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.
Monday, March 29, 2010
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.
Suarez International Trauma Care for Shooters class
Back in November I took Suarez International Trauma Care for Shooters taught by Karl Johnson in Blairsville, Georgia. Tactical trauma care was an area I'd identified as a hole in my skill set quite a while ago, and I'm not alone. We all love to train to do cool, fun stuff like shoot and stab people, but learning how to patch up the holes after a fight never seems to be a priority. This was the first opportunity I'd had to take a class like this and wanted to jump on it.
The class was fairly small, just seven students. Quite a few of them had been to Karl's one day tactical trauma seminar during Warrior Skills Camp last July, and the fact that they showed up for the two day version this speaks well of his teaching skills. This also was my first opportunity to meet Rick Klopp, who was hosting the class. I'd had an online acquaintance with Rick on Warrior Talk for a while now, but this was the first time I'd met him in person. It was also a chance to renew my acquaintance with a couple from South Carolina who I'd met at Tom Sotis' knife class back in June.
The venue for the class was, Camp Jabez, a small summer camp type facility in Blairsville, Georgia. For those who opted to stay at the camp, we got bunks in a bunkhouse and all of our meals for less than the cost of a room at a local hotel. It's a really nice facility, and has everything you could want except a shooting range. For the live fire portion of the class we relocated to a range about fifteen minutes away. Most of the class met for dinner at Camp Jabez on Friday night and enjoyed some good conversation over a nice meal before adjourning upstairs to watch a Systema DVD.
Saturday
The first day was mostly classroom lecture, with the hands on portion of the class on the second day. Karl began with his bio, which is pretty impressive. He's been a police officer, SWAT team member and medic, a contractor in Iraq as a medic and team leader on a personal security detail, and is currently an ICU nurse. He is extremely qualified to teach about tactical trauma care, with a wealth of hands on experience.
He began by talking about what we would learn in the class. The Army talks about Tactical Casualty Combat Care (TCCC) in terms of 3 phases: care under fire, tactical field care, and casualty evacuation. This class was primarily focused on the civilian context, where we can usually rely on an ambulance to show up and take care of the evacuation phase (there are exceptions of course, if you're way out on the boonies, or in the middle of a big disaster like Hurricane Katrina evacuation may be a long time coming). So we spent most of our dime talking about care under fire, and tactical field care.
Karl emphasized that nothing we were learning in this class was intended as a permanent fix. The goal is to keep someone's condition from getting worse, or slow down the rate they are getting worse, long enough for help to arrive and get them to a hospital.
There is a difference between tactical trauma care and first aid. Tactical trauma care is much narrower and more focused. Its pretty much confined to treating wounds from firearms, knives, and blunt objects. Even within these categories, we're only really concerned with wounds that we can do something about. Some injuries just aren't survivable, even if they occurred in an operating room with a trauma surgeon standing by. This class concentrates on wounds that where what we do can make a difference. Unlike first aid, it's usually pretty obvious what the problem is, allowing us to dispense with a lot of the diagnostics associated with normal first aid. If you find someone lying on the ground outside your office, it could be anything from a heart attack to a drunk sleeping it off. In contrast, if a someone goes down during a gunfight, we can make a pretty good guess as to what happened.
Another difference Karl really stressed is that "Scene safety" has a very different meaning in tactical trauma care than it does in first aid. Rather than being concerned with primarily environmental problems like downed power lines, we are concerned with someone who is actively trying to kill us. As long as the fight is still going on, putting your head down and working on a wound could leave us very vulnerable. This means that sometimes the best thing we can do is to ignore a wounded comrade and finish the fight before turning our attention to them. This is really the distinction between the care under fire and tactical field care phases.
Karl explained the biggest threat from the kind of penetrating or blunt trauma we expect in a fight is blood loss. There are some other secondary things to worry about, but blood loss is what kills quickly.
When I was a Boy Scout earning my First Aid merit badge (circa 1990) I was taught that a tourniquet should be a last result, and would almost always result in the loss of a limb. Karl explained that this was probably correct if you used something like a bootlace that applied pressure to a very narrow area. However, a proper tourniquet, at least one inch wide after application, wouldn't result in any permanent harm. Tourniquets are being widely used in Iraq and Afghanistan and are generally the first line of defense against bleeding extremities.
Karl talked a bit about hemostatic agents (such as QuickClot). These have grown increasingly popular in recent years, so much so that some folks seem to think some sort of hemostatic agent is all you need or should be the first choice for every wound. Karl's view, on the other hand, is that hemostatic agents are useful, but more as a last resort, for wounds that aren't in a position where a tourniquet is useful and can't be controlled with direct pressure. He said he doesn't carry any sort of hemostatic agent in his car trauma kit.
While most techniques for dealing with blood loss are aimed at stopping any more blood from being lost, IV fluid replacement can actually increase volume and raise an injured person's blood pressure back towards normal levels. However, while IV fluids can help with dangerously low blood pressure, they don't carry oxygen or clot (in fact, they can make clotting slower and more difficult). Several years ago, the Army emphasized IV fluid replacement in it's Combat Lifesaver classes and employed it aggressively in the field, to the point that some soldiers were coming into hospitals "bleeding pink". In recent years, they've moved away from this and are placing much more emphasis on preventing blood loss through tourniquets and hemostatic agents.
With discussion of some of the more high speed low drag techniques out of the way, Karl moved on to the most basic procedures for stopping bleeding: direct pressure. One of the things he really emphasized that I hadn't appreciated before this was that direct pressure involves more than just shoving down on the wound. It's a three dimensional concept. If you've got a linear, v-shaped wound, you need to exert pressure directly onto the exposed flesh on both sides of the wound. If you've got a big crater, you need to provide pressure in all directions. The way to do this is to pack the wound with gauze, then apply a tight pressure dressing to provide that pressure and keep everything in place.
Blood loss is the most immediate threat, but Karl also went over some longer term consequences of violent trauma that could develop if help takes a while to arrive. A tension pneumothorax is a condition where a puncture allows air to collect inside the chest but outside of the lung. This prevents the lung from inflating properly, making it difficult to breathe. This is the classic "sucking chest wound". A hemothorax is similar, but involves blood instead of air. The accumulation of air can actually start shoving the heart over so it impinges on the other lung, eventually resulting in death.
As immortalized in the movie Three Kings, the treatment is to jab a needle into the chest and let the air out. Karl explained where and how to do this, but he didn't recommend trying it in most circumstances. He doesn't carry a needle for doing this around on a regular basis because the condition takes tens of minutes or hours to develop, by which time the ambulance has probably arrived. You can bandage a chest wound using an occlusive dressing (a fancy way of saying tape something airtight over the wound) to keep any more air from getting in, though this won't help with any air that's already there. Most useful is to be able to describe the symptoms to the paramedics so they can recognize and treat the problem quickly. Besides the bubbling chest wound itself, the main sign of a pneumothorax is difficulty breathing after some sort of trauma to the chest that gets progressively worse.
The other longer term problem we discussed is shock. This doesn't refer to the psychological shock someone might experience after a gunfight, but hypovolemic shock. Essentially, shock is the body's reaction to loosing too much blood. Obviously, the best way to prevent this is to minimize blood loss in the first place. However, we also talked about treatment for shock if it occurs, which basically involves keeping the victim lying down with the feet elevated (unless they have a wound to the torso or chest).
So how does Karl apply these techniques apply in the TCCC care under fire and tactical field care phases mentioned earlier? During the care under fire phase, when the fight is still going on, there isn't really time for packing wounds and applying a pressure dressing. Tourniquets are quick to apply and can prevent someone with a wounded extremity from bleeding out. If you're wounded but still capable of putting on a tourniquet and applying direct pressure, it's time for some self aid. Depending on the severity of the wound, it may be possible to get back in the fight, or at least move to cover and be ready to defend yourself as best you can. If someone is wounded and unconscious, there may be time to slap on a tourniquet and drag them out of the line of fire, but not much else. Finishing the fight and keeping the BG(s) from wounding or killing more people takes priority.
After the fight immediate fight is over, either because all the opponents are down, the cavalry has arrived and secured the area, or active combat has just moved to a different area, it's time for some tactical field care. Pack wounds and apply pressure dressings. As time passes, watch for signs of shock or a pneumothorax.
To round out the lecture portion of the class, Karl broke out a bunch of different tourniquets and pressure dressings from his bag of tricks and opined a bit on the merits and drawbacks of each. The different brands of pressure dressings pretty much follow the same pattern: a stretchy, ace bandage like wrap with an absorbent pad, some method of applying pressure to the wound, and some way to secure the end. While they're generally similar, Karl particularly likes the OALES bandage, because it includes 3 yards of gauze (one less package to open) and has little velcro strips at intervals along the bandage to keep the end from completely unrolling (dealing with the tail as you try to wrap can be a pain). We also went through some of the different tourniquets, but I'll save discussion of those for the Sunday part of the writeup when I was using them to cut off circulation in my extremities.
With that, we adjourned to the chow hall for a nice dinner. Tonights after dinner DVD: Big Folder Fighting Skills by Gabe Suarez (though we spent as much time watching Rick's impromptu knife defense lesson as we did watching the DVD).
Sunday
After a hearty breakfast, we dove right in to the hands on portion of the class. After a bit of review of material from yesterday, we spent the morning trying out various kinds of tourniquet. We applied the tourniquet to our arms and legs, both our own limbs (self aid) and other people's. Once the tourniquet was applied, we (or rather, people in the class who were better at it than I am) felt for a pulse to see if it was tight enough to actually stop bleeding. For these exercises, figuring out how much pressure was enough to do the job was kind of difficult. Of course, in real life, the spurting bleed from an artery will make it pretty evident if you haven't cranked the tourniquet down hard enough. Repeated tourniquet application did not lead to any lost limbs, but they do a pretty good job of simulating a limb disabling injury when they're cranked down (if you can still use the limb normally while the tourniquet is applied, it's probably not tight enough.
