A web site I visit often is pistol-training.com. The have a very active forum and provide a lot of practical drills. One posting in particular was on how to make your own high-visibility front sight using some bright tape. For a complete set of instructions visit http://pistol-training.com/archives/376 . There you are directed to link that gives the step by step details. I added a comment that varies slightly on the procedure that worked well for me.
If you want to build one, and can wait till the UPS shoot in October, I have enough tape to do a small armory. If you can't wait, a role of tape will cost you about five bucks at Ace Hardware. (And then we can do do a medium to large armory!)
Monday, September 8, 2008
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Dogs Attack
Does anyone remember the "Dog Attack Scenario" that we set up a few months back?
Here's a Park City News story for yah.
Here's a Park City News story for yah.Man fends off dog with pistol
He fired weapon once into the groundArticle Launched: 07/08/2008 04:52:08 PM MDTNobody was charged when a man fired a small-caliber handgun to deter two dogs from biting him at Jordanelle State Park."He did not break the law at all," said Tracy See, assistant manager of Jordanelle State Park. "He could have actually shot the dog."
She did not release the name of the Salt Lake County man who is licensed to carry a concealed firearm.
"He had maybe six or seven dogs around him," See said. "He reached down and pulled out his concealed weapon. He fired into the ground and the dogs released."
The victim stopped with his family Sunday afternoon to have lunch at the north end of Jordanelle after camping in the Uinta Mountains east of Kamas.
Meanwhile, a woman from western Summit County, who works for a dog-walking service in Park City, had a dozen dogs off leashes in the area at about 1 p.m.
"One dog came over the rise, then a second dog. The father ran to pick up his child and the dogs, of course, reacted to their excitement," See explained. "By now, he has maybe six or seven dogs around him. He reached down and pulled out his concealed weapon."
The attack occurred near the Ross Creek trailhead and the woman walking the dogs is legally deaf, she added.
"She did not realize the weapon had been discharged, but because the weapon was brandished and visible, it scared her really, really bad," See said. "She took off and ran Basically she was trying to get away from the situation."
See said the dogs, which are mixed breeds, were calm when she arrived. The man had four puncture wounds on his leg, which broke the skin.
"There is a leash law and they have to have their dogs on a leash at all times when they are in the park," See said.
Rabies shots were up to date for the dogs that bit the man, she said.
"They didn't come at him trying to take him down," See said, adding that nobody was arrested at the scene.
The man's wife reportedly threw rocks at the dogs near State Road 248 as her husband tried to escape. See did not release the dog-walker's name or the name of her employer.
Video captures from rifle exercises
We have been doing some rifle basics this summer, and I've taken some video that I would like to share.
Safely slinging your rifle support side:
Notice that the rifle is always under control and is never held just by the sling to flop.
Strong side slinging:
Combat prone:
"Under the vehicle" prone:
"Over the Curb" prone:
Combat Squat (very easy to take off from):
Kneeling:
Sitting:
Offhand:
Safely slinging your rifle support side:
Notice that the rifle is always under control and is never held just by the sling to flop.
Strong side slinging:
Combat prone:
"Under the vehicle" prone:
"Over the Curb" prone:
Combat Squat (very easy to take off from):
Kneeling:
Sitting:
Offhand:
Annual Night Shoot coming up
There’s a Utah Polite Society night event at Hendricksen Range Friday,
July 11.
We plan to have four courses of fire at the night event.
Prior to the first exercise we plan to go over the use of several
techniques for using a hand-held flashlight with both a sidearm and a
carbine.
The first exercise is a skills exercise that will let you exercise several
different light techniques both free standing and from behind cover. You
will have the opportunity to shoot this exercise with either a sidearm, a
carbine, or both.
The second exercise is a simulated encounter where you respond to a home
invasion that starts with you in bed under the covers and involves opening
a door and clearing the adjacent room. You can use either a sidearm, a
carbine, or both for this exercise.
The third exercise is a simulated encounter where you are followed home by
a group of young gentlemen who pull into your driveway behind you and you
have to discriminate threats against the glare of headlights.
The fourth exercise is a skills drill that practices target
discrimination, shooting on the move, and utilizing cover while using a
light.
If you bring a carbine, make sure to arrive with it secured within a case.
A sling that allows muzzle down carry from one shoulder is also
recommended.
For those of you who are new to the use of flashlights with firearms, you
may want to purchase one that has a momentary tail cap switch. Big 5 has
a pretty good Smith & Wesson brand light on sale for $30.
Please bring your handgun (and related equipment) at least 70 rounds of
pistol ammo and a good hand-held light. If you have a carbine that you’d
like to shoot, bring it and 30 rounds of ammo.
As we would like to review flashlight techniques and do course of fire
walkthroughs before it gets dark, please plan on arriving at the range by
8:30 p.m. We plan to start shooting as soon as it gets dark.
As it’s more important you be familiar with our safety and range
procedures in a low light environment, we ask that only those who have
shot with us before attend.
We plan to limit the number of attendees to 25 in order to keep the group
to a manageable size. If you would like to attend, please reply to this
email, and I will send you a confirmation.
Event fee is $12.00.
July 11.
We plan to have four courses of fire at the night event.
Prior to the first exercise we plan to go over the use of several
techniques for using a hand-held flashlight with both a sidearm and a
carbine.
The first exercise is a skills exercise that will let you exercise several
different light techniques both free standing and from behind cover. You
will have the opportunity to shoot this exercise with either a sidearm, a
carbine, or both.
The second exercise is a simulated encounter where you respond to a home
invasion that starts with you in bed under the covers and involves opening
a door and clearing the adjacent room. You can use either a sidearm, a
carbine, or both for this exercise.
The third exercise is a simulated encounter where you are followed home by
a group of young gentlemen who pull into your driveway behind you and you
have to discriminate threats against the glare of headlights.
The fourth exercise is a skills drill that practices target
discrimination, shooting on the move, and utilizing cover while using a
light.
If you bring a carbine, make sure to arrive with it secured within a case.
A sling that allows muzzle down carry from one shoulder is also
recommended.
For those of you who are new to the use of flashlights with firearms, you
may want to purchase one that has a momentary tail cap switch. Big 5 has
a pretty good Smith & Wesson brand light on sale for $30.
Please bring your handgun (and related equipment) at least 70 rounds of
pistol ammo and a good hand-held light. If you have a carbine that you’d
like to shoot, bring it and 30 rounds of ammo.
As we would like to review flashlight techniques and do course of fire
walkthroughs before it gets dark, please plan on arriving at the range by
8:30 p.m. We plan to start shooting as soon as it gets dark.
As it’s more important you be familiar with our safety and range
procedures in a low light environment, we ask that only those who have
shot with us before attend.
We plan to limit the number of attendees to 25 in order to keep the group
to a manageable size. If you would like to attend, please reply to this
email, and I will send you a confirmation.
Event fee is $12.00.
Monday, July 7, 2008
July Event Report
This was another big month for the Utah Polite Society. While we didn't have quite as many people as we did in June (around 20, rather than 38) we still had a larger than usual group, particularly for a holiday weekend. These included a fair number of new shooters (around 6 or 8). This is quite a few people for us, but unlike last month the number of people didn't get into unmanagable territory. As a result of the smaller numbers, and some better planning, I think this event ran a lot more smoothly than it did last time.
Rather than reorganizing things only the fly like we did last month, we were able to run things mostly according to the plan. We'd intended to do a pair of pistol exercises and some hand to hand stuff in the morning and the rifle stuff in the afternoon. We pretty much kept to the schedule, but the hand to hand slipped to the early afternoon, due to the amount of time it took to run everyone through the handgun exercises.
Rock Around the Clock
The focus of both this month's handgun exercises was on movement, specifically getting off the X with explosive movement. Several of us took Gabe Suarez's classes last year when we had him here in Salt Lake City, and we incorporated them into some of our drills in the Polite Society events in the next few months. However, it's been over a year, and we've picked up some new regulars since then, so I thought it was a good time to revisit moving and shooting.
I'd hoped to be able to do a moving and shooting demonstration called the Suicide Drill using airsoft guns, but Harold Green forgot to bring his airsoft stuff out so we had to improvise a little bit. I explained the basic principles of moving and shooting, including basic metal on meat point shooting, explosive movement, and why it's better to move diagonally towards the assailant than to move away from him (it means the assailant has to turn further to track you). I'm not sure how effective I was in getting this stuff across, since I was essentially trying to compress a day of Gabe's Close Range Gunfighting class into less than half an hour. That's a lot to absorb in a short amount of time.
Our first exercise was a fairly simple drill, giving everyone a chance to get off the X to the one, three, nine, and eleven o'clock positions (I omitted five and seven o'clock since we did those back in April in our dog attack drills). Particularly for the new folks, we emphasized taking it slow. While explosive movement is called for in a fight, you have to walk before you can run, so if its your first time, moving and shooting at a walking pace is just fine.
Motionless Operators Ventilate Easily
This month's scenario integrates the moving and shooting skills into a fairly simple confrontation. You're walking down the street when confronted by several assailants. There happen to be two handy pieces of cover (a barrel and a barricade) a few yards away. This presents the opportunity to draw and shoot while moving to cover.
Since moving and shooting was a new concept for a lot of people, it's not surprising that some folks had a little trouble with it. The most common mistake was to draw while standing in place, then move to cover. As the name of the scenario implies, standing still is going to make it a lot easier for them to shoot you. If you aren't comfortable drawing and shooting on the move, in a scenario like this with cover close at hand it would be much better to move first, then draw, rather than the other way around.
The next most common mistake didn't have anything to do with moving. A lot of people tried to shoot over the barrel rather than around it. When you shoot over a piece of cover, you expose a lot more of yourself than you do shooting around the side. What's more, the additional area you expose (essentially from the eyebrows up) is a pretty important part of your body, and one where you really don't want to get shot. Going around the side is a much better solution. Getting down below relatively short cover can be difficult, particularly if you're tall (6'5" here), but if you don't want to get shot, it's important.
The new shooters displayed some of the typical new-shooter errors that we see a lot of. One fellow, shooting a DA/SA handgun left his decocker in the safety position and popped three perfectly good rounds out and reloaded a new magazine before he realized what the problem was. As Jeff Cooper said, "Don't get caught with your dingus down!" The heavy DA trigger pull makes DA/SA autos perfectly safe to carry without having the safety on. Use it to decock before holstering but immediately flip it back to the firing position.
Another new shooter displayed a problem that I'd never seen before. He was particularly vigorous in getting off the X, which is good. What wasn't so good is the mag carrier he was using for his spare magazines. He had one of the nylon double mag pouches with the velcro flaps. I'm not really a fan of these, since they tend to make it take a lot longer to access your extra magazines. This fellow had folded the flaps back into his belt to expose the magazines and make them much easier to access. Unfortunately, the sudden stop when he got to cover sent his extra mags flying out onto the ground, which he didn't realize until he'd dropped the mag out of the gun during a reload. A good, open topped magazine carrier that holds magazines securely while leaving them easy to access is by far the best solution for this problem.
I decided to mess with Robin Hood a bit. We distinguish targets from innocent bystanders using foam cutouts of guns that hang around the target's neck. To encourage people to look a little more closely, we also have some badges and to designate a target with a threat indicator as a cop. You're not supposed to shoot the cop. When his turn came up I put threat indicators and badges on two targets to represent cops and didn't put out any threats. Rather than a fire command or the beep of a timer, we start our scenarios with some appropriate verbal cue. With a mugging or robbery type situation, a typical start signal might be yelling "Gimme all your money!" If the threats just open fire, then the signal is "Bang! Bang! Bang!" Since there weren't any threats out there (and to give a somewhat subtle cue that they were cops) I started the scenario by yelling "Get your hands up!" Robin looked up, got off the X beautifully and shot the hell out of one of the cops on the way to cover. As soon as he got to cover, he yelled "Shit!" as he recognized what he'd done. Then he proceeded to ventilate the other target, not realizing that it, too, was a cop. Afterwards, I remarked that in real life the cops probably would have shot him when he drew, so he probably wouldn't have had a chance to shoot both of them. Small consolation I guess.
He had his revenge though. When I shot the scenario I looked up and drew, but the first thing I saw was a target with two threat indicators and a badge. I managed not to shoot the cop, but it startled me enough that I didn't actually shoot anything on the way to cover. Once I got to the barrel I shot the rest of the scenario from cover. He also hung a threat indicator around a pepper popper that happened to be sitting behind the area where we were shooting the scenario. It took me a while to see it and knock it down. He did the same to another shooter with a different popper, but that one wouldn't go down. Instead the shooter hit the foam gun cutout of the threat indicator and shot it right off the target.
