around 60% of GM/low B class/IDPA Expert level based on my subjective impression of it. Both that course of fire and the Defensive Pistol course of fire use the NRA D-1 target, which is a neutered, lawyer-safe target with 4″, 8″ and 12″ scoring rings. The FBI Q “bottle” target can also be used, providing a more humanoid shape and more realism, but we didn’t use that target in our course. The target below was my target from the advanced coaching qual. I had a good run with very few shots outside the X ring and was told that I “super-passed” the qual. The requirement was all 20 shots inside the 8 ring. The advanced qual included 15 yard shooting.
The Class
I attended a session taught at NPSI in San Antonio, using their classroom and the Bullet Hole range. There were 15 students, coming from as far as Alaska, Washington State, Florida, and Arizona, every corner of the country, to attend. This was only the 3rd time this course had been taught, and as were told, the material is still in development and under revision.
Two days were spent in the classroom, with lecture material heavily derived from traditional athletics coaching instruction and generic “how to coach an athlete” information. The 3rd day was spent on the range, first shooting the qualification courses of fire and then in exercises coaching others through drills from the Defensive Pistol Module.
Many attending the course were experienced instructors with 15 or more years involved with the NRA pistol training program. A few were new instructors just meeting the 5 years experience requirement to attend the class. After my experience at the November 2017 Rangemaster instructor conference, where the level of shooting by attendees was uniformly high, I was disappointed to see a surprising number of those attending this course struggle with the shooting drills, including some that did not pass.
My Opinion
I do a lot of coaching, both in private lessons, answering email questions from students, and in classes. I’ve learned how to train others to coach by developing my assistant instructors on my training team to recognize and correct gunhandling and shooting errors. I’ve written about common gunhandling errors. I’ve developed a block of instruction for the A Girl and a Gun national conference teaching their facilitators how to identify and fix shooting problems. This course contained no material similar to that, which is the core task a pistol shooting coach does. It doesn’t improve attendees’ ability to be better at coaching pistol skills on the range. It does a fair job of certifying them to teach the Defensive Pistol module.
For a basic pistol-level instructor wanting to get certified to teach the Defensive Pistol module, this class is appropriate. For someone wanting to learn how to coach shooters better, it’s not useful, at least in its current level of development. It needs significant revision, replacing a full day of classroom material with a day of additional range and dry fire activities, to cover the kind of material I’ve used (and developed) to train others to coach effectively.
I wrote my recommendations and am providing them to the NRA E&T department for consideration. If I’m invited to be on the national coaching staff for this program, I may be involved in making those improvements.
If you plan to attend the course
Practice before you go. Make sure you can shoot 20 shots out of 20 into the 8″ circle on the NRA D-1 with no time limit. Make sure you can draw from concealment and hit the 8″ circle of the D-1, from 7 yards, in under 3 seconds (preferably 2 seconds). Make sure you can reload your pistol in under 3 seconds (preferably 2 seconds) and clear a failure to fire malfunction (tap rack assess/bang) quickly. Don’t invest money and time attending the course if your skills aren’t up to par, just to get another rating or certificate or patch for your vest.
Be your own coach
Step 1 in being a good coach is to coach yourself. Learn how to analyze your own performance, how to plan practice sessions designed to achieve measurable performance improvements. That means using a target and a timer. Buy a shooting timer if you don’t have one. Record video of your performance and analyze it. Study what top shooters do and how they do it. Study how they train and practice. There’s no shortage of high quality information available today for self-study.
Back in 2013, the Texas House of Representatives passed a bill that would authorize teachers at K-12 schools to carry on campuses, if they passed a special training course and met higher standards for proficiency. Under the Act, teachers would receive training on best practices for the protection of students, how to interact with first responders, tactics to deny an intruder entry into a classroom, and accuracy with a handgun under duress. This enhanced training is voluntary and only available to teachers who already have a license to carry.
In 2017, the Texas Department of Public Safety began offering a 2 day course to certify License to Carry instructors in the new course. Three KR Training instructors attended sessions of the certification class, and we held our first session of the new course on Dec 27-28, 2017. The course was developed by the Texas Department of Public Safety with input from the ALERRT program, to align it with material being taught to law enforcement officers nationwide. Both of the DPS trainers that taught the instructor course I attended were also ALERRT instructors.
This course content is general enough that it has value to anyone interested in active shooter response, and as a state-certified, state-developed course, the training it provides will be more legally defensible in court than other un-certified courses offered by private sector schools.
DPS guidelines require the course to be 15-20 hours long. It includes classroom lecture, video from actual incidents, roleplaying scenarios and range work. In order to pass the course, students in it must pass the Texas License To Carry shooting test with score of 90% (225 points) or higher, the morning of the first day class.
We were told at the instructor course that we could add material to the course, as long as we did not extend the total class hours beyond the 20 hour maximum. Prior to delivering the first KR Training version of this class, Paul, Tina and I prepared some supplemental material, to be used if time was available. Some of that additional content included discussion of medical preparedness, hands-on training in tourniquet use, and audio from actual 911 calls.
I added two additional live fire qualification courses: the shooting test from the NRA Defensive Pistol class, and the annual qualification course of fire used by a major Texas city’s police department. My decision to add these optional qualifications was to provide graduates of the course additional documentation that they meet a national standard higher than the Texas License to Carry class (the NRA test), and a standard equivalent to what a typical responding police officer in our state has met. The video shows a portion of that qualification course. The photo is of the NRA D-1 target used for the Defensive Pistol Test.
We also used photo-realistic targets from the Action Target scenario collection for some range drills. Use of photo targets was allowed under DPS guidelines.
We ended up using all of the supplemental material, completing the coursework within the 15-20 hour limits, because the students in our pilot/beta session of the course were eager to learn, and performed very well on the shooting drills.
Because the shooters in that session were performing well, I added a “walkback” drill where students shot an 18″x24″ rectangle steel plate, moving back a few yards each time, to assess the maximum range at which each student could hit that plate with their carry handgun. At each distance, the student got one opportunity to hit the plate. Only those that hit the plate could move backward to the next distance and attempt from there. All students were able to hit the steel from 50 yards, and 3 were still hitting it when we ended the drill at the 85 yard line, including one student shooting a factory stock M&P Shield subcompact. That same group of shooters fired an average score of 89% on the major metro PD qualification, with all students passing the course well passed the minimum 70% score the department requires.
Student AARs
Several students in class sent me their own AARs, to include in this writeup.
(Student #1) With the current Texas laws and as a teacher for higher education; I was in search for a course that could allow me to learn new skills including a deeper understanding into this subject matter. Before registering for this course, I had spoken to Karl via phone and also by email that also included various other aspects of the handgun world. There’s certainly an appreciation for an instructor who takes time out of his busy schedule to talk to you not only about the upcoming class but also other avenues for additional training and knowledge. Also his attentiveness to details is very welcomed. An example is when he sent an email about a week before class that includes the class time, range location with directions and maps, what to bring, class agenda, and even additional links to help you prepare for the class such as draw and reloading techniques. I found this very refreshing as I’ve been accustomed to a specific training methods prior to this class. One has to remember that as student, I am here to learn to what can make me better then must have an open mind to concepts that you are not comfortable with.
To disclose, I am educator but also a health care provider. There is a relation to new developments in the medical field from procedures, diagnostics, drugs, or discoveries which also hold true to the gun culture. Karl does an excellent job of not only instructing you but also explaining the reasons of their importance. Additional credits goes to out to Paul Martin and Tina. Both brought their knowledge, personal experiences, and perspectives. While the course was developed by Texas DPS, these three brought additional elements that reinforces the learning objectives of the course. It’s not only about instructing a technique but more importantly to actually teach someone to acquire the knowledge, access our progress, identify our strengths / weaknesses to make necessary modifications for improvement, and broadening our mindset the multiple facets of this arena.
Some eye openers of the class include topic matters of the various characteristics of the active shooter which can be or not even typical as highlighted in today’s media. Another is the human response of both physiological and psychological including various methods to handle stress from a gun fight. Also covered are the importance of your medical kit, medical treatment to oneself and others around you, other everyday items that could be used for self-defense, physical health & how it effects your ability, logistics of your facility, safety plan to include regular and reverse evacuation for individuals and groups, various types of hardware to deny entry, types of defensive ammunition, importance of practice both live and dry-fire, simulations, and the 911 call during and after math. Let’s not forget the live fire portion that includes drills and proficiency exams from various departments. Taking notes does help to review the vast amount of information during this 2 day class.
When reading the description of this course, one can easily conclude that it is aimed to “teach employees of a school or district or open-enrollment charter school…” and is “…applicable to anyone defending any facility (church, office, school, or home) against an active shooter threat”; I would also stress any part of the course content is applicable in all aspects to one’s daily activities. Folks, if you haven’t taken this class or sought out classes from KR training; it would serve in your best interest and especially your love ones as there’s a multitude of classes to choose from. Much appreciation to Karl, Paul, and Tina for teaching this class.
(Student #2) The material as presented (with bonus material) covered the topic quite well. The videos provided a nice accompaniment to the lessons. One bonus video demonstrated movement and room clearing in a easy to follow format. It worked well as a primer before Paul and Tina’s roleplaying exercises. The additional medical videos related to risk of death from rapid blood loss were very informative. Watching the multiple active shooter videos from different sources provided more depth than a single source could convey. The in-class portion was engaging, thought provoking and informative.
The range portion was both fun and revealing. The extra qualification shoots were great for revealing areas that need work. The walk back drill was good for me personally. After hitting the steel at 85 yards I know my hits at 50 should be better. It was an eye opener. The red gun scenario of shooter in the mall worked well for demonstrating the difficulties of finding a clear shot in a crowd. Honestly had you not told me it was a Beta class I would not have known. Everything flowed well, the curriculum was well presented and cohesive.
SUMMARY
We’ll be offering this course again. More than half of the material is classroom and “red gun” only, not requiring a range and can be presented in any meeting room. Our plan moving forward is to offer the classroom-only portion as a traveling course that could be taught for churches, businesses or other groups, with a range day completion class offered at the A-Zone for those that want the complete course (and associated state certificate). That will make the lecture portion of the material more accessible to a wider audience, including those that may not have carry permits (yet) and may not be able to pass the more rigorous shooting requirements of the course (yet). The traveling lecture only part of the training will be available on weekday evenings, as weekends are generally reserved for live fire classes held at the A-Zone.
Contact me for additional information if you are interested in attending a future session of the full 2 day course or want a 1 or 2 weekday evening lecture version of the classroom material.
KR Training assistant instructor Kelli Kochan presented this material at our 2017 Preparedness Conference. With our new Preparedness Level 1 and Level 2 classes coming up January 6-7, 2018, this information might be useful to those thinking about attending, or wanting to motivate a spouse to join them.
Strategies for Getting the Reluctant Spouse Into Prepping
Part 4: When You Meet Resistance
Sooner or later, you’re going to cover all of the common ground, and all of the ground where your spouse can be persuaded to see your viewpoint. Your goals are going to start pushing up against her boundary lines, and you’re going to get resistance.
Lesson 6. Don’t try to counter an emotional argument with a rational one.
Just don’t. If it has any effect at all, it will be to increase the emotional level and make her dig in and throw up fortifications around her feelings/beliefs. If you don’t believe me, just try to talk politics or religion with someone on the other side.
When John talked me into joining the local Volunteer Fire Department, he thought I might have some difficulty getting accustomed to the face mask and air pack, so he brought one home so I could experience it for the first time not in front of the whole department. Good thinking, as it turned out. The first time I put the face mask on, I immediately had a panic attack. I stood in the living room, hyperventilating, while saying over and over, “I can’t breathe”. John could have explained to me, calmly and rationally, that in fact I was perfectly able to breathe, and he could have gone on trying to convince me of that right up until I passed out from too much air. Wisely, he chose instead to help me unfasten the mask and remove it, because I was far too emotional to be receptive to rational explanations. Once the mask was off and I calmed down, we could talk about my reaction and I could accept John pointing out that I was breathing the whole time I was in the mask, which really helped when I put it back on again.
Be aware that emotion is going to underlie at least some part of everyone’s motivations and boundary lines. The extent depends on the person and the particular boundary line. Sometimes you just have to let a situation cool down and talk again when your spouse isn’t so emotional. Sometimes, her whole perspective about a particular topic is built on emotion; in that case, you’ll find a counter-emotional argument to have any chance of persuading her toward your viewpoint.
Lesson 7. Work around/over/under/through.
When you can’t move straight from point A to point B, you need to look for alternative ways. If you understand your spouse’s reasons for reluctance, can you find a way to ameliorate them? If her motivation is fear, is there something you can do to help them build confidence or find ways to ease her fears? If the problem is lack of resources, can you build up some extra resources? Note that I’m not talking about just financial or material resources. John and I are increasingly finding that our time and effort influence our plans more than money and the stuff we can buy with it. Can you find ways to make change easier or more rewarding for her?