First up was the classic tourniquet improvised from a triangular bandage and a stick for a windlass. We tried this both using another bandage to hold the windlass and using the small ring off the top of a soda bottle. This method was the most difficult, took longest to apply, and the hardest to effectively stop blood flow with. Applying it one handed is effectively impossible. If you have two hands available, it can be made to work, but it's definitely not the best option.
Our next tourniquet was the TK-4. This is basically a length of 2" wide elastic with hooks at either end (think of a wide, flat bungee cord). It can be applied one or two handed. It's effective, can get it really tight, but you have to make sure to really crank on it, particularly the first few turns around the limb. On the plus side, it's very small and light, easy to slip into a pocket. At $7 a piece, it's also easy to have a bunch stashed in different places so there's always one available.
The last two tourniquets we looked at were the Combat Application Tourniquet (CAT) and the SOF Tactical Tourniquet (SOFTT). The CAT is, the current U.S military issue, while the SOFTT is currently in use with various special operations forces. The two tourniquets are quite similar. Both can easily be applied one handed and have a built in windlass allowing them to be cranked down hard quite easily. The CAT is a bit more compact, but it relies on velcro and is set up slightly differently for one handed vs. two handed use. The SOFTT has a metal buckle rather than velcro, but it's a bit more difficult to secure the windlass, especially one handed. I like the CAT a bit better, but they're both quality pieces of kit that are very easy to use and effective. The only downside is they're about $30, which makes it more difficult to stash a bunch.
Karl also had an odd tourniquet with a plastic ratcheting design, but it was worn out enough it didn't really work right so I can't really give a good evaluation (I never even wrote down the name of that one).
After a fun morning of tourniqueting each other, we enjoyed a nice lunch courtesy of Camp Jabez and packed up. A few of the students had to depart early, so we were down to four for the afternoon's activities. After giving one of the other student's motorcycle a jump start, we headed out to the range about fifteen minutes away. The range is one used by the local Sheriff's Department. It's in the middle of some fields so we did our training to the mooing of cows (much nicer than the donkey in the next field during Extreme Close Range Gunfighting class).
For the live fire part of the class, Karl handed out folded three by five cards with an injury written on them (something like "Left Leg Heavy Bleeding", for example). If he called out that we were injured, we were to safe or holster our weapons, fall down, and read the card and respond appropriately.
The first scenario he ran us through had a pair of shooters walking through the mall when terrorists open fire. On command, we started shooting the targets and had to keep fire on them (the start signal was often Karl letting loose a few rounds from his AK into the berm). Karl called out a number, indicating which shooter was wounded and that student had to holster, drop, read his injury, apply a tourniquet if appropriate, and drag himself to cover if possible. As this was still the care under fire phase, the other student's job was to move aggressively to finish the fight by putting more rounds into the BGs. After Karl called out that there were no visible bad guys, the other student could come over and start helping with treatment by packing the wound and applying a pressure dressing. We ran the drill several times, so each shooter had the chance to be both the injured and non-injured member. When Rick was the injured student Karl called out that they bad guys were coming back during the tactical field care phase, so Rick was lying there leaning out of cover laying down fire with his Glock while the other student tried to finish bandaging his leg.
After the two man drills, we moved on to a three man exercise. The premise this drew on Karl's time in Iraq: we were were part of a PSD pushed out to provide security and came under attack from insurgents. Karl called out one member to be wounded, and had to provide self aid and find cover while the other two continued to fight. Once the immediate fight was over, one got to work bandaging up the wounded member while the other provided security.
We were generally all pretty good at finishing the fight if we were not one wounded. In all of these drills, communication was key. That said, more communication wasn't necessarily better. If you were hit, calling this out to your partner may just be a distraction to him. On the other hand, once the immediate threat ends, communicating who's injured and how is important.
A three man team really helps. It provides twice as much firepower after someone's been hit and it makes it possible for one person to be dedicated to security while another attends to the wounded during the tactical field care phase. On the other hand, having three people makes communication even more critical. While we were all fairly good shooters and safe gunhandlers, I'm pretty sure Rick was the only one with any real team tactics experience. This kind of limited what we could do as far as being a team goes, both because of lack of knowledge and safety concerns. I could see some of this stuff going really well integrated into a team tactics class.
Since we were all fairly experienced when it came to the firearms end of things, the live fire exercises went a bit faster than Karl planned and we wrapped up about 4:00. We spent some time talking, and each of us had a chance to put some rounds through a student's Suchka. It's really a nice little rifle, but I think we established that it needs to booster on the muzzle rather than a slotted flash hider to function properly, and the LaRue medium height Aimpoint mount is a bit too high for a good cheek weld.
Conclusions
This was truly an excellent class. Karl has a lot of experience and he's quite good at conveying it to students effectively. He does a good job of explaining the context of what he's instructing us to do and helping the students understand why we're doing these things, not just what to do. The first day of the class is a bit of an infodump, but there's a lot to cover and Karl is thankfully an engaging and effective lecturer. Something to take notes on is an absolute must! I think I took more notes in this one day than I have in any other tactical class I've taken. The hands on stuff was really great, and I think Karl does as good a job as can be done without some actual trauma to patch up (which, thankfully, we didn't have).
I would highly recommend Karl's trauma classes to anyone. More than that, this class has only reinforced my belief that some sort of trauma class is an absolutely vital piece of education for anyone who intends to use a firearm for self defense. Many of us spend a lot of time taking fun classes; high speed low drag stuff where we get to shoot a lot and do all sorts of cool stuff. More pedestrian classes like trauma care tend to fall by the wayside. If you are in a gunfight, no matter how good you are, there's a decent chance than you, or a loved one, will get shot. Even if you aren't in a gunfight, every one of those cool classes, every match or practice session at the range is an opportunity for a nasty accident. We try to minimize the risk, but we still need to be prepared to deal with it if it happens. In my opinion, everyone who's serious about shooting and firearms self defense really needs to take a class like this.
The class was fairly small, just seven students. Quite a few of them had been to Karl's one day tactical trauma seminar during Warrior Skills Camp last July, and the fact that they showed up for the two day version this speaks well of his teaching skills. This also was my first opportunity to meet Rick Klopp, who was hosting the class. I'd had an online acquaintance with Rick on Warrior Talk for a while now, but this was the first time I'd met him in person. It was also a chance to renew my acquaintance with a couple from South Carolina who I'd met at Tom Sotis' knife class back in June.
The venue for the class was, Camp Jabez, a small summer camp type facility in Blairsville, Georgia. For those who opted to stay at the camp, we got bunks in a bunkhouse and all of our meals for less than the cost of a room at a local hotel. It's a really nice facility, and has everything you could want except a shooting range. For the live fire portion of the class we relocated to a range about fifteen minutes away. Most of the class met for dinner at Camp Jabez on Friday night and enjoyed some good conversation over a nice meal before adjourning upstairs to watch a Systema DVD.
Saturday
The first day was mostly classroom lecture, with the hands on portion of the class on the second day. Karl began with his bio, which is pretty impressive. He's been a police officer, SWAT team member and medic, a contractor in Iraq as a medic and team leader on a personal security detail, and is currently an ICU nurse. He is extremely qualified to teach about tactical trauma care, with a wealth of hands on experience.
He began by talking about what we would learn in the class. The Army talks about Tactical Casualty Combat Care (TCCC) in terms of 3 phases: care under fire, tactical field care, and casualty evacuation. This class was primarily focused on the civilian context, where we can usually rely on an ambulance to show up and take care of the evacuation phase (there are exceptions of course, if you're way out on the boonies, or in the middle of a big disaster like Hurricane Katrina evacuation may be a long time coming). So we spent most of our dime talking about care under fire, and tactical field care.
Karl emphasized that nothing we were learning in this class was intended as a permanent fix. The goal is to keep someone's condition from getting worse, or slow down the rate they are getting worse, long enough for help to arrive and get them to a hospital.
There is a difference between tactical trauma care and first aid. Tactical trauma care is much narrower and more focused. Its pretty much confined to treating wounds from firearms, knives, and blunt objects. Even within these categories, we're only really concerned with wounds that we can do something about. Some injuries just aren't survivable, even if they occurred in an operating room with a trauma surgeon standing by. This class concentrates on wounds that where what we do can make a difference. Unlike first aid, it's usually pretty obvious what the problem is, allowing us to dispense with a lot of the diagnostics associated with normal first aid. If you find someone lying on the ground outside your office, it could be anything from a heart attack to a drunk sleeping it off. In contrast, if a someone goes down during a gunfight, we can make a pretty good guess as to what happened.
Another difference Karl really stressed is that "Scene safety" has a very different meaning in tactical trauma care than it does in first aid. Rather than being concerned with primarily environmental problems like downed power lines, we are concerned with someone who is actively trying to kill us. As long as the fight is still going on, putting your head down and working on a wound could leave us very vulnerable. This means that sometimes the best thing we can do is to ignore a wounded comrade and finish the fight before turning our attention to them. This is really the distinction between the care under fire and tactical field care phases.
Karl explained the biggest threat from the kind of penetrating or blunt trauma we expect in a fight is blood loss. There are some other secondary things to worry about, but blood loss is what kills quickly.
