The Utah Polite Society

Dan Hood

There’s a Utah Polite Society event at Hendricksen Range Saturday,
December 6.  At this month’s event, we plan to have four handgun
exercises.

The first drill is a skills exercise that uses timed, turning targets for
ten quick strings that exercise shooting with just one hand (both dominant
hand and support hand) and, optionally, allows participants to use only
the support hand to draw and fire during two of the strings.

The second drill is a simulated assault that takes place in a parking
garage with the participant having been struck from behind and starting
the exercise on all fours.

The third drill is a skills test using the turning targets for two
strings.  Each string will require the participant to shoot one handed
only (again with both the dominant hand and support hand) while traversing
across the target array and discriminating threats from nonthreats.  The
exercise will also require passing the gun from one hand to the other in
the middle of each string.

The fourth drill is a simulated defensive shooting that starts with the
participant in position SUL as if he/she has just finished a defensive
gunfight and is scanning for additional threats.  The gun will be
downloaded to a random number of rounds and the participant must turn from
facing up-range and assess the target array downrange for threats and
address them as needed.

For those interested, Joe Borgione is coordinating a NRA Range Safety
Officer Course with local NRA instructor Steve Beckstead.  Tentatively it
will be held in two-4 hour evening sessions in January at Hendriksen
Range, for a cost of $100.00.  Talk to Joe at this weekend's event or
reply to this email for more info.

Set up starts at 8:00 a.m.

New shooter orientation starts at 8:30 a.m.

Registration starts at 8:45 a.m.

Handgun shooting exercises start at 9:00 a.m

Event fee is $12.00.

Please bring at least 100 rounds of ammunition.

Dan Hood

It seems that the more I look around, someone else said something better than I ever could. Here are some well spoken words as they pertain the personal defense.

M1911 .org

Rules for a Gunfight
Anonymous

1. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns.

2. Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap - life is expensive.

3. Only hits count. The only thing worse than a miss is a slow miss.

4. If your shooting stance is good, you're probably not moving fast enough or using cover correctly.

5. Move away from your attacker. Distance is your friend. (Lateral and diagonal movement are preferred.)

6. If you can choose what to bring to a gunfight, bring a long gun and a friend with a long gun.

7. In ten years nobody will remember the details of caliber, stance, or tactics. They will only remember who lived.

8. If you are not shooting, you should be communicating, reloading, and running.

9. Accuracy is relative: most combat shooting standards will be more dependent on "pucker factor" than the inherent accuracy of the gun. Use a gun that works EVERY TIME. "All skill is in vain when an Angel blows the powder from the flintlock of your musket."

10. Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.

11. Always cheat, always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose.

12. Have a plan.

13. Have a back-up plan, because the first one won't work.

14. Use cover or concealment as much as possible.

15. Flank your adversary when possible. Protect yours.

16. Don't drop your guard.

17. Always tactical load and threat scan 360 degrees.

18. Watch their hands. Hands kill. (In God we trust. Everyone else, keep your hands where I can see them.)

19. Decide to be aggressive ENOUGH, quickly ENOUGH.

20. The faster you finish the fight, the less shot you will get.

21. Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

22. Be courteous to everyone, friendly to no one.

23. Your number one option for personal security is a lifelong commitment to avoidance, deterrence, and de-escalation.

24. Do not attend a gun fight with a handgun, the caliber of which does not start with anything smaller than "4".

25. You can't miss fast enough to win.

For the follow, I have no idea from where I collect them. Sorry for the lack of credits.

"There are going to be situations where people are going to go without assistance. That's just the facts of life." --LA Chief of Police, Gates.

"To combat evil, you must first understand that it exist."Anon

"You can get a lot further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone."
Al Capone

"If you look like prey, you will be eaten."
Clint Smith

"Only hits count."
Jeff Cooper

"Make haste, slowly."
Wyatt Earp

"Rule # 1 of a gunfight--have a gun."
"Rule # 2--never break Rule # 1."
Mark Moritz

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Edmund Burke - (British statesman - 1756)

"A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity." ("General Introduction to Psychoanalysis," S. Freud) Sigmund Freud

"If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun." (May 15, 2001, The Seattle Times)

The Dalai Lama

Just for fun!

"Even though he was an enemy of mine, I had to admit that what he had accomplished was a brilliant piece of strategy. First, he punched me, then he kicked me, then he punched me again."
-- Jack Handey [Deep Thoughts],

"Carl would have to be fast to beat the stranger. Real fast. 'Draw,' said the stranger. Carl went for his gun, but then 'Hey, where did all these angels come from?'"
-- Jack Handey [Deep Thoughts],

"I'm not afraid of insects taking over the world, and you know why? It would take about a billion ants just to AIM a gun at me, let alone fire it. And you know what I'm doing while they're aiming it at me? I just sort of slip off to the side, and then suddenly run up and kick the gun out of their hands."
-- Jack Handey [Deep Thoughts],

"It makes me mad when people say I turned and ran like a scared rabbit. Maybe it was like an angry rabbit, who was going to fight in another fight, away from the first fight."
-- Jack Handey [Deep Thoughts],

"Sometimes I think you have to march right in and demand your rights, even if you don't know what your rights are, or who the person is you're talking to. Then, on the way out, slam the door."
-- Jack Handey [Deep Thoughts],

"How come the dove gets to be the peace symbol? How about the pillow? It has more feathers than the dove, and it doesn't have that dangerous beak."

-- Jack Handey [Deep Thoughts],

Blackeagle

Greetings from South Carolina!

Moving away from Utah, and the Utah Polite Society, has kind of put a crimp on my handgun shooting. However, it has also opened up some new opportunities. I recently had a chance to take a class from John Farnam called Fighting with a Handgun. Harold Green was nice enough to let me post this writeup of the class here.

Friday Night Lecture

The class began on Friday evening at the hotel John was staying at (handily just across the freeway from my apartment). Everybody introduced themselves. The class was quite small, just four students, plus two of John’s local instructors, Bill and Richard. With three instructors for four students, everyone was guaranteed a lot of individual attention. John went over the plan for the class, with live fire on Saturday and airsoft force-on-force on Sunday.

One of the things John is really big on are “tape loops”: memorized bits of dialog that you have practiced and can recite on demand in a stressful situation. If you’re involved in a deadly force confrontation, it’s going to be one of the most stressful situations of your life, and probably isn’t the best time to speak extemporaneously. If you’re trying to make stuff up on the spot you may end up mumbling indistinctly or saying something you’ll regret later. Tape loops are good for verbal disengagement (“Sorry, can’t help you.”) or dealing with armed, but not immediately threatening individuals (“Police! Drop your weapon!”). One area where they’re particularly useful is in conversing with the police after a gunfight. Even seemingly innocuous remarks can come back to haunt you later on. He recommends:

“Thank God you’re here.”

“I’m the one who called.”

“That man tried to murder us.”

“I’ll be happy to answer all your questions as soon as my lawyer gets here.”

This discussion expanded a bit to more general questions about how citizens with weapons should deal with the police, including traffic stops and the like. John’s advice is never to give consent to search, and never go with the police unless you are under arrest. During a traffic stop ask, “Am I free to go?” after a reasonable period of time has passed (about 20 minutes). If you’re arrested, never say anything without a lawyer, and when they ask if you understand your rights, always say “no”.

After an interesting and wide ranging discussion, we adjourned for the evening and several of us went out to dinner at a nearby restaurant.

Saturday Morning

In most defensive shooting instruction I've had, every drill or scenario begins with a signal to draw and fire at the target. In this class, however, we started earlier on in the confrontation, before justification to use deadly force has arisen. We started out in the interview stance (body bladed, support hand up between you and the attacker, shooting hand hooked over the hem of your cover garment ready to begin the drawstroke). John begins each drill with some dialog from the assailant, usually a question designed to distract you and give you a chance to practice verbal disengagement.

The verbal disengagement techniques are tape loops, usually starting with, "Sorry, I can't help you," in a firm, but conversational tone. If the subject doesn't take the hint you can increase the volume and intensity or move on to something a bit more direct like, "Back off!"

During this, we were supposed to be constantly moving and checking behind you. Constant movement both throws off the subject and can help you gain a more advantageous position. We were moving during verbal disengagement, during the draw, whenever we weren’t shooting (and when shooting if you're close enough to shoot on the move), during reloads, during malfunction drills, and during the post-fight scan. John also insists on constantly checking behind you, to make sure the assailant doesn't have a buddy sneaking up on you. To make us really look, rather than just turning your head, he had Richard and Bill hold out their hands with a number of fingers raised and we had to call out how many fingers we saw.

After we used our verbal disengagement techniques, John called out that the subject had revealed a weapon, prompting us to draw. All of us already had the drawstroke down, so we didn't spend much time on that, but one new wrinkle (for me at least) was that if we didn't shoot, John wanted us to pull back to a compressed high ready. This provides better visibility and is a much stronger position against disarms than with the gun fully extended. It places the pistol just in front of and below the chin, rotated slightly toward the support side. To fire you just punch the pistol forward to your normal shooting position. Unlike a low ready, there's no danger of swinging up past the target and overshooting (often followed by overcorrecting back down) when you bring the pistol up.

