"The course consists of practical war methods of shooting with the one-hand gun, in which any man of average intelligence can be taught to draw, load fire and hit his opponent within a second."
"This is not a new fangled idea, but a proven method which has been in use in the far-east since 1919, against some of the most desperate criminals in the world - men who were, (in most cases), known killers, who preferred always to shoot it out, rather than being captured and finishing up in front of a firing squad, etc....."
"All affrays were on the run - up and down stairways, over roofs, down cobbled alleyways, or in very crowded streets. Ninety percent of the shooting was in the dark and the majority of hits were within four yards. Some of the police were killed by being shot in the back at a matter of inches distance only."
"Students should be informed that the average shooting with the one-hand gun is over, so far as they will be concerned, in a very few seconds. There will no time to reload. If there first shot takes longer than a third of a second to fire, they will not be the one to tell the newspaper about it. It is literally a matter of the quick and the dead - so they can take their choice."
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
2010 National Tactical Invitational
Last week, I attended the 2010 National Tactical Invitational. NTI isn't really a training event, you're not going to learn any new skills while you're there. Instead, it's a testing ground where you can take your existing skills and put them to a test in a mix of live fire and force on force scenarios.
The whole event runs from Tuesday night through Saturday. You do one day of shooting on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. The other days you can attend lectures by various trainers and others. On Saturday morning, there is a partners force on force exercise. I'm here with a few guys from South Carolina, Bill, John, and Richard (Tactical Trainer on this board). I was squaded up with them for todays shooting.
ATSA Village
NTI is composed of ten stages, four force-on-force scenarios, and six live fire stages (five scenarios and a skills test). We started out in the force-on-force stages, the ATSA village (the American Tactical Shooting Association sponsors NTI). Of course, we had to divest ourselves of all live weapons and be searched before being allowed into force-on-force. Once in the village, we were issued j-frame revolvers loaded with Code Eagle sims rounds. These are plastic cased rounds a plastic bullet filled with paint. There isn't any powder, just a primer. The rounds don't generate enough recoil to cycle the slide of a semi-auto (hence the revolvers). They don't require all of the safety gear that Simunitions do, though they do smart a bit more than airsoft. Safety gear includes a plastic face shield and foam collar around the neck to protect the vulnerable bits.
We were introduced to the denizens of the village, including a bride and groom who were getting married that day. Several of the scenarios were wedding related. The law in the village was represented by Vicki Farnam, who played the village Sheriff. All together, this was a fairly major setup, including around fifteen role-players and quite a bit of scenery. We were led through a series of scenarios by a judge, who observed what we did and was responsible for calling a halt to the scenario after it played out.
My first scenario was a visit to the IRS office. Evidently there was a problem with my return, and I had to discuss this with the agent there. During our discussion, her ex came in and started yelling at her. She pulled a gun out of her desk and pointed it at him, prompting him to leave. I didn't want to insert myself into somebody else's domestic situation so I didn't intervene. A few minutes later he comes back. This time when she goes for the gun, he disarms her and I'm within a hair of drawing my gun, but rather than pointing it at her, or me, he pockets it and continues arguing. She eventually crawls over the desk and takes shelter behind my chair. At this point, I still don't want to get in a fight with this guy (especially for a woman who's giving me an audit), but since I'm between him and her, and he's starting to think that I'm the she cheated on him with, I have to do something. I deny the affair and converse with him a bit and he storms off. This was a situation where I could have escalated it to a fight pretty easily, but I didn't want to get into a situation like that where it really wasn't my problem to begin with.
The second scenario took me to a store, where I was to pick up a wedding present, and some other stuff my wife wanted me to get. Just as my hands are full of all of this junk, two guys (one of whom had been loitering suspiciously outside the store earlier) burst in to rob the place. I immediately ditched the stuff, but at this point their attention seemed to be focused on the shop owners and getting the money out of the register, so I didn't want to turn this into a gunfight. One guy behind the counter tried to draw his own gun, but fumbled it uselessly. After they'd gotten the contents of the register, they turned their attention to me, demanding first my money (they passed out fake bills for us to use in scenarios, which I handed over) then my watch. At this point the nearer thug started grabbing for the suspicious bulge under my shirt. In this case was the flashlight on my left hip. It was fairly obvious that my gun was next. I certainly wasn't about to go down that road, so I decided to act. I grabbed the arm that was reaching for my flashlight and yanked that robber towards me as I drew, put two rounds into him, then launched one round at the other robber, grazing his arm. Unfortunately, I didn't do quite a good enough job manhandling the nearer robber, and despite my hold on him, he was able to reach under and pop a round into my chest right as was shooting at the second robber. At this point the judge called a halt. Afterwards, the Sheriff arrived and I was given an opportunity to incriminate myself (I declined).
One of the difficulties here is that there are limits to the amount of physical force you can use with the roleplayers. You can push and shove and grab, but you're supposed to mime and verbally call out any harder strikes or disarms. If I could have manhandled this guy with more force, I might have been able to pull off what I was trying, but given those limitations I probably would have been better off getting off the X rather than going hands on.
The third scenario required walking down a long narrow alley. To justify this to the folks who say "I would never go down an alley like that", you're told that you have to cut through this alley, or you'll be late to your job and get fired. As I reached the first bend in the alley, there was a guy standing there. I gave him a nod but he didn't respond and as soon as I was passed, he yelled out, "yo!" At this point, I'm figuring that he just alerted someone up ahead. I turn the next corner to see two guys conducting what looks like a drug deal. The customer wanders off down the alley while the dealer starts offering me some of his product. As I say no thanks he steps to block me. I'm still conscious of the guy behind me and I don't want to get blocked in between them. I use the wedding present I'm carrying from the last scenario to put something between us, as I step left and shove by him. At that point I boogie out of there. During the debrief on Saturday afternoon, Vicki mentioned that someone navigated the alley by buying the drugs off the dealer, then going to the Sheriff and confessing to the crime.
The last scenario involved all four of the shooters on our squad, and all the 'village people' as they call the role-players. We come together for the long awaited wedding. As we waited around between the earlier scenarios we were throated to scenes of the bride being harassed by an old flame, so we all had the feeling that something would happen. A few minutes into the scenario the lights went out and there was a loud pop and some smoke, which caused to of the participants to bolt for the door, but the preacher explained that it was just electrical problems. After the I dos, the guests were asked to line up in a receiving line. As we did so, the ex-boyfriend came walking in with an explosive vest on. I immediately drew and lit him up. My instinct was to take the headshot, but we'd been asked not to shoot for the head for safety reasons, even with the face shields, so I aimed for the chest above the bomb vest. Bill did the same from another angle and so we peppered him pretty good before he had a chance to do anything with the vest.
This finished up our time in the village, and doing force-on-force, so we turned in our sims revolvers and got our gear back on.
ATSA Meditation Retreat
During the brief for this scenario, they explained that I was going to meet a friend at a construction site and that he was wearing a purple-pinkish shirt and had a really bad haircut (all of your friends/relatives that you're supposed to save in the live fire scenarios had made really bad fashion choices). I was led in with my head turned down so I didn't see the setup until the start signal. The signal was a really big bang (something along the lines of an artillery simulator) followed up by speakers playing sounds of automatic weapons fire and guys shouting 'allahu akbar' (though I didn't appreciate that detail until I heard the tape being played for the next guy to shoot the scenario). I didn't see any targets from my starting position, so I moved forward to my poorly dressed friend and shot two close range targets behind a low wall. These are NTI's standard falling targets. 3d rubber mannequins with a central core that you have to hit to knock over. I pied out from cover and engaged three targets about 50 yards away. These were steel targets, and I managed to ding each of them with the first or second shot. Pieing out further I shot another, nearer one. I really like the Warren Tactical sights I've got on my Glock 21. I think they made it considerably easier to hit those three far targets than it would have been with my old three dot sights. As with most of the live fire stages, this was videotaped, and they ran the tape back to review my performance. They also give you a copy to take home so I have the chance to replay all of my mistakes again and again.
ATSA Mall
This was my first 360 degree stage. On these stages, the range has a berm in all directions and rather than going through it with a range office behind you, you go in on your own, with the RO and judge monitoring via video cameras (you also get a copy of the tape). From their spot safely behind the berm, they can move some targets, open doors, and speak to you over a PA system. Despite being only static targets, this is a very interactive environment.
As the name might suggest, this stage was meant to represent a mall. The setup described during the stage briefing (the 'Bedtime story' as skip Gochenour refers to it) is that you were shopping with your wife or girlfriend and you had gone to the restroom. They mentioned that the start signal would be 'unmistakable'. To cap it off, they put your support hand in a sling, preventing you from using it for anything.
You start off the stage in a small room, simulating a restroom (though without the accoutrements of one). Again, the start signal is a really big bang (they seem to love that around here). I drew my pistol, opened up the door to the rest of the stage, and took a look around. The shoot house was set up with an open central area, with several columns for cover. The sides had a bunch of nooks and closets that could (and did) conceal various targets. At this point, I had an opportunity to see my 'wife' being held hostage in a dark closet in the far corner. It was very easy to miss, and I missed it. The hostage taker also had a good field of fire all the way down the center of the room, an area that I would cross three or four times in the course of the scenario. He could have easily shot me without me even seeing him. I moved into the room and saw a hanging target (one that uses a balloon inside and falls when you pop it). It was intended as a mover, but it hadn't started moving yet. I dispatched it with one round, then immediately realized that I hadn't seen a gun on it before shooting. It would turn out that there was a threat indicator on there that I hadn't seen, but until the debrief afterwards I was certain that I had just shot a no-shoot.
As I moved further into the room, I spotted a target to the right and engaged him. While I was doing that, they opened a door behind me and exposed another target. After I turned and dealt him I spotted another target in an Army uniform further down the mall and saw that he had a pistol. I yelled for him to drop his gun, but he refused, claiming he was a good guy. I didn't want to shoot him, but I didn't want to expose myself to him either, so I moved back to a side hallway where I would be out of sight.
At around this point, they activated a device that dropped a fake bomb (half a dozen sticks of simulated dynamite taped together). I totally missed this, but before the bomb went off (another big bang) I had already moved off to the side hallway. The wall between the hallway and the main part of the stage was only concealment, rather than cover (it's all wood, but some panels are painted with a brick pattern indicating they're hard cover) so it wouldn't necessarily have protected me from the blast.
I did a one handed tactical reload in the hallway, then called out to the fellow in uniform that I was just looking for my wife and not to shoot me. In return for a less confrontational approach, he clued me in to a hostile target around the corner to my right, which I promptly dispatched. Finally, the only part of the stage left unsearched was that dark closet in the corner. When I finally got close and looked inside, I saw my wife (the only target in the stage wearing a wig) in front of an armed hostile. I put a few rounds into his head and told the wife to come with me, ending the scenario.
ATSA Courthouse
Like the mall this stage was on a 360 degree range, overseen by video cameras. As with the previous stage, your support hand was in a sling and out of action. Again, you start out inside and are tasked with rescuing a friend or relative. These two features run through most of the live fire scenarios. The NTI is designed to me occupationally neutral, suited for police officers and the private citizen alike. Unlike police officers, citizens do not have a duty to enter buildings full of armed men, and the best course of action will often realistically be to call 911 and let the professionals handle it. This wouldn't provide you with much training, so the NTI places a friend or relative in most scenarios like the cheese at the end of the maze to incentivize the private citizen to fight their way through a building full of people who want to kill them. They also usually start you inside the building, so you don't actually make the decision to enter, instead you're already there.
The shoot house for this stage was roughly L-shaped. I entered at one end of the L and had a clear view up the length of this leg of the L to a very confusing target. The target had a wig and was wearing a dress. Now in the previous two stages, the only target with the wig was the friend or relative you were trying to rescue. The briefing for this stage did not include a description of the friend or relative that I was going in after. As I was trying to figure this out, a plank with a pair of foam pipes attached to it swiveled up. This was supposed to be a double barreled shotgun the woman was wielding, but because of where it was placed, kind of low and off to the side, it didn't really register that was what it was supposed to be. Based on the position, it looked like the gun was being wielded by someone crouching down behind her, but there wasn't anyone there. After pondering this for a while, I fired some rounds at her, but the angle was hard for a right hander shooting one-handed, and I missed. I figured this wasn't a falling target and moved on, checking the rest of the room she was in.
Hidden to the left of the door was a target wearing cammo with a badge, representing courthouse security. I told him not to shoot me and moved past him into the room. There were two parallel hallways leading off to the right, one of which held another security guard. At this point I missed a target standing outside a window down the right hand hall. I moved over next to the woman and gave her a bit of a shove, knocking her over, then moved down the left hand hall. There was an armed target outside a window on the left. Further on, I saw a target in a small nook to the left, but I didn't see any weapon. I also noticed the gun of the target that I'd missed earlier. The foam rubber gun was attached to the window frame with a screw, in front of the target, but I couldn't see the target itself from this angle and I wasn't about to stick my head in front of that gun to see out the window. I moved by the target in the nook I'd identified earlier and saw that he had a gun, which had been out of view earlier, so I shot him. In the final room were two targets, one of which was armed and one was not. I shot the armed one and correctly assumed the other was my friend I was supposed to save.
ATSA Skills Test
The next stage I shot was the ATSA skills drill. Rather than being a scenario, this involves shooting a series of predefined exercises against cardboard targets. There were two strings of three shots from retention, moving to cover while shooting two rounds on each of three targets, a ball and dummy drill, and a few similar exercises.
Church of the Holy Reload
This was this year's mystery gun stage. The setup is that you are about to enter your niece's wedding carrying your wedding gift: a 12 gauge coach gun (for which you just happened to bring ten rounds of birdshot). Since the point of the mystery gun stage is to force you to fight without your usual gear, you are supposed to be wearing a tuxedo which doesn't have room for any of your normal carry gear. Rather than have every shooter take off all the crap we carry (and because no tuxedo was available) we put on a hospital gown over our clothes. This not only prevents us from getting to our gear, it also deprives us of any pockets.
Before the stage started, I spent a minute handling the coach gun. I wanted to make sure I knew which direction the safety and the lever to open up the action were supposed to go. Unfortunately, I missed the other salient feature of the gun: that the hammers have to be cocked manually. My very brief previous exposure to coach guns has been with models that didn't have external hammers. The gift box I was carrying the shotgun and ammo in also included the worlds worst flashlight. It was dim and activated by a knob (which also focused the beam). Rather than being a tube light, it was about four inches in diameter with a swiveling handle, making it very cumbersome to use in conjunction with a long gun. Of course, this was a dark stage, meaning we would need the flashlight for target identification.
At the start signal (the RO yelling that there was shooting inside the church, rather than an explosion this time) I set down the box and got the shotgun loaded. In my left hand, I grabbed as many shells as I could manage and the light. As I entered the church, I realized that the beam was way too diffuse. I managed to readjust the light and saw two figures with guns off to the right. I tried to fire, but got nothing. It was at this point that I realized I needed to cock the gun manually. After pulling the hammers back, I let them have one barrel each. Somebody yelled out that there was a guy with a knife up in front of the church. I hurriedly reloaded and rechecked the gun, used the light to identify the armed target, and blasted him. A bystander informed me that the bride and groom had gone out the back.
I had no idea which barrel I had just fired, so I reloaded both with my last two shells, dropped the flashlight and pied the corner as I stepped out the back door. I spotted one armed BG at the corner of the church and dropped him. With one round left, I pied around a short wall segment and spotted an unarmed target with an armed one just behind him. I was in the process of pulling the trigger when I spotted the badge on his chest. I know I saw the before the gun went off, but I wasn't able to stop in time and ended up giving the deputy my last round.
Overall, this stage was a series of blunders for me. In addition to my trouble with the hammers and shooting the cop, I also stood rooted in the doorway for at least half a minute while I messed with the light and shotgun rather than stepping back outside and seeking cover. As they explained during the debrief on Saturday, they don't do the mystery gun stage because they think you should know how to operate every weapon on the planet. The do it because forcing you to use an unfamiliar weapon (and a crappy flashlight) rather than your regular gear induces stress that can reveal weaknesses. It's interesting what degrades and what doesn't. I failed to seek cover and had an obvious problem with target discrimination. On the other hand, I shot well. I point shot the gun from the shoulder and every target went down with one shot. I also think I did a good job pieing the two corners, even doing a smooth shoulder transition to pie around the left side of the wall (right before I blew away the deputy).
ATSA Medical Clinic
The final stage I shot used mostly pneumatically activated targets, rather than the falling targets that characterized the earlier scenarios. This allows them to reveal and retract the targets as you move through the stage, but they don't go down with quite the same satisfying finality as the dropping targets. Again, you are tasked with rescuing a relative from a medical clinic after you her shots coming from inside.
I entered, moved down a hallway, and pied a corner to the right. I spotted a target that was facing away from me. The target whirled around just after I spotted it, revealing a pistol. I shot it. A moment later, a pneumatic target popped up out a window to my left. I put several rounds into it before it disappeared. Another target popped out further down the hall. I shot it until it retracted, then rounded another corner to my right, revealing another target. Putting several rounds into this target left me at slide lock, prompting me to reload. I rounded a left hand corner, revealing a long empty hallway with a door at the end. Opening the door revealed my relative out the back door of the clinic, but to reach him I had to move past a hallway to my left. As I pied out I saw another turning target, which I gunned down (almost hitting a no-shoot behind it) and another pneumatic target out the window. I moved past the hallway and spotted yet another pneumatic target in a nook to my right. Shooting it ended the stage.
This was the only scenario I came close to running out of ammunition on. Despite shooting fairly generously, I only used one magazine on the Meditation and Courthouse stages. During the Mall stage, I did a tactical reload and shot slightly more than one magazine of ammunition. On the this stage, I ran one magazine dry and had only 3 rounds left in the second at the end of the stage. I think this can largely be attributed to the fact that the pneumatic targets don't retract anywhere near as fast as the falling targets| drop to the ground.
This finished up my day of shooting on Thursday. NTI was not yet over, however. In addition to a day of lectures and discussions on Friday, there was also a set of partners scenarios on Saturday.
Partners Scenarios
The partners scenarios are run force on force, using the same revolvers loaded with sims as the ATSA village. One partner is armed, but the other is not, and represents the friend or family member to be rescued. I was partnered with John, one of my friends from South Carolina.
For the first scenario, I was unarmed. It was a fairly faithful recreation of the ATSA Mall live fire stage, using the same shot house with role-players in about the same locations as the live fire targets. As the cheese at the end of the maze, I was placed in a small closet to the rear. As John came in the front, I yelled that I was in the back and decided to take a peek out to see if I could see anything to help him. The door swung open further than I'd intended and for my troubles I was shot immediately. Deciding discretion was the better part of valor at this point, I moved back further into the closet and waited for John to come to me.
John ended up taking a round in fairly short order, after he spotted an armed criminal and attempted to shoot him, but was unable to get the revolver to fire. After a moment, the criminal shot him. Before the scenario, John opened the cylinder of the revolver to check that it was loaded (NTI has been known to give people unloaded guns in Force on Force, particularly if it is taken from you by the Sheriff during a scenario and returned). Unfortunately, he didn't completely close the cylinder, resulting in an unifireable gun.
The second partners scenario took place in the Courthouse shoot house, but the scenario was somewhat different than the live fire scenario yesterday. The unarmed partner entered the courthouse to pay a traffic ticket and is thrown in a cell by two criminals attempting to escape. Of course, I did not know this at the time, I'm just waiting outside for my friend when I hear gunfire. I entered and encountered a man holding a cellphone. I manage to identify the contents of his hand correctly and don't shoot him. After he assumes I'm a bad guy (since I have a gun) I tell him to get out of there, then think better of it and ask him to call 911.
As I moved further into the shoot house, I hear the two escaping convicts. They're down a pair of parallel hallways to the right. Rather than trying to dig them out, I initially set up behind some cover and wait for them. My position isn't a great one, since I have to either overexpose myself to one hallway in order to see the other. When one of them yells out where I am to the other, I decided to move. I swung over to the wall next to the to hallways, where they will have to pie the corner in order to see me. They don't seem to be too keen to come out, so I formulate a new plan. The nearer hallway ends in an open door that swings out into the room I'm in. I swung that door shut, eliminating one hallway and, for the moment at least, one convict from the situation. He tries to shoot me through the crack of the door as I swing it shut, but the paint bullet disintegrates on the door. With him out of the way, I rolled out around the corner of the second hallway and shoot the convict at almost the same moment he shoots me. My aim is better and I hit him pretty good while he gets a grazing hit on my cover garment.
At this moment Sheriff Vicki comes in (the fruit of my request to the fellow with the cellphone to call 911). I pulled back from the corner and drop the gun on the Sheriff's order. They called a halt to the scenario.
Major Mistakes
To paraphrase something I said during the debrief on Saturday afternoon, if you don't consider the mistakes you made at NTI, you're not getting your money's worth. In that vein, here are what I consider to be my biggest mistakes.