Can you accomplish the same goal with a different motivation? I didn’t get into gardening or canning for the food production and storage. I got into those things because I enjoy sharing the hobby with my mother; the prepping benefit just makes it more rewarding. Remember the camping vs. no-utility weekend that I mentioned above? That also works if your spouse thinks you’re nuts because tell her you want to have a no-utility weekend. Instead, maybe you can just take her camping – not backyard camping, but actual camping, at a campground, somewhere different that she doesn’t see every day. Present it as being about having an adventure together instead of prepping.
Or take for example the lady Paul mentioned, who did not want to hear any talk that the economy might crash. If you’re partnered with someone like her, you don’t have to tell her that your intent is to prepare for financial collapse. Maybe you’re just interested in funding a better lifestyle in retirement. Maybe you’ve decided that you want to collect coins for a hobby and the various Mints are making some really neat coins in gold and silver and other metals. I’ve seen some nice designs; being a horsewoman I particularly appreciated one I saw commemorating the Chinese Year of the Horse. The Perth Mint in Australia offers a platinum platypus that makes me giggle every time I see it. I know someone who has been collecting the old silver dollars, trying to get a certain number for each year they were minted. It’s not the most efficient or cost-effective method of investing in precious metals, but if it’s a route that works, it’s a route you can use.
I’m stealing one of John’s suggestions here: If all else fails, invoke the Zombie Apocalypse! Seriously, pick eventuality that you want to prepare for – you can cover it by preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse. Forest fire, flood, hurricane, crop failure, job loss, economic collapse, death… all plausible effects of being overrun by zombies. As long as you make a game out of it – and don’t convince your spouse that you’ve gone bonkers and actually expect a zombie outbreak – you can make preparations without talking about topics that are uncomfortable to your spouse.
Lesson 8. Sometimes, what you want isn’t going to happen.
Sometimes, no matter how well you understand and communicate with your spouse, and no matter how much you try to work around, she has drawn a line that is not going to move. Sometimes, the reason for reluctance is so strong that there is no easing it. Learn to recognize the lines that don’t move, because you only have 2 options there. I strongly suggest option 1: Accept those lines as the way things are and quit pushing on them. Option 2 is to keep pushing or just do what you want anyway, and that’s going to create more resistance and damage your relationship, maybe irreparably.
Well, there you have it: what I’ve learned about working together with your spouse, as applied to easing her reluctance toward a preparedness lifestyle. As John Daub pointed out to me, these lessons can also be applied to other relatives, friends, co-workers, etc. Questions and comments are welcome.
KR Training assistant instructor Kelli Kochan presented this material at our 2017 Preparedness Conference. With our new Preparedness Level 1 and Level 2 classes coming up January 6-7, 2018, this information might be useful to those thinking about attending, or wanting to motivate a spouse to join them.
Strategies for Getting the Reluctant Spouse Into Prepping
Part 3: Cooperation and Making Changes
Continuing from the last post, now that you understand (at least somewhat) your spouse’s motivations and you have identified the lines you absolutely can’t cross, how do you go about moving those other boundary lines?
Lesson 3. Start on common ground.
You’re not looking to pick a fight. You’re in a partnership and the idea is to work together, so you want to start out on the same side. When it comes to preparedness, figure out what preparations you both agree are acceptable. What actions are you both prepared to take in support of those preparations? Do some team building! Encourage a spirit of cooperation! Synergize a new paradigm in your relationship! Oh, wait – wrong speech. Where was I? Oh, yes – at least communicate, identify the steps you can agree on, and start there. Even if it’s something small. Your eventual goal may be a pantry fully stocked to last the family for six months, but if she is agreeable to buying a little extra food on each shopping trip, that’s a start.
Sometimes you can agree on a particular goal, but the common ground you need to find is a way to implement it that works for both of you. When John and I were first married, we lived at the end of the road and the end of the electric line, so if anything caused an interruption anywhere on the line (which happened pretty regularly), we lost power for however long it took the power company to effect repairs. We agreed that we needed a portable generator, and that there needed to be a way to plug it into the house. So we bought the generator and John wired a plug to connect it to the house. The problem was that he was also traveling – a lot – for his work, and I needed to be able to run the generator. He walked me through the process, but I know me, and I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t remember it, especially under stress. I do much of my day job – lab work – with SOPs (standard operating procedures), so I asked him to write up an SOP for me. He did – about half a page – and I walked through the procedure with what he wrote, and then asked for a bunch of clarification and details. He added that, and I walked through it again, and we repeated the process until I had a “book of the generator”, a dozen or so printed pages with pictures at each step with labels and arrows and such, as well as text; a procedure that was clear to me.
Even though we both agreed that the generator was a necessary item, to be effective it had to be accessible to both of us. If I hadn’t asked for the SOP, he might have been satisfied with just showing me once and expecting that I got it. Or, if he had recognized that I wasn’t likely to remember, he might have insisted that I practice consistently – which would probably have led to friction between us and possibly mistakes on my part from his not being around much to coach me. In either case, my outcomes in the event of needing to use the generator might have ranged from “Yay, I did it!” to “Argh, useless hunk of metal that I can’t make work!” to “Oh, crap – fire!” If he hadn’t been willing to spend the time and effort to make the SOP… same possible outcomes. As it happened, I used the “book of the generator” on more than one occasion, successfully, which made life easier for both of us.
Lesson 4. Progress in increments.
Remember, change is uncomfortable. It can be scary. A lot of it at once can be overwhelming. If your spouse is a little reluctant to begin with, and you’re jumping in with both feet, it’s understandable if she reacts negatively. Even if she is on board with some prepping, too much too fast can turn that around.
With other lifestyle changes like weight loss and exercise, the people who are successful at it usually don’t change everything at once. They make one change that they can stick with, and then stick with that until it becomes routine, then either ramp it up or make a new change. The same is true with prepping, and it applies to you as well as your spouse, especially if you’re coming from a non-preparedness background. So when you’re making goals together, pick 1 thing to do or change, and then allow time for that thing to become normal. Or even make 2 or 3 small changes at once, if you’re both amenable, but then let those become the new normal before making the next set of changes.
I went from 24 square feet of garden space to 1200 square feet, and from 2 crops to over a dozen – over the course of 4 years. Then I started canning, 4 pints of beans at a time. As I got comfortable with each addition, I added something more, until I found my limit. What we have now is as much as I can handle, and I wouldn’t even be doing this much without John’s help, but I’m enjoying it. However, if I had started with the big garden, I probably would have given it up the first year as being too much to learn and accomplish all at once, too much work and not enough fun. If we had started with this much garden, I don’t know if John would have gotten on board at all, or we would have ended up arguing about what to plant and how to maintain it, since neither of us knew what we were doing when we started.
If there’s something in your preparedness plan that can’t be done in increments – like a major renovation to your house – don’t make that your first change. Take your time and make sure that you’re both fully on board and that what you’re getting is what you both want.
Lesson 5. Make it fun.
If work isn’t rewarding, it’s drudgery. Preparedness is work, and sometimes so are the ways of getting past reluctance. Find a way to make it fun instead.
Spending a whole weekend without utilities for practice or to test your level of preparedness might draw groans and protests from your less-enthusiastic spouse/family. So call it “backyard camping” instead. Include games, ghost stories around the fire, s’mores, all the campy camping stuff. Or if you can’t make the process itself more fun, then have a reward at the end for going along with it. Treat the family to a nice dinner and a fun movie, or give your spouse a night at a swanky hotel with all the amenities.
If I want to take another shooting class – and I do – I’m going to have to get past my fear of failure/fumbling/doing something stupid. I’m going to have to raise my confidence. Pushing hard to train is not going to accomplish that, so I’m not training. When I go out to shoot now, I’m doing it without any goal other than having fun, enough fun that I want to keep doing it. John knows better than to push me, too. He won’t mention that I haven’t been to the range lately, or suggest I should go. Occasionally, he invites me to go with him when he goes, but when we go together he also focuses on having fun.
He hasn’t found a way to make HAM radio fun for me yet, but he’s a clever man and he’ll come up with something eventually. As it is, he sneaks in small teaching moments by having the radio on while we’re driving. He knows I’ll get curious about something he does or says while talking to a contact, and when I ask about it, he gets a chance to explain it.
KR Training assistant instructor Kelli Kochan presented this material at our 2017 Preparedness Conference. With our new Preparedness Level 1 and Level 2 classes coming up January 6-7, 2018, this information might be useful to those thinking about attending, or wanting to motivate a spouse to join them.
Strategies for Getting the Reluctant Spouse Into Prepping
Part 2: Communication and Miscommunication
In this I’m going to talk about understanding your spouse’s reluctance and your goals to reduce that reluctance. To be clear, I’m not a psychologist or a marriage counselor, and I don’t play one on TV. On the other hand, John and I have been together for over 18 years and married for almost 17, and you don’t miscommunicate with someone for that long without learning a few things. These are some of the things I’ve learned, and I’ll illustrate with examples from our life.
Lesson 1. Listen.
The experts will tell you that the foundation of communicating is to actively listen to the other person, to really hear what she is saying. On the face, that sounds like a straightforward task, though it takes a bit of work. It’s not always that simple, though. Sometimes you think you’re listening, but what you hear is not what she said. Once when John and I were dating, in the midst of a conversation – what it was really about, I don’t even remember – but in the middle of it, he said, “I’m looking for a woman who is strong enough to take care of herself when she needs to, weak enough to let me take care of her when I need to, and smart enough to tell the difference.” I replied, “That’s great, because I’m looking for a man who is weak enough to let me take care of myself when I need to, strong enough to take care of me when I need him to, and smart enough to tell the difference.” And we were both happy with that and went on with our conversation, and lived happily ever after. Well, except that we’ve been fighting negotiating aggressively ever since about where that line really lies, about which of us takes care of me at what time, because even though we both said the same words, we meant two completely different things and we each interpreted the other’s comment in light of our own positions.
In fact, we’ve butted heads or talked past each other about a lot of things over the years, and even though we’ve come to understand each other much better in that time, we still miscommunicate and misunderstand each other, because our life experiences and perspectives are so different. Early in January, we had a cold snap. We carpool to work, and on the drive home the evening before, as the weather was closing in, John was acting worried. I asked him about it and he said, “Houses around here aren’t built to withstand extreme low temperatures for long periods of time.” John grew up down here. I grew up in Montana. To me, “extreme low temperatures” are well into negative numbers, and “long periods” of such last several days to weeks. The predicted freeze was supposed to be one night, down to about 26-27°F, and John was talking in general terms – “houses around here” – so I really didn’t see what he was worried about. I found out the next morning, when our water pipes were frozen inside the wall of the house, thanks to the thin layer of insulation between the outside wall and the pipe.
So the first thing is to listen, actively. And then stop and ask yourself, What is your spouse really saying? Their words may make perfect sense to you in your own head, but do you know that what you heard was the intended meaning? Encourage her to explain what motivates her reluctance, and work to understand that. Often, it’s not a matter of all or nothing, but of degrees. Putting up an extra shelf for food storage may be fine, but throwing away the knick-knacks or spending the retirement account to fill every nook of the house with food may be not so fine. Extra food and medical supplies, emergency cash and a portable generator may be OK, while an underground bunker is not. One of Paul’s examples was a lady who had no problem with preparing for natural disasters, but did not want to hear any talk about the possibility of economic collapse. Find out what and where your spouse’s boundary lines are.
Lesson 2. Examine your own motivations.
Your spouse is only half of the communication equation. Ask yourself: What are you really trying to accomplish, and why? What are your reasons for prepping? That is, what events are you preparing for? What are your reasons for wanting her to be involved? And to what degree? Do you just want her to accept your prepping activities without grousing about it, or do you want her to whole-heartedly jump with both feet into the bunker with you? When you know what you really want, ask yourself what you’re willing to accept.
While you’re at it, consider this. Just as you’re asking her to do something she’s not really willing to do, there may be things that she would like you to do that you are reluctant about. Not necessarily prepping-type things, but something. What are your reasons to be reluctant? Where are your boundary lines? Are you willing to overcome that reluctance or at least give some ground, as you’re asking her to do?
Once you understand (at least somewhat) where your spouse is coming from, and where you are coming from, you can start finding ways to work toward your goals and move some of those boundary lines.
KR Training assistant instructor Kelli Kochan presented this material at our 2017 Preparedness Conference. With our new Preparedness Level 1 and Level 2 classes coming up January 6-7, 2018, this information might be useful to those thinking about attending, or wanting to motivate a spouse to join them.