When John called out that the assailant had threatened you with the weapon, we fired a four shot burst (three shots for the fellow with the 1911) at the target, starting at the navel and moving up to the upper chest. This zipper technique is a little different from the Polite Society’s "golden triangle" targets with the scoring zone in the upper chest that I’m used to shooting. After a few strings of fire my target had a few hits in the lower abdomen and a big cluster in the upper chest, so I was evidently starting down low, but quickly moving on to my more usual aiming area. After firing a burst of four shots, the procedure was to move immediately. If the target was still a threat, based on John's description, we fired another four shots. There was no shooting and moving at this stage, but at these ranges (7-20 yards) I wouldn't have hit much on the move anyway.

After John declared the target was no longer a threat, we continued moving and checking behind us using a sul scan, reloaded the pistol, and, after making sure there were no additional threats, re-holstered. Constant movement was required during all of these.

I really like how this training got beyond just the shooting portions of a gunfight. Thanks to the Polite Society, the post-fight procedures (checking behind you, reloading) have been part of my standard practice for a long time, but the pre-fight stuff (verbal challenges, drawing but not firing immediately) are largely new to me. John mentioned that on average people only fire about one in every thirty times they draw a weapon in self defense. Given this, it makes sense not to simply begin every simulated defensive encounter by drawing a weapon and blazing away.

We repeated this several times at various ranges until we all had the different steps down pretty well. Rather than having us tape up the whole target between each drill, we only taped the shots that we weren't happy with. This makes quite a bit of sense, since we're interested in seeing how many shots we're dropping, but as long as a shot goes within 3 inches of the body midline between neck and navel, it's a solid hit, regardless of exactly where it hits the cardboard. Most of my hits were in the desired area, which I was pretty happy with. My only shooting since I moved to South Carolina last August was the 50 round qualification for the concealed weapons permit class, so I was worried about being a little rusty.

We moved on to some precision shooting and practiced our brain stem shots at about three yards. We drew a hostage on the target, along with a face to the assailant, so we knew exactly where to place our shots. The procedure in this case was to ask the assailant "What do you want?", hopefully dividing their attention for a few critical seconds, then extend the pistol and fire two carefully aimed shots into the nose. I was pretty pleased with my accuracy on this drill. I dropped a few shots early on, but I ended up with one ragged hole smaller than a half-dollar centered right on the subject's nose. I normally shoot with a both eyes open, but I found that for a precision shot like this, it really helped to close the non-dominant eye.

Saturday Afternoon

After lunch, John set up a course of fire with targets at multiple ranges. It started with a contact shot, followed by three more targets between 3 and 15 yards, including one with a no-shoot in front of it. We made the contact shot and move right to engage each target in turn. This seems like a simple drill, but it's actually deceptively difficult. After blazing away at the contact or close range targets, it's hard to slow down and shoot at the longer ranged target or the one behind the bystander as slowly and accurately as necessary to achieve good hits.

After running through this drill a couple of times each, John moved the contact shot out a few yards and had us shoot it two at a time. The first shooter would engage targets one and three, while the second would shoot and two and four. After engaging a target you stood there and waited while the other shooter moved behind you with the gun in position Sul and shot the next target. Obviously, having someone behind you moving with a loaded pistol in their hand requires a lot of confidence in their gunhandling skills. However, after shooting with these folks for half a day I didn't have any worries. I certainly hope they felt the same way about me. Once the pair of shooters had engaged all the targets you were expected to cover each other's back as you reloaded. We tried a couple different methods for coordinating reloads, but the one that seemed to work the best was calling out "red" when you start reloading and "green" when you're back up. Obviously this only works if you've worked out the procedure in advance though.

After the two-person drills we moved on to some work transitioning to backup weapons. Several people brought their own BUGs and the two of us who hadn't were able to borrow extras from those who had them. John was nice enough to loan me his Kahr PM45. Other folks were using a pair of S&W hammerless snubbies and a compact Beretta for their backup guns. We started the drill by engaging three targets. While moving to engage a fourth, we popped the magazine out of the pistol (simulating running out of ammo). Firing the last round in the primary weapon, we transitioned to the backup gun and emptied it into the target. Finally, we had to engage the last target with a blade (everyone was carrying a suitable knife).

I had some real trouble with this drill. I carried John's PM45 in an inside the waistband holster around my left kidney. I'm not used to drawing from that position and I had to feel around quite a bit to find the gun. I also had a lot of difficulty with the BUG to knife transition. I carry a Cold Steel Recon 1 clipped to my left side pocket, giving me a weapon accessible to my off hand. This works decently well in conjunction with my primary carry gun, but with a support side backup gun, the transition is kind of difficult. I needed to cycle through three weapons using only two hands, with the last pair of weapons only accessible to the right hand. So I needed to draw the BUG and engage the target while holstering my primary gun, pocket the bug or pass it to my right hand and draw my knife, then stab the last target. Getting the primary gun holstered while simultaneously managing the backup gun wasn't easy. Several times I found myself with a gun in each hand and needing to get to my knife. I ended up dropping John's gun in the dirt twice to get to the knife (not exactly a great way to thank a man for loaning you his pistol) or trying to juggle both guns in my right hand while I stabbed with my left. The sand and grit ended up causing some feeding problems with the PM45.

Clearly, these sorts of transitions require practice, preferably over a more forgiving surface. I also think that if you have a gun accessible to either hand, you need a knife accessible to either hand too. You never know which hand is going to be occupied when you need a knife out in a hurry. This drill has inspired me to look for my own BUG (probably a revolver), and I'm looking for another knife to put on the strong side as well.

Following the transition drills, we did some moving and shooting. John set up targets at various ranges from three yards out to fifteen yards and had us shoot them on the move. We tried out moving right to left with the right hand, and left to right using both hands and using just the left hand. Hits were highly range dependent, with most everyone delivering good hits on the closer targets and distinctly fewer hits on those at seven yards. Hits on the fifteen yarder were pretty much dumb luck. The two IDPA shooters in the class had a tendency to slow down into the smooth, bent-kneed walk you see during competitions, rather than the nice quick jog John wanted. This obviously results in better shooting, but it doesn’t make you much more difficult to hit or get you where you’re going quickly.

The next drill involved a series of targets each placed about a yard to the right and a few yards further downrange than the last. We had to move to the 1 o’clock direction down the diagonal line of targets and engage each target in turn as we went by them.

For last moving and shooting drill three targets were staggered to the left, right, and left again, followed by a no-shoot target in front of the final hostile target. You move between the staggered targets, engaging each in turn, then move off to the right or left to get an angle on the hostile target behind the no-shoot.

Rifles

While this was primarily a pistol class, several of us had brought rifles with us, and we had a little bit of time to do some rifle work. John and I both had XCRs. Mine was in .223 with an EOTech, while his was one of the new ones in 7.62x39mm with an Aimpoint Micro. The other two rifles were both AKs, one a fixed stock model with an Aimpoint, the other an underfolder with iron sights. Those of us who brought rifles were happy to lend them to those who hadn’t, giving everyone a chance to shoot the drills.

John demonstrated the flat stock technique for us. This is an example of why books and websites are distinctly inferior to coming to a class and seeing techniques demonstrated and having your performance critiqued. I read John’s explanation of the flat stock technique on his website, but couldn’t make heads or tails of it. However, after seeing it demonstrated, immediately makes perfect sense.

We started out shooting the same drill as last time, firing at the first three targets on the move using the flat stock technique and following up with a burst to the body and a headshot on the target behind the no-shoot using the sights. I haven’t shot enough close range rifle to get the holdover ingrained, so I ended up placing my headshot a little low, but I think I did pretty well considering my limited experience with a rifle.

Our next drill used the same target setup, but instead of advancing we shot the three close targets, the moved off to the right to get an angle on the target behind the no-shoot and delivered a headshot from about 20 yards. Conscious of my limitations, I chose to drop to kneeling for the headshot.

Weapon Familiarization and Malfunction Drills

As the sun set, John had us all place our pistols on the table and shoot a couple of rounds with each other’s guns. This was perhaps a bit less useful than it might have been because of the uniformity of our firearms choices. Five of the seven people present had Glocks of one description or another (two 21s, a 17, a 30, and a 34). The last student had a 1911. John was also nice enough to let us shoot his new XD-M, which seemed like a really nice pistol (with seventeen rounds of .40 S&W!).

After shooting each other’s guns in operable condition, John had his instructors set up malfunctions. We each got three of the six guns and had to clear an empty chamber, a stovepipe, and a double feed. By this time it was getting dark, so looking at the gun to diagnose it didn’t help much. It was tap-rack-bang and if that doesn’t help, lock-drop-rack-rack-rack-reload. The biggest problem was remembering to start the sequence by trying to fire the pistol. Since we knew there was a malfunction, it was tempting to go straight to immediate action, rather than letting it be triggered by a failure to fire the pistol. Dummy rounds, placed somewhere in the magazine, have the advantage of being more unexpected, but they can only simulate failures to fire, not stovepipes or double-feeds.