When I was a Boy Scout earning my First Aid merit badge (circa 1990) I was taught that a tourniquet should be a last result, and would almost always result in the loss of a limb. Karl explained that this was probably correct if you used something like a bootlace that applied pressure to a very narrow area. However, a proper tourniquet, at least one inch wide after application, wouldn't result in any permanent harm. Tourniquets are being widely used in Iraq and Afghanistan and are generally the first line of defense against bleeding extremities.
Karl talked a bit about hemostatic agents (such as QuickClot). These have grown increasingly popular in recent years, so much so that some folks seem to think some sort of hemostatic agent is all you need or should be the first choice for every wound. Karl's view, on the other hand, is that hemostatic agents are useful, but more as a last resort, for wounds that aren't in a position where a tourniquet is useful and can't be controlled with direct pressure. He said he doesn't carry any sort of hemostatic agent in his car trauma kit.
While most techniques for dealing with blood loss are aimed at stopping any more blood from being lost, IV fluid replacement can actually increase volume and raise an injured person's blood pressure back towards normal levels. However, while IV fluids can help with dangerously low blood pressure, they don't carry oxygen or clot (in fact, they can make clotting slower and more difficult). Several years ago, the Army emphasized IV fluid replacement in it's Combat Lifesaver classes and employed it aggressively in the field, to the point that some soldiers were coming into hospitals "bleeding pink". In recent years, they've moved away from this and are placing much more emphasis on preventing blood loss through tourniquets and hemostatic agents.
With discussion of some of the more high speed low drag techniques out of the way, Karl moved on to the most basic procedures for stopping bleeding: direct pressure. One of the things he really emphasized that I hadn't appreciated before this was that direct pressure involves more than just shoving down on the wound. It's a three dimensional concept. If you've got a linear, v-shaped wound, you need to exert pressure directly onto the exposed flesh on both sides of the wound. If you've got a big crater, you need to provide pressure in all directions. The way to do this is to pack the wound with gauze, then apply a tight pressure dressing to provide that pressure and keep everything in place.
Blood loss is the most immediate threat, but Karl also went over some longer term consequences of violent trauma that could develop if help takes a while to arrive. A tension pneumothorax is a condition where a puncture allows air to collect inside the chest but outside of the lung. This prevents the lung from inflating properly, making it difficult to breathe. This is the classic "sucking chest wound". A hemothorax is similar, but involves blood instead of air. The accumulation of air can actually start shoving the heart over so it impinges on the other lung, eventually resulting in death.
As immortalized in the movie Three Kings, the treatment is to jab a needle into the chest and let the air out. Karl explained where and how to do this, but he didn't recommend trying it in most circumstances. He doesn't carry a needle for doing this around on a regular basis because the condition takes tens of minutes or hours to develop, by which time the ambulance has probably arrived. You can bandage a chest wound using an occlusive dressing (a fancy way of saying tape something airtight over the wound) to keep any more air from getting in, though this won't help with any air that's already there. Most useful is to be able to describe the symptoms to the paramedics so they can recognize and treat the problem quickly. Besides the bubbling chest wound itself, the main sign of a pneumothorax is difficulty breathing after some sort of trauma to the chest that gets progressively worse.
The other longer term problem we discussed is shock. This doesn't refer to the psychological shock someone might experience after a gunfight, but hypovolemic shock. Essentially, shock is the body's reaction to loosing too much blood. Obviously, the best way to prevent this is to minimize blood loss in the first place. However, we also talked about treatment for shock if it occurs, which basically involves keeping the victim lying down with the feet elevated (unless they have a wound to the torso or chest).
So how does Karl apply these techniques apply in the TCCC care under fire and tactical field care phases mentioned earlier? During the care under fire phase, when the fight is still going on, there isn't really time for packing wounds and applying a pressure dressing. Tourniquets are quick to apply and can prevent someone with a wounded extremity from bleeding out. If you're wounded but still capable of putting on a tourniquet and applying direct pressure, it's time for some self aid. Depending on the severity of the wound, it may be possible to get back in the fight, or at least move to cover and be ready to defend yourself as best you can. If someone is wounded and unconscious, there may be time to slap on a tourniquet and drag them out of the line of fire, but not much else. Finishing the fight and keeping the BG(s) from wounding or killing more people takes priority.
After the fight immediate fight is over, either because all the opponents are down, the cavalry has arrived and secured the area, or active combat has just moved to a different area, it's time for some tactical field care. Pack wounds and apply pressure dressings. As time passes, watch for signs of shock or a pneumothorax.
To round out the lecture portion of the class, Karl broke out a bunch of different tourniquets and pressure dressings from his bag of tricks and opined a bit on the merits and drawbacks of each. The different brands of pressure dressings pretty much follow the same pattern: a stretchy, ace bandage like wrap with an absorbent pad, some method of applying pressure to the wound, and some way to secure the end. While they're generally similar, Karl particularly likes the OALES bandage, because it includes 3 yards of gauze (one less package to open) and has little velcro strips at intervals along the bandage to keep the end from completely unrolling (dealing with the tail as you try to wrap can be a pain). We also went through some of the different tourniquets, but I'll save discussion of those for the Sunday part of the writeup when I was using them to cut off circulation in my extremities.
With that, we adjourned to the chow hall for a nice dinner. Tonights after dinner DVD: Big Folder Fighting Skills by Gabe Suarez (though we spent as much time watching Rick's impromptu knife defense lesson as we did watching the DVD).
Sunday
After a hearty breakfast, we dove right in to the hands on portion of the class. After a bit of review of material from yesterday, we spent the morning trying out various kinds of tourniquet. We applied the tourniquet to our arms and legs, both our own limbs (self aid) and other people's. Once the tourniquet was applied, we (or rather, people in the class who were better at it than I am) felt for a pulse to see if it was tight enough to actually stop bleeding. For these exercises, figuring out how much pressure was enough to do the job was kind of difficult. Of course, in real life, the spurting bleed from an artery will make it pretty evident if you haven't cranked the tourniquet down hard enough. Repeated tourniquet application did not lead to any lost limbs, but they do a pretty good job of simulating a limb disabling injury when they're cranked down (if you can still use the limb normally while the tourniquet is applied, it's probably not tight enough.
First up was the classic tourniquet improvised from a triangular bandage and a stick for a windlass. We tried this both using another bandage to hold the windlass and using the small ring off the top of a soda bottle. This method was the most difficult, took longest to apply, and the hardest to effectively stop blood flow with. Applying it one handed is effectively impossible. If you have two hands available, it can be made to work, but it's definitely not the best option.
Our next tourniquet was the TK-4. This is basically a length of 2" wide elastic with hooks at either end (think of a wide, flat bungee cord). It can be applied one or two handed. It's effective, can get it really tight, but you have to make sure to really crank on it, particularly the first few turns around the limb. On the plus side, it's very small and light, easy to slip into a pocket. At $7 a piece, it's also easy to have a bunch stashed in different places so there's always one available.
The last two tourniquets we looked at were the Combat Application Tourniquet (CAT) and the SOF Tactical Tourniquet (SOFTT). The CAT is, the current U.S military issue, while the SOFTT is currently in use with various special operations forces. The two tourniquets are quite similar. Both can easily be applied one handed and have a built in windlass allowing them to be cranked down hard quite easily. The CAT is a bit more compact, but it relies on velcro and is set up slightly differently for one handed vs. two handed use. The SOFTT has a metal buckle rather than velcro, but it's a bit more difficult to secure the windlass, especially one handed. I like the CAT a bit better, but they're both quality pieces of kit that are very easy to use and effective. The only downside is they're about $30, which makes it more difficult to stash a bunch.
Karl also had an odd tourniquet with a plastic ratcheting design, but it was worn out enough it didn't really work right so I can't really give a good evaluation (I never even wrote down the name of that one).
After a fun morning of tourniqueting each other, we enjoyed a nice lunch courtesy of Camp Jabez and packed up. A few of the students had to depart early, so we were down to four for the afternoon's activities. After giving one of the other student's motorcycle a jump start, we headed out to the range about fifteen minutes away. The range is one used by the local Sheriff's Department. It's in the middle of some fields so we did our training to the mooing of cows (much nicer than the donkey in the next field during Extreme Close Range Gunfighting class).
For the live fire part of the class, Karl handed out folded three by five cards with an injury written on them (something like "Left Leg Heavy Bleeding", for example). If he called out that we were injured, we were to safe or holster our weapons, fall down, and read the card and respond appropriately.
The first scenario he ran us through had a pair of shooters walking through the mall when terrorists open fire. On command, we started shooting the targets and had to keep fire on them (the start signal was often Karl letting loose a few rounds from his AK into the berm). Karl called out a number, indicating which shooter was wounded and that student had to holster, drop, read his injury, apply a tourniquet if appropriate, and drag himself to cover if possible. As this was still the care under fire phase, the other student's job was to move aggressively to finish the fight by putting more rounds into the BGs. After Karl called out that there were no visible bad guys, the other student could come over and start helping with treatment by packing the wound and applying a pressure dressing. We ran the drill several times, so each shooter had the chance to be both the injured and non-injured member. When Rick was the injured student Karl called out that they bad guys were coming back during the tactical field care phase, so Rick was lying there leaning out of cover laying down fire with his Glock while the other student tried to finish bandaging his leg.
After the two man drills, we moved on to a three man exercise. The premise this drew on Karl's time in Iraq: we were were part of a PSD pushed out to provide security and came under attack from insurgents. Karl called out one member to be wounded, and had to provide self aid and find cover while the other two continued to fight. Once the immediate fight was over, one got to work bandaging up the wounded member while the other provided security.