Based on the performance during the scenario, four or five repetitions in a couple of hours definitely isn't enough to get someone used to drawing and shooting while moving explosively off the X. Heck, I'm not sure Gabe's two day course really provides enough practice to get comfortable with it. However, I do think what we did today managed to open a few people's eyes to the possibility. Several people remarked that getting off the X made perfect sense, but it was something they'd never even considered before.
Hand to Hand Disarms
Brianna and Lizette were nice enough to come back again this month and teach us some more hand to hand concepts. Last month we concentrated on gun grabs, taking the gun away from an assailant within arms reach. This month we worked on a set of techniques that could only loosely be called a disarm. Rather than going for the gun directly, it involves tying up the gun arm so the assailant can't shoot you and inflicting enough damage on him that he lets go of the gun.
This technique starts off the same steps as the gun takeaway we learned last month: put the hands up, get the adversary talking to slow down his reactions, step and pivot offline and knock the arm holding the gun aside. Rather than grabbing for the wrist, as we did last month, take a half step further in to get inside the muzzle and lock the gun arm between your arm and body, right under the armpit. Once you've got it locked in good and tight, preferably just below the wrist, there's no way he can turn the gun enough to shoot you.
With the gun arm tied up, the next step is to start inflicting punishment. We learned a fairly simple three step procedure: break the elbow, hit them in the throat, and take out a knee. Of course, there are many other possibilities, including drawing a weapon of your own.
Compared to the gun grab technique we learned last month,tying up the gun arm has the advantage of requiring less precision than going for the wrist and gun, perhaps making it a better choice in low light conditions. However, since the assailant keeps ahold of the gun while you're beating on him, he may let off multiple shots before you've inflicted enough pain to get him to drop it. If you have a good background behind you (a brick wall or an ATM) then this isn't really a problem. If your family is standing behind you, then a more direct gun grab may be appropriate (though even that will probably involve at least one shot).
Personally, I wouldn't be quite as confident with this technique as I would with the gun grab. Because there is a real potential for inflicting significant damage here, we weren't able to practice this at full speed since we didn't want anyone to end up with a broken elbow. In contrast, we could go pretty much full bore with the gun grab, as long as we took a few simple precautions (no fingers in the trigger guard or in register, lest they get dislocated).
Carbine Exercise
We had eight or nine folks stick around for the carbine exercise. We basically went through the same exercises we worked on out in the desert a couple of weeks ago. Robert did a great job explaining and demonstrating the techniques for us.
This was definitely an AR-centric crowd, with all but two of our shooters using them, including a very nice JP Rifles example. The JP was interesting in that, unlike the other rifles, it had a muzzle brake rather than a flash hider. This produced a noticeably bigger bang if you were standing behind him when he fired. I'd be interested to see what it looks like at night. In addition to the ARs, Robin Hood was shooting an AK and I had my XCR.
There were a variety of optics in evidence, including three EOTechs, an ACOG with a red dot mounted on top of it, a Trijicon reflex sight, an Aimpoint, and a low power variable scope. The AK was the only iron sighted rifle in the group. The fellow with the Trijicon was nice enough to give me a chance to look through it. I like my EOTech, but more and more I'm thinking that for a home defense rifle I want something that's always on, rather than messing about trying to get it turned on and adjusted when I hear a bump in the middle of the night. I'm considering the Aimpoint and the Trijicon reflex, and it was nice to have a chance to be able to get my hands on one to try it out.
Before we got started, we went over the carbine specific safety rules we'd worked out. Carbines are something new for the Utah Polite Society and during last month's shoot, we saw a few instances of rather scary gunhandling. These new rules (keeping rifles cased unless you're out on the range and slung unless you're actually firing) are intended to keep things safe while still allowing people to gain some experience in carrying around a rifle.
We started out the drill by explaining how to sling and unsling the rifle. Robert demonstrated slinging and unslinging from the weak side shoulder, muzzle down. Since I seem to be the only one around who favors the strong side shoulder I demoed slinging and unslinging from that side, again, muzzle down. We decided to mandate muzzle down carry both for easier deployment and to avoid problems where a shooter bends down to pick up something and ends up muzzle sweeping everyone with his muzzle-up rifle.
Robert demonstrated the various ready positions for us (high, low, field, indoor, and Rhodesian ready), as well as the standard shooting positions (offhand, squatting, kneeling, double kneeling, sitting, and prone). Following his demonstration, we each got a chance to try out the different positions. One thing I noticed was that people had a tendency to load their weapons using their strong side hand. This is a bad habit to get into, since it leaves you unable to shoot while manipulating a magazine. Even if you've only got the one round in the chamber it could be crucial if you need to shoot while performing a reload.
We had one really troublesome jam during the carbine exercise. Robert's AR wouldn't go into battery, even with vigorous use of the forward assist. We took a break and he went over to the safety area to try taking the rifle apart. It was about this time that we discovered that a hive of bees seems to have made it's home in one of the drawers of the safety area workbench. Because the bolt wouldn't go into battery, it was impossible to take down the normal way, by popping the rear pin out and withdrawing the bolt carrier. First Robert tried pulling off the stock, but then he realized that he could get the upper and lower apart with the bolt still in place by popping the forward disassembly pin. Once the rifle was broken down, we spotted the problem: a popped primer cup was in the area where the bolt lugs are supposed to lock up, preventing the bolt from locking up. With this removed, the rifle went back together and functioned fine for the rest of the afternoon.
I think there are a couple of good lessons here. First and most important, when you carry a rifle, it's important to carry a pistol as a backup. This was a fairly simple problem, one that did no permanent damage to the rifle. However, no immediate action drill would have fixed it. The only way to get back in the fight would have been to switch to another weapon. Second, don't get too locked into one way of doing things. Robert was so used to popping the back pin and removing the bolt carrier group that it took him quite a while to realize that he could pop the front pin and detach the lower that way.
With that little problem cleared up, we moved on to the stand up drill. You start out prone and fire two rounds at the target. Once you've shot you start standing up, scanning as you go. The RO calls out "fire" and you have to drop into the quickest stable position and shoot. If the RO times it right, you end up shooting double kneeling, kneeling, squat, and offhand.
It was almost 6 o'clock by the time we got finished up, which made for a very long, but productive day. I think we were a lot more organized than last month and things ran a lot more smoothly. Of course, having about half as many people probably helped too. Once again I'd like to thank Brianna, Lizette, and Robert for their efforts to expand our knowledge.
Rather than reorganizing things only the fly like we did last month, we were able to run things mostly according to the plan. We'd intended to do a pair of pistol exercises and some hand to hand stuff in the morning and the rifle stuff in the afternoon. We pretty much kept to the schedule, but the hand to hand slipped to the early afternoon, due to the amount of time it took to run everyone through the handgun exercises.
Rock Around the Clock
The focus of both this month's handgun exercises was on movement, specifically getting off the X with explosive movement. Several of us took Gabe Suarez's classes last year when we had him here in Salt Lake City, and we incorporated them into some of our drills in the Polite Society events in the next few months. However, it's been over a year, and we've picked up some new regulars since then, so I thought it was a good time to revisit moving and shooting.
I'd hoped to be able to do a moving and shooting demonstration called the Suicide Drill using airsoft guns, but Harold Green forgot to bring his airsoft stuff out so we had to improvise a little bit. I explained the basic principles of moving and shooting, including basic metal on meat point shooting, explosive movement, and why it's better to move diagonally towards the assailant than to move away from him (it means the assailant has to turn further to track you). I'm not sure how effective I was in getting this stuff across, since I was essentially trying to compress a day of Gabe's Close Range Gunfighting class into less than half an hour. That's a lot to absorb in a short amount of time.
Our first exercise was a fairly simple drill, giving everyone a chance to get off the X to the one, three, nine, and eleven o'clock positions (I omitted five and seven o'clock since we did those back in April in our dog attack drills). Particularly for the new folks, we emphasized taking it slow. While explosive movement is called for in a fight, you have to walk before you can run, so if its your first time, moving and shooting at a walking pace is just fine.
Motionless Operators Ventilate Easily
This month's scenario integrates the moving and shooting skills into a fairly simple confrontation. You're walking down the street when confronted by several assailants. There happen to be two handy pieces of cover (a barrel and a barricade) a few yards away. This presents the opportunity to draw and shoot while moving to cover.
Since moving and shooting was a new concept for a lot of people, it's not surprising that some folks had a little trouble with it. The most common mistake was to draw while standing in place, then move to cover. As the name of the scenario implies, standing still is going to make it a lot easier for them to shoot you. If you aren't comfortable drawing and shooting on the move, in a scenario like this with cover close at hand it would be much better to move first, then draw, rather than the other way around.
The next most common mistake didn't have anything to do with moving. A lot of people tried to shoot over the barrel rather than around it. When you shoot over a piece of cover, you expose a lot more of yourself than you do shooting around the side. What's more, the additional area you expose (essentially from the eyebrows up) is a pretty important part of your body, and one where you really don't want to get shot. Going around the side is a much better solution. Getting down below relatively short cover can be difficult, particularly if you're tall (6'5" here), but if you don't want to get shot, it's important.
The new shooters displayed some of the typical new-shooter errors that we see a lot of. One fellow, shooting a DA/SA handgun left his decocker in the safety position and popped three perfectly good rounds out and reloaded a new magazine before he realized what the problem was. As Jeff Cooper said, "Don't get caught with your dingus down!" The heavy DA trigger pull makes DA/SA autos perfectly safe to carry without having the safety on. Use it to decock before holstering but immediately flip it back to the firing position.
Another new shooter displayed a problem that I'd never seen before. He was particularly vigorous in getting off the X, which is good. What wasn't so good is the mag carrier he was using for his spare magazines. He had one of the nylon double mag pouches with the velcro flaps. I'm not really a fan of these, since they tend to make it take a lot longer to access your extra magazines. This fellow had folded the flaps back into his belt to expose the magazines and make them much easier to access. Unfortunately, the sudden stop when he got to cover sent his extra mags flying out onto the ground, which he didn't realize until he'd dropped the mag out of the gun during a reload. A good, open topped magazine carrier that holds magazines securely while leaving them easy to access is by far the best solution for this problem.
I decided to mess with Robin Hood a bit. We distinguish targets from innocent bystanders using foam cutouts of guns that hang around the target's neck. To encourage people to look a little more closely, we also have some badges and to designate a target with a threat indicator as a cop. You're not supposed to shoot the cop. When his turn came up I put threat indicators and badges on two targets to represent cops and didn't put out any threats. Rather than a fire command or the beep of a timer, we start our scenarios with some appropriate verbal cue. With a mugging or robbery type situation, a typical start signal might be yelling "Gimme all your money!" If the threats just open fire, then the signal is "Bang! Bang! Bang!" Since there weren't any threats out there (and to give a somewhat subtle cue that they were cops) I started the scenario by yelling "Get your hands up!" Robin looked up, got off the X beautifully and shot the hell out of one of the cops on the way to cover. As soon as he got to cover, he yelled "Shit!" as he recognized what he'd done. Then he proceeded to ventilate the other target, not realizing that it, too, was a cop. Afterwards, I remarked that in real life the cops probably would have shot him when he drew, so he probably wouldn't have had a chance to shoot both of them. Small consolation I guess.
He had his revenge though. When I shot the scenario I looked up and drew, but the first thing I saw was a target with two threat indicators and a badge. I managed not to shoot the cop, but it startled me enough that I didn't actually shoot anything on the way to cover. Once I got to the barrel I shot the rest of the scenario from cover. He also hung a threat indicator around a pepper popper that happened to be sitting behind the area where we were shooting the scenario. It took me a while to see it and knock it down. He did the same to another shooter with a different popper, but that one wouldn't go down. Instead the shooter hit the foam gun cutout of the threat indicator and shot it right off the target.
Based on the performance during the scenario, four or five repetitions in a couple of hours definitely isn't enough to get someone used to drawing and shooting while moving explosively off the X. Heck, I'm not sure Gabe's two day course really provides enough practice to get comfortable with it. However, I do think what we did today managed to open a few people's eyes to the possibility. Several people remarked that getting off the X made perfect sense, but it was something they'd never even considered before.