Night Shoot

Range rules allowed us to shoot an hour after sunset, so we were able to get a bit of night shooting in. We started off doing the same drill with three staggered targets and a fourth hidden by a no-shoot in low light, with the targets illuminated by a pair of road flares. Then we took the flares away and shot it with our flashlights. Accuracy declined notably with the flashlights, which is in line with my past experience at Polite Society night shoots. As I am in the habit of doing, I shot using the reverse Harries technique (with the flashlight held to the support hand side of the pistol rather than tucked underneath to the shooting hand side). I’ve found this gives me better results than any of the other techniques, but in this drill I noticed I was drawing my light hand too far back, illuminating the back of my pistol as well as the target. John also showed off his First Light Tomahawk, which seems like a pretty neat little light.

After a long day of shooting we retired to a nice dinner and some well-deserved rest.

Sunday

Sunday was dedicated to force-on-force training using airsoft guns. Everyone divested themselves of all weapons, not just guns, but also knives, pepper spray, impact weapons, or anything else that could be used to harm someone. Richard brought a huge assortment of airsoft guns, and most of the students brought their own airsoft weapons as well. Richard wrapped the grips of all his airsoft guns with red electrical tape to clearly identify them, which seems quite useful. Airsoft guns look very realistic, and can easily be mistaken for the real thing (or vice versa). In the past, I’ve gotten into the habit of removing an airsoft gun from the holster to check the orange muzzle marking, but using electrical tape on the grip makes it obvious without unholstering the gun.

Everyone wore paintball masks when participating and shooting glasses when observing. Airsoft guns are pretty safe, but hitting an eye can cause serious damage. We all wore long sleeve shirts, which help take the sting out of it, but nobody wore anything thick enough to be able to shrug off the impacts entirely. Based on some really painful knuckle hits in past airsoft training, I wore gloves most of the day as well.

The exercises we did can be divided into two basic categories which I'll call drills and scenarios. Drills usually involved students shooting at each other to work on a particular skill or prove a particular point. Scenarios, on the other hand, were set up as simulated defense encounters where one of the instructors played the role of the attacker and the students had to react appropriately.

Drills

We started out with some moving target drills, comparing how difficult tracking and shooting a moving target was compared to stationary one. The moving target was definitely more difficult to hit, but smooth constant movement allowed the shooter to track the target and get good hits much more readily than a target that varied speed and direction.

The next drill involved shooting from behind cover. We used a pair of chairs, one sitting normally, and one laying down in front of it to keep the opponent from shooting through the chair legs. Airsoft guns definitely can encourage you to use cover effectively. The sting of a plastic pellet really reminds you to keep knees and elbows tucked in tight. Given the small size of our cover, some of the best shots came not on the side where the opponent was leaning out and firing, but on legs carelessly extended on the opposite side. Similarly, heads poking up over the cover made excellent targets.

After trying it with both shooters moving or both under cover, we went to a drill with one student behind cover and the other moving. Nominally, the person under cover has the advantage, but if the mover can get far enough to one side or another, they can get enough of an angle to shoot around the cover and get good hits. Conversely, if the mover was too predictable in his movements, it was easy for the person behind cover to hold on the point where they knew the mover would emerge and fire for great effect.

During this drill, when I was the mover, I ran out of ammo halfway through. Immediately, I noticed an increase in the number and accuracy of the hits I was taking. Suppressive fire works, even when it’s only little plastic pellets.

Scenarios

The first scenario put us in a restaurant where a couple gets into an increasingly loud and disruptive argument. Bill’s girlfriend was at the range that day and gamely played one half of the couple while John or Richard played the other half (she was quite quick with the verbal comeback during the argument too). One of the other students also played the female role later on, which led to a bit of ribbing.

The argument generally developed into some sort of violent altercation, with the man pulling a rubber knife or an airsoft gun. You area seated nearby and have to decide what to do about the situation. Rapid disengagement before the argument escalates to violence is probably represents the best choice. To make things a bit more interesting, John ruled that the only exit required walking right by the couple having the altercation, forcing us to confront the situation more directly.

One of the students, after getting the man to drop the knife, commanded him to get down on his knees, prompting John to call a time out and explain why this is a bad idea. As a private citizen, it’s much better if the assailant decides to leave, rather than trying to make a citizen’s arrest or hold them at gunpoint.

We also had a nice discussion of pre-assaultive behavior, the cues that can signal that someone is planning to act violently. These are the sort of things that should be setting your alarm bells off, like screaming at someone, aggressive body language, etc.

They changed the scenario up for different people and let us go through it more than once. One of the times I went through the scenario, rather than having an argument, the guy tried to show his girlfriend his gun and NDed into his leg. In that particular case, I decided the last thing I wanted to do was introduce another gun to the situation and instead the best option would be to walk past him out of the restaurant and call for help.

The next scenario involved dealing with an aggressive panhandler while exiting a restaurant. This one was particularly difficult because the door (represented by a pair of chairs a few feet apart) serves as a choke point, limiting your ability to avoid him (which is exactly why a panhandler would stake out such a spot). The short range meant there was very little time to switch from verbal disengagement to deadly force if the panhandler produced a weapon. This led to a lot of retention shooting.

In the next scenario, you enter your garage to find a pair of intruders. Your family is at home and the burglars are between you and your loved ones. In some cases these two were burglars engaged in an argument (some sort of territorial dispute) who barely noticed you at all until you injected yourself into the situation. Sometimes one or both of them could be persuaded to leave at gunpoint, some acted aggressively towards you. Perhaps the most difficult situation was when they tried to flee to the interior of your house (towards your family) forcing you to decide between shooting them in the back or allowing them to potentially do harm to those within.

After all these scenarios involving strangers, the next one instead focused on your habitually drunken brother in law who you discover in your house waving a loaded gun about. The objective is to deal with him without getting yourself shot. In this scenario, drawing and shooting isn’t really a solution (despite being a no-good drunk, your sister would probably be unhappy if you shot him).

John demonstrated a couple of disarm techniques, but we didn’t want to go full speed with the disarms, since airsoft guns are a lot less durable than the real thing. During the disarming discussion, one student asked what would happen if you were holding the slide of an opponent’s gun when the trigger was pulled, so John went and got his XD-M, wrapped his hand around the slide (with fingers clear of the muzzle, of course) and fired into the berm. The slide failed to cycle, but there was no damage or discomfort to his hand.

I’ve now learned disarm techniques from three different people, and been taught three distinct sets of techniques. I really just need to pick a set and practice them enough to be confident in their employment in a life or death situation.

The last scenario simulated a kick in the door home invasion robbery. This lacked some of the pre-fight verbal disengagement and shoot/no-shoot decisions of the other scenarios. Someone kicking in the door of your with a weapon doesn’t require a lot of conversation or involve much ambiguity. However, John ran this one all the way through playing a responding police officer, giving us a chance to practice our tape loops for dealing with the police.

Wrap Up

With the airsoft exercises concluded, we finished up the course with some nice discussion. Richard and Bill gave some commentary on the course and their thoughts on how we’d done as students. John did the same and gave a very nice speech summing up the class. Some folks had to head home to other parts of the state, but the rest of us all adjourned for a nice steak dinner.

Looking back, this was an excellent course, and one I’m really glad to have had the chance to attend. John Farnam is an great instructor, an expert at both the fighting arts, and of teaching those arts to others. I would highly recommend this class, or any of John’s classes, to anyone with a serious interest in learning how to defend themselves with a firearm.

Dan Hood

2 hits center of mass with .40 S&W and he walks himself to the ambulance. What does that tell you?

Thanks to Xavier. See The video here.

Dan Hood

I would like to pass on some training opportunities that are being
provided by Randy Watt (splopsmi@hotmail.com)and Swanson Tactical Training
Center (www.swansontactical.org) in Ogden.

CONCEALED CARRY COMBAT, LEVEL I (CCC I)
October 28 - November 1, (16 hours) $275

CONCEALED FIREARMS PERMIT PREP COURSE
October 14 - October 18, $145

COMBAT CARBINE LEVEL I
October 21 - October 25, $275

Dan Hood

There’s a Utah Polite Society event at Hendricksen Range on Saturday,
October 4th.

We plan to have two handgun drills, two simulated encounters, a series of
carbine "refresher" exercises, and time a weather permitting, a man on man
shoot-off.

The first handgun exercise will be a practical marksmanship test to
practice the draw and shooting on the move. The second handgun exercise
will be
a simulated defensive encounter recreating a home invasion take-over. The
third exercise will be a standard "Tueller" type drill using a rolling
target. The forth with be a simulated defensive encounter taking place in
a parking garage elevator.

The carbine drills we have planned for this month are refreshers of the
basic skill sets that were covered over the length of the summer.
A review with hands-on practice, deploying the carbine from sling carry,
loading/unloading, and firing from various field positions.