During the robbery scenario in the village, I got shot. After some consideration, I think I was on the right track, going hands on with the closer robber as I shot him, then the second robber. However, just grabbing his arm and shooting from retention didn't work so well. In real life, getting shot in the leg might have reset the robbers OODA loop enough that he wouldn't have the presence of mind to shoot me, but that's not something I want to chance. In hindsight, I would have been better off going for the quick kill, rather than the retention shot. Plant the first round in the near robber's head to eliminate him as a threat, then shoot the second robber. Alternatively, rather than grabbing his arm, I could have hit him in the brachial plexus with my left arm and driven him back (or just run him over) relying on that pressure to keep him from shooting me while I dealt with his friend. While I think both of those are good real life options, neither is really available in the ATSA village, due to safety limits on headshots and hard strikes.
I missed chances to see some less obvious threats. During the mall stage, I failed to see my wife being held hostage in the dark closet in the far corder of the room, and at the courthouse, I didn't see one of the targets standing outside the window. This is more than just the NTI organizers being sneaky. Both locations were really good choices to lay up for an ambush, just the kind of thing someone might use in real life. I need to work on recognizing such things.
Finally, I shot twice when I shouldn't have. I shot the first target in the mall before I saw the threat indicator and I let the poor deputy have a load of birdshot in the mystery gun stage. The thing that both of these have in common is that they were times when I was pretty highly stressed. As designed, the mystery gun stage induces a lot of stress as you try to run that coach gun. The Mall target came at the beginning of my first 360 stage, my first real shoot house experience, and my first full on NTI scenario (the Meditation Retreat stage I shot before this one was more of a hybrid skills drill and scenario than a full scenario). After shooting that first target, I calmed down a bit and went on with the stage. Obviously, this kind of stress can induce mistakes, and it's a good thing to be cognizant of. Further experience may solve this problem at NTI, but when I find myself in a real gunfight, it's liable to be pretty stressful.
These were the three big ones. There were some others. I failed to recognize the woman with the shotgun as a threat in the Courthouse stage, but that's really a problem in interpreting what NTI is trying to say with their setups, rather than a problem that might crop up in a real gunfight. I'm confident if a woman wielding a shotgun tried to kill me in real life, I would recognize it as a threat. I'm pretty good at working corners, but most of my experience is with single pieces of cover. A full 360 shoot house (particularly the NTI ones with lots of nooks and crannies) is a more difficult problem. I need to learn more about how to clear complete rooms, rather than just single corners.
Interestingly, two of the areas I decided need some work (0-5 feet and CQB) are the primary subjects of two classes I'm scheduled to take from Gabe Suarez later this year. In a way, my NTI experience provided some additional evidence for what I already knew.
What Worked
Point shooting worked. I was really glad to have taken Roger Phillips' Point Shooting Progressions and Advanced Point Shooting Progressions classes before the NTI. They really raised my point shooting skills to a new level. NTI provided a chance to put those skills to use. I only had a full sight picture on three targets during the NTI scenarios: the three 50 yard targets in the ATSA Meditation Retreat stage. I shot every other target using some variant of point shooting. The Mall and Courthouse stages involved a lot of point shoulder, since I only had one hand available. The Courthouse also required some half him shooting where the quarters were a bit closer. During the other stages, I shot mostly from isosceles, with the gun just below my line of sight. My shooting was pretty accurate, with every target going down in one burst or less. I point shot the shotgun during the mystery gun stage too, and every target went down with only one shot.
With the exception of the mystery gun stage and the very start of the ATSA mall, I was pretty calm throughout the exercise. Some participants talked a lot about how stressed they were during their first NTI, but I didn't experience too much of that. This may have a lot to do with my previous experience. I spent a year and a half doing two live fire scenarios a month, so I'm familiar with that aspect. NTI's scenarios are grander in scope and use a lot more scenery, but the basic need to run through your OODA loop and make quick decisions remains the same. I also had quite a bit of force on force experience coming in, including several classes with Farnam and Suarez International, so that wasn't new to me either.
Final Thoughts
Overall, NTI was a great experience. It really allowed me to put my skills to the test. I didn't walk out with any new skills, but I learned a lot about the skills I've got, and the skills I need to work on. Despite some shortcomings, I was pretty satisfied with my level of performance. It validated a lot of what I'd learned in previous classes and has given me confidence in my fundamental skills. At the same time, it provided a roadmap for some future skill development. If you're willing to be humbled a bit, NTI is a great experience for any skilled shooter. I definitely plan on being back next year.
The whole event runs from Tuesday night through Saturday. You do one day of shooting on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. The other days you can attend lectures by various trainers and others. On Saturday morning, there is a partners force on force exercise. I'm here with a few guys from South Carolina, Bill, John, and Richard (Tactical Trainer on this board). I was squaded up with them for todays shooting.
ATSA Village
NTI is composed of ten stages, four force-on-force scenarios, and six live fire stages (five scenarios and a skills test). We started out in the force-on-force stages, the ATSA village (the American Tactical Shooting Association sponsors NTI). Of course, we had to divest ourselves of all live weapons and be searched before being allowed into force-on-force. Once in the village, we were issued j-frame revolvers loaded with Code Eagle sims rounds. These are plastic cased rounds a plastic bullet filled with paint. There isn't any powder, just a primer. The rounds don't generate enough recoil to cycle the slide of a semi-auto (hence the revolvers). They don't require all of the safety gear that Simunitions do, though they do smart a bit more than airsoft. Safety gear includes a plastic face shield and foam collar around the neck to protect the vulnerable bits.
We were introduced to the denizens of the village, including a bride and groom who were getting married that day. Several of the scenarios were wedding related. The law in the village was represented by Vicki Farnam, who played the village Sheriff. All together, this was a fairly major setup, including around fifteen role-players and quite a bit of scenery. We were led through a series of scenarios by a judge, who observed what we did and was responsible for calling a halt to the scenario after it played out.
My first scenario was a visit to the IRS office. Evidently there was a problem with my return, and I had to discuss this with the agent there. During our discussion, her ex came in and started yelling at her. She pulled a gun out of her desk and pointed it at him, prompting him to leave. I didn't want to insert myself into somebody else's domestic situation so I didn't intervene. A few minutes later he comes back. This time when she goes for the gun, he disarms her and I'm within a hair of drawing my gun, but rather than pointing it at her, or me, he pockets it and continues arguing. She eventually crawls over the desk and takes shelter behind my chair. At this point, I still don't want to get in a fight with this guy (especially for a woman who's giving me an audit), but since I'm between him and her, and he's starting to think that I'm the she cheated on him with, I have to do something. I deny the affair and converse with him a bit and he storms off. This was a situation where I could have escalated it to a fight pretty easily, but I didn't want to get into a situation like that where it really wasn't my problem to begin with.
The second scenario took me to a store, where I was to pick up a wedding present, and some other stuff my wife wanted me to get. Just as my hands are full of all of this junk, two guys (one of whom had been loitering suspiciously outside the store earlier) burst in to rob the place. I immediately ditched the stuff, but at this point their attention seemed to be focused on the shop owners and getting the money out of the register, so I didn't want to turn this into a gunfight. One guy behind the counter tried to draw his own gun, but fumbled it uselessly. After they'd gotten the contents of the register, they turned their attention to me, demanding first my money (they passed out fake bills for us to use in scenarios, which I handed over) then my watch. At this point the nearer thug started grabbing for the suspicious bulge under my shirt. In this case was the flashlight on my left hip. It was fairly obvious that my gun was next. I certainly wasn't about to go down that road, so I decided to act. I grabbed the arm that was reaching for my flashlight and yanked that robber towards me as I drew, put two rounds into him, then launched one round at the other robber, grazing his arm. Unfortunately, I didn't do quite a good enough job manhandling the nearer robber, and despite my hold on him, he was able to reach under and pop a round into my chest right as was shooting at the second robber. At this point the judge called a halt. Afterwards, the Sheriff arrived and I was given an opportunity to incriminate myself (I declined).
One of the difficulties here is that there are limits to the amount of physical force you can use with the roleplayers. You can push and shove and grab, but you're supposed to mime and verbally call out any harder strikes or disarms. If I could have manhandled this guy with more force, I might have been able to pull off what I was trying, but given those limitations I probably would have been better off getting off the X rather than going hands on.
The third scenario required walking down a long narrow alley. To justify this to the folks who say "I would never go down an alley like that", you're told that you have to cut through this alley, or you'll be late to your job and get fired. As I reached the first bend in the alley, there was a guy standing there. I gave him a nod but he didn't respond and as soon as I was passed, he yelled out, "yo!" At this point, I'm figuring that he just alerted someone up ahead. I turn the next corner to see two guys conducting what looks like a drug deal. The customer wanders off down the alley while the dealer starts offering me some of his product. As I say no thanks he steps to block me. I'm still conscious of the guy behind me and I don't want to get blocked in between them. I use the wedding present I'm carrying from the last scenario to put something between us, as I step left and shove by him. At that point I boogie out of there. During the debrief on Saturday afternoon, Vicki mentioned that someone navigated the alley by buying the drugs off the dealer, then going to the Sheriff and confessing to the crime.
The last scenario involved all four of the shooters on our squad, and all the 'village people' as they call the role-players. We come together for the long awaited wedding. As we waited around between the earlier scenarios we were throated to scenes of the bride being harassed by an old flame, so we all had the feeling that something would happen. A few minutes into the scenario the lights went out and there was a loud pop and some smoke, which caused to of the participants to bolt for the door, but the preacher explained that it was just electrical problems. After the I dos, the guests were asked to line up in a receiving line. As we did so, the ex-boyfriend came walking in with an explosive vest on. I immediately drew and lit him up. My instinct was to take the headshot, but we'd been asked not to shoot for the head for safety reasons, even with the face shields, so I aimed for the chest above the bomb vest. Bill did the same from another angle and so we peppered him pretty good before he had a chance to do anything with the vest.
This finished up our time in the village, and doing force-on-force, so we turned in our sims revolvers and got our gear back on.
ATSA Meditation Retreat
During the brief for this scenario, they explained that I was going to meet a friend at a construction site and that he was wearing a purple-pinkish shirt and had a really bad haircut (all of your friends/relatives that you're supposed to save in the live fire scenarios had made really bad fashion choices). I was led in with my head turned down so I didn't see the setup until the start signal. The signal was a really big bang (something along the lines of an artillery simulator) followed up by speakers playing sounds of automatic weapons fire and guys shouting 'allahu akbar' (though I didn't appreciate that detail until I heard the tape being played for the next guy to shoot the scenario). I didn't see any targets from my starting position, so I moved forward to my poorly dressed friend and shot two close range targets behind a low wall. These are NTI's standard falling targets. 3d rubber mannequins with a central core that you have to hit to knock over. I pied out from cover and engaged three targets about 50 yards away. These were steel targets, and I managed to ding each of them with the first or second shot. Pieing out further I shot another, nearer one. I really like the Warren Tactical sights I've got on my Glock 21. I think they made it considerably easier to hit those three far targets than it would have been with my old three dot sights. As with most of the live fire stages, this was videotaped, and they ran the tape back to review my performance. They also give you a copy to take home so I have the chance to replay all of my mistakes again and again.
ATSA Mall
This was my first 360 degree stage. On these stages, the range has a berm in all directions and rather than going through it with a range office behind you, you go in on your own, with the RO and judge monitoring via video cameras (you also get a copy of the tape). From their spot safely behind the berm, they can move some targets, open doors, and speak to you over a PA system. Despite being only static targets, this is a very interactive environment.
As the name might suggest, this stage was meant to represent a mall. The setup described during the stage briefing (the 'Bedtime story' as skip Gochenour refers to it) is that you were shopping with your wife or girlfriend and you had gone to the restroom. They mentioned that the start signal would be 'unmistakable'. To cap it off, they put your support hand in a sling, preventing you from using it for anything.
You start off the stage in a small room, simulating a restroom (though without the accoutrements of one). Again, the start signal is a really big bang (they seem to love that around here). I drew my pistol, opened up the door to the rest of the stage, and took a look around. The shoot house was set up with an open central area, with several columns for cover. The sides had a bunch of nooks and closets that could (and did) conceal various targets. At this point, I had an opportunity to see my 'wife' being held hostage in a dark closet in the far corner. It was very easy to miss, and I missed it. The hostage taker also had a good field of fire all the way down the center of the room, an area that I would cross three or four times in the course of the scenario. He could have easily shot me without me even seeing him. I moved into the room and saw a hanging target (one that uses a balloon inside and falls when you pop it). It was intended as a mover, but it hadn't started moving yet. I dispatched it with one round, then immediately realized that I hadn't seen a gun on it before shooting. It would turn out that there was a threat indicator on there that I hadn't seen, but until the debrief afterwards I was certain that I had just shot a no-shoot.
As I moved further into the room, I spotted a target to the right and engaged him. While I was doing that, they opened a door behind me and exposed another target. After I turned and dealt him I spotted another target in an Army uniform further down the mall and saw that he had a pistol. I yelled for him to drop his gun, but he refused, claiming he was a good guy. I didn't want to shoot him, but I didn't want to expose myself to him either, so I moved back to a side hallway where I would be out of sight.
At around this point, they activated a device that dropped a fake bomb (half a dozen sticks of simulated dynamite taped together). I totally missed this, but before the bomb went off (another big bang) I had already moved off to the side hallway. The wall between the hallway and the main part of the stage was only concealment, rather than cover (it's all wood, but some panels are painted with a brick pattern indicating they're hard cover) so it wouldn't necessarily have protected me from the blast.
I did a one handed tactical reload in the hallway, then called out to the fellow in uniform that I was just looking for my wife and not to shoot me. In return for a less confrontational approach, he clued me in to a hostile target around the corner to my right, which I promptly dispatched. Finally, the only part of the stage left unsearched was that dark closet in the corner. When I finally got close and looked inside, I saw my wife (the only target in the stage wearing a wig) in front of an armed hostile. I put a few rounds into his head and told the wife to come with me, ending the scenario.
ATSA Courthouse
Like the mall this stage was on a 360 degree range, overseen by video cameras. As with the previous stage, your support hand was in a sling and out of action. Again, you start out inside and are tasked with rescuing a friend or relative. These two features run through most of the live fire scenarios. The NTI is designed to me occupationally neutral, suited for police officers and the private citizen alike. Unlike police officers, citizens do not have a duty to enter buildings full of armed men, and the best course of action will often realistically be to call 911 and let the professionals handle it. This wouldn't provide you with much training, so the NTI places a friend or relative in most scenarios like the cheese at the end of the maze to incentivize the private citizen to fight their way through a building full of people who want to kill them. They also usually start you inside the building, so you don't actually make the decision to enter, instead you're already there.
The shoot house for this stage was roughly L-shaped. I entered at one end of the L and had a clear view up the length of this leg of the L to a very confusing target. The target had a wig and was wearing a dress. Now in the previous two stages, the only target with the wig was the friend or relative you were trying to rescue. The briefing for this stage did not include a description of the friend or relative that I was going in after. As I was trying to figure this out, a plank with a pair of foam pipes attached to it swiveled up. This was supposed to be a double barreled shotgun the woman was wielding, but because of where it was placed, kind of low and off to the side, it didn't really register that was what it was supposed to be. Based on the position, it looked like the gun was being wielded by someone crouching down behind her, but there wasn't anyone there. After pondering this for a while, I fired some rounds at her, but the angle was hard for a right hander shooting one-handed, and I missed. I figured this wasn't a falling target and moved on, checking the rest of the room she was in.
Hidden to the left of the door was a target wearing cammo with a badge, representing courthouse security. I told him not to shoot me and moved past him into the room. There were two parallel hallways leading off to the right, one of which held another security guard. At this point I missed a target standing outside a window down the right hand hall. I moved over next to the woman and gave her a bit of a shove, knocking her over, then moved down the left hand hall. There was an armed target outside a window on the left. Further on, I saw a target in a small nook to the left, but I didn't see any weapon. I also noticed the gun of the target that I'd missed earlier. The foam rubber gun was attached to the window frame with a screw, in front of the target, but I couldn't see the target itself from this angle and I wasn't about to stick my head in front of that gun to see out the window. I moved by the target in the nook I'd identified earlier and saw that he had a gun, which had been out of view earlier, so I shot him. In the final room were two targets, one of which was armed and one was not. I shot the armed one and correctly assumed the other was my friend I was supposed to save.
ATSA Skills Test
The next stage I shot was the ATSA skills drill. Rather than being a scenario, this involves shooting a series of predefined exercises against cardboard targets. There were two strings of three shots from retention, moving to cover while shooting two rounds on each of three targets, a ball and dummy drill, and a few similar exercises.
Church of the Holy Reload
This was this year's mystery gun stage. The setup is that you are about to enter your niece's wedding carrying your wedding gift: a 12 gauge coach gun (for which you just happened to bring ten rounds of birdshot). Since the point of the mystery gun stage is to force you to fight without your usual gear, you are supposed to be wearing a tuxedo which doesn't have room for any of your normal carry gear. Rather than have every shooter take off all the crap we carry (and because no tuxedo was available) we put on a hospital gown over our clothes. This not only prevents us from getting to our gear, it also deprives us of any pockets.
Before the stage started, I spent a minute handling the coach gun. I wanted to make sure I knew which direction the safety and the lever to open up the action were supposed to go. Unfortunately, I missed the other salient feature of the gun: that the hammers have to be cocked manually. My very brief previous exposure to coach guns has been with models that didn't have external hammers. The gift box I was carrying the shotgun and ammo in also included the worlds worst flashlight. It was dim and activated by a knob (which also focused the beam). Rather than being a tube light, it was about four inches in diameter with a swiveling handle, making it very cumbersome to use in conjunction with a long gun. Of course, this was a dark stage, meaning we would need the flashlight for target identification.
At the start signal (the RO yelling that there was shooting inside the church, rather than an explosion this time) I set down the box and got the shotgun loaded. In my left hand, I grabbed as many shells as I could manage and the light. As I entered the church, I realized that the beam was way too diffuse. I managed to readjust the light and saw two figures with guns off to the right. I tried to fire, but got nothing. It was at this point that I realized I needed to cock the gun manually. After pulling the hammers back, I let them have one barrel each. Somebody yelled out that there was a guy with a knife up in front of the church. I hurriedly reloaded and rechecked the gun, used the light to identify the armed target, and blasted him. A bystander informed me that the bride and groom had gone out the back.
I had no idea which barrel I had just fired, so I reloaded both with my last two shells, dropped the flashlight and pied the corner as I stepped out the back door. I spotted one armed BG at the corner of the church and dropped him. With one round left, I pied around a short wall segment and spotted an unarmed target with an armed one just behind him. I was in the process of pulling the trigger when I spotted the badge on his chest. I know I saw the before the gun went off, but I wasn't able to stop in time and ended up giving the deputy my last round.
Overall, this stage was a series of blunders for me. In addition to my trouble with the hammers and shooting the cop, I also stood rooted in the doorway for at least half a minute while I messed with the light and shotgun rather than stepping back outside and seeking cover. As they explained during the debrief on Saturday, they don't do the mystery gun stage because they think you should know how to operate every weapon on the planet. The do it because forcing you to use an unfamiliar weapon (and a crappy flashlight) rather than your regular gear induces stress that can reveal weaknesses. It's interesting what degrades and what doesn't. I failed to seek cover and had an obvious problem with target discrimination. On the other hand, I shot well. I point shot the gun from the shoulder and every target went down with one shot. I also think I did a good job pieing the two corners, even doing a smooth shoulder transition to pie around the left side of the wall (right before I blew away the deputy).
ATSA Medical Clinic
The final stage I shot used mostly pneumatically activated targets, rather than the falling targets that characterized the earlier scenarios. This allows them to reveal and retract the targets as you move through the stage, but they don't go down with quite the same satisfying finality as the dropping targets. Again, you are tasked with rescuing a relative from a medical clinic after you her shots coming from inside.
I entered, moved down a hallway, and pied a corner to the right. I spotted a target that was facing away from me. The target whirled around just after I spotted it, revealing a pistol. I shot it. A moment later, a pneumatic target popped up out a window to my left. I put several rounds into it before it disappeared. Another target popped out further down the hall. I shot it until it retracted, then rounded another corner to my right, revealing another target. Putting several rounds into this target left me at slide lock, prompting me to reload. I rounded a left hand corner, revealing a long empty hallway with a door at the end. Opening the door revealed my relative out the back door of the clinic, but to reach him I had to move past a hallway to my left. As I pied out I saw another turning target, which I gunned down (almost hitting a no-shoot behind it) and another pneumatic target out the window. I moved past the hallway and spotted yet another pneumatic target in a nook to my right. Shooting it ended the stage.
This was the only scenario I came close to running out of ammunition on. Despite shooting fairly generously, I only used one magazine on the Meditation and Courthouse stages. During the Mall stage, I did a tactical reload and shot slightly more than one magazine of ammunition. On the this stage, I ran one magazine dry and had only 3 rounds left in the second at the end of the stage. I think this can largely be attributed to the fact that the pneumatic targets don't retract anywhere near as fast as the falling targets| drop to the ground.
This finished up my day of shooting on Thursday. NTI was not yet over, however. In addition to a day of lectures and discussions on Friday, there was also a set of partners scenarios on Saturday.
Partners Scenarios
The partners scenarios are run force on force, using the same revolvers loaded with sims as the ATSA village. One partner is armed, but the other is not, and represents the friend or family member to be rescued. I was partnered with John, one of my friends from South Carolina.