We were generally all pretty good at finishing the fight if we were not one wounded. In all of these drills, communication was key. That said, more communication wasn't necessarily better. If you were hit, calling this out to your partner may just be a distraction to him. On the other hand, once the immediate threat ends, communicating who's injured and how is important.
A three man team really helps. It provides twice as much firepower after someone's been hit and it makes it possible for one person to be dedicated to security while another attends to the wounded during the tactical field care phase. On the other hand, having three people makes communication even more critical. While we were all fairly good shooters and safe gunhandlers, I'm pretty sure Rick was the only one with any real team tactics experience. This kind of limited what we could do as far as being a team goes, both because of lack of knowledge and safety concerns. I could see some of this stuff going really well integrated into a team tactics class.
Since we were all fairly experienced when it came to the firearms end of things, the live fire exercises went a bit faster than Karl planned and we wrapped up about 4:00. We spent some time talking, and each of us had a chance to put some rounds through a student's Suchka. It's really a nice little rifle, but I think we established that it needs to booster on the muzzle rather than a slotted flash hider to function properly, and the LaRue medium height Aimpoint mount is a bit too high for a good cheek weld.
Conclusions
This was truly an excellent class. Karl has a lot of experience and he's quite good at conveying it to students effectively. He does a good job of explaining the context of what he's instructing us to do and helping the students understand why we're doing these things, not just what to do. The first day of the class is a bit of an infodump, but there's a lot to cover and Karl is thankfully an engaging and effective lecturer. Something to take notes on is an absolute must! I think I took more notes in this one day than I have in any other tactical class I've taken. The hands on stuff was really great, and I think Karl does as good a job as can be done without some actual trauma to patch up (which, thankfully, we didn't have).
I would highly recommend Karl's trauma classes to anyone. More than that, this class has only reinforced my belief that some sort of trauma class is an absolutely vital piece of education for anyone who intends to use a firearm for self defense. Many of us spend a lot of time taking fun classes; high speed low drag stuff where we get to shoot a lot and do all sorts of cool stuff. More pedestrian classes like trauma care tend to fall by the wayside. If you are in a gunfight, no matter how good you are, there's a decent chance than you, or a loved one, will get shot. Even if you aren't in a gunfight, every one of those cool classes, every match or practice session at the range is an opportunity for a nasty accident. We try to minimize the risk, but we still need to be prepared to deal with it if it happens. In my opinion, everyone who's serious about shooting and firearms self defense really needs to take a class like this.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
NRA Instructors Course In SLC
Doug Little is holding a three day NRA instructors course that will qualify participants to teach the NRA Basic Pistol Course and Personal Protection in the Home. The dates are Mach 19, 20, & 21.
You can contact Doug directly or go to the NRA training website and search for the two courses for more information and registration.
You can contact Doug directly or go to the NRA training website and search for the two courses for more information and registration.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Training Dates are fixed
All dates are correct at the Suarez website schedule for the Salt Lake City classes being offered in 2010.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
Suarez Rifle Fight Skills Class
As of 1-3-10, the April 10-11 Suarez Fighting Rifle Skills class listed on the Suarez Schedule Page shows Phoenix Arizona as the venue. This is incorrect! Is should read Salt Lake City, Ut. Suarez International is aware of the problem and the web master there should have it fixed before long. Our apologies for any inconvenience.
Friday, December 11, 2009
UPS Saturday Events
As a reminder, UPS hosts a monthly shoot the first Saturday of every month. Our next event will be on January 2, 2010. We'll be there regardless of rain, shine, sleet, snow, wind or football bowl games. For the past couple of months we have experienced an increase in participants, even for the December event which was probably the coldest one on record. We meet at the Hendriksen-PMAA Range at exit 134 on I-80; registration begins at 8:30, and there is a $12.00 range fee.
All events start with a safety briefing, and then we move on to some sort of skills exercise(s). We then set up defensive shooting scenarios that build upon the skills drills. Actual trigger time is only part of coming to a UPS event. As you move through a scenario, the peanut gallery of observers may involve themselves by presenting a training weapon while you scan of additional threats, and you can count on a constructive critique after wards that will further help you develop your defensive skills.
These events are a good venue to try out new gear or to see what others employ, especially if you are new to using a firearm in self defense, or considering a firearm for self defense. All the drills and scenarios are taken at your own speed, and safety is always the top priority. If you would like to be put on the UPS emailing list, send a request to utahps@thebluezone.net
All events start with a safety briefing, and then we move on to some sort of skills exercise(s). We then set up defensive shooting scenarios that build upon the skills drills. Actual trigger time is only part of coming to a UPS event. As you move through a scenario, the peanut gallery of observers may involve themselves by presenting a training weapon while you scan of additional threats, and you can count on a constructive critique after wards that will further help you develop your defensive skills.
These events are a good venue to try out new gear or to see what others employ, especially if you are new to using a firearm in self defense, or considering a firearm for self defense. All the drills and scenarios are taken at your own speed, and safety is always the top priority. If you would like to be put on the UPS emailing list, send a request to utahps@thebluezone.net
Training Schedule for 2010
As noted in an earlier blog (see Point Shooting Progressions, October 8) we are happy to announce additional Suarez International Training Classes being held at the Hendriksen-PMAA Range. These courses are all being taught by Doug Little, Suarez International Staff Instructor.
April 10-11 Suarez Fighting Rifle: This two day course introduces you to rifle fighting fundamentals and is suitable for beginners or as a refresher course for more seasoned shooters. Through a carefully designed and detailed no BS curriculum the instructor is able to bring you up to a level of skill in a short two day class that previously would take over 4 or 5 days to achieve at other schools. You will learn a complete presentation of the combative technique of the rifle which will put you in good standing for any defensive situations you may encounter in the real world.
May 1-2 Suarez Close Range Gun Fighting: Referred to as the flagship Suarez course, it goes as far as you can safely go on a square range with live-fire pistols. The dynamic curriculum surpasses the traditional handgun methods commonly taught in most institutions and focuses of the use of the pistol in aggressive close range applications likely in individual civilian street encounters.
The class begins with a tune-up of the fundamentals, then we progress quickly to new skills such as Proactive and Reactive Manipulations, Shooting While Moving Off The X, Reality-Based Multiple Hostiles Engagement, 360 degree CQB Movement, Danger-Close Fighting, Bilateral Shooting, 360 degree After Action Assessment Methods, and Integrating the Flashlight and Other Tools into the Firing Platform. This is the life-saving material that is often ignored in many other programs. In two days, you will receive more information than most armed professionals ever get! Suitable for BOTH civilian defenders and professional operators.
Please note that this is not a class for first time beginners. If you have had training in basic self defense pistol handling, this class will take you to the next level. Those of you who spent last summer with us at the Monday Night classes will benefit from the course.
September 18-19 Suarez Kalashnikov Rifle Gun Fighting: The AK-47/74 series of rifle is one of the most prolific and useful weapons on earth. Close to 100 million have been made in various parts of the world and anyone's chances of encountering these weapons is high. This special course will take a close look at the Kalashnikov Rifle System and teach you to fight with it in both the standard "urban rifle" engagement as well as in the Close Range Gunfighting matrix. This material will have you appreciating the AK platform like no other rifle. It is too simple to be "tactical".
October 16-17 Suarez Close Range Gun Fighting: A repeat of the May class. This offering will be perfect for those of you that shoot with us through the upcoming summer months. Spend several Monday evenings with UPS developing and honing your basic skills and then take this course.
You can register for all these classes at the Suarez International website.
We are also looking at a 1 or 2 day edged weapons course. This will be held inside, so the dates will be sometime in the winter months.
April 10-11 Suarez Fighting Rifle: This two day course introduces you to rifle fighting fundamentals and is suitable for beginners or as a refresher course for more seasoned shooters. Through a carefully designed and detailed no BS curriculum the instructor is able to bring you up to a level of skill in a short two day class that previously would take over 4 or 5 days to achieve at other schools. You will learn a complete presentation of the combative technique of the rifle which will put you in good standing for any defensive situations you may encounter in the real world.
May 1-2 Suarez Close Range Gun Fighting: Referred to as the flagship Suarez course, it goes as far as you can safely go on a square range with live-fire pistols. The dynamic curriculum surpasses the traditional handgun methods commonly taught in most institutions and focuses of the use of the pistol in aggressive close range applications likely in individual civilian street encounters.
The class begins with a tune-up of the fundamentals, then we progress quickly to new skills such as Proactive and Reactive Manipulations, Shooting While Moving Off The X, Reality-Based Multiple Hostiles Engagement, 360 degree CQB Movement, Danger-Close Fighting, Bilateral Shooting, 360 degree After Action Assessment Methods, and Integrating the Flashlight and Other Tools into the Firing Platform. This is the life-saving material that is often ignored in many other programs. In two days, you will receive more information than most armed professionals ever get! Suitable for BOTH civilian defenders and professional operators.
Please note that this is not a class for first time beginners. If you have had training in basic self defense pistol handling, this class will take you to the next level. Those of you who spent last summer with us at the Monday Night classes will benefit from the course.
September 18-19 Suarez Kalashnikov Rifle Gun Fighting: The AK-47/74 series of rifle is one of the most prolific and useful weapons on earth. Close to 100 million have been made in various parts of the world and anyone's chances of encountering these weapons is high. This special course will take a close look at the Kalashnikov Rifle System and teach you to fight with it in both the standard "urban rifle" engagement as well as in the Close Range Gunfighting matrix. This material will have you appreciating the AK platform like no other rifle. It is too simple to be "tactical".