Please bring your handgun, carbine, and related equipment. Bring 50
rounds of pistol ammo (more if you would like to participate in the
shoot-off)and 50 rounds of carbine ammo (bring extra if you
would like to shoot additional exercises or shoot steel after the
exercises).

Set up starts at 8:00 a.m.

New shooter orientation starts at 8:30 a.m.

Registration starts at 8:45 a.m.

Handgun shooting exercises start at 9:00 a.m.

Event fee is $12.00

JoeB

A web site I visit often is pistol-training.com. The have a very active forum and provide a lot of practical drills. One posting in particular was on how to make your own high-visibility front sight using some bright tape. For a complete set of instructions visit http://pistol-training.com/archives/376 . There you are directed to link that gives the step by step details. I added a comment that varies slightly on the procedure that worked well for me.

If you want to build one, and can wait till the UPS shoot in October, I have enough tape to do a small armory. If you can't wait, a role of tape will cost you about five bucks at Ace Hardware. (And then we can do do a medium to large armory!)

Dan Hood

Does anyone remember the "Dog Attack Scenario" that we set up a few months back?

Here's a Park City News story for yah.

Man fends off dog with pistol
He fired weapon once into the ground
Patrick Parkinson, Of the Record staff
Article Launched: 07/08/2008 04:52:08 PM MDT

Nobody was charged when a man fired a small-caliber handgun to deter two dogs from biting him at Jordanelle State Park.
"He did not break the law at all," said Tracy See, assistant manager of Jordanelle State Park. "He could have actually shot the dog."
She did not release the name of the Salt Lake County man who is licensed to carry a concealed firearm.
"He had maybe six or seven dogs around him," See said. "He reached down and pulled out his concealed weapon. He fired into the ground and the dogs released."
The victim stopped with his family Sunday afternoon to have lunch at the north end of Jordanelle after camping in the Uinta Mountains east of Kamas.
Meanwhile, a woman from western Summit County, who works for a dog-walking service in Park City, had a dozen dogs off leashes in the area at about 1 p.m.
"One dog came over the rise, then a second dog. The father ran to pick up his child and the dogs, of course, reacted to their excitement," See explained. "By now, he has maybe six or seven dogs around him. He reached down and pulled out his concealed weapon."
The attack occurred near the Ross Creek trailhead and the woman walking the dogs is legally deaf, she added.
"She did not realize the weapon had been discharged, but because the weapon was brandished and visible, it scared her really, really bad," See said. "She took off and ran Basically she was trying to get away from the situation."
See said the dogs, which are mixed breeds, were calm when she arrived. The man had four puncture wounds on his leg, which broke the skin.
"There is a leash law and they have to have their dogs on a leash at all times when they are in the park," See said.
Rabies shots were up to date for the dogs that bit the man, she said.
"They didn't come at him trying to take him down," See said, adding that nobody was arrested at the scene.
The man's wife reportedly threw rocks at the dogs near State Road 248 as her husband tried to escape. See did not release the dog-walker's name or the name of her employer.

Dan Hood

We have been doing some rifle basics this summer, and I've taken some video that I would like to share.

Safely slinging your rifle support side:

Notice that the rifle is always under control and is never held just by the sling to flop.

Strong side slinging:

Combat prone:

"Under the vehicle" prone:

"Over the Curb" prone:

Combat Squat (very easy to take off from):

Kneeling:

Sitting:

Offhand:

Dan Hood

There’s a Utah Polite Society night event at Hendricksen Range Friday,
July 11.

We plan to have four courses of fire at the night event.

Prior to the first exercise we plan to go over the use of several
techniques for using a hand-held flashlight with both a sidearm and a
carbine.

The first exercise is a skills exercise that will let you exercise several
different light techniques both free standing and from behind cover. You
will have the opportunity to shoot this exercise with either a sidearm, a
carbine, or both.

The second exercise is a simulated encounter where you respond to a home
invasion that starts with you in bed under the covers and involves opening
a door and clearing the adjacent room. You can use either a sidearm, a
carbine, or both for this exercise.

The third exercise is a simulated encounter where you are followed home by
a group of young gentlemen who pull into your driveway behind you and you
have to discriminate threats against the glare of headlights.

The fourth exercise is a skills drill that practices target
discrimination, shooting on the move, and utilizing cover while using a
light.

If you bring a carbine, make sure to arrive with it secured within a case.
A sling that allows muzzle down carry from one shoulder is also
recommended.

For those of you who are new to the use of flashlights with firearms, you
may want to purchase one that has a momentary tail cap switch. Big 5 has
a pretty good Smith & Wesson brand light on sale for $30.

Please bring your handgun (and related equipment) at least 70 rounds of
pistol ammo and a good hand-held light. If you have a carbine that you’d
like to shoot, bring it and 30 rounds of ammo.

As we would like to review flashlight techniques and do course of fire
walkthroughs before it gets dark, please plan on arriving at the range by
8:30 p.m. We plan to start shooting as soon as it gets dark.

As it’s more important you be familiar with our safety and range
procedures in a low light environment, we ask that only those who have
shot with us before attend.

We plan to limit the number of attendees to 25 in order to keep the group
to a manageable size. If you would like to attend, please reply to this
email, and I will send you a confirmation.

Event fee is $12.00.

Blackeagle

This was another big month for the Utah Polite Society. While we didn't have quite as many people as we did in June (around 20, rather than 38) we still had a larger than usual group, particularly for a holiday weekend. These included a fair number of new shooters (around 6 or 8). This is quite a few people for us, but unlike last month the number of people didn't get into unmanagable territory. As a result of the smaller numbers, and some better planning, I think this event ran a lot more smoothly than it did last time.

Rather than reorganizing things only the fly like we did last month, we were able to run things mostly according to the plan. We'd intended to do a pair of pistol exercises and some hand to hand stuff in the morning and the rifle stuff in the afternoon. We pretty much kept to the schedule, but the hand to hand slipped to the early afternoon, due to the amount of time it took to run everyone through the handgun exercises.

Rock Around the Clock
The focus of both this month's handgun exercises was on movement, specifically getting off the X with explosive movement. Several of us took Gabe Suarez's classes last year when we had him here in Salt Lake City, and we incorporated them into some of our drills in the Polite Society events in the next few months. However, it's been over a year, and we've picked up some new regulars since then, so I thought it was a good time to revisit moving and shooting.

I'd hoped to be able to do a moving and shooting demonstration called the Suicide Drill using airsoft guns, but Harold Green forgot to bring his airsoft stuff out so we had to improvise a little bit. I explained the basic principles of moving and shooting, including basic metal on meat point shooting, explosive movement, and why it's better to move diagonally towards the assailant than to move away from him (it means the assailant has to turn further to track you). I'm not sure how effective I was in getting this stuff across, since I was essentially trying to compress a day of Gabe's Close Range Gunfighting class into less than half an hour. That's a lot to absorb in a short amount of time.

Our first exercise was a fairly simple drill, giving everyone a chance to get off the X to the one, three, nine, and eleven o'clock positions (I omitted five and seven o'clock since we did those back in April in our dog attack drills). Particularly for the new folks, we emphasized taking it slow. While explosive movement is called for in a fight, you have to walk before you can run, so if its your first time, moving and shooting at a walking pace is just fine.

Motionless Operators Ventilate Easily
This month's scenario integrates the moving and shooting skills into a fairly simple confrontation. You're walking down the street when confronted by several assailants. There happen to be two handy pieces of cover (a barrel and a barricade) a few yards away. This presents the opportunity to draw and shoot while moving to cover.

Since moving and shooting was a new concept for a lot of people, it's not surprising that some folks had a little trouble with it. The most common mistake was to draw while standing in place, then move to cover. As the name of the scenario implies, standing still is going to make it a lot easier for them to shoot you. If you aren't comfortable drawing and shooting on the move, in a scenario like this with cover close at hand it would be much better to move first, then draw, rather than the other way around.

The next most common mistake didn't have anything to do with moving. A lot of people tried to shoot over the barrel rather than around it. When you shoot over a piece of cover, you expose a lot more of yourself than you do shooting around the side. What's more, the additional area you expose (essentially from the eyebrows up) is a pretty important part of your body, and one where you really don't want to get shot. Going around the side is a much better solution. Getting down below relatively short cover can be difficult, particularly if you're tall (6'5" here), but if you don't want to get shot, it's important.

The new shooters displayed some of the typical new-shooter errors that we see a lot of. One fellow, shooting a DA/SA handgun left his decocker in the safety position and popped three perfectly good rounds out and reloaded a new magazine before he realized what the problem was. As Jeff Cooper said, "Don't get caught with your dingus down!" The heavy DA trigger pull makes DA/SA autos perfectly safe to carry without having the safety on. Use it to decock before holstering but immediately flip it back to the firing position.