For the first scenario, I was unarmed. It was a fairly faithful recreation of the ATSA Mall live fire stage, using the same shot house with role-players in about the same locations as the live fire targets. As the cheese at the end of the maze, I was placed in a small closet to the rear. As John came in the front, I yelled that I was in the back and decided to take a peek out to see if I could see anything to help him. The door swung open further than I'd intended and for my troubles I was shot immediately. Deciding discretion was the better part of valor at this point, I moved back further into the closet and waited for John to come to me.
John ended up taking a round in fairly short order, after he spotted an armed criminal and attempted to shoot him, but was unable to get the revolver to fire. After a moment, the criminal shot him. Before the scenario, John opened the cylinder of the revolver to check that it was loaded (NTI has been known to give people unloaded guns in Force on Force, particularly if it is taken from you by the Sheriff during a scenario and returned). Unfortunately, he didn't completely close the cylinder, resulting in an unifireable gun.
The second partners scenario took place in the Courthouse shoot house, but the scenario was somewhat different than the live fire scenario yesterday. The unarmed partner entered the courthouse to pay a traffic ticket and is thrown in a cell by two criminals attempting to escape. Of course, I did not know this at the time, I'm just waiting outside for my friend when I hear gunfire. I entered and encountered a man holding a cellphone. I manage to identify the contents of his hand correctly and don't shoot him. After he assumes I'm a bad guy (since I have a gun) I tell him to get out of there, then think better of it and ask him to call 911.
As I moved further into the shoot house, I hear the two escaping convicts. They're down a pair of parallel hallways to the right. Rather than trying to dig them out, I initially set up behind some cover and wait for them. My position isn't a great one, since I have to either overexpose myself to one hallway in order to see the other. When one of them yells out where I am to the other, I decided to move. I swung over to the wall next to the to hallways, where they will have to pie the corner in order to see me. They don't seem to be too keen to come out, so I formulate a new plan. The nearer hallway ends in an open door that swings out into the room I'm in. I swung that door shut, eliminating one hallway and, for the moment at least, one convict from the situation. He tries to shoot me through the crack of the door as I swing it shut, but the paint bullet disintegrates on the door. With him out of the way, I rolled out around the corner of the second hallway and shoot the convict at almost the same moment he shoots me. My aim is better and I hit him pretty good while he gets a grazing hit on my cover garment.
At this moment Sheriff Vicki comes in (the fruit of my request to the fellow with the cellphone to call 911). I pulled back from the corner and drop the gun on the Sheriff's order. They called a halt to the scenario.
Major Mistakes
To paraphrase something I said during the debrief on Saturday afternoon, if you don't consider the mistakes you made at NTI, you're not getting your money's worth. In that vein, here are what I consider to be my biggest mistakes.
During the robbery scenario in the village, I got shot. After some consideration, I think I was on the right track, going hands on with the closer robber as I shot him, then the second robber. However, just grabbing his arm and shooting from retention didn't work so well. In real life, getting shot in the leg might have reset the robbers OODA loop enough that he wouldn't have the presence of mind to shoot me, but that's not something I want to chance. In hindsight, I would have been better off going for the quick kill, rather than the retention shot. Plant the first round in the near robber's head to eliminate him as a threat, then shoot the second robber. Alternatively, rather than grabbing his arm, I could have hit him in the brachial plexus with my left arm and driven him back (or just run him over) relying on that pressure to keep him from shooting me while I dealt with his friend. While I think both of those are good real life options, neither is really available in the ATSA village, due to safety limits on headshots and hard strikes.
I missed chances to see some less obvious threats. During the mall stage, I failed to see my wife being held hostage in the dark closet in the far corder of the room, and at the courthouse, I didn't see one of the targets standing outside the window. This is more than just the NTI organizers being sneaky. Both locations were really good choices to lay up for an ambush, just the kind of thing someone might use in real life. I need to work on recognizing such things.
Finally, I shot twice when I shouldn't have. I shot the first target in the mall before I saw the threat indicator and I let the poor deputy have a load of birdshot in the mystery gun stage. The thing that both of these have in common is that they were times when I was pretty highly stressed. As designed, the mystery gun stage induces a lot of stress as you try to run that coach gun. The Mall target came at the beginning of my first 360 stage, my first real shoot house experience, and my first full on NTI scenario (the Meditation Retreat stage I shot before this one was more of a hybrid skills drill and scenario than a full scenario). After shooting that first target, I calmed down a bit and went on with the stage. Obviously, this kind of stress can induce mistakes, and it's a good thing to be cognizant of. Further experience may solve this problem at NTI, but when I find myself in a real gunfight, it's liable to be pretty stressful.
These were the three big ones. There were some others. I failed to recognize the woman with the shotgun as a threat in the Courthouse stage, but that's really a problem in interpreting what NTI is trying to say with their setups, rather than a problem that might crop up in a real gunfight. I'm confident if a woman wielding a shotgun tried to kill me in real life, I would recognize it as a threat. I'm pretty good at working corners, but most of my experience is with single pieces of cover. A full 360 shoot house (particularly the NTI ones with lots of nooks and crannies) is a more difficult problem. I need to learn more about how to clear complete rooms, rather than just single corners.
Interestingly, two of the areas I decided need some work (0-5 feet and CQB) are the primary subjects of two classes I'm scheduled to take from Gabe Suarez later this year. In a way, my NTI experience provided some additional evidence for what I already knew.
What Worked
Point shooting worked. I was really glad to have taken Roger Phillips' Point Shooting Progressions and Advanced Point Shooting Progressions classes before the NTI. They really raised my point shooting skills to a new level. NTI provided a chance to put those skills to use. I only had a full sight picture on three targets during the NTI scenarios: the three 50 yard targets in the ATSA Meditation Retreat stage. I shot every other target using some variant of point shooting. The Mall and Courthouse stages involved a lot of point shoulder, since I only had one hand available. The Courthouse also required some half him shooting where the quarters were a bit closer. During the other stages, I shot mostly from isosceles, with the gun just below my line of sight. My shooting was pretty accurate, with every target going down in one burst or less. I point shot the shotgun during the mystery gun stage too, and every target went down with only one shot.
With the exception of the mystery gun stage and the very start of the ATSA mall, I was pretty calm throughout the exercise. Some participants talked a lot about how stressed they were during their first NTI, but I didn't experience too much of that. This may have a lot to do with my previous experience. I spent a year and a half doing two live fire scenarios a month, so I'm familiar with that aspect. NTI's scenarios are grander in scope and use a lot more scenery, but the basic need to run through your OODA loop and make quick decisions remains the same. I also had quite a bit of force on force experience coming in, including several classes with Farnam and Suarez International, so that wasn't new to me either.
Final Thoughts
Overall, NTI was a great experience. It really allowed me to put my skills to the test. I didn't walk out with any new skills, but I learned a lot about the skills I've got, and the skills I need to work on. Despite some shortcomings, I was pretty satisfied with my level of performance. It validated a lot of what I'd learned in previous classes and has given me confidence in my fundamental skills. At the same time, it provided a roadmap for some future skill development. If you're willing to be humbled a bit, NTI is a great experience for any skilled shooter. I definitely plan on being back next year.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Roger Phillips' Advanced Point Shooting Progressions
Note: The Utah Polite Society will host Roger Phillips' Advanced Point Shooting Progressions class on June 12-13, immediately the Point Shooting Progressions class. I recently had the chance to take the advanced class, so for those of you who are signed up for it, this is a bit of a preview. If any of you are still on the fence, get off it and sign up! This is a great class!
Earlier this month, I took Roger Phillips' Advanced Point Shooting Progressions class in Blairsville, Georgia. This class came only a month after I took Point Shooting Progressions, so I didn't have time to practice these skills much, but I didn't have time to forget much either.
I shot the class with my usual Glock 21. Since PSP I put a set of Warren Tactical sights on it, which I really like (and actually used a little bit in this class). We also did some work with backup guns, mine was my Smith and Wesson 442 hammerless j-frame. Most of the rest of the students in the class shot Glocks, generally of the 9mm variety. There were also a few XDs and one 1911. Backups were more varied and included j-frames, smaller Glocks, Kahrs and several other models.
This class was on the large side: 16 students. All of them were quite squared away and everyone had a solid grasp of the point shooting and dynamic movement skillsets. The students in the class included four Suarez International instructors: myself, Dan Robison, John Meade, and Rick Klopp (also our host). This was my first class since officially being announced as an instructor. I think the number of instructors speaks volumes about the skills that Roger brings to the table. I've trained with 12 of the 16 guys in the class before, either at the PSP class last month, previous SI classes, or AMOK! seminars. It seems I'm getting to know a lot of the SI training junkies in the southeast.
Saturday Morning
Roger gave a brief introduction to what we would be doing in the class, then went through the usual safety lecture. We signed the usual waivers and promised on video not to sue anybody no way, nohow, for any reason.
One of the elements that distinguishes this class from PSP is the inclusion of back-up guns. Roger talked a bit about BUGs, and the different roles they play in addition to being back-ups: as primary guns in an NPE, as a gun you can discretely have your hand on in the pocket, and as a gun that can be moved around to the appropriate spot as conditions change (pants pocket, jacket pocket, etc.)
We started off working the transition to the BUG in some dry drills. We didn't do any other BUG specific drills, but Roger asked us not to do any reactive reloads this morning and instead to switch to the BUG any time we ran dry.
Other than the addition of the BUG, most of this morning's drills were refreshers of the PSP material. Our first shooting drill was drawing and shooting from two-handed half extension starting at two yards. After each string, we reholstered and backed up a yard. Roger had us take the half-extension out to about 5-6 yards, then let us go out to 3/4 extension. One problem several people had when transitioning to the BUG as they ran dry was extending it out too far. We're used to paying attention to retention with the primary, but those habits aren't as ingrained with the BUG. We ran the same drills one handed, shooting from half hip out to 5-6 yards, then moving to 3/4 hip.
We moved on to some focal point transition drills, firing at the pelvis, then taking the headshot. Making the headshot at 4-5 yards from half-hip is a challenge, but one that most of the shooters in the class were up to.
Our last review drill was the drawstroke zipper: firing as soon as you have the gun horizontal and stitching the target up the centerline as you bring the gun up to eye level.
The first drill that was not a repeat from PSP was the reverse zipper. Rather than stitching the opponent up the body, the goal here is to keep all the bullets in the same spot as you bring the gun up. This has some real-life applications (if only a small part of the opponent's body is exposed from behind cover, you want to be able to hit that part). In addition, it helps to move the student beyond the basic 'gun parallel to the ground' point shooting skill set to the more advanced eye-hand coordination skill set. These more advanced skills would be vital to some of the exercises later in the class.
We moved on to some of the center axis relock drills. These drills were old hat for those of us who took PSP last month, but they're a relatively recent addition and some folks had taken PSP before all of these had made it onto the syllabus. We practiced shooting from the low and high CAR positions, then moved on to the CAR zipper, shooting as you bring the gun up to eye level.
The last drill before lunch was one John Meade dubbed the "One Shot Squat". This was our introduction to some of the vertical displacement work we would be doing this afternoon. You simply start shooting in point shoulder and continue shooting as you drop down to a squatting position, then stand back up. The trick is adjusting your point of aim as you move vertically so that you get a nice tight group. This seems simple but the first time through a lot of folks ended up with vertical stringing, because they kept their shoulder locked. We're used to tracking targets as we move laterally, but not as we move vertically. This drill will cure you of that.
Saturday Afternoon
After a brief lunch, we picked up with the ambidextrous zipper. This is a variation on a drill that Gabe does, firing alternating between one handed with the right hand, two handed, two handed with the gun in the left hand, then one handed on the left, and so on. Rather than having us do it at full extension as Gabe does, we did it as we moved out the drawstroke, passing the gun back and forth at half, 3/4, and full extension. This got us shooting at every major point in the drawstroke with each hand, both one and two handed.
Transferring the gun from one hand to the other is a useful skill set, but if you get shot in the hand or arm, the gun is probably going to end up on the ground rather than remaining in the hand for a transfer. For our next drill we put the gun on the ground, then had to scoop it up with the support hand and fire as we rose to standing. This is pretty easy if the gun lands on it's right side, pointed a little to the right, but if it doesn't, it's going to require some adjustment in your grip as you bring it up.
Finally, consider what happens if your gun hand is injured before you get a chance to draw. The next drill called on us to draw our primary gun with the support hand. Roger demonstrated a couple of techniques (for both folks carrying appendix and those using strong side hip carry). I carry strong side hip, and prefer reaching around behind the back. This is something I've done before with the Utah Polite Society, but you could tell it was new for a lot of folks. There are lots of opportunities to sweep yourself or other people, but drawing with the support side hand is an absolutely vital skill set to develop.
We move back to 25 yards and did some shooting from behind cover. Roger is known as a point shooting guy, but he's not averse to using sights when they're necessary and appropriate. At 25 yards and behind cover, they're definitely both. We shot from both sides of the barricade, both standing and kneeling paying close attention to extending as little as possible beyond cover, yet not shooting the barricades. I found my new Warren tactical sights quite good for this sort of shooting (yes, we did do sighted fire in Advanced Point Shooting Progressions).
The barricade also had some slots in it down near the bottom, so we practiced dropping down and shooting through these, to simulate firing under a piece of cover like a car. We started with some seated fire through a slot about 18 inches high. Being 6'5" I found this a bit difficult, and actually ended up shooting it more from supine than seated. We then did some shots from Spetsnaz prone on both the right and left sides, through a 12" slot. I'd learned about Spetsnaz prone in the rifle context and hadn't really considered it with a pistol. It works quite well though. Some folks had quite a bit of trouble with this, since it requires a lot of flexibility. Many of these folks ended up doing it in urban prone rather than Spetsnaz, but I actually found it easier than the seated shooting.
Roger set out four of large appliance boxes for cover, laid out in an semicircle about 5-7 yards from a pair of targets. We started out right up at a pair of targets. On the start signal, we moved to our five o'clock to the first piece of cover, shot from both sides, moved to the second piece of cover, shot from both sides, and so on around the arc until the fourth piece of cover. After shooting from either side of it, we charged the targets ending the drill about where we started. The two targets were numbered and as we moved, Roger yelled out which one we should direct our fire at. The first two pieces of cover were reasonably high, good for kneeling and standing fire respectively. The last two were really short, especially for guys my size. You could really only work these from some sort of prone. I ran through my last mag easily accessible from prone behind the fourth piece of cover, so I switched to my j-frame for the final charge. Roger, of course, immediately saw me drawing my five shot snubby and yelled out "one and two, one and two" telling me both targets were threats. As I emptied the j-frame into target #1 I was already reaching for my knife (a nice big Cold Steel Voyager X2) and buried it in the second target. This drew quite a laugh.
Our next drill was the Sul Slalom. A series of four barricades were set up one behind the other in front of a target. This drill tests the ability to automatically go to Sul as you pass in front of an innocent bystander, then extend back out when the target becomes visible again. We slalomed back and forth between the barricades as we moved up to the target, extending and retracting as appropriate.
In PSP, Roger had us shoot a drill where we stood facing uprange and drew and shot targets behind us without moving our feet. For APSP he took this one step further and had us do the same drill on our knees. This adds considerably to the difficulty, because it eliminates the 60 degrees or so of rotation you can get from your legs. Form the knees you really had to crank yourself around hard to get to get the gun to bear on target. We'll rarely be called on to shoot behind us from kneeling in the real world, but developing this degree of rotation is is important to being able to shoot behind you as you move away from an adversary.
The next drill followed up the one shot squat, instead of just dropping down to a squatting position, we went all the way down to lying on our backs then got all the way back up, all the while maintaining a continuos cadence of fire. Being knocked down during a fight is pretty likely and the ability to fight your way back to your feet is immensely important. This requires a really well developed point shooting index and good one handed shooting skills. It also requires some thought about how you will get down and up without kicking up your feet into the line of fire. We managed to get through this with some pretty good accuracy and without anyone putting a hole in their foot.
If you're going to get knocked down during a fight, the most likely time for it to happen is probably at the outset. The last drill of the day was drawing and shooting from the ground, both on your back and on your belly. Just to make it a bit more interesting, we didn't do it with our legs pointed directly towards the target. Instead our feet were pointed towards the 10:30 the first time we did the drill and 1:30 the second time, meaning at least one of those times we had to go across the body (whether we were right or left handed).
This wrapped things up for the day. It had been sprinkling a few times throughout the day and it really started pouring just as we finished packing up. Very good timing.
We got together for dinner at a local eatery. As usual, there was some great fellowship between shooters. I had a good meal with some great company.
Sunday Morning
The next morning we started up at 8:00, rather than 9:00, to make it a bit easier for Roger to make his flight.
Roger started off with some lecture and demonstration of the different takeoff methods. Everyone in the class was familiar with the Pekiti takeoff and the 'lean and push' method (basically the same way you would start walking). He also covered the Systema takeoff, pioneered by Sonny Puzikas. It's an interesting technique, and I can see some situations where it would have some advantages over the PTO. I don't know that I have enough experience with it to really judge it at this point though. I really need to put it to the test in FoF (both trying it myself and having people try it on me).
Roger went through his own enhanced pekiti takeoff. This variant of the PTO trades gives up some horizontal displacement and speed of access to your gun in return for a lot more vertical displacement. Again, I need more experience with it, but I can see some applications.
We led off with the first shot drill. This drill involves doing a takeoff and firing your first shot on your second step. The key to getting a good hit is to hold the shot until just after your foot hits the ground, so the footfall doesn't jar the gun and throw off your aim. We ran the drill a second time using the enhanced pekiti. This is a bit more of a challenge because the extreme amount of upper body movement tends to delay the start of your drawstroke.
Next, Roger set up a simple zig-zag drill. We started at seven yards and closed on a target using diagonal movement and several direction changes. We did something similar in PSP, but this time Roger emphasized keeping up our shooting during direction changes. Keeping shots on target while cutting back the other direction is certainly challenging. During this drill, John Meade took a bit of a tumble. He lost his footing and basically did a cartwheel (across his shoulders rather than his hands) ending up on his knees after doing a full 360 of rotation. Despite this fairly radical spill, he kept the gun pointed in a safe direction and didn't let loose any shots as he went around. If he'd meant to do that it really would have been quite impressive.
For our next drill, we charged aggressively straight towards the target. This isn't something you usually do in an SI class, but it can be appropriate in situations where you have the initiative in a proactive gunfight and can dominate the adversary through aggressive action. After charging straight in the first time we ran it again. This time we simulated the situation changing during our attack. Perhaps the adversary brought a weapon into action or put got a hit on us and the we went from a proactive, dominant position to one where we need are behind the curve and need to react. In response halfway through our charge, we took off at a diagonal and turned our response from a proactive one to a reactive one.
The following drill continued the theme of moving at the opponent, only instead of charging directly at him, we moved to the side and attacked parallel to the initial line of force. This makes you a bit harder to hit and makes it less likely to end up in a hand to hand fight with him if you haven't put him down by the time you get there (instead allowing you to pass by and potentially circle around behind him and continue to shoot). We launched into this parallel track using the enhanced pekiti takeoff, which is very well suited for this sort of sideward displacement followed by a forward advance.
Our last drill before lunch involved a Systema takeoff to the forward diagonal followed by an elliptical path that curved back toward the target. Even in drills that call for straight line movement, some folks tend to curve, particularly for diagonal movement. Roger decided to throw in a drill that actually called for elliptical movement for these folks (which, of course, led to jokes that they would end up going in a straight line).
Sunday Afternoon
After a brief break for lunch, we picked up with the confined space in quartata. This is a technique that Gabe came up with for getting off the X in a narrow space, like a hallway or between two parked cars. First, you throw yourself sideways against one wall, then drop down to a crouch, then return to standing as you move to the other side of the hall. The combination of these three displacements in rapid succession can give you a chance to get some rounds on target without getting shot yourself.
We started working some of the rear oblique angles, taking off to the 5:00 and 7:00, then changing direction to circle around to the opponent's flanks. This simulates the process of turing a reactive gunfight into a proactive one by getting around behind the opponent. This drill led to quite a bit of excitement. One student hit one of the metal supports holding up the target frame and his round ricocheted off and fragmented. A bit of the jacket hit Rick Klopp in the scalp. The cut was pretty small, but it bled quite freely (typical for head wounds). Dr. John Meade was right there and we Rick sitting with a bandage on his head inside of a minute. Despite a roll of gauze infused with a hemostatic agent it still took quite a while to get the bleeding stopped. Eventually, John was able to slap a band-aid on it and Rick went and put on a hat. No serious harm done. Nonetheless, this is a reminder of the dangers of this sort of training. If the jacket fragment had struck, say, an unprotected eye, it could have done serious and permanent damage. Wear proper safety gear!
Next, we worked on the triangle drill. This involves getting off the X to the 5 o'clock, moving out five or more yards while shooting using CAR, then changing direction and moving laterally across the range, followed by another direction change to close directly in on the target, completing the triangle. Again, this simulates the changing tempo of the fight as we move along the reactionary curve, from getting off the X in a reactive gunfight, to A lot of folks (including me) managed to run out of ammo just as we were coming up on the target at the end of the drill. I took the opportunity to exercise the 'empty gun as an impact weapon' skillset and jabbed the target in the face with the muzzle of my pistol. We ran the drill again using the in quartata technique to get off the X rather than CAR. This time I took it out further, to about 8-9 yards and included a reload as I moved before charging back in, so I didn't run out of ammo.