October 16-17 Suarez Close Range Gun Fighting: A repeat of the May class. This offering will be perfect for those of you that shoot with us through the upcoming summer months. Spend several Monday evenings with UPS developing and honing your basic skills and then take this course.
You can register for all these classes at the Suarez International website.
We are also looking at a 1 or 2 day edged weapons course. This will be held inside, so the dates will be sometime in the winter months.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
John Farnam's Scenario Based Defensive Handgun Course
In late October I had an opportunity to assist John Farnam with a class in Columbia, South Carolina. The class was itself the same format as the one he taught here last year: one day of live fire and one day of scenario based force on force training. One difference this year was that was that John’s wife Vicki Farnam was here as well, teaching a Women’s Defensive Handgun course.
Last May, I took John’s instructor course. One of the perks of taking the instructor course is the opportunity to act as an assistant instructor at John’s classes. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to avail myself of that opportunity. This writeup is going to be a bit different than my usual class review, focusing more on instructor stuff and some of the issues the students had in the class.
In addition to myself, there were three other fellows assisting with the class. We had eight students, so the student instructor ratio was pretty impressive. For many of the students, this was their first time in one of John’s classes, but others had taken some classes from him before. Every student who was in the class last year was back again as either an instructor or a student. Vicki had five ladies in her class, most of whom were the wives or girlfriends of students.
Usually, at this point in one of my class write-ups I describe the gear I used to shoot the class. In this case, I didn’t end up firing a single shot all weekend. Nevertheless, I carried my usual Glock 21 in a Comp-Tac C-T.A.C IWB holster and a S&W 442 in a pocket holster. All of the instructors were carrying Glocks of one variety or another, except for John, who carried a SIG P250. Five students carried Glocks as well, with one SIG 228, one Springfield XD and one 9mm 1911.
Friday Night Lecture
The class met on Friday night in a meeting room at the local hotel where John and many of the other students were staying. We started off with a round of introductions and a bit of lecture from John. As happened several times in this course, both John and Vicki’s classes came together for the lecture. Comparing this to last year’s Friday night talk, it’s quite evident that John is speaking extemporaneously, rather than delivering a canned lecture. He hits the same major points, but it comes in a different order, and a lot of the ancillary stuff was different. In part, this was because he’s very responsive to student questions and he can launch into a discussion of pretty much any self-defense related topic someone raises.
Saturday Morning
After breakfast at Denny’s, most of the class convoyed to the range together. John delivered the range safety lecture and we geared up and got to work.
We started out with some loading and unloading drills. John runs a hot range, where students are expected to have their pistols loaded at all times (as he puts it, empty guns make him nervous). However, there are occasions when we want unloaded weapons, such as doing a dry fire drill. John ran everyone through the process of administrative unloading, loading, and chamber checks, then got everyone unloaded for some dry fire.
Unlike a lot of training, where the drill begins with a command to draw and fire and ends as soon as the shooters are done firing, John incorporates some pre and post fight actions in almost every drill. Students start out in the interview stance, moving, looking behind them, and practicing verbal disengagement in response to queries from John.
I noticed some of the students didn’t quite get the point of the tape loop concept. “Tape loop” is John’s term for short bit of pre-rehearsed dialogue. Attempting to verbally disengage from a potential threat is a lousy time to extemporize. For one thing, it makes your response more likely to come out garbled or confused when you most need to be clear. More importantly, when a potential assailant asks for the time, or directions, or help finding his lost puppy, he’s trying to distract you. Coming up with a dismissive response to his question (“my watch is broken”) can do the job of distracting you just as well as looking at your watch. “Sorry, I can’t help you” is a quick, all-purpose response to anyone who approaches you on the street. It doesn’t require any specific thought about their question, leaving you free to concentrate on maneuvering, glancing behind you for the potential assailant’s partner, etc.
After a bit of verbal disengagement, John gave the command to move and draw. We had a couple of the students with a tendency to sweep their support hands during the drawstroke, and the instructors had to keep an eye out for this. John teaches that if you’re not shooting to bring the gun back to a compressed high ready with the pistol brought back just beneath the chin and rotated to the support side. This gives better disarm resistance, greater visibility, and unlike low ready, it keeps the gun pointed at the target so that you just have to drive the gun straight out to the target, rather than swinging up and potentially overshooting and having to bring it back down. Some students had a tendancy to forget the compressed ready position and leave the gun out at full extension. As the class progressed, others started drawing to the compressed ready, rather than drawing to full extension and then bringing the pistol back to compressed ready. Drawing to full extension every time keeps the drawstroke consistent, rather than having to decide between two different drawstrokes depending on the situation.
After a few moments with the gun in compressed ready, moving and checking behind them, John announced that the target was threatening you with a weapon, prompting the students to open fire. Since this first drill was done dry, the half of the class that wasn’t shooting manually reciprocated the shooting students’ slides after each shot to reset the trigger. After firing four shots, the students moved and fired another four. John announced that the target was down and out of the fight, prompting students to move again, scan in front, then turn around and do a sul scan. Once everyone has done this, John called for students to holster.
This was some students’ first exposure to these kinds of pre and post fight drills, so we ran through it dry a couple of times to get everyone on the same page.
Saturday Afternoon
After lunch, we did the same drill live fire. This was some students’ first exposure to the “zipper” technique John teaches. Rather than aiming exclusively at the upper torso or center of mass, you fire your first shot at the navel area and move up the midline of the body to the upper chest. Starting at belt level prevents the gun from obscuring the target’s hands, and ensures you won’t lose sight of the assailant if he ducks. The area a few inches on either side of the body’s midline is filled with major arteries and organs, making it a good all the way up. This is rather different from the way most students had been taught previously, and many of them tended to fire one shot into the belly and the rest into the upper torso rather than working their way up.
Rather than taping every shot after each string of fire, John has the students tape only the misses (those not within a six inch strip running up the middle of the target). Not only does this save time for most shooters, it also emphasizes that absolute precision is not the goal, just getting rounds within the target area.
After a few repetitions of the drill, John threw in a reload, followed by an additional burst. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, several of John’s students were working in New Orleans, and found that jettisoning the magazine into the murky depths during each reload quickly depleted their supply of available mags. Since then, John has moved to teaching students to retain magazines as the default, rather than dropping them.
When everyone was comfortable with the reload, we moved back and doubled the distance to fifteen yards. Despite the longer range most students were able to maintain the standard of accuracy. We then moved up to three yards and shot the drill one last time. At this range, the drill was pretty easy, and most students were able to increase their rate of fire and still get good hits. John’s philosophy on accuracy is that if you’re missing the six inch wide target zone with more than 10% of your shots, you’re probably shooting too fast. On the other hand, if you’re not missing about one shot in ten, you’re probably shooting too slow. The goal is a balance between speed and accuracy.
Remaining at 3 yards, we switched over to what John likes to call the “mother in law” drill. This is a hostage rescue scenario where the student has to put a shot through the nose of the target into the brainstem. This is the only part of the body that will produce an instantaneous stop. If someone has a hostage, holding a gun to their head or a knife to their throat, this is the kind of shot you need to make. However, the brain stem is a very small target (about the size of your thumb) buried deep within the skull. Particularly from the front, the skull is heavy enough to deflect pistol bullets away from a relatively small internal target like the brainstem. Given these difficulties, it’s very difficult to hit the brainstem of an active, moving target. To help cope with these difficulties, John recommends asking the hostage taker, “What do you want?” and waiting about two seconds for him to start considering the question. When he starts thinking, he’s probably going to stop moving and look at you, giving you a chance to take the brain stem shot.
To set this up as a drill, we drew some cartoony faces on the heads of cardboard targets. Students made the verbal challenge from a range of 3 yards, raised their pistols, and fired two shots at the nose. At this range, most students who were able to keep their shots inside the nose area if they took their time. Bad shots were generally a result of rushing and taking the shot too quickly. Some students also rushed to raise their pistol. Asking, “What do you want?” only works if you give the hostage taker a second or two to start thinking about it. Shooting immediately defeats the purpose.
After the hostage drill, we brought out the table and had the students lay their weapons out on it and shoot each weapon in turn. The prevalence of Glocks made this a bit less interesting than it might have otherwise been, but the SIG, XD, and 1911 lent some variety to the proceedings. This was also the first drill of the day we shot on the steel rotator targets rather than cardboard.
It was around this time that one of our students had to leave. His wife, over in Vicki’s class, wasn’t doing too well and he needed to take her to the hospital. She and her husband both rejoined us the next day after getting some IV fluids at the hospital. They couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong with her, but the most likely issues were dehydration and lack of food. Keeping fed and especially keeping hydrated are critical when training, even in the relatively cool South Carolina fall.
Once each student had shot all the other weapons, John had the instructors set up malfunctions in each of the pistols on the table. We set up empty chambers, stovepipes, and failures to extract. One of the things John emphasizes is clearing malfunctions without looking at or trying to diagnose them. Tap rack bang, and if that doesn’t work, lock, eject, rack, rack, rack, and reload.
Up until this point, all our drills had been exclusively handgun oriented, and at a distance of at least three yards. Since everyone had demonstrated fairly good gunhandling skills, John set up a more complex scenario involving close range shooting and alternative force. The student started off making a shot from retention at a cardboard target within arms length, then fired bursts at a more distant rotator target until he expended all the rounds in the magazine. With an empty gun, he was then confronted with another close range cardboard target. He used his pistol as an impact weapon, ramming its muzzle into the target’s head, then transitioned to his knife and stabbed the target in the stomach.