Another new shooter displayed a problem that I'd never seen before. He was particularly vigorous in getting off the X, which is good. What wasn't so good is the mag carrier he was using for his spare magazines. He had one of the nylon double mag pouches with the velcro flaps. I'm not really a fan of these, since they tend to make it take a lot longer to access your extra magazines. This fellow had folded the flaps back into his belt to expose the magazines and make them much easier to access. Unfortunately, the sudden stop when he got to cover sent his extra mags flying out onto the ground, which he didn't realize until he'd dropped the mag out of the gun during a reload. A good, open topped magazine carrier that holds magazines securely while leaving them easy to access is by far the best solution for this problem.

I decided to mess with Robin Hood a bit. We distinguish targets from innocent bystanders using foam cutouts of guns that hang around the target's neck. To encourage people to look a little more closely, we also have some badges and to designate a target with a threat indicator as a cop. You're not supposed to shoot the cop. When his turn came up I put threat indicators and badges on two targets to represent cops and didn't put out any threats. Rather than a fire command or the beep of a timer, we start our scenarios with some appropriate verbal cue. With a mugging or robbery type situation, a typical start signal might be yelling "Gimme all your money!" If the threats just open fire, then the signal is "Bang! Bang! Bang!" Since there weren't any threats out there (and to give a somewhat subtle cue that they were cops) I started the scenario by yelling "Get your hands up!" Robin looked up, got off the X beautifully and shot the hell out of one of the cops on the way to cover. As soon as he got to cover, he yelled "Shit!" as he recognized what he'd done. Then he proceeded to ventilate the other target, not realizing that it, too, was a cop. Afterwards, I remarked that in real life the cops probably would have shot him when he drew, so he probably wouldn't have had a chance to shoot both of them. Small consolation I guess.

He had his revenge though. When I shot the scenario I looked up and drew, but the first thing I saw was a target with two threat indicators and a badge. I managed not to shoot the cop, but it startled me enough that I didn't actually shoot anything on the way to cover. Once I got to the barrel I shot the rest of the scenario from cover. He also hung a threat indicator around a pepper popper that happened to be sitting behind the area where we were shooting the scenario. It took me a while to see it and knock it down. He did the same to another shooter with a different popper, but that one wouldn't go down. Instead the shooter hit the foam gun cutout of the threat indicator and shot it right off the target.

Based on the performance during the scenario, four or five repetitions in a couple of hours definitely isn't enough to get someone used to drawing and shooting while moving explosively off the X. Heck, I'm not sure Gabe's two day course really provides enough practice to get comfortable with it. However, I do think what we did today managed to open a few people's eyes to the possibility. Several people remarked that getting off the X made perfect sense, but it was something they'd never even considered before.

Hand to Hand Disarms
Brianna and Lizette were nice enough to come back again this month and teach us some more hand to hand concepts. Last month we concentrated on gun grabs, taking the gun away from an assailant within arms reach. This month we worked on a set of techniques that could only loosely be called a disarm. Rather than going for the gun directly, it involves tying up the gun arm so the assailant can't shoot you and inflicting enough damage on him that he lets go of the gun.

This technique starts off the same steps as the gun takeaway we learned last month: put the hands up, get the adversary talking to slow down his reactions, step and pivot offline and knock the arm holding the gun aside. Rather than grabbing for the wrist, as we did last month, take a half step further in to get inside the muzzle and lock the gun arm between your arm and body, right under the armpit. Once you've got it locked in good and tight, preferably just below the wrist, there's no way he can turn the gun enough to shoot you.

With the gun arm tied up, the next step is to start inflicting punishment. We learned a fairly simple three step procedure: break the elbow, hit them in the throat, and take out a knee. Of course, there are many other possibilities, including drawing a weapon of your own.

Compared to the gun grab technique we learned last month,tying up the gun arm has the advantage of requiring less precision than going for the wrist and gun, perhaps making it a better choice in low light conditions. However, since the assailant keeps ahold of the gun while you're beating on him, he may let off multiple shots before you've inflicted enough pain to get him to drop it. If you have a good background behind you (a brick wall or an ATM) then this isn't really a problem. If your family is standing behind you, then a more direct gun grab may be appropriate (though even that will probably involve at least one shot).

Personally, I wouldn't be quite as confident with this technique as I would with the gun grab. Because there is a real potential for inflicting significant damage here, we weren't able to practice this at full speed since we didn't want anyone to end up with a broken elbow. In contrast, we could go pretty much full bore with the gun grab, as long as we took a few simple precautions (no fingers in the trigger guard or in register, lest they get dislocated).

Carbine Exercise
We had eight or nine folks stick around for the carbine exercise. We basically went through the same exercises we worked on out in the desert a couple of weeks ago. Robert did a great job explaining and demonstrating the techniques for us.

This was definitely an AR-centric crowd, with all but two of our shooters using them, including a very nice JP Rifles example. The JP was interesting in that, unlike the other rifles, it had a muzzle brake rather than a flash hider. This produced a noticeably bigger bang if you were standing behind him when he fired. I'd be interested to see what it looks like at night. In addition to the ARs, Robin Hood was shooting an AK and I had my XCR.

There were a variety of optics in evidence, including three EOTechs, an ACOG with a red dot mounted on top of it, a Trijicon reflex sight, an Aimpoint, and a low power variable scope. The AK was the only iron sighted rifle in the group. The fellow with the Trijicon was nice enough to give me a chance to look through it. I like my EOTech, but more and more I'm thinking that for a home defense rifle I want something that's always on, rather than messing about trying to get it turned on and adjusted when I hear a bump in the middle of the night. I'm considering the Aimpoint and the Trijicon reflex, and it was nice to have a chance to be able to get my hands on one to try it out.

Before we got started, we went over the carbine specific safety rules we'd worked out. Carbines are something new for the Utah Polite Society and during last month's shoot, we saw a few instances of rather scary gunhandling. These new rules (keeping rifles cased unless you're out on the range and slung unless you're actually firing) are intended to keep things safe while still allowing people to gain some experience in carrying around a rifle.

We started out the drill by explaining how to sling and unsling the rifle. Robert demonstrated slinging and unslinging from the weak side shoulder, muzzle down. Since I seem to be the only one around who favors the strong side shoulder I demoed slinging and unslinging from that side, again, muzzle down. We decided to mandate muzzle down carry both for easier deployment and to avoid problems where a shooter bends down to pick up something and ends up muzzle sweeping everyone with his muzzle-up rifle.

Robert demonstrated the various ready positions for us (high, low, field, indoor, and Rhodesian ready), as well as the standard shooting positions (offhand, squatting, kneeling, double kneeling, sitting, and prone). Following his demonstration, we each got a chance to try out the different positions. One thing I noticed was that people had a tendency to load their weapons using their strong side hand. This is a bad habit to get into, since it leaves you unable to shoot while manipulating a magazine. Even if you've only got the one round in the chamber it could be crucial if you need to shoot while performing a reload.

We had one really troublesome jam during the carbine exercise. Robert's AR wouldn't go into battery, even with vigorous use of the forward assist. We took a break and he went over to the safety area to try taking the rifle apart. It was about this time that we discovered that a hive of bees seems to have made it's home in one of the drawers of the safety area workbench. Because the bolt wouldn't go into battery, it was impossible to take down the normal way, by popping the rear pin out and withdrawing the bolt carrier. First Robert tried pulling off the stock, but then he realized that he could get the upper and lower apart with the bolt still in place by popping the forward disassembly pin. Once the rifle was broken down, we spotted the problem: a popped primer cup was in the area where the bolt lugs are supposed to lock up, preventing the bolt from locking up. With this removed, the rifle went back together and functioned fine for the rest of the afternoon.

I think there are a couple of good lessons here. First and most important, when you carry a rifle, it's important to carry a pistol as a backup. This was a fairly simple problem, one that did no permanent damage to the rifle. However, no immediate action drill would have fixed it. The only way to get back in the fight would have been to switch to another weapon. Second, don't get too locked into one way of doing things. Robert was so used to popping the back pin and removing the bolt carrier group that it took him quite a while to realize that he could pop the front pin and detach the lower that way.

With that little problem cleared up, we moved on to the stand up drill. You start out prone and fire two rounds at the target. Once you've shot you start standing up, scanning as you go. The RO calls out "fire" and you have to drop into the quickest stable position and shoot. If the RO times it right, you end up shooting double kneeling, kneeling, squat, and offhand.

It was almost 6 o'clock by the time we got finished up, which made for a very long, but productive day. I think we were a lot more organized than last month and things ran a lot more smoothly. Of course, having about half as many people probably helped too. Once again I'd like to thank Brianna, Lizette, and Robert for their efforts to expand our knowledge.

Blackeagle

Sometimes, things don't go according to plan. In this case, I think that probably ended up being a good thing. We'd planned to go out to Skull Valley and do some 360 degree pistol shooting (using a canyon that provides an all around backstop) and take advantage of the longer ranges to do some rifle stuff that we can't do at our usual shooting range. The pistol scenarios ended up going by the wayside, as did two of the rifle exercises we had planned, in favor of a lot of basic rifle stuff. However, I think the stuff we did do will pay big dividends in the carbine events we're doing at our regular monthly shoots. Robert's going to be teaching carbine stuff again at our July event and I think what we did out in the desert got us well prepared for that.