Our penultimate exercise was the S-drill. This drill had a single student moving back and forth in front of a line of six targets in an "S" pattern. Walking parallel to the targets at a distance of five yards, turning back and walking the other way three yards from the targets, then walking right along one yard from the targets, then move back out to five yards and repeating. Just to make things interesting, there were three target stands set out at 2 and 4 yards representing bystanders. As we walked along the line, Roger would announce where we were on the reactionary continuum (ahead of the curve, even, behind the curve, or way behind the curve). Then he called out a target number or numbers and we had to react appropriately, given the distance and where we are on the reaction curve. If you're at five yards and ahead of the curve, stand and deliver may be appropriate. If you're at one yard and behind the curve, it's time to get off the X. Depending on how you shoot, he might call for follow up shots or additional threats. Once you've dealt with the targets he called, reholster and continue walking. He generally gave each shooter 3-4 setups, giving them a chance to experience different points on the curve and different distances.
When I ran the drill, the first setup he called had me way behind the curve, at one yard, against a single opponent. I hit the target with my support hand, drew to the full retention position and put 5-6 rounds in the target's pelvis, then got off the X to the 5 o'clock as I brought the gun out to full extension and zippered him up to a headshot. As far as I saw, I was the only student to simulate going hands on with any of the targets during this drill.
The final exercise of the class was defending Sul. We practiced starting in Sul and shooting from retention against targets only a few feet way. We did this from all angles: facing the targets, facing right and left, and facing away.
Final Thoughts
This wrapped up two long and intense days of very high level shooting. For me, PSP was really about taking my point shooting and dynamic movement skills beyond the level I thought I could achieve. Advanced PSP started with these skills and taking them into realms I didn't really think were possible, such as continuous fire through vertical displacement. The class also integrated these individual skills into sequences that flowed smoothly together. I had a tendency to see these skills as discrete actions that happen in series, rather than a seamless series of events. After this class it's much easier to see how they blend seamlessly together as you shift form one to another. As John Farnam puts it, "We die in the gaps"; even if our individual techniques are highly effective, the need to switch from one to the other can leave us vulnerable unless we can flow between them without pause.
As always, Roger's material is top flight and he did an excellent job presenting it. It's hard to believe that this is only the second time he's taught this class. Aside from relying on a written course outline more than he did for PSP, there was no sign of this being a brand new curriculum.
In addition to Roger, I think a big part of what made this class so great was the caliber of the shooters (pun intended). Often, a class includes that one guy you want to keep an eye on, because you know that if someone is going to do something stupid, it will be him. That guy wasn't in this class. Everyone was very squared away, very safe, and very skilled. There wasn't anyone slowing the class down and we ripped through this material. I hope to see a lot of these folks at future classes (including Warrior Skills Camp!). Given that this is the second (or third, or fourth) time I've seen many of them, the odds are pretty good.
I should also thank Rick Klopp for doing a great job hosting the class. Not many would maintain such good humor after taking (part of) a bullet to the head.
In summary, this was a great class. I would highly recommend any of Roger's classes, and this really is the apex of what he teaches. If you interested civilian oreinted gunfight training at the very highest level, this is the class.
Earlier this month, I took Roger Phillips' Advanced Point Shooting Progressions class in Blairsville, Georgia. This class came only a month after I took Point Shooting Progressions, so I didn't have time to practice these skills much, but I didn't have time to forget much either.
I shot the class with my usual Glock 21. Since PSP I put a set of Warren Tactical sights on it, which I really like (and actually used a little bit in this class). We also did some work with backup guns, mine was my Smith and Wesson 442 hammerless j-frame. Most of the rest of the students in the class shot Glocks, generally of the 9mm variety. There were also a few XDs and one 1911. Backups were more varied and included j-frames, smaller Glocks, Kahrs and several other models.
This class was on the large side: 16 students. All of them were quite squared away and everyone had a solid grasp of the point shooting and dynamic movement skillsets. The students in the class included four Suarez International instructors: myself, Dan Robison, John Meade, and Rick Klopp (also our host). This was my first class since officially being announced as an instructor. I think the number of instructors speaks volumes about the skills that Roger brings to the table. I've trained with 12 of the 16 guys in the class before, either at the PSP class last month, previous SI classes, or AMOK! seminars. It seems I'm getting to know a lot of the SI training junkies in the southeast.
Saturday Morning
Roger gave a brief introduction to what we would be doing in the class, then went through the usual safety lecture. We signed the usual waivers and promised on video not to sue anybody no way, nohow, for any reason.
One of the elements that distinguishes this class from PSP is the inclusion of back-up guns. Roger talked a bit about BUGs, and the different roles they play in addition to being back-ups: as primary guns in an NPE, as a gun you can discretely have your hand on in the pocket, and as a gun that can be moved around to the appropriate spot as conditions change (pants pocket, jacket pocket, etc.)
We started off working the transition to the BUG in some dry drills. We didn't do any other BUG specific drills, but Roger asked us not to do any reactive reloads this morning and instead to switch to the BUG any time we ran dry.
Other than the addition of the BUG, most of this morning's drills were refreshers of the PSP material. Our first shooting drill was drawing and shooting from two-handed half extension starting at two yards. After each string, we reholstered and backed up a yard. Roger had us take the half-extension out to about 5-6 yards, then let us go out to 3/4 extension. One problem several people had when transitioning to the BUG as they ran dry was extending it out too far. We're used to paying attention to retention with the primary, but those habits aren't as ingrained with the BUG. We ran the same drills one handed, shooting from half hip out to 5-6 yards, then moving to 3/4 hip.
We moved on to some focal point transition drills, firing at the pelvis, then taking the headshot. Making the headshot at 4-5 yards from half-hip is a challenge, but one that most of the shooters in the class were up to.
Our last review drill was the drawstroke zipper: firing as soon as you have the gun horizontal and stitching the target up the centerline as you bring the gun up to eye level.
The first drill that was not a repeat from PSP was the reverse zipper. Rather than stitching the opponent up the body, the goal here is to keep all the bullets in the same spot as you bring the gun up. This has some real-life applications (if only a small part of the opponent's body is exposed from behind cover, you want to be able to hit that part). In addition, it helps to move the student beyond the basic 'gun parallel to the ground' point shooting skill set to the more advanced eye-hand coordination skill set. These more advanced skills would be vital to some of the exercises later in the class.
We moved on to some of the center axis relock drills. These drills were old hat for those of us who took PSP last month, but they're a relatively recent addition and some folks had taken PSP before all of these had made it onto the syllabus. We practiced shooting from the low and high CAR positions, then moved on to the CAR zipper, shooting as you bring the gun up to eye level.
The last drill before lunch was one John Meade dubbed the "One Shot Squat". This was our introduction to some of the vertical displacement work we would be doing this afternoon. You simply start shooting in point shoulder and continue shooting as you drop down to a squatting position, then stand back up. The trick is adjusting your point of aim as you move vertically so that you get a nice tight group. This seems simple but the first time through a lot of folks ended up with vertical stringing, because they kept their shoulder locked. We're used to tracking targets as we move laterally, but not as we move vertically. This drill will cure you of that.
Saturday Afternoon
After a brief lunch, we picked up with the ambidextrous zipper. This is a variation on a drill that Gabe does, firing alternating between one handed with the right hand, two handed, two handed with the gun in the left hand, then one handed on the left, and so on. Rather than having us do it at full extension as Gabe does, we did it as we moved out the drawstroke, passing the gun back and forth at half, 3/4, and full extension. This got us shooting at every major point in the drawstroke with each hand, both one and two handed.
Transferring the gun from one hand to the other is a useful skill set, but if you get shot in the hand or arm, the gun is probably going to end up on the ground rather than remaining in the hand for a transfer. For our next drill we put the gun on the ground, then had to scoop it up with the support hand and fire as we rose to standing. This is pretty easy if the gun lands on it's right side, pointed a little to the right, but if it doesn't, it's going to require some adjustment in your grip as you bring it up.
Finally, consider what happens if your gun hand is injured before you get a chance to draw. The next drill called on us to draw our primary gun with the support hand. Roger demonstrated a couple of techniques (for both folks carrying appendix and those using strong side hip carry). I carry strong side hip, and prefer reaching around behind the back. This is something I've done before with the Utah Polite Society, but you could tell it was new for a lot of folks. There are lots of opportunities to sweep yourself or other people, but drawing with the support side hand is an absolutely vital skill set to develop.
We move back to 25 yards and did some shooting from behind cover. Roger is known as a point shooting guy, but he's not averse to using sights when they're necessary and appropriate. At 25 yards and behind cover, they're definitely both. We shot from both sides of the barricade, both standing and kneeling paying close attention to extending as little as possible beyond cover, yet not shooting the barricades. I found my new Warren tactical sights quite good for this sort of shooting (yes, we did do sighted fire in Advanced Point Shooting Progressions).
The barricade also had some slots in it down near the bottom, so we practiced dropping down and shooting through these, to simulate firing under a piece of cover like a car. We started with some seated fire through a slot about 18 inches high. Being 6'5" I found this a bit difficult, and actually ended up shooting it more from supine than seated. We then did some shots from Spetsnaz prone on both the right and left sides, through a 12" slot. I'd learned about Spetsnaz prone in the rifle context and hadn't really considered it with a pistol. It works quite well though. Some folks had quite a bit of trouble with this, since it requires a lot of flexibility. Many of these folks ended up doing it in urban prone rather than Spetsnaz, but I actually found it easier than the seated shooting.
Roger set out four of large appliance boxes for cover, laid out in an semicircle about 5-7 yards from a pair of targets. We started out right up at a pair of targets. On the start signal, we moved to our five o'clock to the first piece of cover, shot from both sides, moved to the second piece of cover, shot from both sides, and so on around the arc until the fourth piece of cover. After shooting from either side of it, we charged the targets ending the drill about where we started. The two targets were numbered and as we moved, Roger yelled out which one we should direct our fire at. The first two pieces of cover were reasonably high, good for kneeling and standing fire respectively. The last two were really short, especially for guys my size. You could really only work these from some sort of prone. I ran through my last mag easily accessible from prone behind the fourth piece of cover, so I switched to my j-frame for the final charge. Roger, of course, immediately saw me drawing my five shot snubby and yelled out "one and two, one and two" telling me both targets were threats. As I emptied the j-frame into target #1 I was already reaching for my knife (a nice big Cold Steel Voyager X2) and buried it in the second target. This drew quite a laugh.
Our next drill was the Sul Slalom. A series of four barricades were set up one behind the other in front of a target. This drill tests the ability to automatically go to Sul as you pass in front of an innocent bystander, then extend back out when the target becomes visible again. We slalomed back and forth between the barricades as we moved up to the target, extending and retracting as appropriate.
In PSP, Roger had us shoot a drill where we stood facing uprange and drew and shot targets behind us without moving our feet. For APSP he took this one step further and had us do the same drill on our knees. This adds considerably to the difficulty, because it eliminates the 60 degrees or so of rotation you can get from your legs. Form the knees you really had to crank yourself around hard to get to get the gun to bear on target. We'll rarely be called on to shoot behind us from kneeling in the real world, but developing this degree of rotation is is important to being able to shoot behind you as you move away from an adversary.
The next drill followed up the one shot squat, instead of just dropping down to a squatting position, we went all the way down to lying on our backs then got all the way back up, all the while maintaining a continuos cadence of fire. Being knocked down during a fight is pretty likely and the ability to fight your way back to your feet is immensely important. This requires a really well developed point shooting index and good one handed shooting skills. It also requires some thought about how you will get down and up without kicking up your feet into the line of fire. We managed to get through this with some pretty good accuracy and without anyone putting a hole in their foot.
If you're going to get knocked down during a fight, the most likely time for it to happen is probably at the outset. The last drill of the day was drawing and shooting from the ground, both on your back and on your belly. Just to make it a bit more interesting, we didn't do it with our legs pointed directly towards the target. Instead our feet were pointed towards the 10:30 the first time we did the drill and 1:30 the second time, meaning at least one of those times we had to go across the body (whether we were right or left handed).
This wrapped things up for the day. It had been sprinkling a few times throughout the day and it really started pouring just as we finished packing up. Very good timing.
We got together for dinner at a local eatery. As usual, there was some great fellowship between shooters. I had a good meal with some great company.
Sunday Morning
The next morning we started up at 8:00, rather than 9:00, to make it a bit easier for Roger to make his flight.
Roger started off with some lecture and demonstration of the different takeoff methods. Everyone in the class was familiar with the Pekiti takeoff and the 'lean and push' method (basically the same way you would start walking). He also covered the Systema takeoff, pioneered by Sonny Puzikas. It's an interesting technique, and I can see some situations where it would have some advantages over the PTO. I don't know that I have enough experience with it to really judge it at this point though. I really need to put it to the test in FoF (both trying it myself and having people try it on me).
Roger went through his own enhanced pekiti takeoff. This variant of the PTO trades gives up some horizontal displacement and speed of access to your gun in return for a lot more vertical displacement. Again, I need more experience with it, but I can see some applications.
We led off with the first shot drill. This drill involves doing a takeoff and firing your first shot on your second step. The key to getting a good hit is to hold the shot until just after your foot hits the ground, so the footfall doesn't jar the gun and throw off your aim. We ran the drill a second time using the enhanced pekiti. This is a bit more of a challenge because the extreme amount of upper body movement tends to delay the start of your drawstroke.
Next, Roger set up a simple zig-zag drill. We started at seven yards and closed on a target using diagonal movement and several direction changes. We did something similar in PSP, but this time Roger emphasized keeping up our shooting during direction changes. Keeping shots on target while cutting back the other direction is certainly challenging. During this drill, John Meade took a bit of a tumble. He lost his footing and basically did a cartwheel (across his shoulders rather than his hands) ending up on his knees after doing a full 360 of rotation. Despite this fairly radical spill, he kept the gun pointed in a safe direction and didn't let loose any shots as he went around. If he'd meant to do that it really would have been quite impressive.
For our next drill, we charged aggressively straight towards the target. This isn't something you usually do in an SI class, but it can be appropriate in situations where you have the initiative in a proactive gunfight and can dominate the adversary through aggressive action. After charging straight in the first time we ran it again. This time we simulated the situation changing during our attack. Perhaps the adversary brought a weapon into action or put got a hit on us and the we went from a proactive, dominant position to one where we need are behind the curve and need to react. In response halfway through our charge, we took off at a diagonal and turned our response from a proactive one to a reactive one.
The following drill continued the theme of moving at the opponent, only instead of charging directly at him, we moved to the side and attacked parallel to the initial line of force. This makes you a bit harder to hit and makes it less likely to end up in a hand to hand fight with him if you haven't put him down by the time you get there (instead allowing you to pass by and potentially circle around behind him and continue to shoot). We launched into this parallel track using the enhanced pekiti takeoff, which is very well suited for this sort of sideward displacement followed by a forward advance.
Our last drill before lunch involved a Systema takeoff to the forward diagonal followed by an elliptical path that curved back toward the target. Even in drills that call for straight line movement, some folks tend to curve, particularly for diagonal movement. Roger decided to throw in a drill that actually called for elliptical movement for these folks (which, of course, led to jokes that they would end up going in a straight line).
Sunday Afternoon
After a brief break for lunch, we picked up with the confined space in quartata. This is a technique that Gabe came up with for getting off the X in a narrow space, like a hallway or between two parked cars. First, you throw yourself sideways against one wall, then drop down to a crouch, then return to standing as you move to the other side of the hall. The combination of these three displacements in rapid succession can give you a chance to get some rounds on target without getting shot yourself.
We started working some of the rear oblique angles, taking off to the 5:00 and 7:00, then changing direction to circle around to the opponent's flanks. This simulates the process of turing a reactive gunfight into a proactive one by getting around behind the opponent. This drill led to quite a bit of excitement. One student hit one of the metal supports holding up the target frame and his round ricocheted off and fragmented. A bit of the jacket hit Rick Klopp in the scalp. The cut was pretty small, but it bled quite freely (typical for head wounds). Dr. John Meade was right there and we Rick sitting with a bandage on his head inside of a minute. Despite a roll of gauze infused with a hemostatic agent it still took quite a while to get the bleeding stopped. Eventually, John was able to slap a band-aid on it and Rick went and put on a hat. No serious harm done. Nonetheless, this is a reminder of the dangers of this sort of training. If the jacket fragment had struck, say, an unprotected eye, it could have done serious and permanent damage. Wear proper safety gear!
Next, we worked on the triangle drill. This involves getting off the X to the 5 o'clock, moving out five or more yards while shooting using CAR, then changing direction and moving laterally across the range, followed by another direction change to close directly in on the target, completing the triangle. Again, this simulates the changing tempo of the fight as we move along the reactionary curve, from getting off the X in a reactive gunfight, to A lot of folks (including me) managed to run out of ammo just as we were coming up on the target at the end of the drill. I took the opportunity to exercise the 'empty gun as an impact weapon' skillset and jabbed the target in the face with the muzzle of my pistol. We ran the drill again using the in quartata technique to get off the X rather than CAR. This time I took it out further, to about 8-9 yards and included a reload as I moved before charging back in, so I didn't run out of ammo.
Our penultimate exercise was the S-drill. This drill had a single student moving back and forth in front of a line of six targets in an "S" pattern. Walking parallel to the targets at a distance of five yards, turning back and walking the other way three yards from the targets, then walking right along one yard from the targets, then move back out to five yards and repeating. Just to make things interesting, there were three target stands set out at 2 and 4 yards representing bystanders. As we walked along the line, Roger would announce where we were on the reactionary continuum (ahead of the curve, even, behind the curve, or way behind the curve). Then he called out a target number or numbers and we had to react appropriately, given the distance and where we are on the reaction curve. If you're at five yards and ahead of the curve, stand and deliver may be appropriate. If you're at one yard and behind the curve, it's time to get off the X. Depending on how you shoot, he might call for follow up shots or additional threats. Once you've dealt with the targets he called, reholster and continue walking. He generally gave each shooter 3-4 setups, giving them a chance to experience different points on the curve and different distances.
When I ran the drill, the first setup he called had me way behind the curve, at one yard, against a single opponent. I hit the target with my support hand, drew to the full retention position and put 5-6 rounds in the target's pelvis, then got off the X to the 5 o'clock as I brought the gun out to full extension and zippered him up to a headshot. As far as I saw, I was the only student to simulate going hands on with any of the targets during this drill.
The final exercise of the class was defending Sul. We practiced starting in Sul and shooting from retention against targets only a few feet way. We did this from all angles: facing the targets, facing right and left, and facing away.
Final Thoughts
This wrapped up two long and intense days of very high level shooting. For me, PSP was really about taking my point shooting and dynamic movement skills beyond the level I thought I could achieve. Advanced PSP started with these skills and taking them into realms I didn't really think were possible, such as continuous fire through vertical displacement. The class also integrated these individual skills into sequences that flowed smoothly together. I had a tendency to see these skills as discrete actions that happen in series, rather than a seamless series of events. After this class it's much easier to see how they blend seamlessly together as you shift form one to another. As John Farnam puts it, "We die in the gaps"; even if our individual techniques are highly effective, the need to switch from one to the other can leave us vulnerable unless we can flow between them without pause.
As always, Roger's material is top flight and he did an excellent job presenting it. It's hard to believe that this is only the second time he's taught this class. Aside from relying on a written course outline more than he did for PSP, there was no sign of this being a brand new curriculum.
In addition to Roger, I think a big part of what made this class so great was the caliber of the shooters (pun intended). Often, a class includes that one guy you want to keep an eye on, because you know that if someone is going to do something stupid, it will be him. That guy wasn't in this class. Everyone was very squared away, very safe, and very skilled. There wasn't anyone slowing the class down and we ripped through this material. I hope to see a lot of these folks at future classes (including Warrior Skills Camp!). Given that this is the second (or third, or fourth) time I've seen many of them, the odds are pretty good.
I should also thank Rick Klopp for doing a great job hosting the class. Not many would maintain such good humor after taking (part of) a bullet to the head.
In summary, this was a great class. I would highly recommend any of Roger's classes, and this really is the apex of what he teaches. If you interested civilian oreinted gunfight training at the very highest level, this is the class.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Roger Phillips' Point Shooting Progressions class
Note: The Utah Polite Society will host Roger Phillips' Point Shooting Progressions class on June 10-11, followed immediately by the Advanced Point Shooting Progressions class. I had the chance to take it last weekend, so for those of you who are signed up for it, this is a bit of a preview. If any of you are still on the fence, get off it and sign up! This is a great class!
This weekend I finally had a chance to take the Point Shooting Progressions class from Roger Phillips. I've been wanting to take this class for a long time now. When I lived in Salt Lake, I was close enough to have fairly easy access to his classes in Las Vegas, but I was a poor graduate student without any money. When I got a job in South Carolina, I finally had some money, but I Roger's classes were a lot less convenient. Then I made an abortive attempt to host a class in South Carolina, but it didn't work out. Money and accessibility finally intersected when Roger scheduled a class in Montgomery, Alabama, well within a days driving distance.