The students did fairly well on the shooting portion of his drill, but for most of them it was obviously their first experience with using the gun as an impact weapon, or deploying their knife in a defensive scenario. Every single student was carrying their knife on their strong side, requiring them to swap the pistol into their support side hand before beginning to draw the knife. Combined with the fact that they were all carrying folders, and were generally none too quick about deploying them) there was usually a substantial wait between the muzzle strike and the stabbing, more than enough time for the assailant to recover and start doing bad stuff to them. Having an alternative weapon on the support side, either a knife or back-up gun (or both) is a much better choice than having both on the strong side. If you’re going to carry a knife as a back-up weapon, practice deploying it, just like you practice drawing the handgun. If you need it, you’ll need it in a hurry.
One other thing I noticed during this drill was the limited amount of movement by most of the students. When we’re lined up shooting in relays, there are some obvious limits to the amount of movement each student can do; one or two steps to either side at most. In a drill like this, where only one student shoots at a time, there are much fewer restrictions, yet students were still only taking one or two steps in each direction when moving between strings. In order for movement to be useful, it needs to be rapid and dynamic, not a couple of lazy sidesteps. I think this may be an instance where range restrictions are translating into some bad training habits.
With the end of this drill, the light was fading and we moved on to our night shoot. John demonstrated the Harries technique and a modified version of the neck index that places the flashlight higher on the head. We started out shooting without flashlights, just using ambient light and the light from the “takedown mode” on John’s FirstLight Tomahawk (flashes the red and blue LEDs and strobes the main light in sequence). We had two rotators set up and students fired a burst at each of them, with movement in between. Then we broke out the lights and the students had a chance to try both methods before going through and shooting it a third time using the method of their choice. The biggest problem I noted was that some students had a hard time keeping the light on target. These lights are bright enough that you can usually see enough to shoot even if the brightest part of the beam isn’t pointed directly at the target, but that eliminates a lot of the light’s blinding potential. Lights are bullet magnets, so they should be used sparingly, but when they’re on, they needed to be pointed directly at the assailant’s face, to inhibit his ability to direct fire your way as much as possible.
Once everyone had shot with the flashlights, John broke out a couple of road flares to illuminate the targets and we set up the malfunction drills again. This time, it was downright impossible to diagnose the malfunctions by looking at them, demonstrating one of the reasons why John teaches clearing jams without trying to figure out what they are first.
This finished up the night shoot, so we packed up our gear and adjourned to a late dinner at an Italian restaurant near John’s hotel.
Sunday Morning
After another breakfast at Denny’s we all headed down to the range. This morning we got started with another iteration of the dry fire drill. After yesterday, most of the students had this down pat.
Following this, we all divested ourselves of any firearms, knives, OC, saps, or any other weapons for our force on force drills. Obviously, we don’t want anyone confusing a live gun for an airsoft, but it’s important to remove other weapons as well. After everyone laid their weapons out on the table, we did a pat-down of each person just to make sure nobody was carrying any dangerous implements.
For the first set of drills, rather than airsoft, the students were using fake blue guns. A few students had their own, and from John’s rather sizable collection we were able to get most students a pretty similar replica of their carry weapon. The only fellow that had to make do with a different make was the one shooting the SIG.
Once everyone had joined the rubber gun squad, we began some simple disengagement drills. John described some of the tactics potential assailants use to get you to stop and distract you: asking for directions or the time, or for help finding their child or pet. Sometimes they’ll run through a whole string of opening lines to see what catches your attention, then pick up on that subject for further conversations. The students paired up and one played a panhandler while the other tried to avoid engaging with them to give them a chance to practice their disengagement skills in a more free form environment. We started out with fairly passive panhandlers and simple verbal disengagement, “Sorry, I can’t help you.” One of the more interesting techniques John recommends is pointing down at the ground on one side of the panhandler and saying “uh-oh”, then bolting past him on the opposite side when he looks down to see what you’re pointing at. While this seems to be one level above “your shoelace is untied,” it can evidently be quite effective.
In the next drill, we had the panhandlers be a bit more persistent, prompting the other student to escalate their verbal disengagement, “Back off!” John recommends pointing at the potential assailant when you do this, so that any witnesses whose attention you attract are more likely to realize it’s you telling the panhandler to back off, rather than vice versa. He also recommends pointing with two fingers rather than just one to avoid giving the impression that you’ve just flipped him the bird.
Finally, we had the panhandler escalate the point of pulling a knife, prompting the student to draw. One of the things John discussed at this point were some strategies for engaging an assailant at close ranges like this: getting off the X at a forward angle (45 degrees to the right or left of the assailant) to create a lot of apparent motion and get on the assailant’s flank while drawing and shooting him. This is the kind of tactic I’ve learned before from Gabe Suarez and Randy Harris, but it seems to be spreading. The art progresses, and one of the ways you can tell the good trainers is they’re moving forward with it.
Sunday Afternoon
After lunch, we moved on to some more complex scenarios. In these drills, rather than pairing the students up, John’s assistant instructors served as the actors in the scenarios and we ran the students through one at a time. I have to say, this was a lot of fun. Enough fun that I didn’t really mind getting pelted with quite a few airsoft pellets over the course of the afternoon. However, one thing I always tried to keep the in mind that the objective was to help the students learn, rather than to show off my own skills.
Our first scenario was a straightforward application of the disengagement skills the students practiced during the morning. This time, however, the students faced three aggressive assailants instead of one. We tried to box the student in, trapping them. As we closed in, we got more aggressive, escalating our verbal interactions, and eventually flashing (but not drawing) a weapon. This scenario had some interesting lessons. At what point are you justified in shooting? Does it require seeing a gun, or is this group being sufficiently menacing to justify shooting them before the gun is seen. Who do you shoot first? The closest one? The one who showed a weapon? Different students took different approaches, with varying degrees of success. The most notable difference was that sduents who moved quickly and decisively to avoid being boxed in were the only ones who were able to prevent the situation from escalating.
One of the most interesting scenarios we did took place at a family reunion and had one instructor playing a suicidal distant relative, while the other two of us tried to talk him out of killing himself. As the scenario progressed, the suicidal became more and more agitated pointing the blue gun at the student and the other two relatives in addition to himself. Important to the setup was the idea that these folks were your relatives, but they weren’t close enough to automatically be people you’d risk your life or limb for. Students’ reactions ran the gamut from leaving the area and calling 911 to shooting the suicidal relative when he begins to point the gun at other people. The most effective reactions tended to be those that were the most decisive, whether it was leaving immediately, dragging the non-suicidal relatives away, or shooting the suicidal relative. One student performed a very nice covert draw before approaching, then raised the gun and shot the suicidal relative in the head at lightning speed the moment he started to point the gun at someone else. The students who dithered tended to be much less effective. Those who approached, but didn’t act or tried to talk to the suicidal relative, or who weren’t forceful in trying to move the other relatives to safety tended to end up looking down the muzzle of the blue gun before they were able to shoot. The difference between suicide and homicide can be as little as a flick of the wrist.
We also did a scenario that replicated the hostage shot from live fire yesterday. One instructor took another hostage in the classic, gun to the head pose, while the third instructor (me) ran around like a blithering idiot trying to distract the student and generally getting in the way. Some of the students ran into trouble with this one, either they never did the “What do you want?” bit and tried to take the shot as the hostage taker was moving. Others asked the question, but didn’t leave time for the hostage taker to think about it before firing, which kind of defeats the purpose. On the other hand, waiting too long for a shot could be just as bad, giving the hostage taker a chance to shoot you before you get him.
The next scenario was a bit more conventional: the student walks in on a robbery in progress and has to decide what to do about the situation. One instructor played the clerk getting held up, while the other two were robbers armed with a knife and gun respectively. Some students elected to simply walk away, deciding that whatever was going on here was none of their business. Those who elected to intervene had to decide on their tactical priorities, since the robber with the knife was closer, but still out of contact range. One ended up shooting both robbers and the clerk!
The last scenario was probably the most fun from the roleplaying perspective. The student needs to exit a narrow alley to go assist their wife or girlfriend with an automotive problem, but it is blocked by two brothers having a raging argument, who ignore any of the student’s requests to get by, while a third brother attempts to calm down the other two. If the student elects not to take action for a while one of the brothers eventually draws a knife and stabs the other.
In contrast to the other scenarios, the student wasn’t really in any direct jeopardy unless they injected themselves into the situation. The brothers are directing all their attention toward each other, totally ignoring the student. There’s no immediate danger, but there’s also no justification for using force to solve the problem. Some students elected to wait it out, perhaps calling the police. Others intervened after one brother stabbed the other. Some drew their weapon, perhaps on somewhat shaky legal ground. A few tried to rush past, one of them after drawing his weapon, which resulted in an attempted gun grab (which in turn led to him shooting all three brothers).
In all of the scenarios, John emphasized that there was no “School Solution” to any of these situations. Some courses of action may be more successful than others this time around, but that’s no guarantee that the same will hold true in the real world. The common threads were that decisive action almost always led to better results than dithering or tentative action. Sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing, or choose not to get involved, but that should be a deliberate choice, not the result of an inability to make up your mind.
The assistant instructors gave our assessment of the class and John gave his observations and provided a final wrap up. With that we packed up and many of us went out for a nice steak dinner before going our separate ways.
Overall, I think this was a great course. I’d definitely like to do some more firearms and self defense instruction in the future. As always, the best way to learn something is to teach it, and I think I may have gotten more out of this class than the students. I think the students got a lot out of the course to. Force on force training is a real eye opener, and scenario based training like this can make you think about stuff you may not have considered before. I really enjoyed assisting with the instruction and playing the opposing force during the scenarios. While none of them were complete novices coming in, I still saw lot of progress from some of them over the course of the class. If I have any regret about this class, it's that I wasn't able to spend much time with Vicki, since she was mostly busy with the ladies class. She's an excellent instructor and one I think I could learn a lot from both as a student, and as a fellow instructor. Hopefully, I’ll be able to assist again when John comes around next year. I would highly recommend this class, and indeed any of John and Vicki Farnam’s classes.