Strategies for Getting the Reluctant Spouse Into Prepping
Part 1: Introduction to Reluctance
What follows in these four posts is the gist of the presentation that I gave at Paul Martin’s Preparedness Conference back in January. Why the long delay? Well, Karl and Paul asked me to write this up as soon as the conference ended. I said, “Sure, but I have this deadline at work and I’m not doing anything else until I get that done.” Then I let that one thing lead to another. You know how that goes – there’s always another thing – so, no excuses, I kind of blew it. But, I finally got it finished, and I hope you’ll still find it useful.
The idea for this presentation started at Paul’s Preparedness Conference a couple years ago. We were chatting as we were packed up afterward and he mentioned that in the feedback comments someone had asked about a talk on getting spouses interested in prepping. I thought I might have some ideas about that, and I bounced a few of them off John on the drive home, but at the time, the Conference was formatted around one-hour talks, and I didn’t think I had enough ideas for that, so I let it go. The topic came up again last year, so I spent some more time thinking about it, and with the option for a 30-minute talk, I told Paul I was in.
A note on pronouns: I’m going to use she/her throughout as a pronoun for “your spouse”. Please don’t take this the wrong way, I don’t mean to imply that it’s only women who are reluctant or don’t want to be preppers, nor to offend anyone who prefers different pronouns. It’s just that I’m a “she” and I’m speaking from my own point of view, and it’s less cumbersome to stick with one. Please read she/her to be any pronoun that fits your personal circumstances.
When I saw Paul’s blurb about my talk, that I was going to speak about my journey from reluctant spouse to prepper, my first thought was, Who said I was reluctant? I’ve been right alongside John this whole time! I’m glad he wrote it that way, though, because it changed the way I was thinking about both myself and my approach to the topic. Yes, I’m an enthusiastic prepper – about some things. Less so about others. And that is true of all of us – we’re all reluctant about some things, even as we are enthusiastic about others.
John is a tinkerer with electronics, and has been for years. As part of that, he’s been a HAM radio enthusiast, and since we’ve started prepping, he’s gotten much more involved in it, both as hobby and as part of our emergency preparedness. He would love for me to get my technician’s license, and occasionally reminds me that it would be good if I were at least legally allowed to use the radio for communication in an emergency. I have zero interest in HAM as a hobby, and although I know on a rational level that it would be good for me to have the license, I am reluctant to put in the effort for something that doesn’t interest me.
I have a garden. I didn’t get into it for prepping. Mom had a garden when I was growing up, and now that I have space for one, it gives us something to talk about and brings us closer together. Over the years, the garden has grown and last year, I started canning some of the produce. John is mildly interested and likes a few of the veggies, so he started helping out. Last fall we attended a canning seminar given by a woman who is an extreme food saver. She has an entire room in her house, where most people would have an office or game room or library, full of shelves that are full of food. She stores food under beds, in closets, on top of cabinets. She said of knick-knack shelves, “You don’t need knick-knacks; you can store food there!” You can bet that if I ever suggested that John get rid of his historic railroad lantern collection so that we could store food on those shelves, he would develop a sudden and strong reluctance to food storage!
We’re all reluctant about something, at some point.
So, how do you get a reluctant spouse interested in prepping? By understanding, as I came to do, that it’s not about the prepping. It’s about the motivation underlying the reluctance. It’s about real communication with the other person to find and understand that motivation. It’s about learning to work with that.
Reluctance is just unwillingness to do something, and it can range in intensity from something like, “Meh; don’t wanna,” to “Oh, hell, no! Not gonna, and you can’t make me!” It presents as anything from procrastination and other avoidance behaviors to outright refusal, depending on the situation. Sometimes we’re reluctant to do something but eventually acquiesce because the consequences of not doing it outweigh our reluctance (e.g., we get tired of being nagged, or we don’t want to lose a bonus, or our health gets to the point that we must see the doctor or end up in hospital anyway), and sometimes we manage to avoid the thing until it goes away or we do.
Why are we reluctant?
We are avoiding fear.
It can be fear of a happening or event, or just fear of failure. We avoid walking on dark streets at night because we fear getting mugged. We don’t go to the dentist because of the noise of the drill, and the discomfort of holding our mouth open for ages. We don’t try out for the band or apply for the awesome job because we are afraid we will blow the interview and everyone will know we’re not good enough. And when it comes to prepping, we don’t make a will because we are afraid of death and don’t want to have to think about it.
I am a decent shooter. I used to shoot competitively, and I can brag (modestly, of course) that I have taken a revolver that I hadn’t touched in 2 years and shot a perfect score on the CHL test. Even so, when I haven’t been practicing routinely, you couldn’t pay me enough to make me attend a shooting class, because I avoid the fear of slipping up and doing something dumb in front of my friends or the instructor – who is also my friend and who I don’t want to think less of me.
We are avoiding change.
Change is uncomfortable and can be scary even when the change itself is positive and beneficial. We don’t put in for that promotion because it would change the dynamic between us and our coworkers, or it would mean moving to a new and unfamiliar city where we don’t know anyone. For anyone who didn’t grow up in a culture of preparedness, getting into prepping requires two changes that can be monumental: first a change of mindset and then a change of lifestyle.
We lack resources.
We’re reluctant to go back to school and get that degree we’ve always wanted, that would help us get that promotion, because our job takes most of our time and energy, and if we quit the job, we won’t be able to afford it. We’re reluctant to start saving seriously for retirement because we have a mortgage and a car payment and we don’t want to have to eat beans & weenies or Ramen noodles every day. We’re reluctant to start prepping because we’ve seen what all the cool preppers are getting and we don’t have the money to buy all that stuff.
We lack interest.
This is the root of my reluctance with the HAM radio. I have no interest whatsoever, not even in learning it purely for the knowledge. Without interest, the learning would give me no immediate reward. This also ties into resources – our time and energy are finite. The time and energy that I would have to spend to learn the subject and study for the license exam, and then to continue to practice so that I could actually be effective if I needed to communicate on the radio, is time and energy that I instead choose to spend on things that interest me and are more immediately rewarding for me.
In the rest of this series, I’ll present eight lessons that I have learned that might be useful for reducing your spouse’s reluctance toward prepping.
If you aren’t already a subscriber to receive this newsletter each month, you can subscribe here or follow this blog. You can also follow KR Training on Facebook or Twitter for more frequent posts and information.
KR TRAINING BLOG AND FACEBOOK PAGE
In recent classes I’ve mentioned posts I’ve made to the KR Training blog or on the KR Training Facebook page, only to learn that very few in class were aware they existed and had not been following them.
I post something to the KR Training blog every week, usually articles too long to include in the newsletter. I post something to the KR Training Facebook page (and associated Twitter feed) almost every day, usually links to articles I found interesting. The Blog-O-Rama section of the newsletter curates the most interesting of the content from the blog and Facebook page, but if you want to see that information when it’s freshest, subscribe to the blog (there’s a subscribe button on the right hand side) or follow us on Facebook.
UPCOMING MEDIA
John Daub and I were each interviewed for upcoming episodes of Ballistic Radio, to air in early 2018.
On January 7-8 we are replacing our annual Preparedness Conference with a two-day event at the A-Zone, offering a mix of classroom and range training. It’s broken up into 1/2 day blocks so you can register for whatever part of it interests you.
Just want to shoot? Come for the morning sessions each day. Three hours of drills for pistol and long gun. Just want to be inside learning? There are four different half-day sessions available. Attend any single session for $90, any two sessions for $150, all 4 for $260.
The MAG-20 range class is a two day, 500 round defensive handgun course suitable for anyone at the Basic Pistol 2 level or higher. Draw from concealment, two-handed stances, shooting from cover, one-handed stances with either hand, speed reloading, and more are taught with an overall emphasis on fast, accurate shot placement.
We will be hosting Massad Ayoob in March 2018 for his MAG-80 course. That 40 hour course includes handgun, long gun and weapon retention training. To be eligible to attend the MAG-80, students must have completed both the MAG-20 classroom and MAG-20 range class. We’ve hosted both parts (combined they are known as MAG-40.) Anyone interested in attending MAG-80 in March that only attended the MAG-20 classroom needs to complete the MAG-20 range to meet pre-requisites.
KR Training is hosting the only session of the Massad Ayoob Group Deadly Force Instructor class scheduled for 2018, on Jan 30-Feb 4. This 5 day course covers the legal aspects of Deadly Force at a level far beyond what is taught in the DPS License To Carry instructor course, and is highly recommended for any LTC instructor. Armed Citizen Legal Defense Network members and graduates of MAG-40 are eligible for discounts on class tuition. If you plan to attend, please get registered ASAP.
As many of you know, another thing I do is perform music with bands. I just finished up 21 shows at Santa’s Wonderland, a multi-million dollar trail of lights, with shops, food, live music, and many other activities. Here’s are some video samples of our holiday cheer.
The Legacy of Ranching exhibit at the Bush (41) Library, curated by my wife Penny, is still open until January 7th. I assisted with video production and contributed some pulp magazines from my personal collection to a display about Texas ranches in pop culture.
Both the ranching exhibit and Santa’s Wonderland will be open until January 7th. Santa’s is open every day, the Bush Library open every day except Christmas and New Year’s Day.
We look forward to training you!
Karl, Penny and the KR Training team
I classify the difficulty level of drills by comparing the speed and accuracy requirements to what is required to shoot a 100% score on courses of fire used by the US Practical Shooting Association for national classification. To be a Grand Master, you have to shoot scores that are 95% or higher. The 100% level isn’t the absolute maximum skill level a shooter can attain (those at the national and world champion level are capable of shooting 110% or more of the USPSA 100% level), but because there are so many classifier stages with known 100% levels, it’s possible to come up with baseline values for draw time, reload time, split time, target transition times, etc. that can be used to evaluate almost any drill.
For those interested in how to analyze drills for difficulty on this scale, I’ll address that in upcoming blog posts as a separate topic.
Minimum Acceptable (25% of Grand Master)
The first three drills emphasize basic marksmanship and shooting at a moderate pace.
Most state carry permit qualification courses of fire and beginner shooting program drills fit into this category, and all these drills require skill no better than 25% of GM to shoot perfect scores.
1) NRA Basic Pistol Qualification
The 2017 version of the NRA Basic Pistol courses uses 4″ circles. Shooters must put 5 shots into a 4″ circle, at a minimum of 10 feet. Those able to pass the minimum level can repeat the drill at 15 feet (5 yards) and 20 feet (almost 7 yards). NRA Pistol instructors are required to be able to put 16 of 20 shots into a 6″ circle at 15 yards. These drills have no time limit.
2) Texas License To Carry Test
The Texas LTC (formerly known as the Concealed Handgun License) shooting test has been in use since 1995, with well over 1 million shooters meeting this standard. It uses the B-27 target, counting the traditional 8, 9, 10 and X rings all as 5 points, with the 7 ring scored as 4 and anywhere inside the humanoid shape and outside the 7 ring counted as 3 points.
This adds the skills of bringing the gun from a ready position to the target quickly, and firing the required shots within a time limit, to the basic marksmanship tested by the NRA Basic Pistol qualification.
The test is:
3 yards, 20 rounds
1 shot, 2 seconds, 5 times
2 shots, 3 seconds, 5 times
5 shots, 10 seconds, 1 time
7 yards, 20 rounds
5 shots, 10 seconds, 1 time
2 shots, 4 seconds, 1 time
3 shots, 6 seconds, 1 time
1 shot, 3 seconds, 5 times
5 shots, 15 seconds, 1 time
15 yards, 10 rounds
2 shots, 6 seconds, 1 time
3 shots, 9 seconds, 1 time
5 shots, 15 seconds, 1 time
To give you a sense of scale, a perfect score (250 points) on the Texas License To Carry shooting test equates to roughly 25% of the USPSA Grand Master level). That means a Grand Master, starting from a ready position, could shoot a 5 point (center mass) shot in 0.5 seconds, instead of the 2 seconds allowed on the test.
This drill is more challenging than the previous two. It requires shooting at a one shot per second pace, similar to the fastest parts of the Texas LTC test, but at a much smaller target. (Based on what I’ve seen teaching the Texas LTC class for more than 20 years, Texas LTC holders that shot less than 90% on the state test would have a difficult time passing the 5×5 drill.)
Reasonable Level (50% of Grand Master)
When I looked at the difficulty of many different law enforcement academy and police department qualification standards, most of them required being able to draw, reload and clear malfunctions, with speed and accuracy requirements in the 40-50% of GM level. We chose some widely used and well known drills and defined some par times roughly aligning with that difficulty level.
(4) Bill Drill – draw and fire 6, USPSA or IDPA target, 7 yards, 5 seconds (from concealment). All hits must be within the A-zone or 0-ring.
In the video, Bill gives a 3 second par time (from open carry) as a goal for a good shooter. In his book, Practical Shooting, Brian Enos uses a goal time of 2 seconds (from competition holster) as a Master class benchmark. We chose a par time of 5 seconds, assuming a 2 second draw from concealment, and 0.5 second split times between shots.