I came into this class with a fairly solid grasp of the basics of point shooting. Gabe introduced me to PS in Close Range Gunfighting several years ago and I got some more instruction from Randy Harris at the Extreme Close Range Gunfighting class last year. I've kept up my skills reasonably well and spent some time at the range polishing them a bit before this class.
I shot this class with my usual carry gun, a Glock 21. I also brought a .22 conversion kit for it from Advantage Arms. Most of the rest of the students had Glocks of various descriptions, mainly in 9mm, though a few students had .40s and one shot a few of the drills with one .357 SIG. There were a few XDs in evidence, including both classic models and the XDm. One student brought a 1911 (the only other fellow in the class shooting .45), one shot an HK and one had a Taurus semi-auto. One fellow shot the first day with a Walther P22. There were a good number of appendix inside the waistband holsters in evidence (including many Dale Frike models), with the other half of the class was shooting from the classic hip position. Many folks used closed front cover. I was one of the few with an open front cover garment (an unbuttoned short sleeve shirt). Some shot the class without any cover garment, which I think deprived them of a bit of the learning experience. I had to fumble through a few miffed draws, but I think working from under a cover garment made the drills much more applicable and realistic.
I got to Montgomery Friday afternoon a few folks who were taking the class got together for dinner. These included Dr. John Meade, Don Robison, and a couple fo students from the class, including one of the hosts. We got together at Texas Roadhouse for some food and good fellowship.
Bright and early the next morning I drove out to the range for class. Most shooting classes I've been involved with tend to start around 9:00, but Roger set the start time for this class at 8:00. He also asked us to try to be there around 7:30 to get the usual paperwork out of the way before the formal start time (given the amount of material he crammed into this class, now I can see why he wanted to get a jump on things). In any case, I was very glad we were on central time.
For this class we not only had Roger to teach us, we were also graced by the presence of two other instructors. Dr. John Meade, Suarez International's new director of tactical medicine was with us for the first day. For both days we also had Don Robison, a new SI instructor. Both of them had taken PSP before and helped Roger out on the line and coached students. The class was also populated with folks I met at previous SI or Amok classes, and folks I was acquainted with online.
We filled out the usual liability waivers and promised on video not to sue anyone for any reason, nowhere, nohow. As Roger wanted, we had all that out of the way and the main event kicked off right at 8:00. He gave the usual safety briefing. In addition, he also handed out roles to various people in the event of an injury: treat the patient, call 911, go out to the road to guide the ambulance in to the bay where we were shooting, deal with the person's gun. Two people were appointed to each role, just in case one of them was the one who got shot.
With the formalities out of the way, we got started shooting. Roger started us off with sighted fire, asking us to put five rounds into as small a group as possible. We did a bit of dry fire to diagnose any flinching or trigger control problems, then another 5 rounds of live fire. There was some variation in the size of the groups, but it was clear that everyone had a fairly solid grasp of basic sighted fire skills going in.
We started out by progressing down the sighting continuum to less visual input on the gun. Roger had us fire a pair of bursts into a target using a flash sight picture. I actually found this one of the more difficult things in the class. Later on Roger said that I was once a "Modern Technique" shooter, but that isn't exactly true. My initial training came from folks who were MT shooters, but I never really had a comprehensive course of MT instruction. I learned point shooting early enough in my shooting career that I never really mastered the flash sight picture at the level the MT demands, and I haven't really kept up the level of skill with it I was able to achieve. The first burst I put into the target drifted from the flash sight picture towards more point shooting and ended up distressingly large. The second drifted more towards hard focus on the front sight and was much smaller, but slower. This is definitely a hole in my skill set. Yes folks, I went to a point shooting class and learned I need to work on my sighted fire.
At this point Roger gave a brief lecture on the focal point. Where you focus on the adversary is where bullets are going to tend to go. One of the reasons there are a lot of hits on weapons and weapon hands during gunfights (and force on force training) is that there's a natural tendency for people to focus on the dangerous thing in the assailant's hand, rather than places that may be easier to hit and more effective from a terminal ballistics standpoint.
Moving towards less visual input from the gun, we did some shooting with a Type II Focus. This is something that I don't think Gabe covered in the Close Range Gunfighting class. I'd read about it (mostly from Roger) but hadn't really grasped it. In class, he explained that it was still using your sights, but unlike a traditional sight picture, where the front sight is in sharp focus and the target is fuzzy, you focus on the target and align the now fuzzy sights with it. Less precise, but it allows you to focus on the target (which is more natural in a fight or flight situation).
Reducing the focus on the gun further, we lowered it just below the line of sight, using the top of the slight to align it with our target. This provides a lot of feedback on horizontal alignment, but not so much on vertical alignment. This is a technique that I learned from Gabe in the CRG class, but I didn't really take to it at the time. Recently, I developed a renewed appreciation for it while I was doing some point shooting to prepare for this class.
Our next technique was one of my favorites from CRG: metal on meat. Just bring the gun up and superimpose the entire thing on the target. As long as you're close enough that the target's torso is bigger than the gun, you're probably going to hit.
Finally we just drove the gun to the target without paying attention to the visual feedback at all. This is quite quick, but has some real limitations as far as accuracy is concerned.
After we had worked all the different full extension shooting techniques, Roger put them together in one drill. We started out at 2 yards and put a burst into the target, then stepped back a yard and did it again. As we moved further from the targets we transitioned from driving the gun, to metal on meat, to looking over the top of the slide, to type II focus, to using our sights.
At this point, most of our targets looked more like they were the victims of several rounds of particularly large buckshot, rather than the nice tight groups you might see with sighted shooting. Roger launched into an explanation of terminal ballistics, with the assistance of Dr. Meade. Roger went through all of the really good stuff you can hit outside of the classic hit zones in the heart and cranio-ocular cavity. Hits to these areas might not be optimal, but they can still cause fatal blood loss, incapacitating central nervous system damage, and may reset the bad guys OODA loop which may keep him from hitting you.
Previously, we did the align along the top of the slide just below the line of sight, about an inch below eye level. The next drills took this a little further, incrementally reducing the amount of visual input each time. We started out at five yards and held the gun just far enough below the line of sight that we could see the bottom of the cardboard target (equivalent to the waistband on a live assailant). This but the gun at about chin level. After firing a burst we stepped forward and lowered the gun a bit more and shot again. We keep this up down two to yards, which put the gun quite a ways below the line of sight.
Before we moved on to partial extension shooting Roger did an exercise to establish our visual centerline. Almost everyone there knew whether they were right or left eye dominant, but this isn't a binary thing. There are varying degrees of dominance, from entirely right or left eyed, to a blend of the two. Roger stood back a couple of yards, had us focus on his right eye with both of our eyes open, and bring our thumb up into our line of sight at arms length. He looked where it lined up on our face. That is our visual centerline, where we should align the gun for below line of sight point shooting.
With our centerline established we practiced shooting from the midpoint of the drawstroke. This puts your elbows against your ribcage and the gun about a foot from your chest. After we were comfortable shooting at the center of the target's chest from this position (approximately horizontal) we did some focal point drills. One square of colored tape was placed at belt level, and another in the upper chest and we moved our focus back and forth between these, using alternating shots at first, then moving on to bursts.
At this point, I decided to switch to my .22 conversion kit for my Glock, to help keep my ammo costs down. I deliberately didn't start with the .22 because I wanted to get some experience doing the below line of sight shooting where you have to get behind the gun and control the recoil with muscle rather than body structure. Now that we'd done that (and because Roger recommended shooting full power ammo for the drills on the second day) I figured this would be a good time to start saving some money.
Our last drills before lunch introduced the drawstroke zipper. Essentially, you start shooting during the draw as soon as the gun is horizontal and pointed at the target and keep shooting as you drive it up to full extension, resulting in a string of hits running up the center of the body and hopefully tearing up all sorts of good stuff, including the liver, major arteries, the heart, and the central nervous system. If the assailant is still standing, it's traditional to cap it off with a headshot. As part of this, John showed us the level at which you could hit the spinal cord and paralyze the hands, which is fairly low, about halfway between the armpits and the shoulders. The zipper basically works as an extension of the focal point drill, only instead of two discrete points you move up the centerline of the body.
On this note we broke for lunch. Our local hosts provided some sandwiches and chips as refreshments, because the range isn't really convenient to any eateries. This also gave us the opportunity to hear a brief lecture on trauma kits from John. He had invited students to bring their trauma kits to class for use as examples, which I and one other student did. Going through our kits he talked a bit about the different items. He generally seemed to approve of mine, though I did get razzed a bit for bringing it in a ziploc bag (the nice Maxpedition first aid pouch I ordered hasn't arrived yet). John's clearly got a lot of knowledge about the subject, and I look forward to the opportunity to take a tactical medicine class from him.
After lunch, we switched from two-handed to one-handed shooting. Roger started by talking about the combat crouch. The old school combat crouch has taken some abuse from Modern Technique shooters. It does look a bit silly in the pictures, but the pictures don't really do it justice. The combat crouch isn't a stance, the way Weaver and Isosceles are, it's a movement platform. It takes advantage of the natural tendency to crouch down during a fight or flight response, gives you a lower base for movement, thrusts one arm forward to shoot and the other back as a counterbalance. When you start thinking about, and more importantly, trying and using it, in this context, it starts to make a lot of sense.
Part and parcel of the combat crouch is the point shoulder technique of one handed full extension shooting. He had a very good analogy for it, particularly for wing shooters. It's like shooting a shotgun with a 32 inch barrel, and the front sight is your bead. We worked point shoulder in the combat crouch from 3 yards out to 7.
Now somewhat comfortable with one handed shooting, Roger got us uncomfortable again by having us address targets at odd angles. We stood facing uprange with the target to our right rear, then our left rear. Addressing a right rear (7:30) target wasn't that hard (for right handers, anyway). The left rear target (4:30) was much more of a challenge, particularly in drawing and getting the gun across your body to the target without sweeping yourself or the next guy down the line. Roger had us demonstrate both of these using our 'finger guns' to ensure that we could do them safely before shooting it live.
Moving on to a more comfortable position, we did a bit at 3/4 hip. This is a one handed shooting position below the line of sight, with the elbow bent and the forearm horizontal. It's very nice if you need a bit of retention and it's an intermediate point along the one-handed drawstroke zipper. In addition to facing the target, we did this at 4:30 and 7:30 as well.
Completing our one-handed below line of sight curriculum we covered the half hip shooting position. This is also known as elbow-up elbow-down when you do it from the draw (elbow up to get the gun out of the holster and elbow down to drive the gun to the target). The elbow is bent 90 degrees and planted against your side and the gun is in the bottom of your peripheral vision.
After shooting the half hip, Roger introduced the central axis relock (CAR) technique. This is actually one of the newest additions to the PSP curriculum. The low CAR position places the pistol at chest height, with the web of the support hand pressed up against the front of the grip (imagine sul, then rotate the weapon 90 degrees to point straight to your support side). High CAR brings the gun up in front of your face, canted at a 45 degree angle, with the support side arm supporting it from below. It was developed by a fellow who teaches an entire shooting system based on this style, which seems a bit inflexible to me. However, as a situational tool it really shines for shooting to the weak side rear, out the driver's side window of a car (or passenger side if you're a lefty), etc. Both positions work really well with point shooting skills, using the body index for low CAR and aligning off the slide for high CAR (particularly with a Glock or other blocky pistol that has a nice edge along the upper corner of the slide to use for alignment). We practiced shooting from both low and high CAR.
Finally, we put it all together and redid the focal point and zipper drills using one handed shooting.
This would normally be the end of the first day, but because Roger's flight was a bit tight after the class on Sunday, we stayed a bit later and started on the Day 2 curriculum so that he could get out of here a bit earlier.
The 'Day 2' stuff is essentially taking the building blocks we'd learned so far on day 1 and using them during dynamic movement. We started out with some work on the Pekiti takeoff. The Pekiti is one of those things that are much harder to explain in writing than to do, but it essentially involves using the body's natural fight or flight drop into a crouch to reposition your feet where they can drive you into movement in the desired direction. As an alternative for those who weren't so physically agile, Roger also covered 'lean and push', which is essentially taking a normal step rather than doing fancy footwork. This is a little slower, but easier for the less nimble and more suited to surfaces with dodgy footing
We worked this a bit in dry practice, then moved on to the first shot drill. The goal is to use the Pekiti takeoff or lean and push to get off the X and fire one good shot as you start the second step. The key is to hold the shot until just after the jolt from your first foot hitting the ground. If you fire as the foot hits, it will tend to drop your shot low, but holding for a fraction of a second produces much better results.
This wrapped up the first day. We headed back to our homes or hotels to clean up, then most of the class rendezvoused at Jim and Nicks, a local barbecue joint. They had some truly excellent food and the fellowship of a lot of like minded folks made it a really great meal.
The next day, we gathered again at 8:00. Unlike the warm sun of day 1, it rained off and on all morning. As Roger put it "the weather will be perfect". The clouds cleared off by the afternoon though, so we were able to wrap up in some really nice weather.
Today Roger led off with a bit of discussion of criminals' mindset. His day job has led him into contact with some . . . interesting people, and this has given him a lot of insight into how they think. His description of it was quite illuminating.
Getting back to movement, Roger talked about the importance of stretching before practicing this sort of dynamic movement. Particularly stretching out the Achilles tendon, which gets a lot of stress during the takeoff. The only serious injury I've seen in an SI class was a fellow who popped his Achilles during a force on force class last summer in Salt Lake. Roger also described the, "significant other takeoff". Basically this involves giving the person you are defending a shove in one direction why you get off the X going the other way. This gives you some separation, hopefully with the assailant's attention focused on you rather than your spouse or child. It also gets them started on getting the hell out of there.
Our first drill involved taking a sidestep then attacking along a route parallel to the original line of force. This allows you to rapidly close with the opponent, but gets you off the X and doesn't put you on a course that would bring you directly into a hand to hand conflict with the opponent if you fail to shoot him to the ground before you get to him. We did these, and almost all of the drills today, two at a time. The two students were placed quite a ways apart and moved towards each other, but kept shooting at the targets that were in front of them when they started, meaning that their shots were angled safely away from each other. Doing the drills two at a time this way takes a bit longer, but it allows much more dynamic movement than doing them with everybody lined up like in the CRG class. We did this drill starting at 12 yards, which meant most people were firing their first shot at about 9 yards. This was certainly a bit further than I would have felt comfortable point shooting before this class, let alone doing it from fairly rapid movement. Nevertheless, I, and most other folks in the class, shot this quite well, putting the hits on the target and generally in fairly good spots.
We had an injury during this drill. One shooter did something to his ankle while taking that first forward step and fell. I don't know exactly what he did (unfortunately John wasn't with us on the second day, otherwise he probably could have told us), but it wasn't good. As Roger had emphasized, he kept the pistol pointed in a safe direction with his finger off the trigger during the fall, so it wasn't compounded by an ND. He was on the ground there in pain for a while eventually got up and sat down in a chair for a while. After a while he shot a few more drills, but he was limping pretty bad for the rest of the day. I'm afraid he probably did something pretty serious.
With him sitting out, we finished up the parallel line drills and moved on to the forward obliques (1:00 and 11:00). These lines do a great job of getting you angular displacement, making it harder for the opponent to track you. For a right handed shooter, moving to the left this means shooting one-handed. Moving to the right, you can keep two hands on the gun. These are some that I was fairly good at from CRG, but in this class we took them out to a considerably longer distance.
After working the forward obliques, Roger threw in a variation. Generally, getting off the X is a good solution when you're behind the reactionary curve (and have enough distance that it's not a hand to hand problem). However, if you are effectively putting rounds on target, you'll eventually gain the initiative as the opponent takes hits and his capabilities degrade. Now you're at a different point on the reactionary curve and you can use some different tactics. To allow us to practice this, Roger had us get off the X to the 1:00 and 11:00 and put a few shots into the target before changing direction and boring directly in and shooting him to the ground.
One of the things Roger emphasized in this context is cadence. At a longer distance, you have to take more time between shots, but you shouldn't let that lull you into a fixed rhythm. As you close in, you can pick up the pace and still get your hits, so in a drill like this that has you closing on the target, the pace should pick up as you get closer. Conversely, in some of the later drills where you get further from the target, your cadence should slow down as the distance increases.
Next up were the rear obliques. The biggest problem here is avoiding backpedaling. Moving backwards is an instinctive response, from the days when we used contact weapons that required you to face your enemy to use them. Now, we can use firearms, which allow us to prioritize movement (and not getting hit) by pointing our toes in the direction we want to go and still swivel our upper bodies and arms around to get hits on the assailant. Backpedalling is going to be much slower than a charging assailant, and runs the risk of falling and going head over heels. The key to not backpedaling is to get the hips pointed in the right direction during your initial takeoff. Backpedaling is a particularly big problem for right-handed shooters moving to the 5:00 (and for lefties moving to 7:00) where they have to shoot behind their support side shoulder. The further you move, the more extreme the angle gets and the more tension there is. The natural inclination is to relive this tension by turning your body, which leads to backpedaling. This is the application of the CAR technique we learned yesterday, but there are other methods for this as well. We worked drills on both obliques, then broke for lunch.
During lunch, Roger gave us the pitch for the Advanced Point Shooting Progressions class in Blairsville, Georgia next month. He made a really good pitch, but in a sense he was preaching to the converted, more than half the folks in this class were already signed up for APSP either in Blairsville or in Salt Lake City in June.
After lunch we worked on the gun in quartata, also known as the "tactical pirouette". In quartata is a fencing term referring to a maneuver where you turn the body sideways to avoid an incoming strike. The gun in quartata does much the same thing, turning the body sideways to avoid potential incoming fire. It has applications in spaces that are too confined for traditional methods of getting off the X, like a narrow hallway. In this case, however, we are using it as an alternative to shooting over the shoulder with CAR when getting off the X to the 5:00 (for a right handed shooter). Instead of moving directly to the right rear and shooting over the left shoulder, you step to the right, pivot on your right foot to turn your body to the left and move to your right rear while shooting behind your right shoulder using the point shoulder technique. You can also do the reverse, stepping to the left and using CAR to get off the X to your left rear. Lefties, of course, do all of this backwards.
In addition to practicing the alternative methods of getting off the X, Roger also encouraged us to try to take our point shooting out to longer distances. I managed to take point shoulder out to about 11 yards on the move, whereas before this course I rarely point shot beyond 6 yards, and that was generally while stationary.
The two remaining get off the X directions at this point were directly left and right (the 3:00 and 9:00). For these drills Roger had us do something a bit different. One at a time we got off the X and moved down the entire line of targets and fired one shot at each. Now, this doesn't have much direct practical application, unless we get attacked by the Rockettes, but it did give us a chance to practice getting off the X to the 3:00 and 9:00, and focal transitions between targets, which isn't something we'd done so far.
At this point, Roger covered getting off the X to the 5:00 and 7:00 by passing the gun to the other hand. Rather than shooting CAR, or doing the gun in quartata and using footwork to deal with the problem, this just lets you use a left-handed point shoulder (or right handed if you are a left handed shooter). Learning to reliably transfer the pistol takes some work and most of us aren't as good shooting with the support hand. However, support side shooting skills are important in a lot of contexts, including a wounded gun hand, so these are skills we need to develop anyway.
The last method for getting off the X to the rear obliques is just to change your direction. When you find that tension is making it difficult to keep going the way you're going, pivot and cut back the other direction. To practice this Roger used the zig zag drill. You start out getting off the X to the right rear, then after a few steps you reverse directions and head to the left rear, going from CAR to point shoulder. After a few more steps, reverse again and go to CAR. Repeat as many times as necessary. We had about ten yards of distance to safely play around in and Roger pointed out that if you move shallowly, concentrating on lateral movement instead of moving away from the adversary, you could really stretch it out and do a lot of shooting. I managed to burn through three magazines before I got to ten yards, and was able to keep getting good hits in both point shoulder and CAR all the way out.
For our last drill, Roger lined us all up and had us do the confined space gun in quartata, shooting from half-hip. This involves the same turning of the body as we did with the in quartata before, but with a smaller step. Instead of getting off the X you draw to half hip and zipper the target.
That wrapped up the class. Roger handed out the certificates and we all packed up. Roger wasn't able to hang around and chat much, but most of the rest of us stuck around and helped push one student's van out of the mud. He was really in there pretty good, the front wheels were probably sunk in a good six inches. We ended up having to both hitch the van up to one guys truck and push it from the front, as neither pushing nor just pulling with the truck could move it. With that everyone was able to get safely on their way.
A few observations: At most of the shooting classes I've taken, the round count is an overestimate. I usually end up shooting anywhere from half to 2/3 of the recommended number. In this class you'd have to husband your rounds pretty carefully to make it in under the 700 round count. I husbanded my rounds pretty carefully on the first day, both because I didn't want to shoot a huge amount of .45, and because I only had four 10 round magazines for my .22 conversion kit. I was more generous on the second day. Despite not shooting as much as I could have on day 1, I still shot about 450 rounds of .22 and 450 rounds of .45. Several people shot well over 1000 rounds. When Roger says, "Bring more if you want to shoot more", he means it. I'd bring at least 1000 rounds to this class.
