The author stresses the value of marches and how they train you for impending attackers. While I agree I also disagree. He minimizes dry firing which I rate very highly because it gives you a chance to do things that a range will never permit.
Marksmanship skills are not the only issue in security with a sidearm. Situational awareness is a large slice of the pie. Being able to feel if you are in a tight place on comes from practice.
Is everyone watching you walk through the mall or down the street? Ask yourself WHY do all these people give a damn what I am doing. Are they looking at me because I am the only woman or am I an older man they view as a victim. The odds are that you won't be attacked from the front which means that you will have to draw and make a half turn.
Sorry but a 180 is against every range law that I know of. That's where dry firing with an empty sidearm comes in. Dry firing is where you practice technique. Many ways to do this. Fall to the ground and rotate as you are dropping. Turn and fire or strike rearward with an elbow as you turn. These can only be practiced off the range. Sorry, the liability is just too high for a range operator to bare.
Not many ranges will tolerate you firing in full darkness. You can and should practice changing magazines, drawing, trigger control, clearing jams, etc., at home in total (100%) darkness. Doing it while you are light blinded is an excellent practice.
Take a drive out in the countryside on a cloudy evening and locate a remote area where you can fire off a magazine or two so you understand exactly how blinding the muzzle flash is on your sidearm. It'll make you want to start saving for some Crimson Laser sights.
If you are entered into a match and you're competitive like me, you'll want to win it so you won't be using your everyday accessories. Put the everyday magazine and holsters off to the side and use the competition ones because every second counts. You don't want to be unsnapping the mag pouch if it's not in the rulebook that you must. Unless you use your everyday gear at the match I don't feel that you are practicing real world situations.
Ladies, dry firing at home is where you get to practice drawing to your hearts content. Put on an old blouse that won't break your heart if it gets torn. Use that purse holster until you are so smooth with it that you don't believe it.
Always fire twice if you draw your weapon from a concealed holster. In the real world if the threat is there to make you draw then that threat must be sufficient to also make you fire.
One more thing about dry firing, it's free! So there's no reason why you should do it at least twice a week, is there?
Levels 1-5 are hack amateur.
'A mans got to know his limitations'...
LFOD...
Great advice about practicing turning and firing : )
I don’t know much, but the biggest problem that I see isn’t firing the gun, it is situational awareness. If anyone is within 20 feet of me, I simply don’t have enough time to get the gun out, much less fire it.
A gun is just a tool and not the primary self defense tool at that.
Very good info, and it contains MANY useful concepts. However, I offer one important caution. Highly trained and experienced professionals and hobbiests tend to get this mindset that without tons of training and practice, a person will be a useless trembling waste, unable to defend theirself or a loved one. The problem is that its simply not true. Every day we hear about the mom, the elderly person, the clerk at the market,,etc, that save the day with a handgun they otherwise rarely touch. When you get down to it, if you have the strength and hand & eye coordination to use a blow drier, you can handle a pistol sucessfully. I wonder how many people read articles like this and then, too intimidated at being level 1 or 2, or so strapped financially that a trip to thunder ranch is unobtanium, don’t later have a gun with them, precisely when they really wish they did? When its for real, the bang and blast just aren’t hardly even noticeable.
If you buy a revolver, take a basic course or make a few range trips, you will amaze yourself years later when you can still use it. Last, enthusiastic shooters tend to prepare for Armageddon, or Friday the 13th part VII.
While there’s not a single thing wrong with this, in the real world, most people will be facing a bully or coward who never expected ANY resistance. And even though they would easily be overwhelmed by a band of nazi al-queda frogmen in nomex operator-suits, brandishing Kimbers with flashlights, these moms, regular guys in their 40’s who were in the army 20 years ago, and octenogerians will continue scaring off and successfully shooting bad guys just as they always have. Dear beginner,,,just remember the first and the *main* rule of gunfighting. “Have a gun”.
Armed citizens, regardless of training levels are rarely defeated or disarmed as the anti-gun crowd tells you is likely. And excessive requirements for training are the tool of Sarah Brady, designed to scare away beginners and to increase expense for the others. OK,,now that you have my opinion, i’d advise you to go back and read his post again carefully,,*and take heed*, because despite my post,,he’s still as right as I am. I mean it. He correctly mentioned number 5’s might have just been lucky,,,all you might need is to just have ONE idea of his to sink in to get you through.
A willingness to kill without hesitation has historically been the key to winning mortal combat. That is generally far more important than actual skill, but yes it can’t hurt to be prepared, and the more skilled the better.
I really suggest that you don’t just go off in the country to what you think is an empty spot and start firing off rounds. If its private property, you might find that its not as empty as you think. Worse, you might get return fire. Cattlemen and farmers aren’t keen on having people shoot around their livestock.