(5) F.A.S.T.
The Fundamentals, Accuracy and Speed Test (FAST) was created by late trainer Todd Green. It tests concealment draw, slide lock reload, and the ability to shoot at two different speeds – a slower speed to get two hits in the 3″x5″ box, and the faster speed necessary to get 4 hits in the 8″ circle. Typically the split times (shot to shot times) required in the 8″ circle are twice as fast as those required for the 3″x5″ box.
Todd considered runs under 5 seconds to be Master level. We chose 10 seconds, from concealment, as our goal time for those training to the 50% level.
(6) Three Seconds or Less
The drill we use most often in our Defensive Pistol classes is the Three Seconds or Less drill. It’s 9 strings, each 3 seconds long, requiring a variety of shooting skills on a USPSA or IDPA target at 3 and 7 yards.
In addition to the skills tested by the Bill Drill and F.A.S.T., it adds one handed shooting, turning draws, and shooting while moving, in a series of 1, 2 and 3 shot strings.
A score of 90% or higher, working from concealment, requires roughly 50% of Grand Master skill.
(Those seeking to make the test more difficult can decrease the per-string par time down to 2.5 seconds, and change the start position for every string to “hands at sides”.)
(7) Farnam Drill/3M Test = draw, reload, malfunction, 15 seconds
John’s written extensively about the Farnam Drill/3M Test in the past. It was originally developed by John Farnam for use as a qualification drill in his classes. It requires drawing & moving, reloading and moving, clearing malfunction and moving, all in one long drill. The linked article contains the full instructions, including the evolution of the drill to the current version used by Tom Givens of Rangemaster.
We recommend a par time of 15 seconds (midway between Farnam’s beginner student par of 18 and slower than his instructor par of 12 seconds) as the 50% skill level goal.
More Challenging (70%+ GM, or IDPA Master)
These three drills are well known, widely used and very popular with high skill level shooters. My review of qualifications for national level instructor programs that use scored shooting tests for instructor certification (Rangemaster, Massad Ayoob Group, Paul Howe, FBI, many law enforcement programs) indicates that skill at the 70% GM (roughly IDPA Master level) is a common threshold.
(8) “The Test”
This test is shot using an NRA B-8 bullseye target. 10 yards, 10 seconds, 10 rounds. 90 points or better to pass. Made famous by Larry Vickers but often attributed to Ken Hackathorn. There are many variations with more strings at different distances, working from the holster instead of ready, for those that want more challenge from this type of drill.
Dot Torture was developed by David Blinder. Like the NRA Basic Pistol test at the top of this test, it has no time limit and is purely a test of marksmanship. It uses small dots and requires two handed, and one handed shooting, reloads, drawing, and other skills.
BONUS
Two bonus drills we discussed in the podcast.
Walkback
The Walkback drill was documented on Todd Green’s Pistol Forum site. I’ve seen variations of it used in several classes I’ve taken. The common theme is to work at maintaining constant accuracy (keeping 5 shots in a 3×5 card, for example), as you move backward. Some variations include a time limit – 3 shots in 3 seconds, working backward 1 yard at a time until you cannot keep all 3 shots on the card.
Rangemaster Core Skills test
The Rangemaster Core Skills test is similar to the FBI qualification course of fire. Multiple strings, multiple distances, many skills. It can be used as the basis for practice sessions, or to verify skills are maintained at an acceptable level.
SUMMARY
Any shooter, at any level, can use these drills as a guide to measure, maintain or improve skills.
Over the past year I’ve been developing a new course for KR Training, Historical Handgun, that teaches the history & evolution of defensive handgun skills. Part of that effort has been seeking out and reading old books on shooting, purchasing copies signed by the authors when possible.
“…officer down, code three” was recommended to me by John Farnam during a pistol class I took with him in December 2017. John referenced this book as the first significant book on police tactics. The book Street Survival was published in 1980 and was more widely used and better known than Brooks’ book. Brooks was the detective in the famous “Onion Field” incident, which was documented in a book, and dramatized in a 1979 movie.
The book is mainly a series of case studies, with the actual names of the officers changed, describing ten deadly errors Brooks identifies as common mistakes cops make that get them killed. I’m going to go through the list and comment on them from the perspective of an armed citizen, since they are as relevant to personal defense of an armed citizen as they are to law enforcement officers.
1. Failure To Maintain Proficiency & Care of Weapon, Vehicle and Equipment
Firearms
I covered this topic in detail in one part of my Beyond the One Percent blog series. In part 4 of that series I discuss the Dunning Kruger effect, where people with limited ability perceive their skills as better than they are, and how that causes the typical armed citizen to (1) mistake meeting state minimums as “enough training”, (2) be unable to define realistic standards of skill appropriate for personal defense and (3) fail to schedule and structure their own practice sessions to re-evaluate their skills and maintain them to a practically useful level.
The correct approach every armed citizen should take is:
1) Take the state mandated training and get a carry permit.
2) Identify (or research) the set of skills and standards that a majority of private sector schools, particularly top tier trainers, or major national programs, use as their standard for “acceptable skill to be reasonably well prepared for armed defense”. (Those standards, regardless of source, are always going to be higher and include more skills than any state minimum carry permit program.)
I and my team have written extensively on our thoughts on minimum proficiency levels and readers of this article are encouraged to dig into those articles as part of their research. Our Three Seconds or Less shooting test is a simple 20 round drill that many find useful as a baseline practice drill.
3) Confirm that you can meet well chosen standards using the gear you actually carry, including shooting the exact ammo you plan to carry. Not practice ammo. 20 rounds of the exact brand, caliber, bullet weight, and power level that you have chosen as your carry ammo.
4) Re-test yourself against those standards once a year, and do additional practice (dry or live fire) as needed, to keep your skills to a practical minimum level.
This is the same process law enforcement agencies apply to their officers, who have to qualify annually, at a minimum. Many departments now require officers to fire a minimum number of rounds in practice every month, because shooting skills are not a “one and done” thing. They require frequent repetition to maintain.
Vehicles
Keeping your vehicle in good working condition is also important. Regular maintenance, gas and fluid levels, tires, lights. You are higher risk of dying in a car accident than from criminal attack. Your vehicle, like your firearm, is life-safety equipment and should not be neglected. Distracted driving, particularly use of cell phones while behind the wheel, is particularly risky and should be avoided.
Other Equipment
Flashlights, tourniquets, knives or any other item carried daily should be periodically inspected. Batteries lose power, edges dull, belt clips, hinges and screws on folding knives and holsters can rust, loosen or even come off. Sweat, grime, dust, rain and day to day carry can cause wear. The time to be aware of those problems is not when you need the gear for its intended life-saving purpose.
2. Improper Search and Use of Handcuffs
In the book, Brooks recounts several incidents where those taken into custody, who were not properly handcuffed or searched, produced or obtained weapons and killed officers. In October 2017, a Texas Tech University campus police officer was killed in an incident just like the ones Brooks describes in the book.
In the unfortunate event that an armed citizen’s interaction with a police officer includes being handcuffed and searched, perhaps following their involvement in a justified shooting, it’s useful for the armed citizen to understand why the officer is doing something that the citizen may feel is not necessary or appropriate.
3. Sleepy or Asleep
The medical and law enforcement professions both suffer from an institutional attitude that overtime is expected, and personnel are frequently required to work long shifts or additional shifts. Despite significant research showing that fatigue can lead to the same level of poor decision making that chemical impairment can, there are still many people in both professions on the job making life or death decisions, sometimes with a body jacked up on legal stimulants (energy drinks, caffeine, nicotine) supporting a brain in desperate need of rest.
The same problem exists for armed citizens, without the qualified immunity those in uniform may be granted, should a questionable decision or action be made in a sleep-deprived state.
A criminal skilled at victim selection will likely notice sluggish behavior, inattention and other indications a person is tired.
4) Relaxing Too Soon
Earlier this year we had a student attacked while sitting in their vehicle, in their driveway. The individual was sitting in the vehicle, watching a video someone had sent to their phone, instead of waiting until they were in the house to view it. It’s very natural and normal to feel safe once you get back to your own property, particularly if there’s no one visible as you pull into a driveway. In this case while the student was distracted, this provided opportunity for an attacker to walk up the vehicle, open the door and attempt to pull the student out of the vehicle. The student fought back with unarmed skills and pepper spray and was successful in driving the attacker off.
5) Missing the Danger Signs
This video shows quick examples of many different pre-attack cues. The sooner you observe those behaviors, the more space and time you will have, which can avert the situation or provide you the advantage you need to win, should the situation escalate. There are many good videos on youTube on many channels pointing out these types of cues in footage of actual incidents.
6. Taking a Bad Position
Distance and cover are good. Standing in the open is bad. If your training and practice does not include shooting from cover, and learning to move to cover while shooting a threat, that’s something you should move to the top of your “to do” list. We teach those skills in our Defensive Pistol Skills 1, DPS-2 and DPS-3 courses, among others.
7. Failure to watch their hands
Hands hold weapons. Weapons are what harm you. Action is always going to beat reaction. If two shooters are equally skilled, the one that starts first is going to win, because even someone waiting on the ‘go’ signal typically takes 0.25 second to react to the stimulus and start acting. Reaction time increases when the stimulus is not expected. Draw time decreases when the person starts with a grip on their gun. So in the worst case scenario, if an attacker already has a grip on a gun in their pocket or waistband, and you don’t being to draw until you see the already out, that person may be a full second ahead of you, if the situation is a contest of nothing but draw speed.
In a potential attack situation, watching the hands decreases reaction time, because the decision to draw, pending observation of the ‘go’ signal, has already been made. The decision to fire should be separated from the decision to draw, to prevent shooting someone that moves their hands quickly but ends up grasping something that’s not a weapon. This happens more frequently to law enforcement officers than armed citizens, but still an issue to be concerned about.
8. Tombstone Courage
One of the most common problems we see in force-on-force scenarios is a desire by armed citizens to move forward to the threat, to pursue or to get closer when confronting a potential attacker, or trying to stop an attack in progress. This happens because of proxemics. Moving closer to be more intimidating is a natural response – but it’s not always good tactics. The best way to learn and practice use of good tactics is scenario based training against live opponents. The building blocks can be learned in live fire drills, but interaction with other people, in real time, as they react to you, cannot be simulated by any kind of live fire drill. Here’s a real world example of bravery and good intentions ending very badly for the armed citizen.
9. Preoccupation
Brooks defines this as “Worrying about personal problems while on duty”. Substitute “while in public” and it applies to armed citizens. The biggest modern preoccupation is obsession with the cell phone. Jeff Cooper called this Condition White. There are tasks that require full attention. When you have to perform those tasks, having additional layers of security: locks, doors, distance, other eyes/ears watching (human or canine) can be used to mitigate the risk of being lost in thought, unaware of your surroundings.
10. Apathy
“It’ll never happen to me” is not a self-defense plan. Whatever reason someone has for not carrying a gun, or not carrying pepper spray, or not getting training to be prepared to fend off an attack, I probably have a student incident counter example. If I don’t, other trainers do. Age, gender, neighborhood, physical appearance, race, time of day, gun-free facility, and any other factor you can think of. None of them are guaranteed to reduce your risk to zero.
Leaving your gun in the car is not “carrying”. Taking a class one time and never practicing the skills you learned in class is not “being trained”. Target shooting (standing still in one spot shooting with no plan and no time pressure) is not “practice” for defensive pistol use.
It’s almost New Year’s Eve, when people make resolutions to do better the next year. Mostly those resolutions are forgotten or abandoned within 30 days. But even if you do one dry fire session, or get in one real practice session, shoot one match, or take one class, while you are motivated, that’s better than no effort at all. The boost in skill you’ll get from even one focused session will stay with you longer than it will take to gain back the weight you’ll lose on that diet you’ll fall off of by spring.
My signed book
In many cases, particularly with older and out of print books, the signed copies that are available were originally signed to someone else, and often there’s a story that goes with the signed book.
Over the past year I’ve been developing a new course for KR Training, Historical Handgun, that teaches the history & evolution of defensive handgun skills. Part of that effort has been seeking out and reading old books on shooting, purchasing copies signed by the authors when possible.
In 1929, Major William D Frazer published this book. He was a member of the US Army and recipient of the 1922 Distinguished Marksman Badge. He participated in the 1924 Olympics in Paris in the pistol shooting competition, placing 11th overall. He is also related to current NRA national secretary John Frazer, who recommended this book to me.
From the author’s foreward:
The main objective in mind in writing American Pistol Shooting was to provide a means of instruction in all forms of pistol practice in America today. When the Author took up the sport more than 20 years ago he had to learn it much as he did swimming and skating as a small boy, without instructors or the aid of books of any kind, and this handicap was keenly felt at times. It resulted in slow progress and many discouraging hours because of the necessity for correcting bad habits formed by lack of proper coaching.