Hand to Hand Disarms
Brianna and Lizette were nice enough to come back again this month and teach us some more hand to hand concepts. Last month we concentrated on gun grabs, taking the gun away from an assailant within arms reach. This month we worked on a set of techniques that could only loosely be called a disarm. Rather than going for the gun directly, it involves tying up the gun arm so the assailant can't shoot you and inflicting enough damage on him that he lets go of the gun.
This technique starts off the same steps as the gun takeaway we learned last month: put the hands up, get the adversary talking to slow down his reactions, step and pivot offline and knock the arm holding the gun aside. Rather than grabbing for the wrist, as we did last month, take a half step further in to get inside the muzzle and lock the gun arm between your arm and body, right under the armpit. Once you've got it locked in good and tight, preferably just below the wrist, there's no way he can turn the gun enough to shoot you.
With the gun arm tied up, the next step is to start inflicting punishment. We learned a fairly simple three step procedure: break the elbow, hit them in the throat, and take out a knee. Of course, there are many other possibilities, including drawing a weapon of your own.
Compared to the gun grab technique we learned last month,tying up the gun arm has the advantage of requiring less precision than going for the wrist and gun, perhaps making it a better choice in low light conditions. However, since the assailant keeps ahold of the gun while you're beating on him, he may let off multiple shots before you've inflicted enough pain to get him to drop it. If you have a good background behind you (a brick wall or an ATM) then this isn't really a problem. If your family is standing behind you, then a more direct gun grab may be appropriate (though even that will probably involve at least one shot).
Personally, I wouldn't be quite as confident with this technique as I would with the gun grab. Because there is a real potential for inflicting significant damage here, we weren't able to practice this at full speed since we didn't want anyone to end up with a broken elbow. In contrast, we could go pretty much full bore with the gun grab, as long as we took a few simple precautions (no fingers in the trigger guard or in register, lest they get dislocated).
Carbine Exercise
We had eight or nine folks stick around for the carbine exercise. We basically went through the same exercises we worked on out in the desert a couple of weeks ago. Robert did a great job explaining and demonstrating the techniques for us.
This was definitely an AR-centric crowd, with all but two of our shooters using them, including a very nice JP Rifles example. The JP was interesting in that, unlike the other rifles, it had a muzzle brake rather than a flash hider. This produced a noticeably bigger bang if you were standing behind him when he fired. I'd be interested to see what it looks like at night. In addition to the ARs, Robin Hood was shooting an AK and I had my XCR.
There were a variety of optics in evidence, including three EOTechs, an ACOG with a red dot mounted on top of it, a Trijicon reflex sight, an Aimpoint, and a low power variable scope. The AK was the only iron sighted rifle in the group. The fellow with the Trijicon was nice enough to give me a chance to look through it. I like my EOTech, but more and more I'm thinking that for a home defense rifle I want something that's always on, rather than messing about trying to get it turned on and adjusted when I hear a bump in the middle of the night. I'm considering the Aimpoint and the Trijicon reflex, and it was nice to have a chance to be able to get my hands on one to try it out.
Before we got started, we went over the carbine specific safety rules we'd worked out. Carbines are something new for the Utah Polite Society and during last month's shoot, we saw a few instances of rather scary gunhandling. These new rules (keeping rifles cased unless you're out on the range and slung unless you're actually firing) are intended to keep things safe while still allowing people to gain some experience in carrying around a rifle.
We started out the drill by explaining how to sling and unsling the rifle. Robert demonstrated slinging and unslinging from the weak side shoulder, muzzle down. Since I seem to be the only one around who favors the strong side shoulder I demoed slinging and unslinging from that side, again, muzzle down. We decided to mandate muzzle down carry both for easier deployment and to avoid problems where a shooter bends down to pick up something and ends up muzzle sweeping everyone with his muzzle-up rifle.
Robert demonstrated the various ready positions for us (high, low, field, indoor, and Rhodesian ready), as well as the standard shooting positions (offhand, squatting, kneeling, double kneeling, sitting, and prone). Following his demonstration, we each got a chance to try out the different positions. One thing I noticed was that people had a tendency to load their weapons using their strong side hand. This is a bad habit to get into, since it leaves you unable to shoot while manipulating a magazine. Even if you've only got the one round in the chamber it could be crucial if you need to shoot while performing a reload.
We had one really troublesome jam during the carbine exercise. Robert's AR wouldn't go into battery, even with vigorous use of the forward assist. We took a break and he went over to the safety area to try taking the rifle apart. It was about this time that we discovered that a hive of bees seems to have made it's home in one of the drawers of the safety area workbench. Because the bolt wouldn't go into battery, it was impossible to take down the normal way, by popping the rear pin out and withdrawing the bolt carrier. First Robert tried pulling off the stock, but then he realized that he could get the upper and lower apart with the bolt still in place by popping the forward disassembly pin. Once the rifle was broken down, we spotted the problem: a popped primer cup was in the area where the bolt lugs are supposed to lock up, preventing the bolt from locking up. With this removed, the rifle went back together and functioned fine for the rest of the afternoon.
I think there are a couple of good lessons here. First and most important, when you carry a rifle, it's important to carry a pistol as a backup. This was a fairly simple problem, one that did no permanent damage to the rifle. However, no immediate action drill would have fixed it. The only way to get back in the fight would have been to switch to another weapon. Second, don't get too locked into one way of doing things. Robert was so used to popping the back pin and removing the bolt carrier group that it took him quite a while to realize that he could pop the front pin and detach the lower that way.
With that little problem cleared up, we moved on to the stand up drill. You start out prone and fire two rounds at the target. Once you've shot you start standing up, scanning as you go. The RO calls out "fire" and you have to drop into the quickest stable position and shoot. If the RO times it right, you end up shooting double kneeling, kneeling, squat, and offhand.
It was almost 6 o'clock by the time we got finished up, which made for a very long, but productive day. I think we were a lot more organized than last month and things ran a lot more smoothly. Of course, having about half as many people probably helped too. Once again I'd like to thank Brianna, Lizette, and Robert for their efforts to expand our knowledge.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
June Desert Shoot Event Report
Sometimes, things don't go according to plan. In this case, I think that probably ended up being a good thing. We'd planned to go out to Skull Valley and do some 360 degree pistol shooting (using a canyon that provides an all around backstop) and take advantage of the longer ranges to do some rifle stuff that we can't do at our usual shooting range. The pistol scenarios ended up going by the wayside, as did two of the rifle exercises we had planned, in favor of a lot of basic rifle stuff. However, I think the stuff we did do will pay big dividends in the carbine events we're doing at our regular monthly shoots. Robert's going to be teaching carbine stuff again at our July event and I think what we did out in the desert got us well prepared for that.
We all met up out at a truck stop west of Salt Lake for some breakfast. There were only five of us for this event, all regulars at our monthly events. I think the small group of people helped make the day a lot more productive, as did the fact that we all knew and trusted each other in terms of safety, gunhandling and the like. After breakfast we headed out to Skull Valley. It was pretty hot and dry out there in the desert. We all slathered on the sunblock and I'm glad we had some shade available so that we could get out of the sun. We also went through a lot of water and soda to keep ourselves hydrated.
Gear
We had a wide variety of different rifles on display. I spent the whole day shooting with my Robinson Armament XCR. I also brought my .223 Norinco AK, but it never made it out of the case. The AR system was well represented with two regular rifles and one HK 416. Robin Hood switched back and forth between his Mini-14 and the AK that he just finished putting together from a flat and a parts kit. He also put a few rounds through a pump action .30-06. One interesting difference I noticed when the rifles were lying side by side on the table was the details of the AR style magwells. The regular AR had a little flare at the mag well, my XCR had somewhat more, and the HK practically had a huge funnel to help guide mags in. While it didn't make a difference today, there were a fair variety of different muzzle brakes/flash hiders on display: two birdcages, a Vortex, a ban-era bare barrel, and a slant brake on the AK. We're planning on having a carbine stage during our night shoot next month and I'm looking forward to seeing how much of a difference the various flash hiders make.
This was hardly a high-volume stress test (we spent more time talking than shooting), but all the guns ran just fine except the 06. Robin only shot about ten rounds through it and about half of them had extraction problems (one of which required banging the butt on the ground while pulling down on the fore end). The primers in the spent casings were completely flat, so this rifle seems to have a tight bore, leading to very high pressures.
Robert and I ran EOTechs on our rifles. The reticule was still plenty bright, even in the very bright sunlight with a light colored background, though I was on the two brightest settings all day. The 416 had an ACOG, while the other AR and the Mini were fitted with low power variable scopes. The AK and the 06 were iron sights only.
I carried my spare mags in my Hawkepack Rifle Bug Out Bag. I've used it as a range bag before but this is the first time I've really used it as a fighting bag. It generally seemed to work pretty well. It was a bit hard to find the magazine when reloading while prone, but some practice ought to fix that. The only real problem I ran into was when flopping down prone (rather than descending to prone more slowly and carefully) the bag had a tendency to end up underneath me. People have suggested attaching the bag to the belt with a carabiner or short length of bungee cord to help keep it in place, and I think I'm going to try that. I also found that the pad on the shoulder strap tended to end up right where I wanted the stock of my rifle to go, making it difficult to keep the stock in the right place. The pad got shoved to the back for the rest of the day and it came off the strap entirely as soon as I got home. Robin Hood had a shoulder bag for his AK mags. Other folks used a belt carrier, a three mag thigh rig, or just stuck their mag in a pocket.
I used my MagPul PMAGs all day and I'm really happy with them. I just ordered a big batch to build up my supply. The 416 ran the steel HK mags, while the rest of the AR shooters used aluminum GI mags of one description or another. Robin shot his AK using some nifty transparent plastic mags.
Shooting
We started out by sighting in at 25 and 100 yards. I found the hundred yard sight-in kind of difficult with my EOTech. Even with the EOTech's relatively fine center dot compared to some other sights, it still complete obscured the square in the middle of the target we were using. The guys with magnifying optics were getting much better groups. I need to get out and do some more longer ranged shooting.
Once everyone was sighted in, we moved all the targets to 50 yards and started going through the basics. We spent quite a bit of time talking about slinging and unslinging rifles. Partly this was preparation for next month's event. There were a couple of instances of careless gunhandling last month, so we're going to emphasize keeping rifles cased or slung, and for some folks this is clearly going to require some education on proper techniques for slinging and unslinging without muzzling everybody with their rifle.
When you get down to the nitty gritty of safely slinging and unslinging a rifle how the rifle sling is set up really makes a difference. Slinging a rifle with a two point sling mounted to the side is somewhat different than slinging one with the sling mounted to the bottom. Three of us had Vickers' slings on our rifles, two on the side and one on the bottom. The other AR had a simple carry strap and the Mini sported a leather shooting sling. The newly built AK was still slingless.
After that we moved on to some simple shooting drills from various ready positions (low ready, high ready, indoor low ready, and field ready). Honestly, I'm not really seeing the usefulness of field ready (butt on the hip and muzzle up at eye level). High ready is very fast, low ready slower but easier to maintain and indoor low ready good for operating in confined spaces. A good two point sling like the Vickers makes it easy to maintain indoor low ready for a long time since you can just let the gun hang there with your hands on the grips. The EOTech is pretty forgiving about an inconsistent cheek weld, but I still ought to do some dry practice to mount the gun more consistently for iron sights. Also I found that 50 yards is getting a little long for offhand shooting for me (another place where more practice is required), but I could still shoot minute of man at that distance. Even for a relative novice, rifles are a lot easier to shoot and more forgiving than a pistol.
After breaking for lunch (Harold Green cooked up some nice steaks) we moved from offhand to more stable sitting positions (squat, kneeling, sitting, prone). One thing that we found was that not everybody could shoot all of the positions. Squating, in particular, was difficult for some people. Kneeling, sitting and prone were considerably more forgiving. All of these positions make hitting targets at range a lot easier. Prone at 50 yards even headshots are fairly easy (particularly since a rifle zeroed at 200 is about dead on at this distance). If you can get lower and more stable, get lower and more stable!
For these drills, we also switched from everyone shooting at once to one person stepping forward and shooting at a time. The initial impetus for this was to keep those of us down at the right end of the line from getting pelted with brass, but it also provides more opportunity for non-shooters to observe and critique the shooter's technique.
One of the things we noticed watching each other shoot was that there was a tendency for some of us to use the shooting hand to lower ourselves into or boost ourselves out of the sitting and prone positions. We tried out a little impromptu drill to combat this tenancy: You start out prone and fires two shots at the target. You then start getting up. As you get up, the RO calls out 'fire' and you have to shoot from whatever position you can settle into quickly (double knee, kneeling, offhand). It really makes you think about maintaining a fighting position at all times, rather than just moving from one position to another.