Bring lots of magazines! As mentioned earlier, I only had four magazines for my .22 conversion kit, and that wasn't really enough. Twice that number would have been appropriate. If you're not trying to conserve ammo, you can easily go through 8-10 rounds on some of these drills, and you'll run 5-8 drills before Roger calls an ammo break. When I was shooting full caliber, I used nine magazines (one in the gun, two on the belt, three in each hip pocket). That was enough to reload after every drill so I could start each one with a fresh mag.
Several of the people in the class shooting .40 S&W commented on how it got a lot more difficult when we moved to the one-handed stuff. One fellow shot his .357 SIG for a few drills, and noted how much bigger his groups were with it and how much smaller his groups got when he switched back to the 9mm. This is the reason a lot of the Suarez International guys have moved to 9mm instead of .40. For those of you who say, "I can shoot my .40 just as well as a 9mm", does that also apply one-handed? Of course, I was the oddball shooting a .45 Glock, but the .45 is a soft shooting, relatively low velocity round. It's not a 9mm, but it's still pretty easy to handle even with one hand. The more punishing nature of the .40 affected some people as well. We shot a lot of ammo in this class, especially the first day, and the .40 beat some people's hands up.
Before I close, I really ought to thank our hosts for doing a great job setting up the class. Also to John Meade and Don Robison for their part in the instruction. Don did a good job helping run the line and providing shooters a lot of feedback. John did the same during the first day and provided some nice medical insights on terminal ballistics and trauma care.
Overall, this was an excellent class. I drank the point shooting Kool Aid some time ago, so it wasn't as revelatory for me as it was for some other folks (you could see the light bulb coming on for some of them). I entered with a decent point shooting skill set, but Roger really increased my range and accuracy, and my confidence in both. He's taught this class many times, and you can really tell that he's refined his curriculum and presentation based on this experience. Roger is a great instructor and I would highly recommend taking Point Shooting Progressions. I was already signed up for Advanced Point Shooting Progressions next month, but now I'm REALLY looking forward to it.
This weekend I finally had a chance to take the Point Shooting Progressions class from Roger Phillips. I've been wanting to take this class for a long time now. When I lived in Salt Lake, I was close enough to have fairly easy access to his classes in Las Vegas, but I was a poor graduate student without any money. When I got a job in South Carolina, I finally had some money, but I Roger's classes were a lot less convenient. Then I made an abortive attempt to host a class in South Carolina, but it didn't work out. Money and accessibility finally intersected when Roger scheduled a class in Montgomery, Alabama, well within a days driving distance.
I came into this class with a fairly solid grasp of the basics of point shooting. Gabe introduced me to PS in Close Range Gunfighting several years ago and I got some more instruction from Randy Harris at the Extreme Close Range Gunfighting class last year. I've kept up my skills reasonably well and spent some time at the range polishing them a bit before this class.
I shot this class with my usual carry gun, a Glock 21. I also brought a .22 conversion kit for it from Advantage Arms. Most of the rest of the students had Glocks of various descriptions, mainly in 9mm, though a few students had .40s and one shot a few of the drills with one .357 SIG. There were a few XDs in evidence, including both classic models and the XDm. One student brought a 1911 (the only other fellow in the class shooting .45), one shot an HK and one had a Taurus semi-auto. One fellow shot the first day with a Walther P22. There were a good number of appendix inside the waistband holsters in evidence (including many Dale Frike models), with the other half of the class was shooting from the classic hip position. Many folks used closed front cover. I was one of the few with an open front cover garment (an unbuttoned short sleeve shirt). Some shot the class without any cover garment, which I think deprived them of a bit of the learning experience. I had to fumble through a few miffed draws, but I think working from under a cover garment made the drills much more applicable and realistic.
I got to Montgomery Friday afternoon a few folks who were taking the class got together for dinner. These included Dr. John Meade, Don Robison, and a couple fo students from the class, including one of the hosts. We got together at Texas Roadhouse for some food and good fellowship.
Bright and early the next morning I drove out to the range for class. Most shooting classes I've been involved with tend to start around 9:00, but Roger set the start time for this class at 8:00. He also asked us to try to be there around 7:30 to get the usual paperwork out of the way before the formal start time (given the amount of material he crammed into this class, now I can see why he wanted to get a jump on things). In any case, I was very glad we were on central time.
For this class we not only had Roger to teach us, we were also graced by the presence of two other instructors. Dr. John Meade, Suarez International's new director of tactical medicine was with us for the first day. For both days we also had Don Robison, a new SI instructor. Both of them had taken PSP before and helped Roger out on the line and coached students. The class was also populated with folks I met at previous SI or Amok classes, and folks I was acquainted with online.
We filled out the usual liability waivers and promised on video not to sue anyone for any reason, nowhere, nohow. As Roger wanted, we had all that out of the way and the main event kicked off right at 8:00. He gave the usual safety briefing. In addition, he also handed out roles to various people in the event of an injury: treat the patient, call 911, go out to the road to guide the ambulance in to the bay where we were shooting, deal with the person's gun. Two people were appointed to each role, just in case one of them was the one who got shot.
With the formalities out of the way, we got started shooting. Roger started us off with sighted fire, asking us to put five rounds into as small a group as possible. We did a bit of dry fire to diagnose any flinching or trigger control problems, then another 5 rounds of live fire. There was some variation in the size of the groups, but it was clear that everyone had a fairly solid grasp of basic sighted fire skills going in.
We started out by progressing down the sighting continuum to less visual input on the gun. Roger had us fire a pair of bursts into a target using a flash sight picture. I actually found this one of the more difficult things in the class. Later on Roger said that I was once a "Modern Technique" shooter, but that isn't exactly true. My initial training came from folks who were MT shooters, but I never really had a comprehensive course of MT instruction. I learned point shooting early enough in my shooting career that I never really mastered the flash sight picture at the level the MT demands, and I haven't really kept up the level of skill with it I was able to achieve. The first burst I put into the target drifted from the flash sight picture towards more point shooting and ended up distressingly large. The second drifted more towards hard focus on the front sight and was much smaller, but slower. This is definitely a hole in my skill set. Yes folks, I went to a point shooting class and learned I need to work on my sighted fire.
At this point Roger gave a brief lecture on the focal point. Where you focus on the adversary is where bullets are going to tend to go. One of the reasons there are a lot of hits on weapons and weapon hands during gunfights (and force on force training) is that there's a natural tendency for people to focus on the dangerous thing in the assailant's hand, rather than places that may be easier to hit and more effective from a terminal ballistics standpoint.
Moving towards less visual input from the gun, we did some shooting with a Type II Focus. This is something that I don't think Gabe covered in the Close Range Gunfighting class. I'd read about it (mostly from Roger) but hadn't really grasped it. In class, he explained that it was still using your sights, but unlike a traditional sight picture, where the front sight is in sharp focus and the target is fuzzy, you focus on the target and align the now fuzzy sights with it. Less precise, but it allows you to focus on the target (which is more natural in a fight or flight situation).
Reducing the focus on the gun further, we lowered it just below the line of sight, using the top of the slight to align it with our target. This provides a lot of feedback on horizontal alignment, but not so much on vertical alignment. This is a technique that I learned from Gabe in the CRG class, but I didn't really take to it at the time. Recently, I developed a renewed appreciation for it while I was doing some point shooting to prepare for this class.
Our next technique was one of my favorites from CRG: metal on meat. Just bring the gun up and superimpose the entire thing on the target. As long as you're close enough that the target's torso is bigger than the gun, you're probably going to hit.
Finally we just drove the gun to the target without paying attention to the visual feedback at all. This is quite quick, but has some real limitations as far as accuracy is concerned.
After we had worked all the different full extension shooting techniques, Roger put them together in one drill. We started out at 2 yards and put a burst into the target, then stepped back a yard and did it again. As we moved further from the targets we transitioned from driving the gun, to metal on meat, to looking over the top of the slide, to type II focus, to using our sights.
At this point, most of our targets looked more like they were the victims of several rounds of particularly large buckshot, rather than the nice tight groups you might see with sighted shooting. Roger launched into an explanation of terminal ballistics, with the assistance of Dr. Meade. Roger went through all of the really good stuff you can hit outside of the classic hit zones in the heart and cranio-ocular cavity. Hits to these areas might not be optimal, but they can still cause fatal blood loss, incapacitating central nervous system damage, and may reset the bad guys OODA loop which may keep him from hitting you.
Previously, we did the align along the top of the slide just below the line of sight, about an inch below eye level. The next drills took this a little further, incrementally reducing the amount of visual input each time. We started out at five yards and held the gun just far enough below the line of sight that we could see the bottom of the cardboard target (equivalent to the waistband on a live assailant). This but the gun at about chin level. After firing a burst we stepped forward and lowered the gun a bit more and shot again. We keep this up down two to yards, which put the gun quite a ways below the line of sight.
Before we moved on to partial extension shooting Roger did an exercise to establish our visual centerline. Almost everyone there knew whether they were right or left eye dominant, but this isn't a binary thing. There are varying degrees of dominance, from entirely right or left eyed, to a blend of the two. Roger stood back a couple of yards, had us focus on his right eye with both of our eyes open, and bring our thumb up into our line of sight at arms length. He looked where it lined up on our face. That is our visual centerline, where we should align the gun for below line of sight point shooting.
With our centerline established we practiced shooting from the midpoint of the drawstroke. This puts your elbows against your ribcage and the gun about a foot from your chest. After we were comfortable shooting at the center of the target's chest from this position (approximately horizontal) we did some focal point drills. One square of colored tape was placed at belt level, and another in the upper chest and we moved our focus back and forth between these, using alternating shots at first, then moving on to bursts.
At this point, I decided to switch to my .22 conversion kit for my Glock, to help keep my ammo costs down. I deliberately didn't start with the .22 because I wanted to get some experience doing the below line of sight shooting where you have to get behind the gun and control the recoil with muscle rather than body structure. Now that we'd done that (and because Roger recommended shooting full power ammo for the drills on the second day) I figured this would be a good time to start saving some money.
Our last drills before lunch introduced the drawstroke zipper. Essentially, you start shooting during the draw as soon as the gun is horizontal and pointed at the target and keep shooting as you drive it up to full extension, resulting in a string of hits running up the center of the body and hopefully tearing up all sorts of good stuff, including the liver, major arteries, the heart, and the central nervous system. If the assailant is still standing, it's traditional to cap it off with a headshot. As part of this, John showed us the level at which you could hit the spinal cord and paralyze the hands, which is fairly low, about halfway between the armpits and the shoulders. The zipper basically works as an extension of the focal point drill, only instead of two discrete points you move up the centerline of the body.
On this note we broke for lunch. Our local hosts provided some sandwiches and chips as refreshments, because the range isn't really convenient to any eateries. This also gave us the opportunity to hear a brief lecture on trauma kits from John. He had invited students to bring their trauma kits to class for use as examples, which I and one other student did. Going through our kits he talked a bit about the different items. He generally seemed to approve of mine, though I did get razzed a bit for bringing it in a ziploc bag (the nice Maxpedition first aid pouch I ordered hasn't arrived yet). John's clearly got a lot of knowledge about the subject, and I look forward to the opportunity to take a tactical medicine class from him.
After lunch, we switched from two-handed to one-handed shooting. Roger started by talking about the combat crouch. The old school combat crouch has taken some abuse from Modern Technique shooters. It does look a bit silly in the pictures, but the pictures don't really do it justice. The combat crouch isn't a stance, the way Weaver and Isosceles are, it's a movement platform. It takes advantage of the natural tendency to crouch down during a fight or flight response, gives you a lower base for movement, thrusts one arm forward to shoot and the other back as a counterbalance. When you start thinking about, and more importantly, trying and using it, in this context, it starts to make a lot of sense.
Part and parcel of the combat crouch is the point shoulder technique of one handed full extension shooting. He had a very good analogy for it, particularly for wing shooters. It's like shooting a shotgun with a 32 inch barrel, and the front sight is your bead. We worked point shoulder in the combat crouch from 3 yards out to 7.
Now somewhat comfortable with one handed shooting, Roger got us uncomfortable again by having us address targets at odd angles. We stood facing uprange with the target to our right rear, then our left rear. Addressing a right rear (7:30) target wasn't that hard (for right handers, anyway). The left rear target (4:30) was much more of a challenge, particularly in drawing and getting the gun across your body to the target without sweeping yourself or the next guy down the line. Roger had us demonstrate both of these using our 'finger guns' to ensure that we could do them safely before shooting it live.
Moving on to a more comfortable position, we did a bit at 3/4 hip. This is a one handed shooting position below the line of sight, with the elbow bent and the forearm horizontal. It's very nice if you need a bit of retention and it's an intermediate point along the one-handed drawstroke zipper. In addition to facing the target, we did this at 4:30 and 7:30 as well.
Completing our one-handed below line of sight curriculum we covered the half hip shooting position. This is also known as elbow-up elbow-down when you do it from the draw (elbow up to get the gun out of the holster and elbow down to drive the gun to the target). The elbow is bent 90 degrees and planted against your side and the gun is in the bottom of your peripheral vision.
After shooting the half hip, Roger introduced the central axis relock (CAR) technique. This is actually one of the newest additions to the PSP curriculum. The low CAR position places the pistol at chest height, with the web of the support hand pressed up against the front of the grip (imagine sul, then rotate the weapon 90 degrees to point straight to your support side). High CAR brings the gun up in front of your face, canted at a 45 degree angle, with the support side arm supporting it from below. It was developed by a fellow who teaches an entire shooting system based on this style, which seems a bit inflexible to me. However, as a situational tool it really shines for shooting to the weak side rear, out the driver's side window of a car (or passenger side if you're a lefty), etc. Both positions work really well with point shooting skills, using the body index for low CAR and aligning off the slide for high CAR (particularly with a Glock or other blocky pistol that has a nice edge along the upper corner of the slide to use for alignment). We practiced shooting from both low and high CAR.
Finally, we put it all together and redid the focal point and zipper drills using one handed shooting.
This would normally be the end of the first day, but because Roger's flight was a bit tight after the class on Sunday, we stayed a bit later and started on the Day 2 curriculum so that he could get out of here a bit earlier.
The 'Day 2' stuff is essentially taking the building blocks we'd learned so far on day 1 and using them during dynamic movement. We started out with some work on the Pekiti takeoff. The Pekiti is one of those things that are much harder to explain in writing than to do, but it essentially involves using the body's natural fight or flight drop into a crouch to reposition your feet where they can drive you into movement in the desired direction. As an alternative for those who weren't so physically agile, Roger also covered 'lean and push', which is essentially taking a normal step rather than doing fancy footwork. This is a little slower, but easier for the less nimble and more suited to surfaces with dodgy footing
We worked this a bit in dry practice, then moved on to the first shot drill. The goal is to use the Pekiti takeoff or lean and push to get off the X and fire one good shot as you start the second step. The key is to hold the shot until just after the jolt from your first foot hitting the ground. If you fire as the foot hits, it will tend to drop your shot low, but holding for a fraction of a second produces much better results.
This wrapped up the first day. We headed back to our homes or hotels to clean up, then most of the class rendezvoused at Jim and Nicks, a local barbecue joint. They had some truly excellent food and the fellowship of a lot of like minded folks made it a really great meal.
The next day, we gathered again at 8:00. Unlike the warm sun of day 1, it rained off and on all morning. As Roger put it "the weather will be perfect". The clouds cleared off by the afternoon though, so we were able to wrap up in some really nice weather.
Today Roger led off with a bit of discussion of criminals' mindset. His day job has led him into contact with some . . . interesting people, and this has given him a lot of insight into how they think. His description of it was quite illuminating.
Getting back to movement, Roger talked about the importance of stretching before practicing this sort of dynamic movement. Particularly stretching out the Achilles tendon, which gets a lot of stress during the takeoff. The only serious injury I've seen in an SI class was a fellow who popped his Achilles during a force on force class last summer in Salt Lake. Roger also described the, "significant other takeoff". Basically this involves giving the person you are defending a shove in one direction why you get off the X going the other way. This gives you some separation, hopefully with the assailant's attention focused on you rather than your spouse or child. It also gets them started on getting the hell out of there.
Our first drill involved taking a sidestep then attacking along a route parallel to the original line of force. This allows you to rapidly close with the opponent, but gets you off the X and doesn't put you on a course that would bring you directly into a hand to hand conflict with the opponent if you fail to shoot him to the ground before you get to him. We did these, and almost all of the drills today, two at a time. The two students were placed quite a ways apart and moved towards each other, but kept shooting at the targets that were in front of them when they started, meaning that their shots were angled safely away from each other. Doing the drills two at a time this way takes a bit longer, but it allows much more dynamic movement than doing them with everybody lined up like in the CRG class. We did this drill starting at 12 yards, which meant most people were firing their first shot at about 9 yards. This was certainly a bit further than I would have felt comfortable point shooting before this class, let alone doing it from fairly rapid movement. Nevertheless, I, and most other folks in the class, shot this quite well, putting the hits on the target and generally in fairly good spots.
We had an injury during this drill. One shooter did something to his ankle while taking that first forward step and fell. I don't know exactly what he did (unfortunately John wasn't with us on the second day, otherwise he probably could have told us), but it wasn't good. As Roger had emphasized, he kept the pistol pointed in a safe direction with his finger off the trigger during the fall, so it wasn't compounded by an ND. He was on the ground there in pain for a while eventually got up and sat down in a chair for a while. After a while he shot a few more drills, but he was limping pretty bad for the rest of the day. I'm afraid he probably did something pretty serious.
With him sitting out, we finished up the parallel line drills and moved on to the forward obliques (1:00 and 11:00). These lines do a great job of getting you angular displacement, making it harder for the opponent to track you. For a right handed shooter, moving to the left this means shooting one-handed. Moving to the right, you can keep two hands on the gun. These are some that I was fairly good at from CRG, but in this class we took them out to a considerably longer distance.
After working the forward obliques, Roger threw in a variation. Generally, getting off the X is a good solution when you're behind the reactionary curve (and have enough distance that it's not a hand to hand problem). However, if you are effectively putting rounds on target, you'll eventually gain the initiative as the opponent takes hits and his capabilities degrade. Now you're at a different point on the reactionary curve and you can use some different tactics. To allow us to practice this, Roger had us get off the X to the 1:00 and 11:00 and put a few shots into the target before changing direction and boring directly in and shooting him to the ground.
One of the things Roger emphasized in this context is cadence. At a longer distance, you have to take more time between shots, but you shouldn't let that lull you into a fixed rhythm. As you close in, you can pick up the pace and still get your hits, so in a drill like this that has you closing on the target, the pace should pick up as you get closer. Conversely, in some of the later drills where you get further from the target, your cadence should slow down as the distance increases.
Next up were the rear obliques. The biggest problem here is avoiding backpedaling. Moving backwards is an instinctive response, from the days when we used contact weapons that required you to face your enemy to use them. Now, we can use firearms, which allow us to prioritize movement (and not getting hit) by pointing our toes in the direction we want to go and still swivel our upper bodies and arms around to get hits on the assailant. Backpedalling is going to be much slower than a charging assailant, and runs the risk of falling and going head over heels. The key to not backpedaling is to get the hips pointed in the right direction during your initial takeoff. Backpedaling is a particularly big problem for right-handed shooters moving to the 5:00 (and for lefties moving to 7:00) where they have to shoot behind their support side shoulder. The further you move, the more extreme the angle gets and the more tension there is. The natural inclination is to relive this tension by turning your body, which leads to backpedaling. This is the application of the CAR technique we learned yesterday, but there are other methods for this as well. We worked drills on both obliques, then broke for lunch.
During lunch, Roger gave us the pitch for the Advanced Point Shooting Progressions class in Blairsville, Georgia next month. He made a really good pitch, but in a sense he was preaching to the converted, more than half the folks in this class were already signed up for APSP either in Blairsville or in Salt Lake City in June.
After lunch we worked on the gun in quartata, also known as the "tactical pirouette". In quartata is a fencing term referring to a maneuver where you turn the body sideways to avoid an incoming strike. The gun in quartata does much the same thing, turning the body sideways to avoid potential incoming fire. It has applications in spaces that are too confined for traditional methods of getting off the X, like a narrow hallway. In this case, however, we are using it as an alternative to shooting over the shoulder with CAR when getting off the X to the 5:00 (for a right handed shooter). Instead of moving directly to the right rear and shooting over the left shoulder, you step to the right, pivot on your right foot to turn your body to the left and move to your right rear while shooting behind your right shoulder using the point shoulder technique. You can also do the reverse, stepping to the left and using CAR to get off the X to your left rear. Lefties, of course, do all of this backwards.
In addition to practicing the alternative methods of getting off the X, Roger also encouraged us to try to take our point shooting out to longer distances. I managed to take point shoulder out to about 11 yards on the move, whereas before this course I rarely point shot beyond 6 yards, and that was generally while stationary.
The two remaining get off the X directions at this point were directly left and right (the 3:00 and 9:00). For these drills Roger had us do something a bit different. One at a time we got off the X and moved down the entire line of targets and fired one shot at each. Now, this doesn't have much direct practical application, unless we get attacked by the Rockettes, but it did give us a chance to practice getting off the X to the 3:00 and 9:00, and focal transitions between targets, which isn't something we'd done so far.