His book is one of many published in the late 20’s and 1930’s, each providing written instruction in pistol skills. I’ve reviewed many of them in previous blog posts.
Topics
Like the other books of this era, it covers all the standard topics, with more emphasis on competition shooting than other books I’ve reviewed:
Origins of pistol shooting & history
Types of pistol shooting (military, police, recreational, competition, defensive, hunting)
Pistol and holster selection
Pistol shooting fundamentals
Shooting Against Time
Aerial Practice & Exhibition Shooting
Defensive Shooting and Quick Drawing
Police Handgun Training
Shooting Psychology
Competition Shooting
Coaching and Teamwork
On Instructing Ladies
Game Shooting / Long Range shooting
Ammunition and Accessories
A Few “Don’ts”
Target Design
He provides detailed dimensions for the military “L” (slow fire), “E” (rapid fire) and “M” (mounted) targets, as shown below.
and specs for the Standard American Target (50 yard) and its smaller cousins, the International target and Standard American 20 yard target.
Back in the 1920’s and 1930’s, pre-printed targets were harder to obtain than they are today, and many readers of these books may have had to make their own targets, drawing circles to the correct dimensions.
Handgun Shooting Tips
After one has fired ten or more shots rapidly with the .45 caliber Service Automatic pistol or its contemporary .45 revolver, he may find that the repeated shock of the heavy recoil on his pistol hand has caused tremors in it, and this, exclusive of any nervousness due to mental agitation, makes steady holding more difficult and is conducive to flinching.
He would probably be amazed at the modern trend of 300-500 round per day intensive handgun skills courses. Then again, back in 1929 they were shooting mostly one-handed without hearing protection.
Foot position and shooting stance was an obsession with competition shooters of the bullseye era, with books devoting dozens of pages to photos showing the different form of top shooters. Maj. Frazer’s book provides a detailed engineering drawing of his concept of perfect foot position.
You will find that you have a natural tendency to press against the right side of the trigger and the pistol frame. Now move your finger to the right until no part of it rests against the frame; then any pressure you may exert will come on the face of the trigger. Squeeze with that part of the finger that rests on the trigger naturally and enables a squeeze straight back.
Advice on Rapid Firing
1. Every movement of pointing and aiming must be made in the quickest and most direct manner. (KR note: This universal concept still applies.)
2. In rapid aiming the shooter should first establish his line of sight by fixing his master eye on the aiming point of the target, and then bring the pistol sights into this line of sight. To attempt to align the sights first and then, by moving the pistol, to align the sights and the target is the wrong procedure. (KR note: in the modern area this problem occurs when shooters are trying to get a sight picture when the gun is in a ready position, rather than bringing the gun to the eye-target line as part of their presentation. The concept applies both to bullseye shooting and to defensive shooting.)
3. In all rapid firing care should be taken to release the trigger fully after each shot. (KR note: the idea of pinning and slowly releasing the trigger is widely taught, and I taught that technique for many years myself. I stopped teaching it because my observations agreed with many others, particularly top tier USPSA competitors, that found that students would often concentrate too much on pinning and slow release, but still jerk the trigger when actually firing the shot, and using pin-and-reset for anything other than slow fire group shooting severely limits the speed at which the pistol can be shot. Trying to hold the trigger back or not fully release it, for very high speed shooting, often causes ‘trigger freeze’. So his advice, while intended for bullseye shooters, is valid for all speeds of shooting.)
Aerial and Exhibition Shooting
Shooting pistol bullets at aerial targets was something that people seemed to think was perfectly OK as recently as 1960. The book devotes a chapter to shooting of aerial targets, with zero discussion about safe shooting direction or any concern as to where the fired bullets might land.
Exhibition shooting was more popular and common than it is today, and early exhibition shooters would engage in what Major Frazer calls “William Tell” stunts trying to hit objects held by, or placed on an assistant’s head. Frazer wisely advises against this, listing several cases where assistants were injured. His chapter on exhibition shooting provides guidance on a wide variety of trick shots involving mirrors, guns fired upside down, splitting bullets on axe blades, and more.
Exhibition shooting has made a comeback, thanks to youTube, with many creative shooters re-creating classic trick shots and coming up with their own variations.
Since it’s almost Christmas, this example of modern trick shooting seems appropriate…
Flinching
Frazer offers 4 essential tips to minimizing flinching:
Keep the nervous system in a normal healthy condition by sensible exercise and diet.
While firing, concentrate on aiming, holding, squeezing and calling the shots until the habits become mechanical.
Do not fire many shots at each practice period while learning the game or until the muscles and nerves become thoroughly accustomed to the noise and recoil. Too much shooting is conducive to carelessness and flinching.
Know your pistol, especially its cocking action and trigger pull and avoid treacherous and uncertain triggers and actions.
Competition Shooting
A large portion of the book is advice specific to those training to attain a high level of skill specific to bullseye competition. Advice is given on how to train, how to work with others on a shooting team, gear, diet, fitness, and many aspects of the mental game of shooting. Compared to other shooting books of this era, this book covers those topics in much more detail, with more sophistication than the others.
Instructing Ladies
All of these quotes from the book made me smile, for various reasons:
Most women have an inherent dread of firearms and the sight of them will at once arouse nervousness and sometimes bring on hysterics.
The author has taught over 300 women to shoot, most of them university students. Girls learned more quickly than the boys..and with the rifle the young women did better work than the young men. The big majority (of the boys) had done some shooting at an earlier date and felt that they knew how to do it. They invariably showed the lack or absence of proper instruction and had acquired enough bad habits to require a lot of correcting.
After a few trying experiences with the first classes of young women, in which one had hysterics, another fainted, and a third almost shot an instructor, the necessity for very close supervision, individual coaching, and a carefully thought out plan of instruction was an absolute necessity if accidents were to be avoided and confidence and enthusiasm developed in the pupils.
The thrills a girl got from seeing her shot in the bull’s-eye were often enough to cause her to turn quickly about with the gun in her hand and acclaim her success to her neighbors on the firing line or to the rear of it. This could not be tolerated.
There have been some very fine pistol shots among women. The pistol and revolver championship of Texas was won by a woman using the .45 Colt Automatic pistol a few years ago.
1911 Advice
Terrible advice regarding handling of the 1911, from the book:
It is perfectly safe to carry this pistol so charged (full magazine and loaded chamber) with the hammer down, and is safe than to carry the gun with a cartridge in the chamber and the hammer cocked and locked.
Sadly, this advice is completely wrong and dangerous. In Frazer’s era, double-action revolvers were rarely shot double action, as slow fire bullseye shooting was all done in single action mode. 1911 pistols of Frazer’s time all had a large spur hammer, much like a cowboy sixgun, so the idea that the 1911 could be thumb-cocked when drawn did not seem as wrong as it does today. It wasn’t until 1983, when the Colt Series 80 line was introduced, that any 1911 maker acknowledged that carrying the gun in Condition Two (loaded chamber, hammer down) was inherently unsafe without the firing pin safety the Series 80 guns added.
This may be the worst two handed grip I’ve ever seen in a book.
Other advice was better, as the book contains a good photo of correct and incorrect alignment of the gun with the hand and arm. In the left picture, the gun is recoiling on top of the thumb knuckle. That’s a frequent problem with modern shooters, who often buy guns that are too wide/fat for their hand, and twist the gun in their grip to compensate. That’s not an appropriate fix. The correct solution is to grip the gun properly, and choose a narrower gun if the trigger cannot be reached at all, or can only be reached with “frame dragging” when the gun is oriented properly in the hand.
Frazer’s Reading List
For those wanting to go farther down the Historical Handgun trail, Frazer’s list of recommended “older” books on shooting, referenced in his book, are:
American Pistol Shooting is well written and would have been very useful to any serious pistol shooter when it was published, particularly those interested in being a serious competition shooter or exhibition shooter. Skyhorse Publishing reprinted this book in both print and e-book format, and good condition used copies of the print edition are fairly easy to find online and at used book stores.
On Dec 2, 2017 I traveled to El Paso, Texas to take 1 day handgun class with legendary trainer John Farnam of Defense Training International. I used the class as an opportunity to train with my M&P Shield, running all the different magazine configurations I’ve been evaluating for the past few months. There are many ways to turn an M&P Shield into a practical 9+1 round carry gun.
Shield 9 round 9mm Magazine Options
The standard comes with a 7 round flush fit magazine and an 8 round magazine with a plastic sleeve that provides a little more room for all your fingers on the frame.
There are a number of magazine basepad alternatives and replacement spring and follower kits available. I purchased several of them and have been using them all in practice, and during the Farnam class. This picture shows all of them, sorted by overall length.
The shortest one is the factory 7 round mag. This is handy when I pocket carry the Shield. With all the other variants, the grip of the gun is just too long for practical pocket carry, even in pants with large pocket openings like my favorite Propper pants. (I like the Propper pants because they are 4-pocket pants that can be worn anywhere dress pants or khakis can be worn, without the extra pockets that cargo or tactical pants have. They have larger pocket openings that make pocket carry of guns, larger phones, tourniquets and other stuff much easier.)
Another way to make a 9 round Shield magazine is to put the MagGuts +2 kit on a 7 round magazine. This option creates the slimmest 9 round magazine of all the variants I’ve been working with.
Next shown is a Glock 19 magazine for comparison. The Shield with an 8 round factory mag is basically the same length as a Glock 19, which holds twice as many rounds and is 0.8″ longer in barrel length but wider (thicker) than the Shield.
One of the first aftermarket solutions was the Plan B base pad made by the Safety Solutions Academy. It goes on the 8 round magazine and is a better option than the factory plastic sleeve. On SSA’s owner Paul Carlson’s recommendation, I purchased a MagGuts +1 spring/follower kit, making a 9-round Plan B magazine.
The Plan B magazine is basically the same length as the factory 8 round mag, which is shown to the right of the Plan B magazine.
Taylor Freelance makes a +1 base pad that uses the factory spring. It works on both the 7 and 8 round magazine. I put one on an 8 round mag, making another 9-round Shield 9mm magazine.
Next in line is a full size 17 round M&P magazine.
ProMag makes a 10 round magazine for the 9mm Shield. I bought a few of these thinking they might be handy to use as training mags in classes or loaner mags for students bringing Shield guns to classes designed for higher capacity guns. The first batch of 3 mags I got had feeding problems and I could not reliably get 10 rounds in them. The replacement mags I got back from ProMag were incredibly difficult to get 10 rounds in, but run reliably with loaded with 9. These mags are longer a full size M&P 17 round mag.
Running the 9 round mags in class
I had originally been scheduled to take a 2 day vehicle defense long gun class with John in Victoria, Texas in October 2017, but Hurricane Harvey disrupted my plans, and everything in Victoria. The hotel and the range were both damaged by the flood. John was returning to El Paso in December to teach a one day basic/intermediate pistol class, so I decided to divert my tuition to that course, which would give me an opportunity to see John teach the kind of students I frequently work with on the range. I’ve known John for years, as he’s attended and observed my sessions at the annual Rangemaster Tactical Conferences, and I’ve attended his classroom lectures. I had never seen him present his live fire curriculum, and as part of my Historical Handgun course development, I wanted to go to the “root of the tree” to see it the way he teaches it, rather than just reading about it in his books. John’s been a trainer for 40 years, and his ideas have been influential on many in the training industry.
The range was actually in New Mexico, just across the Texas/New Mexico border, and the US/Mexico border, not far from a large Border Patrol station. It was a public range out in the desert, with fine sand on the ground, so any mag dropped to the ground was likely to get sand in it. Because of that, John encouraged people to do reloads with retention. Mostly I let my mags fall to the ground to see if the sand would cause malfunctions. To my surprise and delight I had zero malfunctions in almost 500 rounds fired that day.
The class included a mix of drills shot on paper and rotating reactive steel targets.
The rotating steel targets were more challenging for those of us with lower capacity guns, as they often took more than 7-8 hits of 9mm to generate enough kinetic energy to rotate the target all the way around. The rotators are a standard target used in DTI classes, but I had never shot that particular target type before. Spinning the flipper requires accuracy and timing, as you have to assess the correct time to hit the plate, when it’s moving the correct direction. The mental challenge of target assessment this target provides was great, and I may get one of these for my own range.
Signed Books
In preparation for training with John I picked up copies of several of his books to add to my library. I collect signed copies of books written by firearms trainers, and this was my opportunity to get John to sign all of his books for my collection. One of the books I got (a 1st edition copy of his Farnam Method of Defensive Handgunning) had already been signed by him. It appeared to be a signed copy that had at one time belonged to his mother, based on the inscription. I brought the book with me to class, and he agreed that it likely was a copy he had given to her that had been sold in an estate sale. I gave the book back to him and he’s going to replace it with a signed copy of the most current edition.