Overall, what we covered out in the desert was more limited and basic than we had planned, but I think it's going to pay dividends down the line when we're trying to do carbine stuff at future monthly shoots. Not only do we have a pretty good idea of what we're doing next month, those of us who were out there in the desert know enough to really help Robert out when it comes to teaching folks carbine stuff. Now all we have to do is stay one month ahead of everybody else and we'll be set.
We all met up out at a truck stop west of Salt Lake for some breakfast. There were only five of us for this event, all regulars at our monthly events. I think the small group of people helped make the day a lot more productive, as did the fact that we all knew and trusted each other in terms of safety, gunhandling and the like. After breakfast we headed out to Skull Valley. It was pretty hot and dry out there in the desert. We all slathered on the sunblock and I'm glad we had some shade available so that we could get out of the sun. We also went through a lot of water and soda to keep ourselves hydrated.
Gear
We had a wide variety of different rifles on display. I spent the whole day shooting with my Robinson Armament XCR. I also brought my .223 Norinco AK, but it never made it out of the case. The AR system was well represented with two regular rifles and one HK 416. Robin Hood switched back and forth between his Mini-14 and the AK that he just finished putting together from a flat and a parts kit. He also put a few rounds through a pump action .30-06. One interesting difference I noticed when the rifles were lying side by side on the table was the details of the AR style magwells. The regular AR had a little flare at the mag well, my XCR had somewhat more, and the HK practically had a huge funnel to help guide mags in. While it didn't make a difference today, there were a fair variety of different muzzle brakes/flash hiders on display: two birdcages, a Vortex, a ban-era bare barrel, and a slant brake on the AK. We're planning on having a carbine stage during our night shoot next month and I'm looking forward to seeing how much of a difference the various flash hiders make.
This was hardly a high-volume stress test (we spent more time talking than shooting), but all the guns ran just fine except the 06. Robin only shot about ten rounds through it and about half of them had extraction problems (one of which required banging the butt on the ground while pulling down on the fore end). The primers in the spent casings were completely flat, so this rifle seems to have a tight bore, leading to very high pressures.
Robert and I ran EOTechs on our rifles. The reticule was still plenty bright, even in the very bright sunlight with a light colored background, though I was on the two brightest settings all day. The 416 had an ACOG, while the other AR and the Mini were fitted with low power variable scopes. The AK and the 06 were iron sights only.
I carried my spare mags in my Hawkepack Rifle Bug Out Bag. I've used it as a range bag before but this is the first time I've really used it as a fighting bag. It generally seemed to work pretty well. It was a bit hard to find the magazine when reloading while prone, but some practice ought to fix that. The only real problem I ran into was when flopping down prone (rather than descending to prone more slowly and carefully) the bag had a tendency to end up underneath me. People have suggested attaching the bag to the belt with a carabiner or short length of bungee cord to help keep it in place, and I think I'm going to try that. I also found that the pad on the shoulder strap tended to end up right where I wanted the stock of my rifle to go, making it difficult to keep the stock in the right place. The pad got shoved to the back for the rest of the day and it came off the strap entirely as soon as I got home. Robin Hood had a shoulder bag for his AK mags. Other folks used a belt carrier, a three mag thigh rig, or just stuck their mag in a pocket.
I used my MagPul PMAGs all day and I'm really happy with them. I just ordered a big batch to build up my supply. The 416 ran the steel HK mags, while the rest of the AR shooters used aluminum GI mags of one description or another. Robin shot his AK using some nifty transparent plastic mags.
Shooting
We started out by sighting in at 25 and 100 yards. I found the hundred yard sight-in kind of difficult with my EOTech. Even with the EOTech's relatively fine center dot compared to some other sights, it still complete obscured the square in the middle of the target we were using. The guys with magnifying optics were getting much better groups. I need to get out and do some more longer ranged shooting.
Once everyone was sighted in, we moved all the targets to 50 yards and started going through the basics. We spent quite a bit of time talking about slinging and unslinging rifles. Partly this was preparation for next month's event. There were a couple of instances of careless gunhandling last month, so we're going to emphasize keeping rifles cased or slung, and for some folks this is clearly going to require some education on proper techniques for slinging and unslinging without muzzling everybody with their rifle.
When you get down to the nitty gritty of safely slinging and unslinging a rifle how the rifle sling is set up really makes a difference. Slinging a rifle with a two point sling mounted to the side is somewhat different than slinging one with the sling mounted to the bottom. Three of us had Vickers' slings on our rifles, two on the side and one on the bottom. The other AR had a simple carry strap and the Mini sported a leather shooting sling. The newly built AK was still slingless.
After that we moved on to some simple shooting drills from various ready positions (low ready, high ready, indoor low ready, and field ready). Honestly, I'm not really seeing the usefulness of field ready (butt on the hip and muzzle up at eye level). High ready is very fast, low ready slower but easier to maintain and indoor low ready good for operating in confined spaces. A good two point sling like the Vickers makes it easy to maintain indoor low ready for a long time since you can just let the gun hang there with your hands on the grips. The EOTech is pretty forgiving about an inconsistent cheek weld, but I still ought to do some dry practice to mount the gun more consistently for iron sights. Also I found that 50 yards is getting a little long for offhand shooting for me (another place where more practice is required), but I could still shoot minute of man at that distance. Even for a relative novice, rifles are a lot easier to shoot and more forgiving than a pistol.
After breaking for lunch (Harold Green cooked up some nice steaks) we moved from offhand to more stable sitting positions (squat, kneeling, sitting, prone). One thing that we found was that not everybody could shoot all of the positions. Squating, in particular, was difficult for some people. Kneeling, sitting and prone were considerably more forgiving. All of these positions make hitting targets at range a lot easier. Prone at 50 yards even headshots are fairly easy (particularly since a rifle zeroed at 200 is about dead on at this distance). If you can get lower and more stable, get lower and more stable!
For these drills, we also switched from everyone shooting at once to one person stepping forward and shooting at a time. The initial impetus for this was to keep those of us down at the right end of the line from getting pelted with brass, but it also provides more opportunity for non-shooters to observe and critique the shooter's technique.
One of the things we noticed watching each other shoot was that there was a tendency for some of us to use the shooting hand to lower ourselves into or boost ourselves out of the sitting and prone positions. We tried out a little impromptu drill to combat this tenancy: You start out prone and fires two shots at the target. You then start getting up. As you get up, the RO calls out 'fire' and you have to shoot from whatever position you can settle into quickly (double knee, kneeling, offhand). It really makes you think about maintaining a fighting position at all times, rather than just moving from one position to another.
Overall, what we covered out in the desert was more limited and basic than we had planned, but I think it's going to pay dividends down the line when we're trying to do carbine stuff at future monthly shoots. Not only do we have a pretty good idea of what we're doing next month, those of us who were out there in the desert know enough to really help Robert out when it comes to teaching folks carbine stuff. Now all we have to do is stay one month ahead of everybody else and we'll be set.
Mother's Day Class
A couple of weeks ago I helped teach a Mothers Day Course for novice female shooters. This isn't exactly a Utah Polite Society event, but it was kind of interesting and I thought I'd write it up here anyway. It was organized by Weldon Anderson, one of our members who teaches Utah CCW courses though his company, Self Defense Solutions. We get a lot of our new shooters through Weldon, since he highly recommends getting more advanced training in his CCW classes. Weldon asked his friend Paul, Harold Green, and I to help out with this class. I really enjoy teaching people to shoot. Lately I've been spending most of my time at our events running drills and scenarios. Running the stages does involve quite a bit of teaching, but it's usually somewhat more advanced stuff like using cover or making tactical decisions. Harold Green and Robin Hood have been handling most of our new shooter instruction. While I like teaching the more advanced things, I enjoy teaching new shooters as well, so I jumped at the chance to help out.
The astute among you will note that Mother's Day was over a month ago. The class was held on Mother's Day weekend in years past, but the weather in early May isn't always nice (Hendrickson Range is just down the road from Park City, so it's at a fairly high elevation). Doing this in June makes pleasant conditions more likely. Nevertheless, the Mother's Day name stuck. The class was for women only, to give them a chance to shoot without having their husband/boyfriend/father looking over their shoulder while they're learning to shoot. It's aimed at novices, but the level of experience varied from those who have never shot a gun before to those that had a fair bit of shooting experience, but no formal training. There were a little less than 20 ladies in the class.
Weldon spent about half an hour going through range safety procedures, basic shooting skills and operational procedures for each type of gun. He also gave Harold and I a chance to shill for the Utah Polite Society. Some of the ladies seemed fairly receptive, but some of them were looking at us a bit askance. That's to be expected, I guess, many of these ladies were generally quite new at this and I'm not sure some of them were really ready for our emphasis on defensive handgunning. After the lecture portion of the evening was finished we split up into two groups, with half the class staying with Weldon and Paul and the other half coming with Harold and I. Harold is an experienced revolver shooter (though he carries a Glock these days) so we took all the ladies with revolvers (some of whom also brought semi-autos) plus a few more to balance the groups.
We started out by explaining the operating procedures of their guns to the ladies that needed some instruction in that area. Quite a few did. Even those that had shot before didn't necessarily know how to load, unload, or otherwise operate the pistol they had brought. Guys, if you take your gal out shooting, don't just put a loaded pistol in her hand, teach her how to operate the gun.
There was quite a variety of guns on display. Everything from Single Action Army clones in .22 long rifle to a S&W M&P semi-auto. Probably the most common single type of gun was the .38/.357 caliber snubnose revolver. This is, unfortunately, rather typical. There is a tendency to push novice shooters, particularly women, towards snubnose revolvers because they are fairly simple, small, and easy to carry. I think this does them a disservice, however. The snubnosed revolver is an easy weapon to learn, but a difficult one to master. There's very little to learn as far as operating procedures and not much that can go wrong, but the long double action trigger pull and short sight radius makes them very difficult to shoot well without a lot of practice. In the right hands, it they can be effective self defense tools, but it takes a long time to get to that level. As I said in my article on Choosing a Defensive Handgun, I think new shooters a much better off with a point and shoot semi-auto, like a Glock, XD, M&P, or similar gun.
Explaining the operational procedures for most guns was fairly easy. The one really odd one was a Phoenix Arms .22 semi-auto. This little mechanical wonder has two separate manual safeties (one on the frame, one on the slide). More disturbingly, you can't rack the slide unless there is a magazine inserted, meaning the standard procedure for clearing a semi-auto (drop the magazine, lock the slide back, inspect) is impossible, since there has to be a magazine in the gun to rack the slide and the magazine cannot be ejected with the slide back. This just seems like an invitation to a mistake during the unloading process that could lead to an ND.
A few of the ladies had arrived at the course without a pistol. Harold got them set up with a Walther P22, which they seemed to enjoy shooting. These gals also expressed interest in shooting his Glock 22, so he let each of them run some rounds through it, which they also seemed to enjoy quite a bit.
Once everyone knew how to load and operate their guns, we got started shooting. Some of the ladies were a little hesitant at first, but we eventually got everyone shooting. Muzzle discipline was very good, finger discipline somewhat less so. Shooting abilites varied pretty widely, as some gals had nice tight groups at about 5 yards, while other's had trouble staying on the 8.5"x11" paper the bullseye was on.
One of the ladies was consistently placing her shots no higher than 2" below the center of the target. I figured this was a flinching problem, so I had her dry fire through a cylinder, then shoot another cylinder with mixed dry fire and live. Every time she pulled the trigger on a dry chamber, you could see the gun jerk downward a little bit. The flinch was pretty obvious. I perscribed lots of dry fire practice and mixing dummy and live rounds in her gun at the range.
One of the ladies brought both a box of .38 Special and one of .357 magnum for her revolver. After she shot her way through the .38, she switched over to the magnum loads. Even standing next to her, the difference was notable. At her urging, I shot a cylinder full of the magnums, and I have to say that the recoil was pretty brisk, even in a steel framed gun. I can imagine that magnum loads in a scandium gun would be downright painful.
I hadn't gotten a chance to put any rounds through my own gun the whole night, so after most of the gals had left I decided to run a mag through my Glock. I drew and shot 14 rounds of fairly rapid sighted fire. When I went to slide lock, I did an emergency reload, got back on target, then reholstered. As I did so, I heard a voice from the other end of the firing line say, "Woah, that was cool! I want to learn how to do that." She was evidently quite impressed by the reload. So, I think we may have gotten one or two of them interested enough to show up to a Utah Polite Society event in the future.