We all met up out at a truck stop west of Salt Lake for some breakfast. There were only five of us for this event, all regulars at our monthly events. I think the small group of people helped make the day a lot more productive, as did the fact that we all knew and trusted each other in terms of safety, gunhandling and the like. After breakfast we headed out to Skull Valley. It was pretty hot and dry out there in the desert. We all slathered on the sunblock and I'm glad we had some shade available so that we could get out of the sun. We also went through a lot of water and soda to keep ourselves hydrated.

Gear
We had a wide variety of different rifles on display. I spent the whole day shooting with my Robinson Armament XCR. I also brought my .223 Norinco AK, but it never made it out of the case. The AR system was well represented with two regular rifles and one HK 416. Robin Hood switched back and forth between his Mini-14 and the AK that he just finished putting together from a flat and a parts kit. He also put a few rounds through a pump action .30-06. One interesting difference I noticed when the rifles were lying side by side on the table was the details of the AR style magwells. The regular AR had a little flare at the mag well, my XCR had somewhat more, and the HK practically had a huge funnel to help guide mags in. While it didn't make a difference today, there were a fair variety of different muzzle brakes/flash hiders on display: two birdcages, a Vortex, a ban-era bare barrel, and a slant brake on the AK. We're planning on having a carbine stage during our night shoot next month and I'm looking forward to seeing how much of a difference the various flash hiders make.

This was hardly a high-volume stress test (we spent more time talking than shooting), but all the guns ran just fine except the 06. Robin only shot about ten rounds through it and about half of them had extraction problems (one of which required banging the butt on the ground while pulling down on the fore end). The primers in the spent casings were completely flat, so this rifle seems to have a tight bore, leading to very high pressures.

Robert and I ran EOTechs on our rifles. The reticule was still plenty bright, even in the very bright sunlight with a light colored background, though I was on the two brightest settings all day. The 416 had an ACOG, while the other AR and the Mini were fitted with low power variable scopes. The AK and the 06 were iron sights only.

I carried my spare mags in my Hawkepack Rifle Bug Out Bag. I've used it as a range bag before but this is the first time I've really used it as a fighting bag. It generally seemed to work pretty well. It was a bit hard to find the magazine when reloading while prone, but some practice ought to fix that. The only real problem I ran into was when flopping down prone (rather than descending to prone more slowly and carefully) the bag had a tendency to end up underneath me. People have suggested attaching the bag to the belt with a carabiner or short length of bungee cord to help keep it in place, and I think I'm going to try that. I also found that the pad on the shoulder strap tended to end up right where I wanted the stock of my rifle to go, making it difficult to keep the stock in the right place. The pad got shoved to the back for the rest of the day and it came off the strap entirely as soon as I got home. Robin Hood had a shoulder bag for his AK mags. Other folks used a belt carrier, a three mag thigh rig, or just stuck their mag in a pocket.

I used my MagPul PMAGs all day and I'm really happy with them. I just ordered a big batch to build up my supply. The 416 ran the steel HK mags, while the rest of the AR shooters used aluminum GI mags of one description or another. Robin shot his AK using some nifty transparent plastic mags.

Shooting
We started out by sighting in at 25 and 100 yards. I found the hundred yard sight-in kind of difficult with my EOTech. Even with the EOTech's relatively fine center dot compared to some other sights, it still complete obscured the square in the middle of the target we were using. The guys with magnifying optics were getting much better groups. I need to get out and do some more longer ranged shooting.

Once everyone was sighted in, we moved all the targets to 50 yards and started going through the basics. We spent quite a bit of time talking about slinging and unslinging rifles. Partly this was preparation for next month's event. There were a couple of instances of careless gunhandling last month, so we're going to emphasize keeping rifles cased or slung, and for some folks this is clearly going to require some education on proper techniques for slinging and unslinging without muzzling everybody with their rifle.

When you get down to the nitty gritty of safely slinging and unslinging a rifle how the rifle sling is set up really makes a difference. Slinging a rifle with a two point sling mounted to the side is somewhat different than slinging one with the sling mounted to the bottom. Three of us had Vickers' slings on our rifles, two on the side and one on the bottom. The other AR had a simple carry strap and the Mini sported a leather shooting sling. The newly built AK was still slingless.

After that we moved on to some simple shooting drills from various ready positions (low ready, high ready, indoor low ready, and field ready). Honestly, I'm not really seeing the usefulness of field ready (butt on the hip and muzzle up at eye level). High ready is very fast, low ready slower but easier to maintain and indoor low ready good for operating in confined spaces. A good two point sling like the Vickers makes it easy to maintain indoor low ready for a long time since you can just let the gun hang there with your hands on the grips. The EOTech is pretty forgiving about an inconsistent cheek weld, but I still ought to do some dry practice to mount the gun more consistently for iron sights. Also I found that 50 yards is getting a little long for offhand shooting for me (another place where more practice is required), but I could still shoot minute of man at that distance. Even for a relative novice, rifles are a lot easier to shoot and more forgiving than a pistol.

After breaking for lunch (Harold Green cooked up some nice steaks) we moved from offhand to more stable sitting positions (squat, kneeling, sitting, prone). One thing that we found was that not everybody could shoot all of the positions. Squating, in particular, was difficult for some people. Kneeling, sitting and prone were considerably more forgiving. All of these positions make hitting targets at range a lot easier. Prone at 50 yards even headshots are fairly easy (particularly since a rifle zeroed at 200 is about dead on at this distance). If you can get lower and more stable, get lower and more stable!

For these drills, we also switched from everyone shooting at once to one person stepping forward and shooting at a time. The initial impetus for this was to keep those of us down at the right end of the line from getting pelted with brass, but it also provides more opportunity for non-shooters to observe and critique the shooter's technique.

One of the things we noticed watching each other shoot was that there was a tendency for some of us to use the shooting hand to lower ourselves into or boost ourselves out of the sitting and prone positions. We tried out a little impromptu drill to combat this tenancy: You start out prone and fires two shots at the target. You then start getting up. As you get up, the RO calls out 'fire' and you have to shoot from whatever position you can settle into quickly (double knee, kneeling, offhand). It really makes you think about maintaining a fighting position at all times, rather than just moving from one position to another.

Overall, what we covered out in the desert was more limited and basic than we had planned, but I think it's going to pay dividends down the line when we're trying to do carbine stuff at future monthly shoots. Not only do we have a pretty good idea of what we're doing next month, those of us who were out there in the desert know enough to really help Robert out when it comes to teaching folks carbine stuff. Now all we have to do is stay one month ahead of everybody else and we'll be set.

Blackeagle

A couple of weeks ago I helped teach a Mothers Day Course for novice female shooters. This isn't exactly a Utah Polite Society event, but it was kind of interesting and I thought I'd write it up here anyway. It was organized by Weldon Anderson, one of our members who teaches Utah CCW courses though his company, Self Defense Solutions. We get a lot of our new shooters through Weldon, since he highly recommends getting more advanced training in his CCW classes. Weldon asked his friend Paul, Harold Green, and I to help out with this class. I really enjoy teaching people to shoot. Lately I've been spending most of my time at our events running drills and scenarios. Running the stages does involve quite a bit of teaching, but it's usually somewhat more advanced stuff like using cover or making tactical decisions. Harold Green and Robin Hood have been handling most of our new shooter instruction. While I like teaching the more advanced things, I enjoy teaching new shooters as well, so I jumped at the chance to help out.

The astute among you will note that Mother's Day was over a month ago. The class was held on Mother's Day weekend in years past, but the weather in early May isn't always nice (Hendrickson Range is just down the road from Park City, so it's at a fairly high elevation). Doing this in June makes pleasant conditions more likely. Nevertheless, the Mother's Day name stuck. The class was for women only, to give them a chance to shoot without having their husband/boyfriend/father looking over their shoulder while they're learning to shoot. It's aimed at novices, but the level of experience varied from those who have never shot a gun before to those that had a fair bit of shooting experience, but no formal training. There were a little less than 20 ladies in the class.

Weldon spent about half an hour going through range safety procedures, basic shooting skills and operational procedures for each type of gun. He also gave Harold and I a chance to shill for the Utah Polite Society. Some of the ladies seemed fairly receptive, but some of them were looking at us a bit askance. That's to be expected, I guess, many of these ladies were generally quite new at this and I'm not sure some of them were really ready for our emphasis on defensive handgunning. After the lecture portion of the evening was finished we split up into two groups, with half the class staying with Weldon and Paul and the other half coming with Harold and I. Harold is an experienced revolver shooter (though he carries a Glock these days) so we took all the ladies with revolvers (some of whom also brought semi-autos) plus a few more to balance the groups.

We started out by explaining the operating procedures of their guns to the ladies that needed some instruction in that area. Quite a few did. Even those that had shot before didn't necessarily know how to load, unload, or otherwise operate the pistol they had brought. Guys, if you take your gal out shooting, don't just put a loaded pistol in her hand, teach her how to operate the gun.