He’s well known for the excellent content in his DTI quips column, which he’s written for more than 20 years. A collection of Quips from the late 90s and early 2000’s was collected in a book, Guns and Warriors, Vol 1. His wife Vicki is frequently a co-instructor in his classes, and has been an active trainer for many decades. Her book (co-written with Diane Nicholl), Teaching Women to Shoot, remains an important and useful book for those teaching defensive pistol skills.
Summary
I’ve shot my Shield a lot, but never 500 rounds in one session. The Farnam class required drawing, shooting on the move, lots of reloads, one handed shooting — a good test of usability and reliability of any defensive firearm. All the guns used by students in class worked well (a few SIG DA/SA guns, many Glocks, one Beretta APX, my Shield), and I had no malfunctions or problems with any of the magazine configurations I used, each providing 9 round capacity in the little Shield. By far my favorite for carry is the 7 round mag with the Magguts +2.
Tom invited John to present on lessons he’s learned from watching more than 12,000 videos of gunfights. John has posted over 1100 videos of actual armed encounters on his channel, narrated with analysis. He estimates for every video he’s posted, he’s viewed at least 10 to select the video of the day. Two decades ago, a channel like John’s could not have existed, but as security cameras in facilities, car and body cameras on police officers, and cell phone cameras became omnipresent, the amount of video available from incidents has increased.
John had many lessons in his presentation. I’m going to share a few of them, with commentary.
The Pareto Principle
John explained that 20% of the skills taught in the typical defensive shooting course are all that are necessary in 80% of the incidents he’s viewed. The 20/80 rule is often called the Pareto Principle. As applied to firearms training, it means that roughly 20% of the exercises and habits have 80% of the impact and the trainee should not focus so much on a varied training. John pointed out that 80% is a “B”, and that for most, having a “B” grade in gunfighting is a practical “passing score”.
His list of 20% skills aligns pretty well with our thoughts on minimum standards as well as what has been taught in defensive shooting courses for the past 20 years or so.
Empty handed skills – From John’s presentation: “Empty handed skills are important for the 80% of assaults that don’t rise to the level of deadly force response.” Pepper spray is a frequently ignored, rarely carried tool that can fill the gap between physical skills and deadly force skills, and (like a firearm), its use requires less training and less fitness than true empty hand skills. Pepper spray is not the ideal solution in all situations, particularly enclosed areas, though.
Getting the First Hit Usually Wins – This observation is nothing new, going back to the days when point shooting was taught because the fraction of a second necessary to raise the gun to eye level and use the sights was considered “too long”, and the standards for what was an acceptable hit were lower. One of the biggest deficiencies the typical “I met the state minimum” permit holder has is zero concern about the critical skill of drawing from concealment and getting a realistically effective hit. Most ranges do not allow practice of that skill, because of the high probability an untrained person will injure themselves trying to practice a skill they have no training in and have not done the slower speed dry practice necessary to master the safe execution of that skill.
If there was one thing I could fix or change about the gun culture, in its present state, it would be greater awareness or concern among those with carry permits about the importance of a quick, effective presentation of the gun from concealment, which would bring with it motivation to carry using better holsters, carry in methods that facilitate meeting realistic standards for draw to first shot times, recognition of the importance of training and proper practice in that skill. This video shows how a slow draw from off-body carry works, but just barely.
This video shows why carrying on an empty chamber is another way to be too slow. Empty chamber is not taught or recommended by modern law enforcement trainers nor any private sector school, but remains popular with untrained permit holders, because they consider it ‘safer’ than loaded chamber carry. Often I see a sequence of bad decisions that cascade resulting in empty chamber carry, like this:
1) Start with a lack of understanding of the importance of draw speed in a defensive encounter.
2) Add some Dunning Kruger effect, causing the person to believe their draw speed is “fast enough”, despite never having measured that skill with a timer, or taken any training, or done any practice, in that skill.
3) Add some basic cheapness and/or obsession with “comfort”, causing the person to have no willingness to spend additional money on a quality holster to carry the gun and/or general unwillingness to carry using a belt holster, instead seeking any and all alternatives to avoid using the one carry method that offers the most advantages in incidents where the gun is actually needed.
4) This results in bad choices like choosing to pocket carry without a holster, just stuffing the gun in your waistband, gimmick holsters (Versacarry in particular), or having a loaded gun flopping around loose in the console, glove box or map pocket of the vehicle.
5) Mix in some lingering concern that those choices might actually bad if a round was chambered, leading to the wrong solution of choosing to carry on an empty chamber. (Because, as you recall from #2, their untimed, un-practiced draw speed will be “fast enough” thanks to Dunning-Kruger).
Follow Up Shots Are Often Necessary – Training that teaches students to expect a one-shot stop is unrealistic. We teach a minimum engagement, per threat, of 2-4 rounds, and John’s evidence based approach to defining skills supports that approach.
Trained Skills That Are Never Used
John gave a list of skills that are taught in many classes, including our own, that he’s never seen used in any incident video (so far). That’s useful data when defining minimum standards, making decisions about what gear is truly essential for every day carry, and setting training priorities. For those that have time and interest to go beyond the minimum, learning those skills can be interesting and challenging. Many of those skills are taught because there are examples of them being used in incidents that weren’t captured on video.
One handed gun manipulation – John says one handed shooting is common, not because the other arm is injured, but because the shooter fails to drop whatever is in his/her hand, or is doing some other task with the other hand. So if/when malfunctions occur or a reload is needed, both hands are available (and are used).
Strong hand to weak hand transition – Normally when one handed shooting is taught, the assumption is that the other hand is injured and is not longer available for use. Even in USPSA competition, requiring a strong hand only to weak hand only transition is not allowed because of the implausibility of that skill being relevant in a self-defense situation. The only time I’ve seen that skill required was in square range drills designed to improve one handed shooting. Having the shooter draw with strong hand only is simpler/faster/safer than requiring a weak-hand draw, and doing a strong hand to weak hand transition is just a lazy way of including both types of one handed shooting in a drill. So I’m not surprised this purely training-drill skill doesn’t occur in real fights.
Gun dropped and recovered in a fight – One workaround to doing weak hand only draw practice is to start with the gun on the ground (as if it were dropped when the strong hand was injured), and pick it up and resume shooting, firing weak hand only. I’m unaware of any actual incident that inspired that drill, which I’ve seen used in multiple handgun courses (with the strong hand injury presented as justification for the drill). Running that drill a few times can check the “I’ve done that before and can do it if needed” box, but the skill itself is not so difficult that someone needing to do it in a fight couldn’t succeed at it having never “trained” in it.
Use of the gun for a muzzle strike – Generally if someone can get the gun out in a close range fight, they want to use it for its intended purpose.
Backup guns used in any capacity – Despite many of the videos John uses coming from law enforcement sources, and carry of backup guns being much more common in law enforcement than among carry permit holders, those backup guns aren’t being used, even when malfunctions occur.
Reloads – Just as Tom Givens observed in the data from his student involved shootings, reloads are incredibly rare in defensive incidents. Fights are won and lost with the ammo that’s in the gun when it’s drawn and fired. Reloads, if they occur, typically happen after the fight is over, to top off the gun, as shown in this video. John estimated that fewer than 8 of the 12,000 videos he’s viewed included a reload that happened during the fight that had any bearing on the outcome.
Weapon Mounted Lights on handguns aren’t useful outside the home – Just as Tom observed in his student data, when armed citizen incidents occur at night, they typically occur in urban areas with sufficient ambient light that negates any value a weapon mounted handgun light might provide.
Summary
As someone that has taken a science- and evidence-based approach to training, from prioritization of skills & gear to setting training standards, I appreciate John’s approach of using a statistically valid number of trials to draw conclusions. Some of his conclusions conflict with “doctrine” taught by many well meaning trainers, particularly those with heavy law enforcement or military backgrounds, whose priorities and programs were often shaped by the different context of their uniformed work. As the database of gunfight videos grows over the next few (or 5, or 10) years, his efforts to archive and collate these incidents will continue to be important in shaping the direction and content of training programs.
Highlights from another presentation at the conference:
John Hearne – Who Wins, Who Loses and Why
This information-rich slide from John Hearne’s excellent presentation “Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why” explains a lot about setting training priorities. He defines 4 factors you can control: emotional control, level of learning/automaticity, fitness and gear, with their relative importance shown by circle sizes. Unfortunately, those priorities are mostly inverted from the concerns of the average gun owner that’s not in the 1% that are serious about their training and preparation. Gear reviews are typically the most popular topic on youTube channels and blogs, with articles on tactics typically less popular. Fitness – another area that many gun owners do not emphasize in their daily lives – is more important than gear but not as important as the top two: Emotional Control and Level of Automaticity.
Automaticity comes from practicing a skill enough that you can do it without conscious thought. This requires doing more than the state minimum to get your carry permit. This article provides some data on how many repetitions may be required to reach that level. It’s more than what is required to do the task one without error. Probably double or triple that number of repetitions, with additional repetitions performed frequently enough to keep that skill at that level. The way to achieve that level with a handgun has been understood since the 1930s (or earlier): dry fire practice.
Emotional Control comes from learning how to manage stress. Putting yourself in stressful situations, for example doing Force on Force training, where you interact with live opponents, using low impact training rounds and other gear that allows simulation of gunfighting and physical fighting, can teach the emotional control necessary to prevail in an actual incident.
Things you can’t control (much)
All the other factors are things you have limited control over. You can avoid places, times, people and behaviors that put yourself at high risk, but unfortunately there are plenty of examples of incidents that happened when the odds were very low. How many attackers there are, how high their skill levels are, where the attack occurs — all those elements are controlled by the attacker(s).
The best you can do is to put as much weight on the side of the scale that tips in your favor: whether it’s improving your fitness (and diet), getting back to regular dry fire practice, attending more training, or making a bigger effort to carry your gun, put your phone down and pay more attention to your surroundings when in public.
One of the presentations covered Rangemaster’s 10 principles of teaching. They answer the question “what does it mean to be a Rangemaster-certified instructor?” The Rangemaster program has been a significant influence on the way we do things at KR Training. Here are my thoughts on how we apply those principles in our classes:
Self-Awareness
Understanding the limits of your own knowledge and skill are important. Early in my engineering R&D career I had a great boss who advised me (and others) that “I don’t know” is a better answer than fumbling your way through a half-guess, half-informed response just to avoid saying “I don’t know”. And I had a high school government teacher that would give students partial credit on exams for writing “I don’t know yet” and showing up at the first class after the test with answers they had looked up.
Understanding what you don’t know, and what you need to know, is incredibly useful in setting training goals, choosing trainers, and designing practice sessions.
It’s also important to have confidence in what you know, in those areas where you’ve put in the work, and gathered enough experience and expertise to be able to explain specifically why a particular kind of holster or gun manipulation technique or tactic is a bad choice. “Because my guru does it this way” doesn’t answer the “why” question as well as understanding the reasons behind the guru’s decision, or (better) your own decision based on your analysis and testing.
I teach what I know, and the topics I’ve put the most effort into learning. I host instructors that are expert in topics outside my lane, or have expertise beyond mine in topics I also teach. That’s been my approach since day one of offering classes.
Contextual Grounding
I don’t own a plate carrier, a chest rig or a battle belt. I’ve never taken a class where that gear was required. As a professional musician that plays over 100 shows a year in restaurants, bars, festivals and special events, and during the 30+ years I spent working in R&D and training for the state of Texas, I’ve had to focus on practical, every day carry gear, often in non-permissive environments, sometimes with the only firearm legally accessible to me locked up in a vehicle. That’s the same context many of my students “operate” in. It’s not the same context someone carrying openly in a uniform, with body armor and armed friends a radio call away has. That’s why I offer small & pocket gun classes, unarmed, knife, medical, tactics and legal classes in addition to firearms training, and why we want students to bring their actual carry gear to classes.
Front Sight Focus
For the past several years I’ve been doing deep study of historical handgun techniques. For decades the conventional wisdom, repeated in book after book, was that there wasn’t time to aim, and all shooting had to be done with the gun at hip level, or with some form of “point” shooting. Some instructors continue to promote those ideas, citing evidence that those in gunfights do not see their sights, so we should not try to use them. Much of that evidence comes from analyzing performance of law enforcement officers that shoot less than 100 rounds a year, who do not dry fire on a regular basis.
Much has been learned in the past 100 years about being fast and accurate with a handgun. Those that have performed well in actual gunfights, for example the 60+ students Tom Givens has trained (who have a hit ratio over 90%), or the officers of LAPD Metro division (hit ratio over 85%) were trained to use a front sight focus.