Overall, I had quite a bit of fun. I always enjoy teaching and it's very rewarding to help introduce novice shooters to the discipline. All the ladies seemed to enjoy it and I think the all were able to get something out of the experience. As for me, the big grin that tends to appear on the face of someone who's just been introudced to something as fun as shooting is it's own reward.
The astute among you will note that Mother's Day was over a month ago. The class was held on Mother's Day weekend in years past, but the weather in early May isn't always nice (Hendrickson Range is just down the road from Park City, so it's at a fairly high elevation). Doing this in June makes pleasant conditions more likely. Nevertheless, the Mother's Day name stuck. The class was for women only, to give them a chance to shoot without having their husband/boyfriend/father looking over their shoulder while they're learning to shoot. It's aimed at novices, but the level of experience varied from those who have never shot a gun before to those that had a fair bit of shooting experience, but no formal training. There were a little less than 20 ladies in the class.
Weldon spent about half an hour going through range safety procedures, basic shooting skills and operational procedures for each type of gun. He also gave Harold and I a chance to shill for the Utah Polite Society. Some of the ladies seemed fairly receptive, but some of them were looking at us a bit askance. That's to be expected, I guess, many of these ladies were generally quite new at this and I'm not sure some of them were really ready for our emphasis on defensive handgunning. After the lecture portion of the evening was finished we split up into two groups, with half the class staying with Weldon and Paul and the other half coming with Harold and I. Harold is an experienced revolver shooter (though he carries a Glock these days) so we took all the ladies with revolvers (some of whom also brought semi-autos) plus a few more to balance the groups.
We started out by explaining the operating procedures of their guns to the ladies that needed some instruction in that area. Quite a few did. Even those that had shot before didn't necessarily know how to load, unload, or otherwise operate the pistol they had brought. Guys, if you take your gal out shooting, don't just put a loaded pistol in her hand, teach her how to operate the gun.
There was quite a variety of guns on display. Everything from Single Action Army clones in .22 long rifle to a S&W M&P semi-auto. Probably the most common single type of gun was the .38/.357 caliber snubnose revolver. This is, unfortunately, rather typical. There is a tendency to push novice shooters, particularly women, towards snubnose revolvers because they are fairly simple, small, and easy to carry. I think this does them a disservice, however. The snubnosed revolver is an easy weapon to learn, but a difficult one to master. There's very little to learn as far as operating procedures and not much that can go wrong, but the long double action trigger pull and short sight radius makes them very difficult to shoot well without a lot of practice. In the right hands, it they can be effective self defense tools, but it takes a long time to get to that level. As I said in my article on Choosing a Defensive Handgun, I think new shooters a much better off with a point and shoot semi-auto, like a Glock, XD, M&P, or similar gun.
Explaining the operational procedures for most guns was fairly easy. The one really odd one was a Phoenix Arms .22 semi-auto. This little mechanical wonder has two separate manual safeties (one on the frame, one on the slide). More disturbingly, you can't rack the slide unless there is a magazine inserted, meaning the standard procedure for clearing a semi-auto (drop the magazine, lock the slide back, inspect) is impossible, since there has to be a magazine in the gun to rack the slide and the magazine cannot be ejected with the slide back. This just seems like an invitation to a mistake during the unloading process that could lead to an ND.
A few of the ladies had arrived at the course without a pistol. Harold got them set up with a Walther P22, which they seemed to enjoy shooting. These gals also expressed interest in shooting his Glock 22, so he let each of them run some rounds through it, which they also seemed to enjoy quite a bit.
Once everyone knew how to load and operate their guns, we got started shooting. Some of the ladies were a little hesitant at first, but we eventually got everyone shooting. Muzzle discipline was very good, finger discipline somewhat less so. Shooting abilites varied pretty widely, as some gals had nice tight groups at about 5 yards, while other's had trouble staying on the 8.5"x11" paper the bullseye was on.
One of the ladies was consistently placing her shots no higher than 2" below the center of the target. I figured this was a flinching problem, so I had her dry fire through a cylinder, then shoot another cylinder with mixed dry fire and live. Every time she pulled the trigger on a dry chamber, you could see the gun jerk downward a little bit. The flinch was pretty obvious. I perscribed lots of dry fire practice and mixing dummy and live rounds in her gun at the range.
One of the ladies brought both a box of .38 Special and one of .357 magnum for her revolver. After she shot her way through the .38, she switched over to the magnum loads. Even standing next to her, the difference was notable. At her urging, I shot a cylinder full of the magnums, and I have to say that the recoil was pretty brisk, even in a steel framed gun. I can imagine that magnum loads in a scandium gun would be downright painful.
I hadn't gotten a chance to put any rounds through my own gun the whole night, so after most of the gals had left I decided to run a mag through my Glock. I drew and shot 14 rounds of fairly rapid sighted fire. When I went to slide lock, I did an emergency reload, got back on target, then reholstered. As I did so, I heard a voice from the other end of the firing line say, "Woah, that was cool! I want to learn how to do that." She was evidently quite impressed by the reload. So, I think we may have gotten one or two of them interested enough to show up to a Utah Polite Society event in the future.
Overall, I had quite a bit of fun. I always enjoy teaching and it's very rewarding to help introduce novice shooters to the discipline. All the ladies seemed to enjoy it and I think the all were able to get something out of the experience. As for me, the big grin that tends to appear on the face of someone who's just been introudced to something as fun as shooting is it's own reward.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
June Event Report
This month's Utah Polite Society event was a bit different from our usual fare. Generally, we do two drills and two scenarios with pistols. We're usually done by around noon or one o'clock. This month we only did one pistol drill and one scenario, but added some training on hand to hand disarming techniques and the first of several carbine classes. With all these activities, the event was planned to last all day, rather than just the morning.
Because of the unusually large number of people, we had to reorganize things on the fly. The plan was to run the pistol exercises first, followed by the disarm drills, break for lunch, and do the carbine stuff in the afternoon. With the huge number of people we had it would have taken all morning and part of the afternoon just to run everyone through the pistol exercises. Instead we rented the 25 yard range next door and took over part of the road up to the range for the hand to hand stuff so we could run all three events in parallel, rather than serially.
Any Which Way You Can
Both the pistol drill and the scenario this month were built around the idea of shooting while lying down. Getting knocked down in a fight is a very real possibility, but we practice most of our shooting standing, or occasionally kneeling. Being able to shoot from the ground is an important skill. These drills focused on shooting from the ground at up-close and personal opponents. Prone positions are also useful for using a pistol against a long range adversary, but that's an exercise for some other month.
Shooting from the ground, even sideways or upside down, can be just as accurate as shooting from a more normal position. However, it does require concentration. When shooting from conventional positions, we have the advantage of muscle memory to help keep everything lined up right. Shooting sideways or upside-down is not something most of us are really used to, and it takes more concentration to keep the sights lined up from these unusual shooting positions. As long as you keep the sights in alignment it's possible to shoot quite accurately, at least at close ranges. At longer ranges, however, differences in the alignment of the sights and the bore will come into play when shooting sideways or upside down. The only other caveat involves recoil control, which can be more difficult from these positions, particularly upside-down. It's probably best to slow things down a little bit.
I'm Not Going to Take This Lying Down
The Charlie's Angels ready position (also called the "Sabrina" after a character on that show) is a lousy idea for two reasons. First, it makes it easy for someone to take the gun away from you. All they have to do is prevent you from bringing the gun forward with one hand and twist the firearm out of your grip with the other. In a low ready position, if they try to grab the gun and shove it downward, all you have to do is fall backwards and the gun will come up on target. The second reason for eschewing the Sabrina is for safety purposes. We're on an outdoor range and there is no backstop in that direction. What goes up must come down, and when it does it's gonna hurt.
Disarms
Hand to hand skills are certainly a hole in my skill set. One of the things the Interactive Gunfighting class we took from Gabe Suarez last year made evident to me is that an opponent is only really a gun problem if he's beyond about three yards. An opponent within arms reach is a hand to hand problem rather than a gun problem (assailants out of arms reach but within three yards are in a sort of grey area where there are no really good solutions, merely "die less often" techniques).
I have to say right off, Brianna and Lizette did a really good job. They did an excellent job explaining what you needed to do and critiquing your technique during practice. I'm really glad we were able to get them to do this. Harold Green also put together some nice wooden practice guns for us. You can use red guns for this kind of thing, but if anyone leaves their trigger finger inside the trigger guard there's a good chance it's going to end up broken or sprained.
Some of us learned some disarm techniques when we took a class from Gabe Suarez last year. The techniques Brianna taught were similar in their general principles, but somewhat different in detail. She taught three techniques, one for when you are facing an adversary who has a gun pointed at your torso, one for an adversary with a gun pointed at your head, and one for an adversary pointing a gun at you from behind. While there are differences, all three have common elements and all three follow the same basic steps.
The first step in this is to put your hands up, whether or not the assailant asks you to. This may put him at ease and give a feeling of power, but it also gets your hands into position for what's going to happen next. It can also be a good idea to start talking to the attacker, particularly asking him a question such as, "What do you want?" Answering this will degrade his reaction time, and even the smallest delay could make a difference.
Once the gun is no longer pointed at you, your outside hand (the left hand if you are confronting a right-handed shooter) goes to the wrist while the other grabs the gun and twists it up and back. This works best if you step into the attacker, bringing the gun close to your body. That way you can put your entire body into this maneuver, whereas the assailant is essentially trying to resist with three or four fingers and a thumb. Even if the assailant is a lot bigger or stronger than you, his fingers probably aren't going to be strong enough to hand on if you can put your whole body into it.
As I mentioned earlier, Gabe Suarez taught some disarms in his Interactive Gunfighting class a year ago. While it was fairly similar, Gabe's techniques emphasized going directly for the wrist with your hand, rather than knocking the gun out of the way first. I think I prefer the forearm. It leaves a lot bigger margin for error, which is particularly important in a low light situation or when the assailant is behind you.
Carbine
Our third activity this month was the first of what will be a series of rifle/carbine exercises. Several of our members have recently acquired black rifles of one description or another (ARs mostly) and expressed interest in some long gun training. We asked Robert, one of our members who is very well versed in rifle shooting, to do some instruction for us. Unfortunately, I missed part of his lecture because I was still doing the disarm training. During the part I was able to listen to he gave a very solid explanation of the operating procedures for the AR and AK. We had a nice discussion about the merits of different rifles and calibers, getting good rifle magazines that will work with your gun, and flashlight techniques (which should come in handy next month). Robert had to run off to get ready for a wedding, but after the discussion was done we had a chance to do some shooting.
There was a fair amount of rifle trading going on during the shooting period. It's always nice to get a chance to shoot some different guns. One of our members had let me shoot his AR on a previous occasion, so I returned the favor by letting him shoot my Robinson Armament XCR. He seemed to like it, and later commented to me that it had less recoil than his AR, which surprised me a bit. I recently finished the break-in period, and last time I brought it up to the range I adjusted the gas system from full bore to a much lower setting. This reduced recoil noticeably, but I'm surprised that it was actually less than a gas impingement AR (not that either of them has a lot of recoil shooting the .223 round).
I also think shooting my rifle convinced him of the merits of a vertical foregrip. I have to say that I resisted putting a foregrip on there for a long time; it just seemed way too "tacticool" for me. However, reading Kyle Lamb's book Green Eyes Black Rifles made me reconsider. He's definitely a guy who knows what he's talking about and he makes several good arguments for a forward pistol grip. The one that finally pushed me over the edge was its benefits in weapon retention, but I've found that it really does help in countering muzzle rise for follow up shots and driving the weapon from one target to another.
Later on I also had a chance to watch Brianna and Lizette shoot an AR. Neither of them have a black rifle of their own, but we were able to talk them into trying one out. From the smiles on their faces I think they enjoyed it quite a bit. The look of the AR can be intimidating to someone who's never shot it, but thanks to their low recoil .223 rifles are a real joy to shoot and very friendly to new shooters.
Despite the unexpected number of shooters I think this month's event went fairly well. We had to adapt a bit, but plenty of our more experienced shooters were willing to pitch in and help run things. I'd really like to thank Brianna, Lizette, and Robert for contributing to this month's events. All three of them did an excellent job. I think they really helped us expand our toolbox into some new areas.