At this point, Roger covered getting off the X to the 5:00 and 7:00 by passing the gun to the other hand. Rather than shooting CAR, or doing the gun in quartata and using footwork to deal with the problem, this just lets you use a left-handed point shoulder (or right handed if you are a left handed shooter). Learning to reliably transfer the pistol takes some work and most of us aren't as good shooting with the support hand. However, support side shooting skills are important in a lot of contexts, including a wounded gun hand, so these are skills we need to develop anyway.
The last method for getting off the X to the rear obliques is just to change your direction. When you find that tension is making it difficult to keep going the way you're going, pivot and cut back the other direction. To practice this Roger used the zig zag drill. You start out getting off the X to the right rear, then after a few steps you reverse directions and head to the left rear, going from CAR to point shoulder. After a few more steps, reverse again and go to CAR. Repeat as many times as necessary. We had about ten yards of distance to safely play around in and Roger pointed out that if you move shallowly, concentrating on lateral movement instead of moving away from the adversary, you could really stretch it out and do a lot of shooting. I managed to burn through three magazines before I got to ten yards, and was able to keep getting good hits in both point shoulder and CAR all the way out.
For our last drill, Roger lined us all up and had us do the confined space gun in quartata, shooting from half-hip. This involves the same turning of the body as we did with the in quartata before, but with a smaller step. Instead of getting off the X you draw to half hip and zipper the target.
That wrapped up the class. Roger handed out the certificates and we all packed up. Roger wasn't able to hang around and chat much, but most of the rest of us stuck around and helped push one student's van out of the mud. He was really in there pretty good, the front wheels were probably sunk in a good six inches. We ended up having to both hitch the van up to one guys truck and push it from the front, as neither pushing nor just pulling with the truck could move it. With that everyone was able to get safely on their way.
A few observations: At most of the shooting classes I've taken, the round count is an overestimate. I usually end up shooting anywhere from half to 2/3 of the recommended number. In this class you'd have to husband your rounds pretty carefully to make it in under the 700 round count. I husbanded my rounds pretty carefully on the first day, both because I didn't want to shoot a huge amount of .45, and because I only had four 10 round magazines for my .22 conversion kit. I was more generous on the second day. Despite not shooting as much as I could have on day 1, I still shot about 450 rounds of .22 and 450 rounds of .45. Several people shot well over 1000 rounds. When Roger says, "Bring more if you want to shoot more", he means it. I'd bring at least 1000 rounds to this class.
Bring lots of magazines! As mentioned earlier, I only had four magazines for my .22 conversion kit, and that wasn't really enough. Twice that number would have been appropriate. If you're not trying to conserve ammo, you can easily go through 8-10 rounds on some of these drills, and you'll run 5-8 drills before Roger calls an ammo break. When I was shooting full caliber, I used nine magazines (one in the gun, two on the belt, three in each hip pocket). That was enough to reload after every drill so I could start each one with a fresh mag.
Several of the people in the class shooting .40 S&W commented on how it got a lot more difficult when we moved to the one-handed stuff. One fellow shot his .357 SIG for a few drills, and noted how much bigger his groups were with it and how much smaller his groups got when he switched back to the 9mm. This is the reason a lot of the Suarez International guys have moved to 9mm instead of .40. For those of you who say, "I can shoot my .40 just as well as a 9mm", does that also apply one-handed? Of course, I was the oddball shooting a .45 Glock, but the .45 is a soft shooting, relatively low velocity round. It's not a 9mm, but it's still pretty easy to handle even with one hand. The more punishing nature of the .40 affected some people as well. We shot a lot of ammo in this class, especially the first day, and the .40 beat some people's hands up.
Before I close, I really ought to thank our hosts for doing a great job setting up the class. Also to John Meade and Don Robison for their part in the instruction. Don did a good job helping run the line and providing shooters a lot of feedback. John did the same during the first day and provided some nice medical insights on terminal ballistics and trauma care.
Overall, this was an excellent class. I drank the point shooting Kool Aid some time ago, so it wasn't as revelatory for me as it was for some other folks (you could see the light bulb coming on for some of them). I entered with a decent point shooting skill set, but Roger really increased my range and accuracy, and my confidence in both. He's taught this class many times, and you can really tell that he's refined his curriculum and presentation based on this experience. Roger is a great instructor and I would highly recommend taking Point Shooting Progressions. I was already signed up for Advanced Point Shooting Progressions next month, but now I'm REALLY looking forward to it.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Upcoming Training Events
Spring time is just around the corner and with it the training season is upon us.
In March, Doug Little from Armed Personal Defense is offering three days of NRA instructor training in Salt Lake City. The classes include the NRA Instructors Workshop, Basic Pistol Instructor, and Personal Protection in the Home Instructor. Dates are March 19,20,21; visit the Armed Personal Defense website for more specifics.
If you've spent more than about 30 seconds on this blog, you know that the UPS is steeped in the Gabe Suarez school of combat pistol and rifle techniques. This spring and summer the following Suarez International classes are slated for the PMAA/Hendriksen Range:
April 10-11: Suarez Fighting Rifle
May 1-2: Suarez Close Range Gun Fighting
June 10-11: Point Shooting Progressions
June 12-13: Advanced Point Shooting Progressions
September 18-19: Suarez Kalashnikov Rifle Fighting
October 16-17: Suarez Close Range Gun Fighting
November 13-14: Suarez Defensive Knife (Location TBA)
These classes are taught by Suarez International Trainers, Doug Little and Roger Phillips and will take your shooting skills to new level. Check out Suarez International for registration and pricing.
In March, Doug Little from Armed Personal Defense is offering three days of NRA instructor training in Salt Lake City. The classes include the NRA Instructors Workshop, Basic Pistol Instructor, and Personal Protection in the Home Instructor. Dates are March 19,20,21; visit the Armed Personal Defense website for more specifics.
If you've spent more than about 30 seconds on this blog, you know that the UPS is steeped in the Gabe Suarez school of combat pistol and rifle techniques. This spring and summer the following Suarez International classes are slated for the PMAA/Hendriksen Range:
April 10-11: Suarez Fighting Rifle
May 1-2: Suarez Close Range Gun Fighting
June 10-11: Point Shooting Progressions
June 12-13: Advanced Point Shooting Progressions
September 18-19: Suarez Kalashnikov Rifle Fighting
October 16-17: Suarez Close Range Gun Fighting
November 13-14: Suarez Defensive Knife (Location TBA)
These classes are taught by Suarez International Trainers, Doug Little and Roger Phillips and will take your shooting skills to new level. Check out Suarez International for registration and pricing.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Gabe Suarez's Combat Pistol Instructor School
Earlier this month I attended Gabe's Combat Pistol Instructor School in Houston. This class was pretty neat for me in a couple of ways. Two of my friends from the Utah Polite Society who I'd only seen once since I moved to South Carolina were also signed up for the class, and we had a chance to hang out quite a bit. I was also surprised to find a fellow I knew from local matches in Columbia was attending the class (odd to fly a thousand miles and run in to someone I know from home). I also had the chance to make the acquaintance of some folks I'd only known online at Warriortalk.
For the first two days of the class, Gabe taught his Defensive Pistol Skills class. Defensive Pistol Skills class is intended as an introductory course that will take someone who has no experience with defensive shooting and give them the solid base of sighted shooting skills that they need for more advanced instruction. Gabe went through the entire class, giving both the course material, and a lot of advice on how to teach that material to students. We did all the drills (though generally with fewer reps than a student would get). All the shooting was done in pairs, with one student coaching while the other one shoots. On the third day, Gabe talked about administrative details involved in running a firearms company, talked about how Suarez International works, and extended an invitation to apply to be an SI instructor.
I shot the class with my normal carry rig: a Glock 21 in an IWB hip holster. Glocks were by far the most prevalent gun in the class, with about 2/3 of the class carrying them. The 9mm models were the most popular, followed by the .40s (I was carrying the only .45 Glock). Three students were armed with XDs, and one each with a Kimber and a Sig (several of these folks had Glocks with them as well). Gabe made the point that instructors should generally carry common pistols in plain jane configurations. When you're demonstrating something, you don't want students paying attention to your cool gun rather than what you're trying to demonstrate.
Day One
At the beginning of class, Gabe handed out an outline for the Defensive Pistol Skills class, and a copy of his Combative Pistol Marksmanship DVD, which generally covers the same material. Gabe suggested that those of us with access to a laptop or DVD player watch the DVD before the second day. I'd actually brought along my copy of the Combative Pistol Marksmanship DVD and my friends from Utah and I had watched it the night before. I thought having seen it before the first day was really helpful. One suggestion I made to Gabe is to send out the DVD to folks enrolled in the class beforehand, so everyone can have a chance to watch it ahead of time.
Gabe discussed a bit about the SI training philosophy generally, and the DPS class in particular. One particularly interesting point was why he doesn't use timers. He feels that they tend to discourage students who may be doing as well as they can, given age or medical limitations, but who aren't the fastest. The pressure to go faster than you really have the skill for also has a tendency to lead to accidents. The philosophy of the DPS class is focused on the idea that sighted shooting is easy, if you follow the right recipe. "If you can drive a car in traffic, you can shoot a pistol."
We went through the safety briefing, both from the perspective of not shooting anyone in this class, and from a teaching perspective. Gabe explained the reasons behind some of his deviations from the wording of the 4 rules of gun safety as Cooper laid them down. Most of these changes have to do with the fact that students will end up violating a more strict interpretation of the traditional rules especially in more advanced classes. There's really no way to draw from a hip holster without covering your leg at least a little bit, for example. He also introduced the concept of a "Grasshopper" (a la the old Kung Fu TV series); a student who asks a lot of questions, especially when the instructor seems to contradict himself.
There was some discussion of what to tell students about terminal ballistics. Gabe gave his take, that all pistol calibers are roughly the same and it's all about shot placement and volume. He went through his story about the fellow down in Argentina who was involved in 47 gunfights and acquitted himself quite well using 9mm ball (and invited us to use it).
We talked a bit about making sure that students have good gear that can be used safely in class. Holsters and belts need particular attention from an instructor to ensure that they will safely carry a gun. Some pistols can be problematic; competition guns in particular may need some extra attention from an instructor.
This segued a bit into a discussion of student-instructor ratio. Obviously, the skill of an instructor plays into this some, but the skill level of the students is important also. A low student-instructor ratio is particularly important in introductory classes where students need more supervision and are more likely to do something stupid and unsafe.
We moved out onto the range and started in on the fundamentals of shooting. Gabe divides the fundamentals into grip, stance, sight alignment, sight picture, breathing, trigger press, and trigger reset. We went through each of these in turn, with Gabe both explaining them, and talking about how to best explain them to the students.
During this process, we also went through loading, unloading, and chamber checks. Gabe emphasizes that all loading and unloading procedures should begin and end with a chamber check. I was a bit skeptical, since this seemed like an awful lot of chamber checking when we have a pretty good idea of the status of the gun. However, Gabe's reasons for it were pretty interesting. Checking the chamber may be useful for inexperienced students who are more likely to make mistakes during the loading or unloading process (failing to seat a magazine when loading, running the slide before ejecting the mag when unloading, etc.). They also give students a bit more experience manipulating their guns, helping to familiarize them with their weapons.
He introduced an interesting drill for getting very new shooters to experience a surprise break. The shooter points in and the instructor caps his sights (putting a mag on top of the rear sight and asking if they see the front sight with the same amount of light on either side). Then the student stays pointed in with their finger in register while the instructor pulls the trigger to the rear with his own finger. Obviously, the moment of firing is going to come as a surprise to the student. Then the student puts their finger on the trigger and relaxes while the instructor pulls the trigger and trigger finger backward until the gun fires, then lets the trigger and finger forward until the trigger resets. For this part of the drill, it's very important to grip the shooter's hand so that the instructor's hand stays in contact with the gun during recoil, otherwise you're likely to double as the student recovers from recoil. Finally, have the student work the trigger on his own, gradually applying more and more pressure while telling them to try not to fire the gun. I think a drill like this would have been very useful when I was a new shooter. I developed a bit of a flinching problem when I was starting out, and it was quite a while before I experienced a real surprise break (it came shooting a S&W revolver that an instructor had lightened the spring on a bit too much so that it only lit off about one round in three; when it went "click" three or four times, the eventual "boom" really did come as a surprise).
After this drill, we broke for lunch. Gabe showed off his Glock with the Trijicon RMR red dot mounted on the slide. This seems like a pretty slick setup, though it would definitely take a lot of practice to get the red dot lined up with your eye every time. Definitely worth further investigation. I also got a chance to look at the Warren Tactical Sights on Gabe's other Glock. They produce a pretty sharp sight picture, and I think a pair will end up on my Glock pretty soon.
After lunch, we did some drills involving shooting from the ready position. The only ready position Gabe usually teaches in the DPS class is the compressed ready (count 3 on a 4 count drawstroke). Unlike low ready, this keeps the gun pointed at the target, and it integrates nicely into the drawstroke. More complex readies like Sul are left for more advanced classes.
We started with single shots from ready, then moved on to strings of multiple shots to practice trigger reset. During these drills, Gabe also talked about how to watch students shoot. He recommended standing on the strong side, just behind the tip of the muzzle in compressed ready. This affords a much greater view than standing behind them, and gives you the ability to physically grab their gun or arm if they are going to muzzle you or other people on the line.
After the basic shooting drills, we went through proactive and reactive gun manipulation. A proactive reload is what some folks call the tactical reload. Gabe made the point that for most new shooters, the terms "speed reload", and "tactical reload" are pretty meaningless ("Aren't all reloads in a gunfight tactical reloads?"). Proactive and reactive are more descriptive.
One interesting point Gabe made about demonstrating reloads is that it may be useful to strip the slide from the frame of your pistol (particularly easily done with a Glock) and demonstrate a reload using the frame. Reloads really can't be demonstrated using a blue gun, since you need to be able to insert and remove the magazine. Using the frame allows this, without needing to worry about muzzling someone.
Gabe teaches the simple, "make a hole, fill a hole" proactive reload. Remove the old magazine, pocket it, draw the new one and inset it into the gun. He discussed the pros and cons of racking the slide afterwards: making sure you have a round in the chamber at the potential cost of one round of capacity (a small sacrifice on a high cap gun, a larger one on a single stack).
We talked a bit about reloading the revolver. In the course of the demonstration he made one interesting and pithy observation about the j-frame: "it's simple for the first five shots".
For reactive gun manipulation, Gabe is a big advocate of non-diagnostic malfunction clearance. Rather than spend time trying to figure out what time of malfunction you have, just use clearance techniques that will work on any malfunction. We went through two procedures that will cure almost any malfunction or running out of ammo. A tap-rack will clear a failure to fire or failure to eject, and ripping out the magazine and reloading the gun will clear a failure to extract or an empty gun. They are simple, easy to teach and learn, and performed in order will allow you to fix anything that's fixable without disassembling your gun. We practiced both proactive and reactive manipulations.
At this point, we wrapped up our first day at the range. I enjoyed a nice dinner with some friends from Utah and South Carolina, then retired to start work on this writeup.
Day Two
We started out the morning of the second day with a review of Day 1's activities. Gabe went over the fundamentals of shooting and we had a discussion of why he teaches the compressed contact ready in the introductory classes and how it fits into the ready positions taught in more advanced classes.
With the review out of the way we moved on to teaching the drawstroke. Gabe emphasized that teaching a new shooter to draw a loaded gun is probably one of the most dangerous things we do (followed up in second place by teaching a new shooter to holster a loaded gun). Go very slow, teach one count at a time, and do lots of dry repetitions before going live.
He teaches a somewhat different 5 count drawstroke than more traditional gunfighting schools. The five counts are Grip, Clear, Clap (where the hands merge), Point, and Sights. This omits the "Rotate" count a lot of schools use in teaching the drawstroke. There "Rotate" count is included because it matches the close contact shooting position that these schools teach. SI teaches some rather different concepts that are much more combative focused than the usual close contact/retention/speed rock type shot, so there isn't really much reason to have a separate rotate count.
As the student learns the drawstroke, you can start removing some of the steps and have them all blend together. Omit clear and make it Grip, Clap, Point, Sights. In a point shooting class, you take away Sights and make it Grip, Clap, Point. Eventually, you can even take away Point and do half hip type shooting.
In order to practice drawing loaded guns from a holster, you need to first holster a loaded gun. This has it's own pitfalls. Many NDs at gun schools occur when shooters are holstering under stress, indeed, my friends from Utah recently told me of just such an occurrence at one of their monthly shoots (without any injury, thankfully). While we need to learn how to draw fast, there's really no need to learn a speed reholstering technique. No one ever won a gunfight by getting his gun back in the holster quicker. Tell students to do it slowly, and pull it out if they feel any resistance. Again, do a lot of dry practice before having the students do it live. Gabe suggested allowing (indeed, encouraging) students to look at the holster when they are first starting out. You obviously don't want them doing this forever, but the first couple of times it can be a great help.
At this point, Gabe discusses what a student should do if he drops a gun: just let if fall. If they try to grab it, there's a chance that their finger will end up in the trigger guard, and according to Murphy's Law, the gun will probably be pointed at something important when it goes off, like your head. Gabe recounted the story of a female police officer who was being trained on the fat gripped Glock 21. She fumbled the gun, tried to grab it as it fell, and skipped a round off her forehead. She survived, but it could have easily been fatal. Phil, the range owner mentioned that a few weeks ago a shooter in a class on another local range had done something similar and put a round through his femoral artery. He bled out. If a student looses their grip on a gun, they should just let it drop. No matter how nice their gun is, a scuff mark isn't worth someone's life
Gabe suggested that after students shoot their first drill from the holster (single shots from a fairly close range), that you leave the students guns loaded and transition to a hot range at this point. Of course, this depends on how squared away the students are and how confident you are of them at this point. Some classes you may not want to use a hot range at all. If you have one student you're worried about, Gabe had a fairly clever suggestion: call that student up to the front and have him unload and use him as an example of reholstering, then just leave him dry until the start of the next drill.
We moved from the classroom out to the range and went through the fundamentals again. This time, Gabe called on various students to get up and teach the safety rules and the fundamentals, then critiqued their lesson. As part of this, I explained the trigger press, surprise break, and breathing. During this process, Gabe reiterated his suggestion about stripping the slide off a Glock and using the frame as a demonstration tool. Since I'd left my blue gun in the car (not having gotten any use out of it yesterday), I used this technique for my short lesson. He also suggested using the Glock slide, sans frame, as a tool to demonstrate sight alignment.
We went through a few dry drills, then moved on to firing single shots. Before shooting, Gabe demonstrated the exercise. He also had some suggestions for doing demonstrations in class. It's important that you don't embarrass yourself in a demonstration, so do the demonstration close to the target. Don't go at full speed, 80% of what you can do will seem plenty fast to the students. Also, get the students to stand to your left and right so they can watch what you're doing, rather than standing behind you and watching the back of your head. Finally, always do a chamber check before shooting a demonstration (either live or dry fire). There's nothing that will make you look a fool faster than going up for a live fire demonstration and getting a click or doing a dry fire demonstration and getting a bang. Instructors are even more vulnerable than students for this because they are constantly unloading and loading their firearms to do live and dry demos and it's easy to forget the status of your gun. Always check!
Gabe also gave us a good trick for getting people lined up evenly. Have everyone face to the left, then line up directly behind the person in front of them, then face downrange and they should be an even distance from the targets. Simple, but it works.
After lunch, we discussed the After Action Review process. Introductory students aren't going to be doing Sul scans, but you can have them check the threat, look left and right, reload, and do a self check to see if they were hit.
Much like the chamber checks before and after administratively loading or unloading, Gabe suggested having the students do a preemptive reload after every drill. This builds in a lot of repetitions over the course of the class in a much more interesting way than just going up and having them do twenty preemptive reloads in a row.
Once the students are comfortable with shooting from the holster, they can move on to a simple multiple adversary drill. Three targets, one shot on each. The instructor calls out an order and the students have to change their point of aim between targets. Of course, this is a lot less dynamic than the multiple adversary stuff in Close Range Gunfighting or Force on Force, but it gives them an introduction to the idea.
Gabe also suggested moving to more realistic targets at this point (he happens to like of the photorealistic targets). Prior to this part of the class, his suggestion for a target is an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper with a dot in the middle.
Moving to more realistic targets also allows introducing the failure to stop drill. The students fire three shots to the torso then come up for one or more headshots.
We went out to the range and started shooting multiple adversary drills. We shot this drill many times, enough for each student to have a chance running the line and calling out the range commands. After some students turn up on the line, Gabe called us together to critique and give some suggestions.
He also took the opportunity during one of these sessions to talk about teaching concealment. Drawing from concealment is not formally part of the curriculum for this class, but if the students are squared away and you think they can handle it, you might introduce it sometime on the second day. If you're having the class in cold or rainy weather, it may be appropriate to teach getting the gun from concealment on the first day, since every student is going to end up wearing some sort of overgarment anyway. On the other hand, if you're teaching on a hot, humid day, you may not want to go for concealment at all.
After everyone had their turn up on the line, we broke for the day. I had another fine dinner with friends old and new.
Day Three
Sunday morning, the class began with Gabe calling us up to the line for a test of our shooting skills. He had us fire ten prevision rounds at the little guy in the upper left of a B-27 silhouette target, then 90 rounds freestyle at main portion of the target.