Additionally, a basic understanding of geometry, applied to shooting, clearly shows that the likelihood of hitting the intended target increases as the gun is aligned more precisely with it. Sights – the front sight specifically – are the key to achieving that alignment. It can take less than 0.1 sec to read a sight picture and confirm that it’s aligned properly with the target. Part of our program is to teach shooters the relationship between sight picture quality (precision in gun alignment) and speed. As the target gets closer and larger, less perfect alignment is required – but seeing the front sight is still essential.
Logical Progression
Unlike many schools that offer their curriculum in 2-day, 3-day or longer courses, we’ve broken our curriculum up into 1/2 day blocks, to make them more accessible to a wider audience. Many people have limited funds and time to train. The courses are organized in a logical progression, with the most important skills trained first. We often offer multiple classes on a single day or over a weekend to provide 2- and 3-day blocks of training for those able to invest more time and money, but many students complete a sequence of 16 or more hours of training over many separate classes over months or years.
Broad Application
The principles we teach in classes are generic to a wide variety of handgun action types, calibers, carry methods and human factors. Our defensive long gun class is unique in the training industry, because it can be taken using any long gun (AR-15, lever action rifle, pump shotgun, semiauto shotgun, pistol caliber carbine, even a .22 rifle). The curriculum is derived from how the gun will be used in a defensive incident. The targets, the time frames, and the type and quantity of hits required are the same, so that course teaches students how to use what they have effectively.
Understanding Violence
Most people that are not working on the front lines of law enforcement or the military have very limited life experience with violence. John Hearne’s studies into overcoming the “freeze” response show that those that have experienced violence (for real or in force on force simulations) are less likely to lock up in an actual incident. We’ve offered force on force (FOF) training courses for more than 20 years, pioneering the use of Airsoft guns as lower cost training tools for FOF, offering force on force scenarios as part of the annual Rangemaster Tactical Conference for more than a decade. We include FoF scenarios in many courses in our program, to provide opportunities for students to experience full context scenarios. Several of our force on force graduates that have been involved in defensive incidents have commented to us afterward that they had “I’ve seen this before” moments where the situation reminded them of scenarios they had participated in.
Reluctant Willingness
Using force on force scenarios as part of our training allows us to teach skills beyond simply solving all problems with deadly force. Force on force training provides opportunities to “win” a scenario with avoidance, effective communication, posturing, and threats of deadly force, as well as appropriate use of deadly force when the situation requires it. In live fire shoot house training, photographic targets are used to require students to make shoot/no-shoot decisions. These approaches to training teach use of force decision making. For some students this involves restraining an over-eagerness to use deadly force, and for some it involves getting students over a natural resistance to using force at all, to get both to the reluctant willingness mindset that limits use of deadly force to a last resort, but allows full commitment to that action when no options remain.
Effective Assessment
Influenced by the Rangemaster program, we developed a simple “3 Seconds Or Less” shooting test suited to our short course format, with escalating standards for each course in the progression. In more advanced courses, and in the Historical Handgun course, we use longer, more complex shooting tests to evaluate student performance. Standards are useful for setting training goals and evaluating skills, not only for instructors but for any shooter seeking any level, from minimum competence to mastery.
Respect for Students
Early in my development as a shooter, I traveled to a major national school, spending thousands of dollars, to take a 3 day course. Despite being a Master class level USPSA competitor with several hundred hours of ‘tactical’ pistol training from other schools, I (and others enrolled in the course) were told we could not take a level 2 class because we had not taken that particular school’s level 1 course.
The class had 15 students; 13 of which were over qualified for the course, and 2 well-equipped but completely inexperienced students that would have benefited from a locally run NRA Basic Pistol course before attempting to take a tactical pistol course. The course pace was taught down to the level of the 2 beginners, with significant down time for the other 13 students as we shot remedial drills and then sat around for 4 hours, on the final day of class, as we each got a single run in the facility’s multimillion dollar shoot house (the reason I had attended the course). During that run I “cleared” 4 rooms and shot 2 targets.
What I learned from that experience shaped several components of my program. I gather enough information from students to recommend the right class for their interests and their skill level. We developed a detailed list of questions specific to our Basic Pistol 2 course that’s guided many that thought they did not need that course to take it prior to attending Defensive Pistol Skills 1. One-at-a-time drills in the shoot house or force on force scenarios are combined with other drills run by an assistant, so that students have no significant down time. I use enough range staff, particularly on lower level courses, that students needing remedial work can be taken to a separate shooting berm and given the attention they need, while the rest of the class continues learning the material in the course. Sometimes the remedial student rejoins the class after a short coaching session; sometimes the remedial student ends up getting a private version of a lower level course, bringing them up to the level necessary to attend a future session of the course they wanted to take.
The other area of respect we focus on is professional behavior. That means making the presentation of our training no different from any other adult education course. Throughout the history of KR Training, we’ve tried to make our classes inviting to everyone, regardless of politics, gender, or any other characteristic. We keep politics out of the classroom and do our best to treat students the way we want to be treated not only in firearms training classes, but as customers of any business.
Lifelong Learning
Every instructor on the KR Training team attends some type of professional development training every year: taking classes, shooting matches, online training or self-study of books, videos, and other sources. Every year the team discusses changes in curriculum, making small adjustments to improve the content or the presentation, and we develop or review complete courses on a regular basis. We host traveling trainers every year, and each year I bring it at least one trainer new to KR Training to provide the team and our students access to a wide variety of credible information.
Summary
Over the past 2 decades the Rangemaster certification has become one of the most respected instructor credentials, because of their commitment to high standards. KR Training will be hosting the 3 day Rangemaster instructor development course again in April 2018. Anyone that teaches firearms, even informally to friends and family, would benefit from the material taught in the class, and raising their own level of shooting skill to the standards required to pass the course.
Over the past year I’ve been developing a new course for KR Training, Historical Handgun, that teaches the history & evolution of defensive handgun skills. Part of that effort has been seeking out and reading old books on shooting, purchasing copies signed by the authors when possible.
In 1916, competition pistol shooter Abraham Lincoln Artman Himmelwright published his “Pistol and Revolver Shooting” book. Himmelwright did a significant revision of the book in 1928, and it was reprinted again in 1930. His credentials included a term as president of the United States Revolver Association, and serving as captain of the Americas Shooting Team. He wrote a earlier book called The Pistol and Revolver in 1908.
The concepts in this book are the same as are repeated in the many books from the 1930s that I’ve reviewed in previous blog posts.
Of pistol shooting, he writes:
It is a healthful exercise, being practiced out of doors in the open air. There are no undesirable concomitants, such as gambling, coarseness, and rough and dangerous play. In order to excel, regular and temperate habits of life must be formed and maintained. It renders the senses more alert and trains them to act in unison and in harmony. Skill in shooting is a useful accomplishment that should be cultivated by every patriotic citizen.
About 90 pages of the book is discussion of specific pistols and revolvers: military arms, target arms, pocket arms, arms for home and shop protection, arms for hunting, and shot pistols. His advice on home and shop protection? He recommends a 4″ barrel, .38 special DA revolver, Smith and Wesson or Colt.
His opinion on pistol sights:
The front sight should have a rear face or tip of some light colored metal… Such a front sight forms a conspicuous contrast against a green, drab, brown, grey or dark background and consequently can be seem more distinctly and can be “picked up” much more rapidly than a black sight, under normal field conditions.
On competition pistols:
One match for pistols known as the “Free Pistol” match, in which there are no restrictions whatever, and the result is that competitors frequently develop and use arms with such radical modifications as to make the weapons absolutely useless and impracticable for any other purpose except competition in that particular match.
As someone that shot USPSA during the late 80’s and early 90’s – the era before there was a Limited division and typical competition guns changed from single stack iron sighted 1911’s drawn from leather holsters to red dot sighted, compensated, high capacity 2011’s, his comments about the arms race and “gamer guns”, written at the turn of the century, sound exactly like what gunwriters were saying in the racegun era. Nothing is new.
SHOOTING DRILLS & STANDARDS
Himmelwright recommends that someone armed for personal defense should practice every 2-3 months, firing at least 15 rounds, at 20 feet, using a 20 yard bullseye target with a 2.72″ center. A more modern equivalent would be firing at a 3″ dot at 7 yards.
He includes specs for the American Standard Target, which was a very common target prior to WW2.
He lists shooting scores, from 1886, where 100 rounds were fired on this target, using a .44 S&W Russian revolver with a 2.5 lb single action trigger pull, at 50 yards (one handed, of course), with the highest score recorded 914 out of a possible 1000 points. 100 rounds, at 50 yards, with the majority striking inside a 5.5″ bullseye (the 9 ring), with many hitting inside a 3.5″ 10-ring is an impressive feat far, far beyond the abilities of all but the very best modern day shooters.
Himmelwright uses the term Practical Shooting to describe both handgun hunting and shooting for pleasure, by rolling cans on the ground or shooting at objects floating in a stream.
He describes the 4 courses of fire commonly used by the US Revolver Association:
Marksman Course
(Slow Fire) 10 shots at 10 yards. 60 seconds for each set of 5 shots (2 minutes total). 90 points to pass.
(Rapid Fire) 10 shots at 10 yards. 30 seconds for each set of 5 shots (1 minute total). 80 points to pass.
Sharpshooter Course
(Slow Fire) 10 shots at 20 yards. 60 seconds for each set of 5 shots (2 minutes total). 90 points to pass.
(Rapid Fire) 10 shots at 20 yards. 30 seconds for each set of 5 shots (1 minute total). 80 points to pass.
Expert Course
(Slow Fire) 10 shots at 20 yards. 30 seconds for each set of 5 shots (1 minutes total). 90 points to pass.
(Rapid Fire) 10 shots at 20 yards. 15 seconds for each set of 5 shots (30 seconds total). 80 points to pass.
Quick Fire Course
Face target, arms at sides, weapon in pocket or holster. Distance of 5 yards. At command “fire”, draw weapon and shoot.
10 shots, 1 shot per string, double action. Record time for each shot. (1 shot draw)
10 shots in 2-5 shot strings double action. Record total time for each string.
These drills are clearly the precursor to modern defensive handgun drills. No recommended par times are given.
Himmelwright quotes Col. R.R. Raymond (“well known writer and authority on small arms”):
The quickest draw for a right handed man is from a holster on the right thigh at such at a height that the hand falls naturally on the butt. Quick drawing can only be acquired only by diligent practice, grasping the butt from various positions, and putting special thought upon smooth movement rather than speed. The thing to be avoided in practice is too much haste, resulting in a fumble.
Raymond’s observations about holster position can be seen in the modern cowboy fast draw holster.
Chapters
Introductory and Historical
Arms
Ammunition
Ballistics
Hand-loading Ammunition
Sights
Shooting Position
Targets
Target Shooting – Historical
Practice Shooting
Revolver Practice for the Police
Pistol Shooting for Ladies
Clubs and Ranges
Hints to Beginners
Appendix 1 – US Revolver Association
Appendix 2 – NRA matches
Appendix 3 – War Department Target Practice
Appendix 4 – War Dept Tests of Automatic Pistols
Appendix 5 – Colt Automatic Pistol
Appendix 6 – Powders for Pistols and Revolvers
Appendix 7 – Priming Compositions and Effects
Appendix 8 – Stopping Power
Appendix 9 – Gunsmithing
Appendix 10 – Directory
Summary
It’s a long book, filled with plenty of technical information. The level of detail is at the ‘serious gun nerd’ level, particularly those interested in the mechanical engineering, chemistry and physics of shooting and the history of pistol competition. In its day, it was probably the most complete collection of information about all aspects of handgun shooting available, and remains an excellent historical record of what was known about the topic prior to 1930.
This article from The Federalist, listing 6 reasons why “Your Right Wing Friend Isn’t Coming to Your Side on Gun Control” has been getting shared by many of my gun owner and trainer friends. The clickbait title was cleverly written to appeal to gun control advocates as the target audience.
The points the article makes are valid but fall short of hitting the X-ring of a clear explanation. Here are the key points from the article, with my additional thoughts on each:
We Rarely Get to Come to the Conversation in Good Faith
The article correctly points out that when gun control advocates tell gun owners their opposition to new gun restrictions means that they “don’t care” about the tragedy and loss of life, it’s offensive. After each tragedy, gun rights supporters point out the linkage between gun-free zones and mass killings, and provide examples of incidents where immediate armed response from an individual saved lives. Both sides have their preferred policy solutions (eliminating gun free zones and national concealed carry reciprocity, on the pro-gun side), and both come to the issue with a desire to save more lives.
A true compromise on gun policy would be if gun control advocates were willing to trade support for national reciprocity, for example, if the pro-gun side would agree to universal background checks. When gun control advocates use the word “compromise”, they want you to agree to give up some rights, but not as many as they would like to take away, offering nothing in trade. It’s like a mugger taking all the cash in your wallet and your phone but leaving you your credit cards and ID.
The definition of good faith is “honesty or sincerity of intention”.