Thursday, June 5, 2008
June Event
Folks:
There’s a Utah Polite Society event at Hendricksen Range Saturday, June 7.
We plan to have two handgun exercises, a demonstration of handgun takeaway
techniques, takeaway exercises, and a set of carbine exercises.
Prior to the handgun exercises, we will demonstrate techniques for
shooting from the supine position. These will include shooting forward,
left, right, and upside-down and backwards.
The demonstration will be followed by a skills drill that has you shoot in
all these directions. If you’ve ever wanted to shoot upside down and
backwards, here’s your chance.
The second handgun exercise will be a simulated defensive encounter that
has you respond to a home invasion while flat on your back (as if you were
knocked down when your front door was forced open).
After the handgun exercises, Brinna will demonstrate several techniques
for disarming and/or disabling an adversary that’s holding you at
close-quarters gunpoint.
After the demonstration, we’ll team up with training partners and practice
these techniques with training guns.
We’ll break for lunch after the takeaway exercises. The kitchen at the
range has several menu options available for lunch in the $5 range. They
make a very good burger as well as other very tasty items.
After the lunch break, Robert’s going to start teaching us how to run our
carbines. If you don’t yet have a carbine, this would be a very good
chance to handle and/or shoot a few different kinds.
Here’s what Robert has planned.
Safety, establishing a working zero (the shooting part of the afternoon);
the pros and cons of zeroing at various ranges with the caliber of one’s
choice; problems created by a high line of sight over the bore line;
manual of arms for AR, AK and M1. The intent is to help someone, even if
they are starting from scratch, to get their rifle up and running.
When you bring your carbine to the range, please either keep it in its
case or place it in one of the rifle racks until Robert’s had a chance to
go over safety and range procedures with the group. There will be no
handling of carbines while others are downrange until carbine safety and
range procedures have been formalized.
Please bring your handgun, carbine, and related equipment. Bring 50
rounds of pistol ammo, and 80 rounds of carbine ammo (bring extra, if you
would like to shoot additional exercises or shoot steel after the
exercises).
Set up starts at 8:00 a.m.
New shooter orientation starts at 8:30 a.m.
Registration starts at 8:45 a.m.
Handgun shooting exercises start at 9:00 a.m. followed by hand-to-hand
exercises.
Lunch break will be at about 11:30 a.m.
Carbine exercises start after the lunch break.
Event fee is $12.00.
There’s a Utah Polite Society event at Hendricksen Range Saturday, June 7.
We plan to have two handgun exercises, a demonstration of handgun takeaway
techniques, takeaway exercises, and a set of carbine exercises.
Prior to the handgun exercises, we will demonstrate techniques for
shooting from the supine position. These will include shooting forward,
left, right, and upside-down and backwards.
The demonstration will be followed by a skills drill that has you shoot in
all these directions. If you’ve ever wanted to shoot upside down and
backwards, here’s your chance.
The second handgun exercise will be a simulated defensive encounter that
has you respond to a home invasion while flat on your back (as if you were
knocked down when your front door was forced open).
After the handgun exercises, Brinna will demonstrate several techniques
for disarming and/or disabling an adversary that’s holding you at
close-quarters gunpoint.
After the demonstration, we’ll team up with training partners and practice
these techniques with training guns.
We’ll break for lunch after the takeaway exercises. The kitchen at the
range has several menu options available for lunch in the $5 range. They
make a very good burger as well as other very tasty items.
After the lunch break, Robert’s going to start teaching us how to run our
carbines. If you don’t yet have a carbine, this would be a very good
chance to handle and/or shoot a few different kinds.
Here’s what Robert has planned.
Safety, establishing a working zero (the shooting part of the afternoon);
the pros and cons of zeroing at various ranges with the caliber of one’s
choice; problems created by a high line of sight over the bore line;
manual of arms for AR, AK and M1. The intent is to help someone, even if
they are starting from scratch, to get their rifle up and running.
When you bring your carbine to the range, please either keep it in its
case or place it in one of the rifle racks until Robert’s had a chance to
go over safety and range procedures with the group. There will be no
handling of carbines while others are downrange until carbine safety and
range procedures have been formalized.
Please bring your handgun, carbine, and related equipment. Bring 50
rounds of pistol ammo, and 80 rounds of carbine ammo (bring extra, if you
would like to shoot additional exercises or shoot steel after the
exercises).
Set up starts at 8:00 a.m.
New shooter orientation starts at 8:30 a.m.
Registration starts at 8:45 a.m.
Handgun shooting exercises start at 9:00 a.m. followed by hand-to-hand
exercises.
Lunch break will be at about 11:30 a.m.
Carbine exercises start after the lunch break.
Event fee is $12.00.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
Thanks For The Help
Thanks to everyone who whelped with the workday project at Hendricksen Range on May 24.
We were able to rebuild the roof over the safety area on the fifty-yard range. It turned out to be a bit more work than expected because we had to completely dismantle and then rebuild the roof. With help form all who participated, the project went very smoothly.
Again, thanks to everyone who helped with this project.
We were able to rebuild the roof over the safety area on the fifty-yard range. It turned out to be a bit more work than expected because we had to completely dismantle and then rebuild the roof. With help form all who participated, the project went very smoothly.
Again, thanks to everyone who helped with this project.
June Event
I thought I’d give you an early heads up for the June 7 Utah Polite
Society event and some other things we have in the works. For the June
event, we have pistol exercises, disarming exercises, and carbine
exercises planed. As we have quite a lot planned for this event, we’re
anticipating running the event into the afternoon. As always, the event
fee will be $12.
The pistol exercises will focus on shooting from the ground, as if you
were knocked down in an altercation prior to engaging your target(s).
These exercises are still in development, but we plan on demonstrating
ground shooting techniques, running a skills drill to reinforce them, and
then running a simulated defensive encounter that exercises them.
After the pistol exercises, Brianna is going to teach us some martial arts
techniques that can be used to disarm and/or disable a close-quarters
adversary holding you at gunpoint. After she’s demonstrated these to us,
we’ll each work with a training partner and a dummy gun to get a little
hands-on with them.
After the disarm exercises, we plan to take a short lunch break. The
kitchen at the range is now serving lunch, and will have a menu of lunch
dishes available in the $5 range. We took advantage of the lunch dishes
available at the range during last month’s Gunsite class, and they were
very good.
After the lunch break, we’ll start the first in our series of carbine
exercises that will run through the summer months.
Here’s what Robert has planned for the first of the carbine series at the
June event.
Safety: Establishing a working zero (the shooting part of the day); the
pros and cons of zeroing at various ranges with the caliber of one’s
choice; problems created by a high line of sight over bore line; manual of
arms for AR, AK, and M1. The intent is to help someone, even if they are
starting from scratch, to get their rifle up and running.
Here’s what he’s planning for the carbine exercises in July.
Marksmanship: Basic skill drills (the shooting part of the day). The
other subjects he would like to cover here are support systems: slings,
mags, mag carry system, sights, and maintenance. On day 2, a person can
use the sights that came on the rifle, a simple web, no sling, and load
from a back pocket. However, from here on, one needs to start building a
support system.
In the succeeding months.
Future subjects: Transition to pistol, low-light, the effects of cover on
various calibers, operation of a carbine with one hand only, and whatever
else the group would like to cover.
Keep in mind the carbine exercises aren’t exclusively for those with
“black rifles.” If you have a Ruger 10-22, a lever-action 30-30, or even
a bolt-action rifle that you would like to learn how to use defensively,
bring it to the event in June.
Also in June, we’re planning to do some longer-range carbine shooting in
Skull Valley. As part of this, we plan to do penetration tests on car
doors and windshields, as well as on sheetrock wall sections. In parallel
with the carbine exercises, we plan to run a 360-degree pistol exercise in
an adjacent canyon that offers 360-degree backstops. The tentative date
for this is Saturday, June 21.
In July, we plan to run a night event that will include both pistol
exercises and carbine exercises. This will be in addition to our regular
event, and is tentatively scheduled for the evening of Friday, June 11.
More later,
Harold Green
Society event and some other things we have in the works. For the June
event, we have pistol exercises, disarming exercises, and carbine
exercises planed. As we have quite a lot planned for this event, we’re
anticipating running the event into the afternoon. As always, the event
fee will be $12.
The pistol exercises will focus on shooting from the ground, as if you
were knocked down in an altercation prior to engaging your target(s).
These exercises are still in development, but we plan on demonstrating
ground shooting techniques, running a skills drill to reinforce them, and
then running a simulated defensive encounter that exercises them.
After the pistol exercises, Brianna is going to teach us some martial arts
techniques that can be used to disarm and/or disable a close-quarters
adversary holding you at gunpoint. After she’s demonstrated these to us,
we’ll each work with a training partner and a dummy gun to get a little
hands-on with them.
After the disarm exercises, we plan to take a short lunch break. The
kitchen at the range is now serving lunch, and will have a menu of lunch
dishes available in the $5 range. We took advantage of the lunch dishes
available at the range during last month’s Gunsite class, and they were
very good.
After the lunch break, we’ll start the first in our series of carbine
exercises that will run through the summer months.
Here’s what Robert has planned for the first of the carbine series at the
June event.
Safety: Establishing a working zero (the shooting part of the day); the
pros and cons of zeroing at various ranges with the caliber of one’s
choice; problems created by a high line of sight over bore line; manual of
arms for AR, AK, and M1. The intent is to help someone, even if they are
starting from scratch, to get their rifle up and running.
Here’s what he’s planning for the carbine exercises in July.
Marksmanship: Basic skill drills (the shooting part of the day). The
other subjects he would like to cover here are support systems: slings,
mags, mag carry system, sights, and maintenance. On day 2, a person can
use the sights that came on the rifle, a simple web, no sling, and load
from a back pocket. However, from here on, one needs to start building a
support system.
In the succeeding months.
Future subjects: Transition to pistol, low-light, the effects of cover on
various calibers, operation of a carbine with one hand only, and whatever
else the group would like to cover.
Keep in mind the carbine exercises aren’t exclusively for those with
“black rifles.” If you have a Ruger 10-22, a lever-action 30-30, or even
a bolt-action rifle that you would like to learn how to use defensively,
bring it to the event in June.
Also in June, we’re planning to do some longer-range carbine shooting in
Skull Valley. As part of this, we plan to do penetration tests on car
doors and windshields, as well as on sheetrock wall sections. In parallel
with the carbine exercises, we plan to run a 360-degree pistol exercise in
an adjacent canyon that offers 360-degree backstops. The tentative date
for this is Saturday, June 21.
In July, we plan to run a night event that will include both pistol
exercises and carbine exercises. This will be in addition to our regular
event, and is tentatively scheduled for the evening of Friday, June 11.
More later,
Harold Green
Mother's Day Event
Welden (Welden@xmission.com ) of Self Defense Solutions is
offering a free, ladies-only shooting class on the evening of June 9.
Please take a look at the message, below and at the attached document.
Thanks,
Harold Green
-----------
Compatriots!
Once a year when the weather turns mild, Self-Defense Solutions, LLC
offers a free pistol clinic for women. Even though it is after the
official Mothers Day holiday, the clinic is to provide a venue for women
to be introduced to firearms use in a relaxed environment.
Ladies, this FREE class is FOR YOU AND ONLY YOU!
No boyfriends, no spouses, no significant male friends at all this time.
(OK guys, listen up. This class is NOT for you, but the one you love! So
do the right thing and see that she is registered to come. Mothers, wives,
girlfriend(s), sister(s) and daughter(s) are welcome)
For the woman who would like to be shown correctly how to shoot a pistol,
but doesn't want to have someone (you know who) looking over your shoulder
or making comments, I'm giving a free class on how to shoot. That's
right, here's your chance to receive
Free Instruction and Free Range time!
I will personally teach you about firearm function and safety and how to
shoot. We finish up with my live-fire self-defense and tactical
demonstration for those that would like to stay.
This class is not being held on Mother's Day, but it is my contribution to
the safety of all women during the month of May.
Class will be held Monday June 9th at the Hendricksen Range. We start
promptly at 6:30pm and run to 8:30pm
If you have a handgun of any type, bring it and some ammunition with you.
If you don't have one, I will provide a .22 pistol and the ammunition free
for you to shoot.
Please call or email me if you have any questions.
You MUST REGISTER with me to be included in the class. I want to be sure
that you have a good experience, so I will keep the class small. We only
have room for those who register and are told that they are accepted in
the class.