There was quite a variety of guns on display. Everything from Single Action Army clones in .22 long rifle to a S&W M&P semi-auto. Probably the most common single type of gun was the .38/.357 caliber snubnose revolver. This is, unfortunately, rather typical. There is a tendency to push novice shooters, particularly women, towards snubnose revolvers because they are fairly simple, small, and easy to carry. I think this does them a disservice, however. The snubnosed revolver is an easy weapon to learn, but a difficult one to master. There's very little to learn as far as operating procedures and not much that can go wrong, but the long double action trigger pull and short sight radius makes them very difficult to shoot well without a lot of practice. In the right hands, it they can be effective self defense tools, but it takes a long time to get to that level. As I said in my article on Choosing a Defensive Handgun, I think new shooters a much better off with a point and shoot semi-auto, like a Glock, XD, M&P, or similar gun.

Explaining the operational procedures for most guns was fairly easy. The one really odd one was a Phoenix Arms .22 semi-auto. This little mechanical wonder has two separate manual safeties (one on the frame, one on the slide). More disturbingly, you can't rack the slide unless there is a magazine inserted, meaning the standard procedure for clearing a semi-auto (drop the magazine, lock the slide back, inspect) is impossible, since there has to be a magazine in the gun to rack the slide and the magazine cannot be ejected with the slide back. This just seems like an invitation to a mistake during the unloading process that could lead to an ND.

A few of the ladies had arrived at the course without a pistol. Harold got them set up with a Walther P22, which they seemed to enjoy shooting. These gals also expressed interest in shooting his Glock 22, so he let each of them run some rounds through it, which they also seemed to enjoy quite a bit.

Once everyone knew how to load and operate their guns, we got started shooting. Some of the ladies were a little hesitant at first, but we eventually got everyone shooting. Muzzle discipline was very good, finger discipline somewhat less so. Shooting abilites varied pretty widely, as some gals had nice tight groups at about 5 yards, while other's had trouble staying on the 8.5"x11" paper the bullseye was on.

One of the ladies was consistently placing her shots no higher than 2" below the center of the target. I figured this was a flinching problem, so I had her dry fire through a cylinder, then shoot another cylinder with mixed dry fire and live. Every time she pulled the trigger on a dry chamber, you could see the gun jerk downward a little bit. The flinch was pretty obvious. I perscribed lots of dry fire practice and mixing dummy and live rounds in her gun at the range.

One of the ladies brought both a box of .38 Special and one of .357 magnum for her revolver. After she shot her way through the .38, she switched over to the magnum loads. Even standing next to her, the difference was notable. At her urging, I shot a cylinder full of the magnums, and I have to say that the recoil was pretty brisk, even in a steel framed gun. I can imagine that magnum loads in a scandium gun would be downright painful.

I hadn't gotten a chance to put any rounds through my own gun the whole night, so after most of the gals had left I decided to run a mag through my Glock. I drew and shot 14 rounds of fairly rapid sighted fire. When I went to slide lock, I did an emergency reload, got back on target, then reholstered. As I did so, I heard a voice from the other end of the firing line say, "Woah, that was cool! I want to learn how to do that." She was evidently quite impressed by the reload. So, I think we may have gotten one or two of them interested enough to show up to a Utah Polite Society event in the future.

Overall, I had quite a bit of fun. I always enjoy teaching and it's very rewarding to help introduce novice shooters to the discipline. All the ladies seemed to enjoy it and I think the all were able to get something out of the experience. As for me, the big grin that tends to appear on the face of someone who's just been introudced to something as fun as shooting is it's own reward.

Blackeagle

This month's Utah Polite Society event was a bit different from our usual fare. Generally, we do two drills and two scenarios with pistols. We're usually done by around noon or one o'clock. This month we only did one pistol drill and one scenario, but added some training on hand to hand disarming techniques and the first of several carbine classes. With all these activities, the event was planned to last all day, rather than just the morning.

This month's even was also rather unusual in the number of people who attended. A typical Polite Society event will draw around ten people. Anything over fifteen is considered a fairly big crowd. This month we had 38 people show up. Part of this was probably because of the stuff that we were offering this month, particularly the carbine exercise. People interested in this who may not have shown up for one of our regular events probably accounted for five or ten of the additional people. We also had a very large number of new shooters this month. Around fifteen people who'd never shot with us before (most with relatively little shooting experience) showed up, which is probably the largest contingent of new shooters we've had except for one or two of our new shooter classes. Some of these folks were fairly inexperienced, and they probably would have benefited from a full-on new shooter class, but given the amount of things we had going on this month that wasn't really practical. Harold Green took them aside and gave them a little basic instruction. While their inexperience showed a bit, most of them did fairly well in the pistol exercises.

Because of the unusually large number of people, we had to reorganize things on the fly. The plan was to run the pistol exercises first, followed by the disarm drills, break for lunch, and do the carbine stuff in the afternoon. With the huge number of people we had it would have taken all morning and part of the afternoon just to run everyone through the pistol exercises. Instead we rented the 25 yard range next door and took over part of the road up to the range for the hand to hand stuff so we could run all three events in parallel, rather than serially.

Any Which Way You Can

Both the pistol drill and the scenario this month were built around the idea of shooting while lying down. Getting knocked down in a fight is a very real possibility, but we practice most of our shooting standing, or occasionally kneeling. Being able to shoot from the ground is an important skill. These drills focused on shooting from the ground at up-close and personal opponents. Prone positions are also useful for using a pistol against a long range adversary, but that's an exercise for some other month.

For this month's drill, you start by lying down about four yards from the target (we put down some cardboard so you're not lying on the range's rather uncomfortable grave). The first string is fired lying on your back with your feet pointed towards the target. This string is shot from the holster, so it's important not to sweep your let or feet when drawing. It's also important not to shoot your feet, but this is less of a problem than it might seem. Unless you’re shooting something very distant or very low (say, about the size of a cat) the line of fire is going to pass several feet above your toes, even if you have size 14 skis like I do. Because of the risk of sweeping the other shooter or people behind the line, none of the subsequent strings are shot from the holster. Instead you ground your gun, pointing down range before you get into position. For the second string, the shooter rotates 90 degrees, putting the target to their right. You roll over to the right so your body is facing the target, pick up the gun, and shoot. People's instinct is to try to hold the gun upright, but twisting your arms around to do this tends to inhibit accuracy and recoil control. The better technique is to hold the gun horizontally, so it lines up with your body. Just imagine your normal two-handed shooting stance and tip it over so you are lying on your side. The third string is basically the same as the second, save that the target is to the shooter's left. The fourth string is the fun one. Your head is pointed towards the target. You look up at the target, pick up your gun and shoot it upside-down. Some people don't realize that the pistol will function perfectly properly even when inverted.

Shooting from the ground, even sideways or upside down, can be just as accurate as shooting from a more normal position. However, it does require concentration. When shooting from conventional positions, we have the advantage of muscle memory to help keep everything lined up right. Shooting sideways or upside-down is not something most of us are really used to, and it takes more concentration to keep the sights lined up from these unusual shooting positions. As long as you keep the sights in alignment it's possible to shoot quite accurately, at least at close ranges. At longer ranges, however, differences in the alignment of the sights and the bore will come into play when shooting sideways or upside down. The only other caveat involves recoil control, which can be more difficult from these positions, particularly upside-down. It's probably best to slow things down a little bit.

I'm Not Going to Take This Lying Down

Our scenario for this month builds on the ground shooting drill. Basically, you answer the door in response to what turns out to be a group of home invaders. One of them kicks the door in, knocking you on your keister. You have to draw your weapon and solve the problem. We set up barricades about three feet apart, representing the door and put one target right in the middle of it. Several more targets represent additional robbers, passers-by, and pursuing police officers, depending on the presence or absence of threat indicators and badges. As usual, a few people ended up shooting the sheriff. Before the scenario we talked about the difference between cover and concealment and just which these barricades represented depending on the construction of your home.

People shot this drill in two very distinct ways. Some shot it entirely from the ground, engaging all the targets from their original position. Some shot only the initial target (representing the assailant who kicked the door in) from the ground then got up and shot the rest from the cover/concealment of the doorframe. Each of these has advantages and disadvantages. Getting up made it easier and quicker to shoot, but the act of getting up tended to take a long time, particularly due to the need to carefully keep the gun pointing down range. Shooting all the assailants from the ground obviated the need to rise until all the threats had been dealt with, but engaging each individual target, and transitioning between them, tended to be slower than shooting from your feet.

As usual, I was able to watch quite a few people shoot the scenario before shooting it myself. Based on the difficulties of both shooting from the ground and getting up with gun in hand, I decided to pursue a different strategy. Instead of drawing from the ground, I immediately rolled over behind concealment, got up without needing to worry about managing my pistol, then drew my weapon and engaged all the targets from concealment. I was probably out of the line of fire quicker than someone choosing to shoot from the ground could have neutralized the initial target. I ended up neutralizing all the threats, but had some shoot throughs on some of the non-threat targets. It's important to keep your background in mind.