Awareness of this ongoing pattern of disinformation is widely known within the gun culture, as examples of technically incorrect information, prejudicially selected data, and gun control movement “talking points” are repeated without verification by media outlets whose editorial boards all support any and all new gun restrictions. (Media bias against gun rights is explained in depth in John Lott’s book The Bias Against Guns.)
The article’s point #2 is the same as point #1. The majority of mass shooting incidents have occurred in “gun free” zones. Gun control advocates resist the idea of allowing more people to be armed in more places, claiming “more guns leads to more violence”. Yet gun shops, gun shows, and shooting ranges, where almost everyone present is armed, are not locations where mass killings occur, and in those rare occasions where violence starts, armed defenders quickly end it.
From a pro-gun perspective, it is those that insist on disarming victims through implementation of gun -free zones, and laws making it difficult/impossible to get carry permits in states such as California and New York, who have the victims’ blood on their hands.
The Loudest Voices Are Often the Most Ignorant
In the mainstream media, and even in the “conservative” media, the number of actual gun owners, who carry on a regular basis, or associate with anyone who carries, is near zero. Sean Hannity (FOX news, Sirius XM) and Andrew Wilkow (Sirius XM) are gun owners and shooters, but those that typically speak for the gun owner side of the debate in panel shows are coastal elites living in areas with the nation’s most restrictive gun laws, working in a business in which gun ownership and daily carry does not exist. Former FOX news megastar Bill O’Reilly’s views on gun control leaned closer to his pal Michael Bloomberg’s than to Wayne LaPierre’s, and he frequently used his top rated show to spout misinformation and technically wrong facts about guns and crime. Gun control advocates that claim that the pro-gun side of the discussion is being heard because there are conservative media outlets or because some right wing pundit was on a panel show are wrong. Most of the conservative websites and old school publications, like National Review and the Weekly Standard, are also run and written by coastal elites as isolated from the gun culture as their friends at CNN, NBC, Time, Newsweek, Slate, Salon and other media sources are. The NRA’s new team of spokespeople, Colion Noir for example, would do well if given the opportunity to speak for the gun culture, but are largely ignored by mainstream and “conservative” media alike, as they just keep featuring the same insular group on show after show.
The list of errors the media publishes on firearms is long, with the most recent being the USA Today info graphic showing a chainsaw bayonet as a popular accessory to the AR-15. A recent Houston Chronicle editorial discussing a “gun surrender” policy for domestic abusers included a stock photo showing a revolver, with a single stack 1911 magazine sitting next to it. Stock photos automatically linked to news articles on Facebook seem to always find the derpiest pictures showing the worst examples of handgun carry and handgun shooting technique available.
David Kopel’s recent article on The Hill hit the ball out of the park, listing all the major components of existing gun law. The overwhelming majority of gun control advocates do not understand existing gun laws, or how guns operate. That widespread ignorance makes it nearly impossible to have any kind of conversation on the topic, as most of the pro-gun person’s time is spent attempting to bring the anti-gun person up to a basic level of competence on fundamental issues, with the anti-gun person refusing to believe what is being explained out of an emotional confirmation bias driving them to reject anything a pro-gun person says as “NRA propaganda” that cannot be true.
This is why many that are the most informed on the pro-gun side simply walk away from discussions of the issue, and why so many will no longer bother to be interviewed or talk to reporters at all.
The Most Prominent Policy Ideas Have Nothing to Do With the Tragedy
Technical and tactical ignorance of gun control advocates is a factor yet again, as their belief that banning particular types of guns or magazines would change the outcome of a mass shooting situation is pure fantasy. Shooters using 19th century mechanically operated firearms are capable of firing with significant speed and accuracy.
The other common fantasy that is promoted by those seeking to ban magazines based on capacity is that unarmed people can rush an attacker during the time he or she is changing magazines. The gun control advocates believe that untrained people can succeed in that highly dangerous, unlikely-to-succeed tactic but are unable of doing something even easier, drawing a pistol and shooting back, during that same time window. A typical handgun reload time for a moderately trained shooter is under 2 seconds. Similarly, the typical handgun draw time for a moderately trained shooter is 2 seconds. Skilled shooters can draw and reload even faster.
A new trend in the Left is to pout that the public no longer takes advice from “experts” on policy issues (in books like The Death Of Expertise). They accuse the Right (and Trump supporters specifically) of ignoring data and science and verified experts on topics where the experts favor left-wing policies–while engaging the same exact bad behavior themselves when it comes to gun violence. Actual subject matter experts in firearms, tactics, criminal behavior and any other relevant topic whose opinion did not align with the narrative have been systematically excluded from the policy making process for decades.
We Seriously Don’t Care About Gun Laws in Other Countries
Gun control advocates frequently cite the gun violence rates of European countries, with the implication that if the US had EU-style gun laws, we would have EU-style violent crime rates. There are two basic flaws with that approach:
The pro-gun person does not believe that EU style gun laws will reduce their risk of being attacked with a firearm. States with strict gun laws, particularly Illinois, California and Maryland, have terrible violent crime problems that their neighboring states with more gun freedoms do not have. It would take house to house searches and mass confiscations to reduce the number of guns in circulation in the US to EU levels. If that occurred without starting a civil war (unlikely), the same network that brings in billions of dollars of illegal drugs into the country each year could easily supply (and already does supply) criminals with illegal guns.
The pro-gun person believes that EU style gun laws would increase their vulnerability to injury death by criminal attack. When a pro-gun person imagines themselves being a victim of violent crime, the scenario ends when they present a firearm, use it, and the attack ends – regardless of what the mode of criminal attack is: gun, knife, or physical attack. In many cases simply presenting the gun is sufficient to stop the attack, as noted in this Obama-era CDC study. The CDC estimated that more than 500,000 defensive gun uses happen each year, exceeding the 30,000 gun deaths (only 15K of these were murders, the rest were suicides and accidents) by a factor of more than 10. A simple cost-benefit analysis of those two data points shows that the net benefit of allowing citizens to have defensive firearms far outweighs the potential negative outcomes.
If you believe that EU-style gun laws won’t make you safer, statistics don’t really matter.
We Really Do Consider Owning Firearms a Right
Self defense is the most fundamental human right. The concept of that right goes beyond the 2nd amendment of the Constitution, all the way down to the 2nd of Maslow’s human needs: safety and security. Both gun rights advocates and gun control supporters are motivated by concerns about their individual safety and security. As these Pew Research poll results show, the divide between them is very broad, because their core beliefs are so disparate. The history of the US is one of ever expanding freedoms and rights: from the abolition of slavery, to granting women the vote, to protections against discrimination, overturning the national ban on alcohol, and more recent Supreme Court rulings expanding both concealed carry rights and gay marriage to all 50 states, as well as state level legalization of marijuana. Culturally, from left to right, those standing on the side of “more freedom” tend to win on their issues over the long term.
The 2017 Rangemaster Instructor Conference was held at the BDC Gun Room in Shawnee, OK. On the counter at the store, they had a stack of handouts listing “Jack’s Rules To Live By”, written by BDC owner Jack Barrett.
It’s a great list, particularly his #1 rule:
Be Kind and Generous to All — Our world, our nation, our state, our community, our families and our own lives will be better if we show more kindness and more generosity to everyone.
Concealed Carry
ALWAYS carry your pistol – It does you no good at home or in your car. Never leave a gun in your vehicle. Thieves look there first.
Carry a good pistol – Why trust your life to a piece of junk? Quality does not have to be expensive.
Get a good holster – Anything is better than nothing, but kydex or reinforced leather carried IWB or AIWB is best. Do NOT open carry. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Get more training and practice – Shooting skills do not come naturally and are perishable. Formal instruction and frequent practice are necessary to maintain proficiency.
Carry/Learn other means of defense – You can’t shoot everyone. You can pepper spray just about anyone! Carry it always. It isn’t magic, but it will get you three steps towards the door. Learn some empty hand skills: punching, kicking and separation techniques (how to get hands off you and get away). Having something sharp and stabby is useful, too.
Mind your own damn business – You are not a cop. You are not a super hero, nor an arbiter of right and wrong. You are an armed citizen. Nothing good can come from you butting into someone else’s problem, even if you save the day.
(KR note: When the situation is conflict between a few people, none of which are known to you, his advice is good. In an active shooter/mass killing incident, the decision to act should be based on the totality of the circumstances of that specific event, as doing anything other than what is necessary to protect yourself and those near you will likely place you at much greater risk.)
All Guns Are Always Loaded – Before you can clean it, tinker with it, or show it to a buddy, you must clear it first. If you want to shoot it, shoot it. If you want do anything else with it, clear it first.
Never Point a Gun At Anything You Are Not Willing To Destroy – Keep up with where you gun is pointed at all times. The gun will either be in the holster, at the ready, or on target, period.
Keep Your Finger Off the Trigger And Out of the Trigger Guard Unless Your Sights Are On the Target – Pressure on the trigger is what causes the gun to fire. Keep your finger indexed well away from the trigger unless you want the gun to fire. Gun on target = finger on trigger. Gun OFF target = finger OFF trigger.
Always Be Certain of Your Target and What is Beyond and Around It – Know what you are shooting and why.
The event included live fire time on the range, shooting the most challenging qualification courses in the Rangemaster program, from the Rangemaster Bullseye course to the Casino Drill, with two drills shot for score Sunday.
The level of shooting proficiency of attendees was very high, with most shooting 90% or better, and many shooting 95% or better, on all the scored courses of fire. At one point Tom asked for a show of hands of those that were top shooter in their instructor class, and many of those present raised their hands.
Presentations
Tom didn’t do most of the teaching. In his opening remarks he observed that many of the pioneers, founders and key figures of the private sector training industry were slowing down, retiring or had passed away. Part of his efforts over the past two decades of his instructor program was to mentor other trainers that can carry on the great work of the previous generation. Tom started the annual Rangemaster Tactical Conference to provide annual professional development opportunities for everyone in the private sector training industry. The model was law enforcement training conferences, where new ideas could be shared and peers from all over the country could network and compare skills and training concepts. The impact of the conference (and Tom’s instructor training program) on the curriculum taught by trainers all over the US has been significant.
On the range and in the classroom, Tom provided opportunities for younger trainers to gain experience teaching their peers.
Tiffany Johnson, John Murphy, Lee Weems and John Hearne presented a long block discussing the ten principles of Rangemaster training doctrine. I’ll summarize that presentation in a separate blog post.
John Murphy (in the picture above) will be visiting KR Training September 2018 to offer a two person team tactics course and a vehicle defense course. I’ll be visiting John’s school, First Person Training, in Culpepper, Virginia, in October 2018 to offer a session of my Historical Handgun course.
John Hearne’s section included some of his excellent material analyzing gunfight successes and failures.
Lee Weems presented some excellent material on interacting with police, including an in depth discussion of 4th amendment issues, McFadden stops (commonly known as Terry stops) and the history of “Miranda rights”.
Warren Wilson, from the Enid, OK police department, presented on criminal gangs and the armed citizen, providing advice on how to recognize members of organized gangs (colors, tattoos, clothing, other behaviors). Several instructors present at the conference were also K-12 teachers, who shared their own experiences dealing with teenagers (and younger children) with gang affiliations in classes.
John Correia of the Active Self Protection youTube channel gave a long presentation on 21 points learned from his observation of more than 12,000 videos of gunfights. I recently became an ASP-affiliated instructor, so I’ll be using some of John’s 1100+ narrated videos of actual incidents in classes.
Shooting Competition
The end of the range session Sunday was a two stage match. One stage was a 60 round qualification course of fire based on the Rangemaster Instructor qual test. The other was the casino drill. The casino drill was scored using “time plus” (penalties added 1 sec for each shot outside any shape). The field was tightly bunched together. Only those that shot a perfect 300 on the qual course and had zero penalties made the top 5. I pushed for speed on the casino course and had 3 hits less than 1″ outside the shapes and ended up 12th. Dave Reichek only had 1 hit outside a shape and ended up 9th. Spencer Keepers won the match with solid runs on both courses of fire.
John Correia did a poll of what guns and ammo the attendees carried, and reported the results in a video on his channel.
LOCAL HOSPITALITY
The BDC Gun Room was a terrific host for this event. Their indoor range area was clean with a fantastic air handling system. Multiple classrooms, an archery range, machine gun rentals, inventory of guns, ammo, clothing, accessories, and store dogs – the 3 Givens dogs plus two that belonged to one of the BDC employees (who was attending the conference).
SUMMARY
The Rangemaster instructor family is full of great people: highly skilled shooters committed to providing high quality, relevant, life-saving training. It’s always a pleasure to be around them.
Those that attended got copies of all the powerpoint presentations and videos. I’ll share some highlights from that content in future blog posts.
This adds the skills of bringing the gun from a ready position to the target quickly, and firing the required shots within a time limit, to the basic marksmanship tested by the NRA Basic Pistol qualification.