Mothers Day Special Firearm Instruction for Women Only -
Who: Welden C. Andersen 801.272.8949 welden@self-defensesolutions.com
Former Marine with Expert ratings in Pistol and Rifle , Utah Certified Firearms Instructor. NRA Certified Instructor in Pistol and Personal
Protection in the Home. Nationally Certified IDPA Safety Officer, Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Citizens Police Academy graduate, FBI
Citizen’s Academy graduate, Suarez International trained in Pistol Marksmanship, Combative Pistol Concepts I, II, Close Range Gunfighting,
Interactive Gunfighting/Force On Force, Front Sight Firearms Training Institute Distinguished Graduate in Defensive Handgun, Rifle and
Tactical Shotgun, Provo SWAT (Threat Management Group) trained in Edged Weapons Defense I, II, Counter-Terrorism Institute of
America trained in Tactical Pistol, Jeff Tueller Defensive training in Hostile Control and Weapon Disarmament, Utah Polite Society board
member. Free Instruction and Range time
When: Monday June 9th Starts promptly at 6:30pm to 8:30pm Welden will personally teach you
about firearm function and safety and how to shoot. We finish up with my live-fire selfdefense
and tactical demonstration for those that would like to stay.
Bring: Bring a baseball cap, your eyeglasses, safety glasses or your sun glasses, hearing protection,
and your handgun and some ammo. If you don’t have your own gun, I will provide a .22 cal
revolver and a semi-auto pistol for the Range Exercise including the ammo. Those wishing to
shoot my Glock can bring .40cal 165Gr or 180Gr NEW boxed ammo or pay $5 per 15 shots.
Location: Directions to the Hendricksen Range
• Hendricksen Range is east of Salt Lake City in Parleys Canyon.
• From I-15, take the I-80 East Exit towards CHEYENNE.
• Merge into I-80 East.
• From I-80 East, Take Parley's Canyon Exit 134.
• Keep RIGHT at the fork on the off-ramp.
• Turn RIGHT.
• About 50 yards from the off-ramp, you will see the sign PMAA Hendricksen range.
• Follow the road up the hill to the range house.
• Park on the right side of the range house by the stairs
Lichtenberg Research
Yesterday, we spent the day building rifles with Rodger from Lichtenberg Research. I had a great time. Suggest that everyone check out their site. They have some cool AK 9mm conversions.
Good people
Good guns
Check them out.
Lichtenberg Research Link
Check out the Handguns sales page.
Robin Hood
Good people
Good guns
Check them out.
Lichtenberg Research Link
Check out the Handguns sales page.
Robin Hood
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
May and June Calendar
The May event is being superceded by a three-day pistol class presented by Gunsite Academy. This class will be held at Hendricksen Range on May 2and 3, and at the shoot house at the Swanson tactical facility in Ogden onMay 4.
The Gunsite class is the second in a series of annual classes the UtahPolite Society is sponsoring. Last year we partnered with Self DefenseSolutions to bring Suarez International to Salt Lake for two classes, this year we are sponsoring the three-day pistol class presented by Gunsite Academy. We hope to sponsor at least one class from a nationally knowntrainer each year in the future.
The June Utah Polite Society Event is going to combine our usual pistol exercises with the first in a series of carbine exercises. We have the use of the range for the entire day. This will allow us to start off withour usual pistol exercises and then transition into some basic carbine instruction and exercises. If you’d like to improve your carbine skills, plan on participating in the carbine series starting in June.
If you don’t have a black rifle, bring your .22, or your lever gun. If you don’t have a rifle at all, just show up and someone will loan you one to shoot the exercises with.
The Gunsite class is the second in a series of annual classes the UtahPolite Society is sponsoring. Last year we partnered with Self DefenseSolutions to bring Suarez International to Salt Lake for two classes, this year we are sponsoring the three-day pistol class presented by Gunsite Academy. We hope to sponsor at least one class from a nationally knowntrainer each year in the future.
The June Utah Polite Society Event is going to combine our usual pistol exercises with the first in a series of carbine exercises. We have the use of the range for the entire day. This will allow us to start off withour usual pistol exercises and then transition into some basic carbine instruction and exercises. If you’d like to improve your carbine skills, plan on participating in the carbine series starting in June.
If you don’t have a black rifle, bring your .22, or your lever gun. If you don’t have a rifle at all, just show up and someone will loan you one to shoot the exercises with.
Range info
When I talked with Dave at Hendricksen Range last weekend, he mentioned there was quite a bit of lead piled up behind the target backers on the public range that he’d like to get rid of. This is from bullets that stopped in the snow bank behind the targets over the winter and is now just laying on the surface of the ground behind the targets. If you cast your own bullets, are interested in free lead, and are willing to pick itup off the ground, stop in and see Dave.
Dave also mentioned he’d like to organize a work day or two sometime inthe next couple of months, and would very much appreciate any volunteerhelp anyone is willing to provide. He’d like help with some major maintenance issues like resetting the roof over the safety area on the fifty-yard range, and with several smaller cleanup and maintenance projects. We haven’t set a date for this yet, but it will likely be sometime in May and involve free food. If you think you might be willing to help with this, please reply in the comments.
Dave also mentioned he’d like to organize a work day or two sometime inthe next couple of months, and would very much appreciate any volunteerhelp anyone is willing to provide. He’d like help with some major maintenance issues like resetting the roof over the safety area on the fifty-yard range, and with several smaller cleanup and maintenance projects. We haven’t set a date for this yet, but it will likely be sometime in May and involve free food. If you think you might be willing to help with this, please reply in the comments.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
April Event Report
This month the Utah Polite Society went to the dogs . . . and to a restaurant. We had a really interesting set of drills and scenarios this month. Our first had a drill that gave each shooter a chance to practice drawing and shooting while seated and scenario involving a restaurant robbery while you're seated at a booth. The other drill gave people a chance to practice getting off the X and moving away from the assailant and a scenario that allowed you to put these skills into practice against a rapidly approaching canine target. We also had a great discussion about personal rules of engagement and when to get involved in a violent situation that doesn't threaten you directly, which inspired Harold Green's recent blog post.
Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit
Our first exercise this month gave people a chance to practice drawing and shooting while seated. You start off on a bench, facing a target about four yards away. While remaining seated, draw and fire until you've neutralized the target. After the first string, we rotate the bench 90 degrees to the right, so the target is to your left, and you have to draw and fire on it again. After turning the bench around so the target is on your right, it's time to shoot one more time.
After a safety briefing that emphasized not sweeping your legs when drawing (particularly when the target is on your support side), we got started. Perhaps the most consistent thing I noticed people doing on this drill was when we turned the bench sideways, a lot of people decided they really wanted to sit on the end of the bench nearest the target, rather than in the center. Everybody's looking for an edge, I guess. One yard of range really doesn't make that much difference for this drill, but I think scooting down to the end changed the drill in another way. Folks who sat at the end of the bench tended to swing their legs around to face the target before shooting. Folks who shot from the middle of the bench ended up shooting across their bodies when shooting to the support side and shooting one handed to the strong side. Facing the target makes things easier, but it may not always be possible (in a restaurant booth, for instance).
Check Please!
Our next scenario put you in that restaurant booth, with an armed robbery occurring at the cash register a few yards away. This was inspired by an armed robbery that took place at a restaurant a few blocks from my house. I've eaten there occasionally, so it inspired me to think about what I'd do in that sort of situation. To complete the booth effect, we put a table in front of the bench and put a sitting height target directly across from you simulating your dining partner (a friend or significant other). Downrange there were 2-3 assailants and at least one no-shoot target (simulating the cashier). A pair of barricades delineated the entrance to the kitchen, marking one possible exit. You could also exit by going directly downrange past the cashiers station. The target stand with the dining partner was loose, rather than clamped tight, allowing you to grab the target and drag them to safety.
When I was explaining this scenario I asked Harold Green to give his "Who are you willing to defend" spiel. He didn't know I was going to do this, so I kind of ended up putting him on the spot (sorry Harold). This is a complicated issue, one deserving of a blog post of it's own, but it boils down to this: are you willing to put your financial future, your freedom, and your life on the line for the clerk in a convenience store? How about for a casual acquaintance? For a close friend? For a family member? This is a complicated issue, and the answers are going to be different for different people, but the important thing is to think about this and make your decisions beforehand. The worst possible decision here is not to consider the issue. You do not want to start weighing the pros and cons in the middle of a holdup. This led to about 15-20 minutes of very good discussion among the people there, and while it delayed our getting started I think it was really worthwhile.
After getting everyone pondering their moral and ethical obligations to their fellow man, we got started with the scenario. The scenario started with me yelling the robbers demands. To simulate what we'd just been talking about I generally escalated the robber's threats from just being against the cashier to threatening everyone in the restaurant.
We had a fairly high number of new shooters this month, so I noticed a lot of typical new shooter mistakes. The number one new shooter error we see is shooting too low. We use our own custom scoring zones on targets. They're based on the "golden triangle" principle and are located quite a bit higher than the zones on typical IPSC or IDPA targets are. There is a 5 point zone about the size of a fist directly over the heart and a 4 point zone about a handspan across around it. This is where the important stuff is in a human body (heart, major arteries). Hits anywhere else in the torso are only 1 point. This means that hits that would be in the A zone of an IPSC target or one point down on an IDPA target are only worth one point on ours. Since nine points are required to neutralize, low hits aren't really going to get you anywhere. To make thing even more difficult we cover the targets with t-shirts both so you can't see the scoring zones (bad guys don't come with bullseyes) and so you can't see whether you've hit it. New shooters, used to targets that let you hit them a lot lower, often shoot a nice tight double tap in the sternum, for a grand total of two points.
That double tap brings up the second most common new shooter mistake, which is failing to shoot the target enough times. The combination of small scoring zones and the t-shirt makes neutralizing one of these targets a pretty demading task. Even excellent shooting skills won't necessarily save you, since the t-shirt means you have to guess where the "X" ring is. Again, bad guys don't come with bullseyes on their chest. New shooters generally put 2-3 rounds into each target. Folks who have been shooting with us for a while average 4-5. I generally get no more than three targets out of the 14 rounds in my Glock 21, and I've been known to burn through an entire mag on just two. This, of course, is one of the reasons we use small scoring zones and t-shirts in the first place. Pistol bullets are not good stoppers and one or two hits probably aren't going to immediately physically incapacitate an assailant. The challenging nature of our targets is intended to ingrain the habit of shooting more than once or twice.
Aside from the usual new shooter mistakes, most folks did pretty well. With one exception, nobody shot their dining partner. A great many people probably deafened them (at least temporarily) by shooting past their head though. Some folks ran off without their spouse or used them for cover (I sense a divorce in their future). One of our more experienced shooters did shoot his dining partner, but he had a good excuse. Someone decided to have a little fun at his expense and hung a threat indicator around the wife's neck (it wasn't me, I swear). He'd shot all the other targets and was dragging her off when he noticed the cardboard gun. He seemed a bit puzzled, but decided to put a round through the target for good measure.
For a couple of people we put a cardboard sheriff's star on one of the targets along with a threat indicator, simulating an officer responding to the robbery. As usual, a few folks ended up shooting the cop. Again, it's important to pay attention to what you're seeing, not just to look for what you're expecting to see (in this case, a cardboard gun).
7 O'clock Rock
Our other drill involved getting off the X away from a threat. This is something a lot of us learned in Gabe Suarez's class last year, but we've gained a fair number of new shooters since then who have never done it (and the rest of us could always use a refresher).
When facing an assailant armed with a contact weapon like a knife or a baseball bat, you want to create as much distance between you and them. Optimally, you'd like to stay out of arms reach entirely, but barring that, you want to give yourself as long as possible to stop them with your handgun. It might seem like the logical thing to do is to run directly away from them, but it's not. Running directly away makes it difficult to get your gun on target and it simplifies the pursuer's task. Running away at a slight angle makes your job easier and the assailant's a little harder. If you imagine a clock face, with the assailant at 12 o'clock, you want to run in the 5 o'clock or 7 o'clock directions.
I've used the word run so far because that's exactly what you want to do. In some action shooting competitions you see shooters moving (including backing up) in a shuffling sort of half crouch. This provides a very stable gun platform, but it's not going to do much to keep you away from a charging assailant. You also don't want to be backing up. Trying to run backwards is an invitation to trip and fall, which will leave you lying on the ground with the assailant about to run over you. If you hit the back of your head hard enough, it may even leave you unconscious on the ground at the mercy of your attacker. Instead, you want to point your toes in the direction you're going and move as quickly as possible. The key here is quick, explosive movement.