My wife carried a 38 snub reluctantly, and even fired at least 50 shots thru it on a “level 2” range. She always said she was sure she could never shoot anyone anyway. Then one night when i was gone to Kuwait during the Gulf war 90/91, someone followed her through several turns in a lonely area,,and unprovoked, he suddenly made his move and blocked her car in and exited agressively. She said she *instantly* realized her life was far more important than the concept of “never shooting anyone”. It still irritates her when i tease her about how fast her liberal ideas vanished. She’s still here.
Where do hunters fit? It seems that the writer has forgot to include lots of stuff. He has made it too long to be interesting and too incomplete to be of use.
I respectfully disagree. Most of the time, from “victim” surveys, the mere presence of the firearm is enough to defuse the situation. If you wait so long that you must fire immediately upon drawing your firearm, you have probably waited too long. Police *do not* always fire when they draw their weapon.
Macho bull-shit post
Two of the most dangerous things that can afflict a shooter: Overconfidence and underconfidence.
I don’t practice shooting as often as I’d like to, but I do practice more often than the average cop - and certainly more than the average criminal. That’s not an overconfident statement - there are no guarantees when it comes to gunfights. A gun can’t guarantee safety, but if you have one and an adequate amount of training, it’s the best way to improve your chances of survival. That improvement of chance is the best anyone can ask for. Nothing is ever guaranteed.
No one with any sense would argue against better training in firearms use for firearms owners. But the above statement is a great argument for much stricter gun control laws. If the RKBAs is a basic civil right (or a basic human right as I see it) it shouldn't be subject to licensing or permits making it instead a privilege subject to government revocation.
Good info. I was out of practice..time just got away from me. I didnt realize how rusty I had become till I was out shooting one day. It was an eye opener.
Where does that leave me in the mix?
You can effectively practice at a regular outdoor range. The whole idea that you have to be a Navy Seal to defend yourself is just plain stupid BS.
I just took mt CCW class last weekend and will sending in the app for the permit this week.
Thanks and a BTTT
The question is, how much practice do you really need, and do you really want to give a prosecutor or plaintiff's attorney the opportunity to put you under oath and ask you how often you had practiced killing the poor innocent victim you'd nailed a month or two previously?
One of the two or three few armed professionals whose skill I was willing to take for granted was an armored car courier who lived on a rural farm. Every day as he drove to work in the morning, he'd set six tin cans on the fence posts that lined his private drive from the county road to his house. And every day after work, he'd knock the cans off the posts on his return, usually shooting one-handed while driving his car, shooting out his driver-side window. Over a sixteen-year career period, he'd been involved in four armed robbery attempts in which criminals tried to interrupt the deliveries he was making. In three of those tries, five of them died.
One other, who had been pointed out to me by a local cop of whom I thought pretty highly, while in a conversation about best the best handgun shooters and the most serious ones in our area. I figured he'd favor some old cop he'd known, or a state trooper or local sheriff; nope. The guy he named was a middle-aged heavy equipment operator, who I'd never even seen with a handgun- I figured him for a shotgun and .22 rifle kind of guy. Nope.
The story went something like this: when the fella had been an 18-year old Marine, he'd had one leg scratched up on a coral beach while under fire, which got infected. While recovering and still limping, his company's first sergeant came around and asked him if he felt recovered enough to help out with a necessary detail. He welcomed the exercise and happily accepted the break in what for him had been boring days in a sun-cooked tent. The first shirt gave him a .45 pistol, several magazines and three boxes of .45 ammo, 50 shots each, and asssigned another guy, with a BAR, to cover him. Every morning, he went out into the wire in front of their night positions and went to make sure that all of the bodies still in the wire were as dead as they looked; any trying to play any tricks on him would be dealt with by the BAR gunner.
The first day out, he took care of a couple of dozen, probably all dead or nearly so. After he was done, there was no doubt: they were all dead. Next morning, 15 or 20 more, next day, more. By the end of the first week he'd used up all 150 rounds and got 5 new boxes; ammo was not a problem, and he was getting all the target practice he needed as on-the-job training. He kept that up for something like 6 to 10 weeks, and indeed had a couple of experiences in which a couple of his customers had been playing possom.
In fact, he had gotten so good at the *ash and trash* detail that when it came time for the Marines to move on to the next Pacific island, he and his BAR partner got the same job again. In all he made six major landings, and had the *ash and trash* job on five of them; during the last one somebody found out just how good he was with the .45, and made him a bodyguard for one of the Marine generals.
So how many guys had he shot during his fairly specialized job? More than lived in our town at the time. How many live ones had he actually killed? Unknown, but by his own best estimate, at least two dozen, and it was easily possible that it was double or triple that.
So far as I knew, he'd never practiced with the .45 he had brought home from the Marines since 1945. I would not have wanted him coming my way intending to use it on me for anything in the world, and he's one of the half-dozen or so who I'd want on my side in a gunfight without ever having seen him shoot.