Last May, I took John’s instructor course. One of the perks of taking the instructor course is the opportunity to act as an assistant instructor at John’s classes. This is the first time I’ve had a chance to avail myself of that opportunity. This writeup is going to be a bit different than my usual class review, focusing more on instructor stuff and some of the issues the students had in the class.
In addition to myself, there were three other fellows assisting with the class. We had eight students, so the student instructor ratio was pretty impressive. For many of the students, this was their first time in one of John’s classes, but others had taken some classes from him before. Every student who was in the class last year was back again as either an instructor or a student. Vicki had five ladies in her class, most of whom were the wives or girlfriends of students.
Usually, at this point in one of my class write-ups I describe the gear I used to shoot the class. In this case, I didn’t end up firing a single shot all weekend. Nevertheless, I carried my usual Glock 21 in a Comp-Tac C-T.A.C IWB holster and a S&W 442 in a pocket holster. All of the instructors were carrying Glocks of one variety or another, except for John, who carried a SIG P250. Five students carried Glocks as well, with one SIG 228, one Springfield XD and one 9mm 1911.
Friday Night Lecture
The class met on Friday night in a meeting room at the local hotel where John and many of the other students were staying. We started off with a round of introductions and a bit of lecture from John. As happened several times in this course, both John and Vicki’s classes came together for the lecture. Comparing this to last year’s Friday night talk, it’s quite evident that John is speaking extemporaneously, rather than delivering a canned lecture. He hits the same major points, but it comes in a different order, and a lot of the ancillary stuff was different. In part, this was because he’s very responsive to student questions and he can launch into a discussion of pretty much any self-defense related topic someone raises.
Saturday Morning
After breakfast at Denny’s, most of the class convoyed to the range together. John delivered the range safety lecture and we geared up and got to work.
We started out with some loading and unloading drills. John runs a hot range, where students are expected to have their pistols loaded at all times (as he puts it, empty guns make him nervous). However, there are occasions when we want unloaded weapons, such as doing a dry fire drill. John ran everyone through the process of administrative unloading, loading, and chamber checks, then got everyone unloaded for some dry fire.
Unlike a lot of training, where the drill begins with a command to draw and fire and ends as soon as the shooters are done firing, John incorporates some pre and post fight actions in almost every drill. Students start out in the interview stance, moving, looking behind them, and practicing verbal disengagement in response to queries from John.
I noticed some of the students didn’t quite get the point of the tape loop concept. “Tape loop” is John’s term for short bit of pre-rehearsed dialogue. Attempting to verbally disengage from a potential threat is a lousy time to extemporize. For one thing, it makes your response more likely to come out garbled or confused when you most need to be clear. More importantly, when a potential assailant asks for the time, or directions, or help finding his lost puppy, he’s trying to distract you. Coming up with a dismissive response to his question (“my watch is broken”) can do the job of distracting you just as well as looking at your watch. “Sorry, I can’t help you” is a quick, all-purpose response to anyone who approaches you on the street. It doesn’t require any specific thought about their question, leaving you free to concentrate on maneuvering, glancing behind you for the potential assailant’s partner, etc.
After a bit of verbal disengagement, John gave the command to move and draw. We had a couple of the students with a tendency to sweep their support hands during the drawstroke, and the instructors had to keep an eye out for this. John teaches that if you’re not shooting to bring the gun back to a compressed high ready with the pistol brought back just beneath the chin and rotated to the support side. This gives better disarm resistance, greater visibility, and unlike low ready, it keeps the gun pointed at the target so that you just have to drive the gun straight out to the target, rather than swinging up and potentially overshooting and having to bring it back down. Some students had a tendancy to forget the compressed ready position and leave the gun out at full extension. As the class progressed, others started drawing to the compressed ready, rather than drawing to full extension and then bringing the pistol back to compressed ready. Drawing to full extension every time keeps the drawstroke consistent, rather than having to decide between two different drawstrokes depending on the situation.
After a few moments with the gun in compressed ready, moving and checking behind them, John announced that the target was threatening you with a weapon, prompting the students to open fire. Since this first drill was done dry, the half of the class that wasn’t shooting manually reciprocated the shooting students’ slides after each shot to reset the trigger. After firing four shots, the students moved and fired another four. John announced that the target was down and out of the fight, prompting students to move again, scan in front, then turn around and do a sul scan. Once everyone has done this, John called for students to holster.
This was some students’ first exposure to these kinds of pre and post fight drills, so we ran through it dry a couple of times to get everyone on the same page.
Saturday Afternoon
After lunch, we did the same drill live fire. This was some students’ first exposure to the “zipper” technique John teaches. Rather than aiming exclusively at the upper torso or center of mass, you fire your first shot at the navel area and move up the midline of the body to the upper chest. Starting at belt level prevents the gun from obscuring the target’s hands, and ensures you won’t lose sight of the assailant if he ducks. The area a few inches on either side of the body’s midline is filled with major arteries and organs, making it a good all the way up. This is rather different from the way most students had been taught previously, and many of them tended to fire one shot into the belly and the rest into the upper torso rather than working their way up.
Rather than taping every shot after each string of fire, John has the students tape only the misses (those not within a six inch strip running up the middle of the target). Not only does this save time for most shooters, it also emphasizes that absolute precision is not the goal, just getting rounds within the target area.
After a few repetitions of the drill, John threw in a reload, followed by an additional burst. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, several of John’s students were working in New Orleans, and found that jettisoning the magazine into the murky depths during each reload quickly depleted their supply of available mags. Since then, John has moved to teaching students to retain magazines as the default, rather than dropping them.
When everyone was comfortable with the reload, we moved back and doubled the distance to fifteen yards. Despite the longer range most students were able to maintain the standard of accuracy. We then moved up to three yards and shot the drill one last time. At this range, the drill was pretty easy, and most students were able to increase their rate of fire and still get good hits. John’s philosophy on accuracy is that if you’re missing the six inch wide target zone with more than 10% of your shots, you’re probably shooting too fast. On the other hand, if you’re not missing about one shot in ten, you’re probably shooting too slow. The goal is a balance between speed and accuracy.
Remaining at 3 yards, we switched over to what John likes to call the “mother in law” drill. This is a hostage rescue scenario where the student has to put a shot through the nose of the target into the brainstem. This is the only part of the body that will produce an instantaneous stop. If someone has a hostage, holding a gun to their head or a knife to their throat, this is the kind of shot you need to make. However, the brain stem is a very small target (about the size of your thumb) buried deep within the skull. Particularly from the front, the skull is heavy enough to deflect pistol bullets away from a relatively small internal target like the brainstem. Given these difficulties, it’s very difficult to hit the brainstem of an active, moving target. To help cope with these difficulties, John recommends asking the hostage taker, “What do you want?” and waiting about two seconds for him to start considering the question. When he starts thinking, he’s probably going to stop moving and look at you, giving you a chance to take the brain stem shot.
To set this up as a drill, we drew some cartoony faces on the heads of cardboard targets. Students made the verbal challenge from a range of 3 yards, raised their pistols, and fired two shots at the nose. At this range, most students who were able to keep their shots inside the nose area if they took their time. Bad shots were generally a result of rushing and taking the shot too quickly. Some students also rushed to raise their pistol. Asking, “What do you want?” only works if you give the hostage taker a second or two to start thinking about it. Shooting immediately defeats the purpose.
After the hostage drill, we brought out the table and had the students lay their weapons out on it and shoot each weapon in turn. The prevalence of Glocks made this a bit less interesting than it might have otherwise been, but the SIG, XD, and 1911 lent some variety to the proceedings. This was also the first drill of the day we shot on the steel rotator targets rather than cardboard.
It was around this time that one of our students had to leave. His wife, over in Vicki’s class, wasn’t doing too well and he needed to take her to the hospital. She and her husband both rejoined us the next day after getting some IV fluids at the hospital. They couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong with her, but the most likely issues were dehydration and lack of food. Keeping fed and especially keeping hydrated are critical when training, even in the relatively cool South Carolina fall.
Once each student had shot all the other weapons, John had the instructors set up malfunctions in each of the pistols on the table. We set up empty chambers, stovepipes, and failures to extract. One of the things John emphasizes is clearing malfunctions without looking at or trying to diagnose them. Tap rack bang, and if that doesn’t work, lock, eject, rack, rack, rack, and reload.
Up until this point, all our drills had been exclusively handgun oriented, and at a distance of at least three yards. Since everyone had demonstrated fairly good gunhandling skills, John set up a more complex scenario involving close range shooting and alternative force. The student started off making a shot from retention at a cardboard target within arms length, then fired bursts at a more distant rotator target until he expended all the rounds in the magazine. With an empty gun, he was then confronted with another close range cardboard target. He used his pistol as an impact weapon, ramming its muzzle into the target’s head, then transitioned to his knife and stabbed the target in the stomach.
The students did fairly well on the shooting portion of his drill, but for most of them it was obviously their first experience with using the gun as an impact weapon, or deploying their knife in a defensive scenario. Every single student was carrying their knife on their strong side, requiring them to swap the pistol into their support side hand before beginning to draw the knife. Combined with the fact that they were all carrying folders, and were generally none too quick about deploying them) there was usually a substantial wait between the muzzle strike and the stabbing, more than enough time for the assailant to recover and start doing bad stuff to them. Having an alternative weapon on the support side, either a knife or back-up gun (or both) is a much better choice than having both on the strong side. If you’re going to carry a knife as a back-up weapon, practice deploying it, just like you practice drawing the handgun. If you need it, you’ll need it in a hurry.