With our large contingent of new shooters, we did see a lot of new shooter mistakes. In addition to the usual failures to neutralize (primarily due to shooting too low or not shooting enough), doing after action scans with an empty gun, and putting guns back into holsters without reloading a lot of the newer shooters also crowded cover and/or used the "Charlie's Angels" ready position. Many of the new shooters tended to get very close to the cover, even extending their gun beyond the doorway. This is not only an inviting setup for a gun grab if someone is standing on the other side of the wall, it also telegraphs your position to anyone on the other side. If the wall is concealment rather than cover, a smart opponent may just shoot you through the wall. If it is hard cover, they can either shoot your hand, or just know exactly where you are going to pop out and be lined up on that spot before you even move.

The Charlie's Angels ready position (also called the "Sabrina" after a character on that show) is a lousy idea for two reasons. First, it makes it easy for someone to take the gun away from you. All they have to do is prevent you from bringing the gun forward with one hand and twist the firearm out of your grip with the other. In a low ready position, if they try to grab the gun and shove it downward, all you have to do is fall backwards and the gun will come up on target. The second reason for eschewing the Sabrina is for safety purposes. We're on an outdoor range and there is no backstop in that direction. What goes up must come down, and when it does it's gonna hurt.

Disarms

I spent all morning running the pistol scenario but after an excellent lunch (provided the range manager's wife and her sister) I managed to sneak over to our disarming exercise. Brianna and Lizette have been shooting with us for a couple of months and they've come to us (Brianna in particular) with martial arts experience. One of the purposes of the Polite Society is for members to share knowledge of self defense techniques with each other, so we drafted them into teaching some disarm techniques.

Hand to hand skills are certainly a hole in my skill set. One of the things the Interactive Gunfighting class we took from Gabe Suarez last year made evident to me is that an opponent is only really a gun problem if he's beyond about three yards. An opponent within arms reach is a hand to hand problem rather than a gun problem (assailants out of arms reach but within three yards are in a sort of grey area where there are no really good solutions, merely "die less often" techniques).

I have to say right off, Brianna and Lizette did a really good job. They did an excellent job explaining what you needed to do and critiquing your technique during practice. I'm really glad we were able to get them to do this. Harold Green also put together some nice wooden practice guns for us. You can use red guns for this kind of thing, but if anyone leaves their trigger finger inside the trigger guard there's a good chance it's going to end up broken or sprained.

Some of us learned some disarm techniques when we took a class from Gabe Suarez last year. The techniques Brianna taught were similar in their general principles, but somewhat different in detail. She taught three techniques, one for when you are facing an adversary who has a gun pointed at your torso, one for an adversary with a gun pointed at your head, and one for an adversary pointing a gun at you from behind. While there are differences, all three have common elements and all three follow the same basic steps.

The first step in this is to put your hands up, whether or not the assailant asks you to. This may put him at ease and give a feeling of power, but it also gets your hands into position for what's going to happen next. It can also be a good idea to start talking to the attacker, particularly asking him a question such as, "What do you want?" Answering this will degrade his reaction time, and even the smallest delay could make a difference.

The next step is to get the gun pointing at something other than you so that when it goes off (and it must be emphasized that the gun will almost certainly go off sometime during this procedure) it's not going to hit you. For an assailant pointing at your torso or behind you this involves stepping to the outside of the assailant's gun hand (so for a right handed shooter you want to step to his right/your left) and knocking his arm aside with your forearm. This is more difficult to do with someone behind you since it's harder to know where the gun is. You can glance over your shoulder to see which arm is holding the gun and even step or lean back to feel how high he's holding it. For an attacker pointing a gun at your head, instead of knocking the gun sideways, it will be easier and faster to knock it upwards using both hands.

Once the gun is no longer pointed at you, your outside hand (the left hand if you are confronting a right-handed shooter) goes to the wrist while the other grabs the gun and twists it up and back. This works best if you step into the attacker, bringing the gun close to your body. That way you can put your entire body into this maneuver, whereas the assailant is essentially trying to resist with three or four fingers and a thumb. Even if the assailant is a lot bigger or stronger than you, his fingers probably aren't going to be strong enough to hand on if you can put your whole body into it.

As I mentioned earlier, Gabe Suarez taught some disarms in his Interactive Gunfighting class a year ago. While it was fairly similar, Gabe's techniques emphasized going directly for the wrist with your hand, rather than knocking the gun out of the way first. I think I prefer the forearm. It leaves a lot bigger margin for error, which is particularly important in a low light situation or when the assailant is behind you.

We're going to be continuing these exercises in the future. The next set is going to emphasize getting control of the gun arm then attacking the assailant directly (going for elbows, knees, eyes, ears, and other nice vulnerable spots) rather than trying to take the gun away directly.

Carbine

Our third activity this month was the first of what will be a series of rifle/carbine exercises. Several of our members have recently acquired black rifles of one description or another (ARs mostly) and expressed interest in some long gun training. We asked Robert, one of our members who is very well versed in rifle shooting, to do some instruction for us. Unfortunately, I missed part of his lecture because I was still doing the disarm training. During the part I was able to listen to he gave a very solid explanation of the operating procedures for the AR and AK. We had a nice discussion about the merits of different rifles and calibers, getting good rifle magazines that will work with your gun, and flashlight techniques (which should come in handy next month). Robert had to run off to get ready for a wedding, but after the discussion was done we had a chance to do some shooting.

There was a fair amount of rifle trading going on during the shooting period. It's always nice to get a chance to shoot some different guns. One of our members had let me shoot his AR on a previous occasion, so I returned the favor by letting him shoot my Robinson Armament XCR. He seemed to like it, and later commented to me that it had less recoil than his AR, which surprised me a bit. I recently finished the break-in period, and last time I brought it up to the range I adjusted the gas system from full bore to a much lower setting. This reduced recoil noticeably, but I'm surprised that it was actually less than a gas impingement AR (not that either of them has a lot of recoil shooting the .223 round).

I also think shooting my rifle convinced him of the merits of a vertical foregrip. I have to say that I resisted putting a foregrip on there for a long time; it just seemed way too "tacticool" for me. However, reading Kyle Lamb's book Green Eyes Black Rifles made me reconsider. He's definitely a guy who knows what he's talking about and he makes several good arguments for a forward pistol grip. The one that finally pushed me over the edge was its benefits in weapon retention, but I've found that it really does help in countering muzzle rise for follow up shots and driving the weapon from one target to another.

We did have one serious malfunction. One of our members shooting steel cased Wolf ammo though his M&P AR suffered a stuck case. It was stuck well enough that no amount of racking the bolt was sufficient to remove it. Eventually he disassembled his rifle and we used a cleaning rod to knock the case out. This did give me the opportunity to show a member who was considering getting into black rifles the difference between the AR bolt (lots of little lugs, spring loaded ejector, little extractor) and the bolt from my AK (three big lugs, fixed ejector, big extractor).

Later on I also had a chance to watch Brianna and Lizette shoot an AR. Neither of them have a black rifle of their own, but we were able to talk them into trying one out. From the smiles on their faces I think they enjoyed it quite a bit. The look of the AR can be intimidating to someone who's never shot it, but thanks to their low recoil .223 rifles are a real joy to shoot and very friendly to new shooters.

Despite the unexpected number of shooters I think this month's event went fairly well. We had to adapt a bit, but plenty of our more experienced shooters were willing to pitch in and help run things. I'd really like to thank Brianna, Lizette, and Robert for contributing to this month's events. All three of them did an excellent job. I think they really helped us expand our toolbox into some new areas.

The Utah Polite Society has a very full calendar coming up this month and next. On June 21st we're going to be going out the desert in Skull Valley, west of Salt Lake. We've got three major activities planned for while we're out there: We're going to be doing some 360 degree pistol scenarios (there's a nice bend in the canyon that provides an all-around backstop). We'll also take advantage of some of the extended ranges out there to do some longer ranged carbine work. Finally, we'll be doing some Box O' Truth style penetration testing of things like drywall, windshields, and car doors. Our next regular event will be on the 5th of July. We'll be doing the carbine class again, probably focusing on slings and transition to the pistol. Less than a week later, on the evening of Friday, July 11th, we will be having our yearly night shoot. We did this last year and I think it was a really big success. Shooting at night is a very eye opening experience if you've never done it before, and something few of us get enough practice at.

The Utah Polite Society

Thursday, December 4, 2008

December event

One Liner's

Monday, November 3, 2008

John Farnam's Fighting With a Handgun class

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Don't Expect Them to Go Down!!!

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Training Oportunities

October event

Monday, September 8, 2008

Building Your Own High Visibility Front Sight

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Dogs Attack

Man fends off dog with pistol

Video captures from rifle exercises

Annual Night Shoot coming up

Monday, July 7, 2008

July Event Report

Sunday, June 22, 2008

June Desert Shoot Event Report

Mother's Day Class

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

June Event Report

Calendar

Utah's Personal Protection Laboratory