After that was out of the way, we moved on to talking about the administrative end of being a firearms instructor. Gabe listed four requirements to be a successful firearms trainer:
Finding and Arranging Venues
Development and Delivery of Classes
Advertising and Marketing
Accepting Phone Calls and Payments
An interesting part of this discussion was Gabe's description of how the training business has evolved since the early '80s. There are really a lot of options, particularly in the advertising and marketing areas, that really weren't available twenty or thirty years ago. On the other hand, students expect more than they did thirty years ago. Not having a good website and not being able to accept credit card payments online are really going to limit how successful you can be.
Gabe pointed out some of the pitfalls in dealing with venues. Once you've advertised a class and had students sign up, the range kind of has you over a barrel if they want to be underhanded and jack up their rate. Memorialize these discussions in an email so there's a 'paper' trail later in the event of a dispute.
We also discussed insurance. It's required by many venues, but it can be difficult to get (or keep) it if you're teaching some of the more advanced stuff. Gabe talked about who SI has insurance with and how he manages that relationship.
While insurance is required to train at many venues, it may not really provide much protection in the event of a lawsuit. Gabe strongly recommended organizing a firearms training business as an LLC or corporation to help isolate it from your personal assets. He also talked a bit about the importance of a good attorney (or attorneys, specializing in different areas).
This led into a discussion of the sort of things that can lead you to need your insurance or a good attorney, and I took the opportunity to push one of my pet peeves: how few shooters take trauma care classes. Instructors strive to prevent accidents, but if one happens, you need to be able to deal with it and keep them alive until you can get them to medical help. Gabe described an incident where a student shot himself in a class several years ago. Phil, the range owner, described two accidental gunshot wounds, both of which severed the femoral artery. One occurred on his range, and he had tourniquets at the ready and the skill to use them. One occurred on another local range and did not have the instructor did not have the skill or equipment to deal with the situation and the injured shooter bled out (this was the same dropped gun incident I described earlier). An instructor has an obligation to be prepared for an accident, that means having the right skills and the right tools to deal with the situation.
The remainder of the class was dedicated to Gabe pitching the idea of signing up as a Suarez International Staff Instructor. This really gets into some internal SI business, like how his instructors are categorized and compensated that would not be appropriate for me to repeat in a public forum. I will say that the arrangement seems eminently fair to both SI, and the staff instructors.
Concluding Thoughts
This was an excellent class. I picked up quite a few neat tricks, both for teaching in general, and especially for instructing an introductory pistol class. The discussion on the third day also taught me a lot about the administrative elements of running a firearms training business, an area I knew very little about. Unlike other SI classes I've taken, this class didn't really make me any more badass, but I think it improved my ability to teach other people to be more badass.
This is normally the part of a review where, if I liked a class, I encourage people to sign up for it. I did like this class, and I think it would benefit a lot of people, but signing up for it may not be possible. Gabe is teaching this class three more times this year, one of them as I write this. All three classes are completely full. He's also teaching a Combat Rifle Instructor School in June; that's completely full as well. All of them filled up very quickly after being put on the schedule, some within a few hours of when they were opened for registration. I have no idea if he will be teaching these classes in the future, but if you are interested in teaching people how to shoot and you see this class on the SI schedule, jump on it quick, because you may not get another chance.
I'd like to thank Gabe for putting on an excellent class, as usual. I also want to thank my fellow students, who provided some very interesting conversations over the course of the class. One of the highlights of these classes for me is a chance for some fellowship with like minded folks.
For the first two days of the class, Gabe taught his Defensive Pistol Skills class. Defensive Pistol Skills class is intended as an introductory course that will take someone who has no experience with defensive shooting and give them the solid base of sighted shooting skills that they need for more advanced instruction. Gabe went through the entire class, giving both the course material, and a lot of advice on how to teach that material to students. We did all the drills (though generally with fewer reps than a student would get). All the shooting was done in pairs, with one student coaching while the other one shoots. On the third day, Gabe talked about administrative details involved in running a firearms company, talked about how Suarez International works, and extended an invitation to apply to be an SI instructor.
I shot the class with my normal carry rig: a Glock 21 in an IWB hip holster. Glocks were by far the most prevalent gun in the class, with about 2/3 of the class carrying them. The 9mm models were the most popular, followed by the .40s (I was carrying the only .45 Glock). Three students were armed with XDs, and one each with a Kimber and a Sig (several of these folks had Glocks with them as well). Gabe made the point that instructors should generally carry common pistols in plain jane configurations. When you're demonstrating something, you don't want students paying attention to your cool gun rather than what you're trying to demonstrate.
Day One
At the beginning of class, Gabe handed out an outline for the Defensive Pistol Skills class, and a copy of his Combative Pistol Marksmanship DVD, which generally covers the same material. Gabe suggested that those of us with access to a laptop or DVD player watch the DVD before the second day. I'd actually brought along my copy of the Combative Pistol Marksmanship DVD and my friends from Utah and I had watched it the night before. I thought having seen it before the first day was really helpful. One suggestion I made to Gabe is to send out the DVD to folks enrolled in the class beforehand, so everyone can have a chance to watch it ahead of time.
Gabe discussed a bit about the SI training philosophy generally, and the DPS class in particular. One particularly interesting point was why he doesn't use timers. He feels that they tend to discourage students who may be doing as well as they can, given age or medical limitations, but who aren't the fastest. The pressure to go faster than you really have the skill for also has a tendency to lead to accidents. The philosophy of the DPS class is focused on the idea that sighted shooting is easy, if you follow the right recipe. "If you can drive a car in traffic, you can shoot a pistol."
We went through the safety briefing, both from the perspective of not shooting anyone in this class, and from a teaching perspective. Gabe explained the reasons behind some of his deviations from the wording of the 4 rules of gun safety as Cooper laid them down. Most of these changes have to do with the fact that students will end up violating a more strict interpretation of the traditional rules especially in more advanced classes. There's really no way to draw from a hip holster without covering your leg at least a little bit, for example. He also introduced the concept of a "Grasshopper" (a la the old Kung Fu TV series); a student who asks a lot of questions, especially when the instructor seems to contradict himself.
There was some discussion of what to tell students about terminal ballistics. Gabe gave his take, that all pistol calibers are roughly the same and it's all about shot placement and volume. He went through his story about the fellow down in Argentina who was involved in 47 gunfights and acquitted himself quite well using 9mm ball (and invited us to use it).
We talked a bit about making sure that students have good gear that can be used safely in class. Holsters and belts need particular attention from an instructor to ensure that they will safely carry a gun. Some pistols can be problematic; competition guns in particular may need some extra attention from an instructor.
This segued a bit into a discussion of student-instructor ratio. Obviously, the skill of an instructor plays into this some, but the skill level of the students is important also. A low student-instructor ratio is particularly important in introductory classes where students need more supervision and are more likely to do something stupid and unsafe.
We moved out onto the range and started in on the fundamentals of shooting. Gabe divides the fundamentals into grip, stance, sight alignment, sight picture, breathing, trigger press, and trigger reset. We went through each of these in turn, with Gabe both explaining them, and talking about how to best explain them to the students.
During this process, we also went through loading, unloading, and chamber checks. Gabe emphasizes that all loading and unloading procedures should begin and end with a chamber check. I was a bit skeptical, since this seemed like an awful lot of chamber checking when we have a pretty good idea of the status of the gun. However, Gabe's reasons for it were pretty interesting. Checking the chamber may be useful for inexperienced students who are more likely to make mistakes during the loading or unloading process (failing to seat a magazine when loading, running the slide before ejecting the mag when unloading, etc.). They also give students a bit more experience manipulating their guns, helping to familiarize them with their weapons.
He introduced an interesting drill for getting very new shooters to experience a surprise break. The shooter points in and the instructor caps his sights (putting a mag on top of the rear sight and asking if they see the front sight with the same amount of light on either side). Then the student stays pointed in with their finger in register while the instructor pulls the trigger to the rear with his own finger. Obviously, the moment of firing is going to come as a surprise to the student. Then the student puts their finger on the trigger and relaxes while the instructor pulls the trigger and trigger finger backward until the gun fires, then lets the trigger and finger forward until the trigger resets. For this part of the drill, it's very important to grip the shooter's hand so that the instructor's hand stays in contact with the gun during recoil, otherwise you're likely to double as the student recovers from recoil. Finally, have the student work the trigger on his own, gradually applying more and more pressure while telling them to try not to fire the gun. I think a drill like this would have been very useful when I was a new shooter. I developed a bit of a flinching problem when I was starting out, and it was quite a while before I experienced a real surprise break (it came shooting a S&W revolver that an instructor had lightened the spring on a bit too much so that it only lit off about one round in three; when it went "click" three or four times, the eventual "boom" really did come as a surprise).
After this drill, we broke for lunch. Gabe showed off his Glock with the Trijicon RMR red dot mounted on the slide. This seems like a pretty slick setup, though it would definitely take a lot of practice to get the red dot lined up with your eye every time. Definitely worth further investigation. I also got a chance to look at the Warren Tactical Sights on Gabe's other Glock. They produce a pretty sharp sight picture, and I think a pair will end up on my Glock pretty soon.
After lunch, we did some drills involving shooting from the ready position. The only ready position Gabe usually teaches in the DPS class is the compressed ready (count 3 on a 4 count drawstroke). Unlike low ready, this keeps the gun pointed at the target, and it integrates nicely into the drawstroke. More complex readies like Sul are left for more advanced classes.
We started with single shots from ready, then moved on to strings of multiple shots to practice trigger reset. During these drills, Gabe also talked about how to watch students shoot. He recommended standing on the strong side, just behind the tip of the muzzle in compressed ready. This affords a much greater view than standing behind them, and gives you the ability to physically grab their gun or arm if they are going to muzzle you or other people on the line.
After the basic shooting drills, we went through proactive and reactive gun manipulation. A proactive reload is what some folks call the tactical reload. Gabe made the point that for most new shooters, the terms "speed reload", and "tactical reload" are pretty meaningless ("Aren't all reloads in a gunfight tactical reloads?"). Proactive and reactive are more descriptive.
One interesting point Gabe made about demonstrating reloads is that it may be useful to strip the slide from the frame of your pistol (particularly easily done with a Glock) and demonstrate a reload using the frame. Reloads really can't be demonstrated using a blue gun, since you need to be able to insert and remove the magazine. Using the frame allows this, without needing to worry about muzzling someone.
Gabe teaches the simple, "make a hole, fill a hole" proactive reload. Remove the old magazine, pocket it, draw the new one and inset it into the gun. He discussed the pros and cons of racking the slide afterwards: making sure you have a round in the chamber at the potential cost of one round of capacity (a small sacrifice on a high cap gun, a larger one on a single stack).
We talked a bit about reloading the revolver. In the course of the demonstration he made one interesting and pithy observation about the j-frame: "it's simple for the first five shots".
For reactive gun manipulation, Gabe is a big advocate of non-diagnostic malfunction clearance. Rather than spend time trying to figure out what time of malfunction you have, just use clearance techniques that will work on any malfunction. We went through two procedures that will cure almost any malfunction or running out of ammo. A tap-rack will clear a failure to fire or failure to eject, and ripping out the magazine and reloading the gun will clear a failure to extract or an empty gun. They are simple, easy to teach and learn, and performed in order will allow you to fix anything that's fixable without disassembling your gun. We practiced both proactive and reactive manipulations.
At this point, we wrapped up our first day at the range. I enjoyed a nice dinner with some friends from Utah and South Carolina, then retired to start work on this writeup.
Day Two
We started out the morning of the second day with a review of Day 1's activities. Gabe went over the fundamentals of shooting and we had a discussion of why he teaches the compressed contact ready in the introductory classes and how it fits into the ready positions taught in more advanced classes.
With the review out of the way we moved on to teaching the drawstroke. Gabe emphasized that teaching a new shooter to draw a loaded gun is probably one of the most dangerous things we do (followed up in second place by teaching a new shooter to holster a loaded gun). Go very slow, teach one count at a time, and do lots of dry repetitions before going live.
He teaches a somewhat different 5 count drawstroke than more traditional gunfighting schools. The five counts are Grip, Clear, Clap (where the hands merge), Point, and Sights. This omits the "Rotate" count a lot of schools use in teaching the drawstroke. There "Rotate" count is included because it matches the close contact shooting position that these schools teach. SI teaches some rather different concepts that are much more combative focused than the usual close contact/retention/speed rock type shot, so there isn't really much reason to have a separate rotate count.
As the student learns the drawstroke, you can start removing some of the steps and have them all blend together. Omit clear and make it Grip, Clap, Point, Sights. In a point shooting class, you take away Sights and make it Grip, Clap, Point. Eventually, you can even take away Point and do half hip type shooting.
In order to practice drawing loaded guns from a holster, you need to first holster a loaded gun. This has it's own pitfalls. Many NDs at gun schools occur when shooters are holstering under stress, indeed, my friends from Utah recently told me of just such an occurrence at one of their monthly shoots (without any injury, thankfully). While we need to learn how to draw fast, there's really no need to learn a speed reholstering technique. No one ever won a gunfight by getting his gun back in the holster quicker. Tell students to do it slowly, and pull it out if they feel any resistance. Again, do a lot of dry practice before having the students do it live. Gabe suggested allowing (indeed, encouraging) students to look at the holster when they are first starting out. You obviously don't want them doing this forever, but the first couple of times it can be a great help.
At this point, Gabe discusses what a student should do if he drops a gun: just let if fall. If they try to grab it, there's a chance that their finger will end up in the trigger guard, and according to Murphy's Law, the gun will probably be pointed at something important when it goes off, like your head. Gabe recounted the story of a female police officer who was being trained on the fat gripped Glock 21. She fumbled the gun, tried to grab it as it fell, and skipped a round off her forehead. She survived, but it could have easily been fatal. Phil, the range owner mentioned that a few weeks ago a shooter in a class on another local range had done something similar and put a round through his femoral artery. He bled out. If a student looses their grip on a gun, they should just let it drop. No matter how nice their gun is, a scuff mark isn't worth someone's life
Gabe suggested that after students shoot their first drill from the holster (single shots from a fairly close range), that you leave the students guns loaded and transition to a hot range at this point. Of course, this depends on how squared away the students are and how confident you are of them at this point. Some classes you may not want to use a hot range at all. If you have one student you're worried about, Gabe had a fairly clever suggestion: call that student up to the front and have him unload and use him as an example of reholstering, then just leave him dry until the start of the next drill.
We moved from the classroom out to the range and went through the fundamentals again. This time, Gabe called on various students to get up and teach the safety rules and the fundamentals, then critiqued their lesson. As part of this, I explained the trigger press, surprise break, and breathing. During this process, Gabe reiterated his suggestion about stripping the slide off a Glock and using the frame as a demonstration tool. Since I'd left my blue gun in the car (not having gotten any use out of it yesterday), I used this technique for my short lesson. He also suggested using the Glock slide, sans frame, as a tool to demonstrate sight alignment.
We went through a few dry drills, then moved on to firing single shots. Before shooting, Gabe demonstrated the exercise. He also had some suggestions for doing demonstrations in class. It's important that you don't embarrass yourself in a demonstration, so do the demonstration close to the target. Don't go at full speed, 80% of what you can do will seem plenty fast to the students. Also, get the students to stand to your left and right so they can watch what you're doing, rather than standing behind you and watching the back of your head. Finally, always do a chamber check before shooting a demonstration (either live or dry fire). There's nothing that will make you look a fool faster than going up for a live fire demonstration and getting a click or doing a dry fire demonstration and getting a bang. Instructors are even more vulnerable than students for this because they are constantly unloading and loading their firearms to do live and dry demos and it's easy to forget the status of your gun. Always check!
Gabe also gave us a good trick for getting people lined up evenly. Have everyone face to the left, then line up directly behind the person in front of them, then face downrange and they should be an even distance from the targets. Simple, but it works.
After lunch, we discussed the After Action Review process. Introductory students aren't going to be doing Sul scans, but you can have them check the threat, look left and right, reload, and do a self check to see if they were hit.
Much like the chamber checks before and after administratively loading or unloading, Gabe suggested having the students do a preemptive reload after every drill. This builds in a lot of repetitions over the course of the class in a much more interesting way than just going up and having them do twenty preemptive reloads in a row.
Once the students are comfortable with shooting from the holster, they can move on to a simple multiple adversary drill. Three targets, one shot on each. The instructor calls out an order and the students have to change their point of aim between targets. Of course, this is a lot less dynamic than the multiple adversary stuff in Close Range Gunfighting or Force on Force, but it gives them an introduction to the idea.
Gabe also suggested moving to more realistic targets at this point (he happens to like of the photorealistic targets). Prior to this part of the class, his suggestion for a target is an 8.5"x11" sheet of paper with a dot in the middle.
Moving to more realistic targets also allows introducing the failure to stop drill. The students fire three shots to the torso then come up for one or more headshots.
We went out to the range and started shooting multiple adversary drills. We shot this drill many times, enough for each student to have a chance running the line and calling out the range commands. After some students turn up on the line, Gabe called us together to critique and give some suggestions.
He also took the opportunity during one of these sessions to talk about teaching concealment. Drawing from concealment is not formally part of the curriculum for this class, but if the students are squared away and you think they can handle it, you might introduce it sometime on the second day. If you're having the class in cold or rainy weather, it may be appropriate to teach getting the gun from concealment on the first day, since every student is going to end up wearing some sort of overgarment anyway. On the other hand, if you're teaching on a hot, humid day, you may not want to go for concealment at all.
After everyone had their turn up on the line, we broke for the day. I had another fine dinner with friends old and new.
Day Three
Sunday morning, the class began with Gabe calling us up to the line for a test of our shooting skills. He had us fire ten prevision rounds at the little guy in the upper left of a B-27 silhouette target, then 90 rounds freestyle at main portion of the target.
After that was out of the way, we moved on to talking about the administrative end of being a firearms instructor. Gabe listed four requirements to be a successful firearms trainer:
Finding and Arranging Venues
Development and Delivery of Classes
Advertising and Marketing
Accepting Phone Calls and Payments
An interesting part of this discussion was Gabe's description of how the training business has evolved since the early '80s. There are really a lot of options, particularly in the advertising and marketing areas, that really weren't available twenty or thirty years ago. On the other hand, students expect more than they did thirty years ago. Not having a good website and not being able to accept credit card payments online are really going to limit how successful you can be.
Gabe pointed out some of the pitfalls in dealing with venues. Once you've advertised a class and had students sign up, the range kind of has you over a barrel if they want to be underhanded and jack up their rate. Memorialize these discussions in an email so there's a 'paper' trail later in the event of a dispute.
We also discussed insurance. It's required by many venues, but it can be difficult to get (or keep) it if you're teaching some of the more advanced stuff. Gabe talked about who SI has insurance with and how he manages that relationship.
While insurance is required to train at many venues, it may not really provide much protection in the event of a lawsuit. Gabe strongly recommended organizing a firearms training business as an LLC or corporation to help isolate it from your personal assets. He also talked a bit about the importance of a good attorney (or attorneys, specializing in different areas).
This led into a discussion of the sort of things that can lead you to need your insurance or a good attorney, and I took the opportunity to push one of my pet peeves: how few shooters take trauma care classes. Instructors strive to prevent accidents, but if one happens, you need to be able to deal with it and keep them alive until you can get them to medical help. Gabe described an incident where a student shot himself in a class several years ago. Phil, the range owner, described two accidental gunshot wounds, both of which severed the femoral artery. One occurred on his range, and he had tourniquets at the ready and the skill to use them. One occurred on another local range and did not have the instructor did not have the skill or equipment to deal with the situation and the injured shooter bled out (this was the same dropped gun incident I described earlier). An instructor has an obligation to be prepared for an accident, that means having the right skills and the right tools to deal with the situation.
The remainder of the class was dedicated to Gabe pitching the idea of signing up as a Suarez International Staff Instructor. This really gets into some internal SI business, like how his instructors are categorized and compensated that would not be appropriate for me to repeat in a public forum. I will say that the arrangement seems eminently fair to both SI, and the staff instructors.
Concluding Thoughts
This was an excellent class. I picked up quite a few neat tricks, both for teaching in general, and especially for instructing an introductory pistol class. The discussion on the third day also taught me a lot about the administrative elements of running a firearms training business, an area I knew very little about. Unlike other SI classes I've taken, this class didn't really make me any more badass, but I think it improved my ability to teach other people to be more badass.
This is normally the part of a review where, if I liked a class, I encourage people to sign up for it. I did like this class, and I think it would benefit a lot of people, but signing up for it may not be possible. Gabe is teaching this class three more times this year, one of them as I write this. All three classes are completely full. He's also teaching a Combat Rifle Instructor School in June; that's completely full as well. All of them filled up very quickly after being put on the schedule, some within a few hours of when they were opened for registration. I have no idea if he will be teaching these classes in the future, but if you are interested in teaching people how to shoot and you see this class on the SI schedule, jump on it quick, because you may not get another chance.
I'd like to thank Gabe for putting on an excellent class, as usual. I also want to thank my fellow students, who provided some very interesting conversations over the course of the class. One of the highlights of these classes for me is a chance for some fellowship with like minded folks.
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