One other thing I noticed during this drill was the limited amount of movement by most of the students. When we’re lined up shooting in relays, there are some obvious limits to the amount of movement each student can do; one or two steps to either side at most. In a drill like this, where only one student shoots at a time, there are much fewer restrictions, yet students were still only taking one or two steps in each direction when moving between strings. In order for movement to be useful, it needs to be rapid and dynamic, not a couple of lazy sidesteps. I think this may be an instance where range restrictions are translating into some bad training habits.
With the end of this drill, the light was fading and we moved on to our night shoot. John demonstrated the Harries technique and a modified version of the neck index that places the flashlight higher on the head. We started out shooting without flashlights, just using ambient light and the light from the “takedown mode” on John’s FirstLight Tomahawk (flashes the red and blue LEDs and strobes the main light in sequence). We had two rotators set up and students fired a burst at each of them, with movement in between. Then we broke out the lights and the students had a chance to try both methods before going through and shooting it a third time using the method of their choice. The biggest problem I noted was that some students had a hard time keeping the light on target. These lights are bright enough that you can usually see enough to shoot even if the brightest part of the beam isn’t pointed directly at the target, but that eliminates a lot of the light’s blinding potential. Lights are bullet magnets, so they should be used sparingly, but when they’re on, they needed to be pointed directly at the assailant’s face, to inhibit his ability to direct fire your way as much as possible.
Once everyone had shot with the flashlights, John broke out a couple of road flares to illuminate the targets and we set up the malfunction drills again. This time, it was downright impossible to diagnose the malfunctions by looking at them, demonstrating one of the reasons why John teaches clearing jams without trying to figure out what they are first.
This finished up the night shoot, so we packed up our gear and adjourned to a late dinner at an Italian restaurant near John’s hotel.
Sunday Morning
After another breakfast at Denny’s we all headed down to the range. This morning we got started with another iteration of the dry fire drill. After yesterday, most of the students had this down pat.
Following this, we all divested ourselves of any firearms, knives, OC, saps, or any other weapons for our force on force drills. Obviously, we don’t want anyone confusing a live gun for an airsoft, but it’s important to remove other weapons as well. After everyone laid their weapons out on the table, we did a pat-down of each person just to make sure nobody was carrying any dangerous implements.
For the first set of drills, rather than airsoft, the students were using fake blue guns. A few students had their own, and from John’s rather sizable collection we were able to get most students a pretty similar replica of their carry weapon. The only fellow that had to make do with a different make was the one shooting the SIG.
Once everyone had joined the rubber gun squad, we began some simple disengagement drills. John described some of the tactics potential assailants use to get you to stop and distract you: asking for directions or the time, or for help finding their child or pet. Sometimes they’ll run through a whole string of opening lines to see what catches your attention, then pick up on that subject for further conversations. The students paired up and one played a panhandler while the other tried to avoid engaging with them to give them a chance to practice their disengagement skills in a more free form environment. We started out with fairly passive panhandlers and simple verbal disengagement, “Sorry, I can’t help you.” One of the more interesting techniques John recommends is pointing down at the ground on one side of the panhandler and saying “uh-oh”, then bolting past him on the opposite side when he looks down to see what you’re pointing at. While this seems to be one level above “your shoelace is untied,” it can evidently be quite effective.
In the next drill, we had the panhandlers be a bit more persistent, prompting the other student to escalate their verbal disengagement, “Back off!” John recommends pointing at the potential assailant when you do this, so that any witnesses whose attention you attract are more likely to realize it’s you telling the panhandler to back off, rather than vice versa. He also recommends pointing with two fingers rather than just one to avoid giving the impression that you’ve just flipped him the bird.
Finally, we had the panhandler escalate the point of pulling a knife, prompting the student to draw. One of the things John discussed at this point were some strategies for engaging an assailant at close ranges like this: getting off the X at a forward angle (45 degrees to the right or left of the assailant) to create a lot of apparent motion and get on the assailant’s flank while drawing and shooting him. This is the kind of tactic I’ve learned before from Gabe Suarez and Randy Harris, but it seems to be spreading. The art progresses, and one of the ways you can tell the good trainers is they’re moving forward with it.
Sunday Afternoon
After lunch, we moved on to some more complex scenarios. In these drills, rather than pairing the students up, John’s assistant instructors served as the actors in the scenarios and we ran the students through one at a time. I have to say, this was a lot of fun. Enough fun that I didn’t really mind getting pelted with quite a few airsoft pellets over the course of the afternoon. However, one thing I always tried to keep the in mind that the objective was to help the students learn, rather than to show off my own skills.
Our first scenario was a straightforward application of the disengagement skills the students practiced during the morning. This time, however, the students faced three aggressive assailants instead of one. We tried to box the student in, trapping them. As we closed in, we got more aggressive, escalating our verbal interactions, and eventually flashing (but not drawing) a weapon. This scenario had some interesting lessons. At what point are you justified in shooting? Does it require seeing a gun, or is this group being sufficiently menacing to justify shooting them before the gun is seen. Who do you shoot first? The closest one? The one who showed a weapon? Different students took different approaches, with varying degrees of success. The most notable difference was that sduents who moved quickly and decisively to avoid being boxed in were the only ones who were able to prevent the situation from escalating.
One of the most interesting scenarios we did took place at a family reunion and had one instructor playing a suicidal distant relative, while the other two of us tried to talk him out of killing himself. As the scenario progressed, the suicidal became more and more agitated pointing the blue gun at the student and the other two relatives in addition to himself. Important to the setup was the idea that these folks were your relatives, but they weren’t close enough to automatically be people you’d risk your life or limb for. Students’ reactions ran the gamut from leaving the area and calling 911 to shooting the suicidal relative when he begins to point the gun at other people. The most effective reactions tended to be those that were the most decisive, whether it was leaving immediately, dragging the non-suicidal relatives away, or shooting the suicidal relative. One student performed a very nice covert draw before approaching, then raised the gun and shot the suicidal relative in the head at lightning speed the moment he started to point the gun at someone else. The students who dithered tended to be much less effective. Those who approached, but didn’t act or tried to talk to the suicidal relative, or who weren’t forceful in trying to move the other relatives to safety tended to end up looking down the muzzle of the blue gun before they were able to shoot. The difference between suicide and homicide can be as little as a flick of the wrist.
We also did a scenario that replicated the hostage shot from live fire yesterday. One instructor took another hostage in the classic, gun to the head pose, while the third instructor (me) ran around like a blithering idiot trying to distract the student and generally getting in the way. Some of the students ran into trouble with this one, either they never did the “What do you want?” bit and tried to take the shot as the hostage taker was moving. Others asked the question, but didn’t leave time for the hostage taker to think about it before firing, which kind of defeats the purpose. On the other hand, waiting too long for a shot could be just as bad, giving the hostage taker a chance to shoot you before you get him.
The next scenario was a bit more conventional: the student walks in on a robbery in progress and has to decide what to do about the situation. One instructor played the clerk getting held up, while the other two were robbers armed with a knife and gun respectively. Some students elected to simply walk away, deciding that whatever was going on here was none of their business. Those who elected to intervene had to decide on their tactical priorities, since the robber with the knife was closer, but still out of contact range. One ended up shooting both robbers and the clerk!
The last scenario was probably the most fun from the roleplaying perspective. The student needs to exit a narrow alley to go assist their wife or girlfriend with an automotive problem, but it is blocked by two brothers having a raging argument, who ignore any of the student’s requests to get by, while a third brother attempts to calm down the other two. If the student elects not to take action for a while one of the brothers eventually draws a knife and stabs the other.
In contrast to the other scenarios, the student wasn’t really in any direct jeopardy unless they injected themselves into the situation. The brothers are directing all their attention toward each other, totally ignoring the student. There’s no immediate danger, but there’s also no justification for using force to solve the problem. Some students elected to wait it out, perhaps calling the police. Others intervened after one brother stabbed the other. Some drew their weapon, perhaps on somewhat shaky legal ground. A few tried to rush past, one of them after drawing his weapon, which resulted in an attempted gun grab (which in turn led to him shooting all three brothers).
In all of the scenarios, John emphasized that there was no “School Solution” to any of these situations. Some courses of action may be more successful than others this time around, but that’s no guarantee that the same will hold true in the real world. The common threads were that decisive action almost always led to better results than dithering or tentative action. Sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing, or choose not to get involved, but that should be a deliberate choice, not the result of an inability to make up your mind.
The assistant instructors gave our assessment of the class and John gave his observations and provided a final wrap up. With that we packed up and many of us went out for a nice steak dinner before going our separate ways.
Overall, I think this was a great course. I’d definitely like to do some more firearms and self defense instruction in the future. As always, the best way to learn something is to teach it, and I think I may have gotten more out of this class than the students. I think the students got a lot out of the course to. Force on force training is a real eye opener, and scenario based training like this can make you think about stuff you may not have considered before. I really enjoyed assisting with the instruction and playing the opposing force during the scenarios. While none of them were complete novices coming in, I still saw lot of progress from some of them over the course of the class. If I have any regret about this class, it's that I wasn't able to spend much time with Vicki, since she was mostly busy with the ladies class. She's an excellent instructor and one I think I could learn a lot from both as a student, and as a fellow instructor. Hopefully, I’ll be able to assist again when John comes around next year. I would highly recommend this class, and indeed any of John and Vicki Farnam’s classes.
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