If you're a right-handed shooter, shooting while moving in the 7 o'clock direction is fairly simple. Just point your feet back and to the left and twist your torso around to shoot one handed. Shooting right handed while going to the 5 o'clock direction, on the other hand, is almost impossible. There's just no way to get your upper body twisted around enough to shoot with the right hand. If you have a choice it's easiest to go to 7 o'clock (or 5 o'clock if you're left handed) but sometimes that may not be possible because of some sort of obstruction.
If you have to go to the other direction, the best strategy is to transfer the pistol to your support hand and shoot one handed from that side. We demonstrated a technique for transferring the pistol smoothly and quickly while minimizing the risk of dropping it.
I was busy running the other drill, so I didn't have a chance to shoot this exercise or see anyone else shoot it.
The 21 Paw Rule
The 21 foot rule is a rule of thumb that's taught to police officers. Anyone within 21 feet armed with a contact weapon can be on you in less time than it takes to draw and fire a pistol. The Tueller Drill, created by Salt Lake City police officer Dennis Tueller, is intended to demonstrate this. A moving target is placed 21 feet away and is pulled towards you. The goal is to get your pistol out and engage it before it reaches you. This scenario does essentially the same thing, except we used a simulated dog rather than a human looking target.
Harold put together a pair of rolling targets in the shape of a dog. Some folks thought they looked more like ducks or sheep than canines, but I think he did a really nice job.
We gave each person at least two chances to shoot it. The first time you stand and deliver, remaining still and just concentrating on drawing and firing as quickly as possible. The second time, you apply the get off the X technique from the previous drill. This gives you considerably more time to engage the simulated canine.
The dog really does come at you fast. The first time through I had both my cover garment and a jacket on and I wasn't able to get my gun out before the dog blew by me. I wasn't alone in this either. One guy kicked the dog as it went past. Once I discarded the outer jacket, I was able to engage the dog before it got to me, but I only got one round into it before it got too close. When I switched to getting off the X, I was able to get two hits on it before it reached me (one of them right through the head).
Shooting the dog is a lot harder than shooting a human sized Tueller target. It comes at you faster and it's a lot smaller and lower, making it harder to hit. Couple this with the fact that an aggressive dog is likely to continue attacking even if he's hit and 21 feet starts to seem awfully close.
I was a bit worried that the dogs would get all shot up, particularly the wheels. Since they're so much shorter you're shooting a lot closer to the wheels than on the Tueller target. Cujo held up pretty well though, at least until Robin Hood decided to try the drill with a shotgun.
Overall I think this month was really successful. Things went smoothly and everyone seemed to enjoy both the restaurant and dog scenarios. I also think the new shooters learned a lot, and I hope some of them will be back in June.
Speaking of June, just a reminder that our May event will be preempted by the Gunsite class. Our June event is going to be an all-day affair, with pistol practice in the morning and the first session of our summer rifle series in the afternoon. I'm really looking forward to doing some rifle work.
Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit
Our first exercise this month gave people a chance to practice drawing and shooting while seated. You start off on a bench, facing a target about four yards away. While remaining seated, draw and fire until you've neutralized the target. After the first string, we rotate the bench 90 degrees to the right, so the target is to your left, and you have to draw and fire on it again. After turning the bench around so the target is on your right, it's time to shoot one more time.
After a safety briefing that emphasized not sweeping your legs when drawing (particularly when the target is on your support side), we got started. Perhaps the most consistent thing I noticed people doing on this drill was when we turned the bench sideways, a lot of people decided they really wanted to sit on the end of the bench nearest the target, rather than in the center. Everybody's looking for an edge, I guess. One yard of range really doesn't make that much difference for this drill, but I think scooting down to the end changed the drill in another way. Folks who sat at the end of the bench tended to swing their legs around to face the target before shooting. Folks who shot from the middle of the bench ended up shooting across their bodies when shooting to the support side and shooting one handed to the strong side. Facing the target makes things easier, but it may not always be possible (in a restaurant booth, for instance).
Check Please!
Our next scenario put you in that restaurant booth, with an armed robbery occurring at the cash register a few yards away. This was inspired by an armed robbery that took place at a restaurant a few blocks from my house. I've eaten there occasionally, so it inspired me to think about what I'd do in that sort of situation. To complete the booth effect, we put a table in front of the bench and put a sitting height target directly across from you simulating your dining partner (a friend or significant other). Downrange there were 2-3 assailants and at least one no-shoot target (simulating the cashier). A pair of barricades delineated the entrance to the kitchen, marking one possible exit. You could also exit by going directly downrange past the cashiers station. The target stand with the dining partner was loose, rather than clamped tight, allowing you to grab the target and drag them to safety.
When I was explaining this scenario I asked Harold Green to give his "Who are you willing to defend" spiel. He didn't know I was going to do this, so I kind of ended up putting him on the spot (sorry Harold). This is a complicated issue, one deserving of a blog post of it's own, but it boils down to this: are you willing to put your financial future, your freedom, and your life on the line for the clerk in a convenience store? How about for a casual acquaintance? For a close friend? For a family member? This is a complicated issue, and the answers are going to be different for different people, but the important thing is to think about this and make your decisions beforehand. The worst possible decision here is not to consider the issue. You do not want to start weighing the pros and cons in the middle of a holdup. This led to about 15-20 minutes of very good discussion among the people there, and while it delayed our getting started I think it was really worthwhile.
After getting everyone pondering their moral and ethical obligations to their fellow man, we got started with the scenario. The scenario started with me yelling the robbers demands. To simulate what we'd just been talking about I generally escalated the robber's threats from just being against the cashier to threatening everyone in the restaurant.
We had a fairly high number of new shooters this month, so I noticed a lot of typical new shooter mistakes. The number one new shooter error we see is shooting too low. We use our own custom scoring zones on targets. They're based on the "golden triangle" principle and are located quite a bit higher than the zones on typical IPSC or IDPA targets are. There is a 5 point zone about the size of a fist directly over the heart and a 4 point zone about a handspan across around it. This is where the important stuff is in a human body (heart, major arteries). Hits anywhere else in the torso are only 1 point. This means that hits that would be in the A zone of an IPSC target or one point down on an IDPA target are only worth one point on ours. Since nine points are required to neutralize, low hits aren't really going to get you anywhere. To make thing even more difficult we cover the targets with t-shirts both so you can't see the scoring zones (bad guys don't come with bullseyes) and so you can't see whether you've hit it. New shooters, used to targets that let you hit them a lot lower, often shoot a nice tight double tap in the sternum, for a grand total of two points.
That double tap brings up the second most common new shooter mistake, which is failing to shoot the target enough times. The combination of small scoring zones and the t-shirt makes neutralizing one of these targets a pretty demading task. Even excellent shooting skills won't necessarily save you, since the t-shirt means you have to guess where the "X" ring is. Again, bad guys don't come with bullseyes on their chest. New shooters generally put 2-3 rounds into each target. Folks who have been shooting with us for a while average 4-5. I generally get no more than three targets out of the 14 rounds in my Glock 21, and I've been known to burn through an entire mag on just two. This, of course, is one of the reasons we use small scoring zones and t-shirts in the first place. Pistol bullets are not good stoppers and one or two hits probably aren't going to immediately physically incapacitate an assailant. The challenging nature of our targets is intended to ingrain the habit of shooting more than once or twice.
Aside from the usual new shooter mistakes, most folks did pretty well. With one exception, nobody shot their dining partner. A great many people probably deafened them (at least temporarily) by shooting past their head though. Some folks ran off without their spouse or used them for cover (I sense a divorce in their future). One of our more experienced shooters did shoot his dining partner, but he had a good excuse. Someone decided to have a little fun at his expense and hung a threat indicator around the wife's neck (it wasn't me, I swear). He'd shot all the other targets and was dragging her off when he noticed the cardboard gun. He seemed a bit puzzled, but decided to put a round through the target for good measure.
For a couple of people we put a cardboard sheriff's star on one of the targets along with a threat indicator, simulating an officer responding to the robbery. As usual, a few folks ended up shooting the cop. Again, it's important to pay attention to what you're seeing, not just to look for what you're expecting to see (in this case, a cardboard gun).
7 O'clock Rock
Our other drill involved getting off the X away from a threat. This is something a lot of us learned in Gabe Suarez's class last year, but we've gained a fair number of new shooters since then who have never done it (and the rest of us could always use a refresher).
When facing an assailant armed with a contact weapon like a knife or a baseball bat, you want to create as much distance between you and them. Optimally, you'd like to stay out of arms reach entirely, but barring that, you want to give yourself as long as possible to stop them with your handgun. It might seem like the logical thing to do is to run directly away from them, but it's not. Running directly away makes it difficult to get your gun on target and it simplifies the pursuer's task. Running away at a slight angle makes your job easier and the assailant's a little harder. If you imagine a clock face, with the assailant at 12 o'clock, you want to run in the 5 o'clock or 7 o'clock directions.
I've used the word run so far because that's exactly what you want to do. In some action shooting competitions you see shooters moving (including backing up) in a shuffling sort of half crouch. This provides a very stable gun platform, but it's not going to do much to keep you away from a charging assailant. You also don't want to be backing up. Trying to run backwards is an invitation to trip and fall, which will leave you lying on the ground with the assailant about to run over you. If you hit the back of your head hard enough, it may even leave you unconscious on the ground at the mercy of your attacker. Instead, you want to point your toes in the direction you're going and move as quickly as possible. The key here is quick, explosive movement.
If you're a right-handed shooter, shooting while moving in the 7 o'clock direction is fairly simple. Just point your feet back and to the left and twist your torso around to shoot one handed. Shooting right handed while going to the 5 o'clock direction, on the other hand, is almost impossible. There's just no way to get your upper body twisted around enough to shoot with the right hand. If you have a choice it's easiest to go to 7 o'clock (or 5 o'clock if you're left handed) but sometimes that may not be possible because of some sort of obstruction.
If you have to go to the other direction, the best strategy is to transfer the pistol to your support hand and shoot one handed from that side. We demonstrated a technique for transferring the pistol smoothly and quickly while minimizing the risk of dropping it.
I was busy running the other drill, so I didn't have a chance to shoot this exercise or see anyone else shoot it.
The 21 Paw Rule
The 21 foot rule is a rule of thumb that's taught to police officers. Anyone within 21 feet armed with a contact weapon can be on you in less time than it takes to draw and fire a pistol. The Tueller Drill, created by Salt Lake City police officer Dennis Tueller, is intended to demonstrate this. A moving target is placed 21 feet away and is pulled towards you. The goal is to get your pistol out and engage it before it reaches you. This scenario does essentially the same thing, except we used a simulated dog rather than a human looking target.
Harold put together a pair of rolling targets in the shape of a dog. Some folks thought they looked more like ducks or sheep than canines, but I think he did a really nice job.
We gave each person at least two chances to shoot it. The first time you stand and deliver, remaining still and just concentrating on drawing and firing as quickly as possible. The second time, you apply the get off the X technique from the previous drill. This gives you considerably more time to engage the simulated canine.
The dog really does come at you fast. The first time through I had both my cover garment and a jacket on and I wasn't able to get my gun out before the dog blew by me. I wasn't alone in this either. One guy kicked the dog as it went past. Once I discarded the outer jacket, I was able to engage the dog before it got to me, but I only got one round into it before it got too close. When I switched to getting off the X, I was able to get two hits on it before it reached me (one of them right through the head).
Shooting the dog is a lot harder than shooting a human sized Tueller target. It comes at you faster and it's a lot smaller and lower, making it harder to hit. Couple this with the fact that an aggressive dog is likely to continue attacking even if he's hit and 21 feet starts to seem awfully close.
I was a bit worried that the dogs would get all shot up, particularly the wheels. Since they're so much shorter you're shooting a lot closer to the wheels than on the Tueller target. Cujo held up pretty well though, at least until Robin Hood decided to try the drill with a shotgun.
Overall I think this month was really successful. Things went smoothly and everyone seemed to enjoy both the restaurant and dog scenarios. I also think the new shooters learned a lot, and I hope some of them will be back in June.
Speaking of June, just a reminder that our May event will be preempted by the Gunsite class. Our June event is going to be an all-day affair, with pistol practice in the morning and the first session of our summer rifle series in the afternoon. I'm really looking forward to doing some rifle work.
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