…and from the more effective Chapman Rollover Prone.
Learn to make tactical movement as thoroughly ingrained as stance and trigger press. Here Justine Ayoob, 15, performs a tactical reload while moving behind cover at the New England Regional IDPA championships.
Let’s say it’s a course of fire with 300 points possible. You average 299 and the partner averages 230. Give the partner 69 bonus points as a handicap. Now he or she is challenged: beating you is within striking distance, where before it seemed hopeless. This will encourage the partner to really focus and put forth his or her best effort. Before, you weren’t challenged, but now you know that the newer shooter with the faster learning curve only has to get a little better to beat you. You, in turn, are now motivated to shoot a perfect score, the only thing that will keep you from losing the bet.
At Lethal Force Institute, we have the instructors shoot what we call a pace-setter drill on the last day. Just before the students shoot their final qualification test, the staff will shoot the same course of fire as a demonstration. This does several good things. First, it lets the students see what’s expected of them. Second, watching us do it helps them “set their internal clock” which in turn helps them make the times required for each string of fire. Third, it gives them a mental image of what they are supposed to be doing.
“Simunitions” has ushered in a new dimension in reality-based training. This Glock has been factory modified to fire only the Simunitions paint pellet rounds.
Be able to shoot effectively from non-standard positions. National IDPA champ Ted Yost shows his form with a “cover crouch,” which gets him down behind the rear of a car faster than conventional kneeling.
Bob Lindsey, the master police officer survival instructor, noted in the 1980s that a number of cops who were losing fights would suddenly see in their mind’s eye an image of an instructor performing a technique. They would act out that image, make it work, and prevail. He called it “modeling.” This is the main reason we do the pace-setter drill. Until then, I had followed the advice I’d been given in firearms instructor school. “Don’t shoot in front of the students,” I had been told. “If you’re as good as you’re supposed to be, it will make some of them despair of ever reaching your level. And if you blow it, you lose your credibility.”
That had made sense. If a student asked me back then, “When do we get to see you shoot,” my standard answer was, “When you go to Bianchi Cup or Second Chance. You’re not here to see how well I can shoot. You’re here to see how well you can shoot.”
Lindsey’s research changed my opinion on that. It was after hearing Bob’s presentation on modeling that we started the pace-setter drills at LFI. Since we’ve been doing it, the scores of the students have gone up, and fewer of the students have had problems getting all their shots into the target before the cease-fire signal.
One thing we added was an incentive. Whatever score I shoot, if the student ties me he or she gets an autographed dollar bill with the inscription, “You tied me at my own game.” If the student beats me, it’s an autographed $5 bill that says, “You beat me at my own game.” It’s the cheapest investment I can make in their shooting skill, and it pushes them to do their best. It’s natural for a student to want to exceed the instructor…and frankly, accomplishing that is the highest compliment a student can pay to a dedicated teacher.
My favorite award to give out is “most improved shooter.” This award is the instructor’s target, signed by all the staff. Often, the student who has accelerated “from zero to 50” has accomplished more than the already-skilled student who came to class at 100 miles an hour and was only able to get about 5 miles an hour faster.
In the end, it’s up to you. Your skill development will be proportional to how much time you’re prepared to spend training yourself, and acquiring training from others. Getting good training is cost-effective, because despite tuition and travel expense, it saves you re-inventing the wheel. Yes, it takes a lot of years to get a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, but it would take you a helluva lot longer to figure out nuclear physics by yourself. Shooting isn’t nuclear physics, but you don’t need years in the university to learn it either. A few well-chosen weeks, backed up by your own commitment to a training regimen of live fire when you can and dry fire the rest of the time, will be the best investment in skill development you can make.
I do this for a living, as a full-time teacher and part-time cop, part-time writer, and part-time everything else. I’m supposed to have “arrived.” But it’s never wise to kid oneself. This sort of thing, at its greatest depth, is a life-study. As soon as you think you’ve “arrived,” you stop moving forward. That’s why I budget a minimum of a week a year for myself to take training from others. It keeps me sharp, and keeps the mind open. The old saying is true: Minds, like parachutes, work best when they’re open.
The Heart Of The Beast:Mastering Trigger Control
Agreed: What kind of bullet we’re firing doesn’t matter unless the bullet hits the target.
Agreed: The bullet doesn’t have to just hit, it has to hit something vital.
Agreed: The bullet doesn’t have to just hit something vital, it has to hit something so immediately vital that the person can no longer continue to attack.
Agreed: We’ll have a very short time frame in which to accomplish this.
Agreed: As much as we might rather have a rifle, a shotgun, or a submachinegun to deal with this problem, the tool we’re most likely to have with us is a handgun.
If we can agree that all these things are predicates to stopping a deadly fight with a combat handgun, then we are agreed that accuracy is extremely important. It’s like high school Logic 101: If A is true and B is true, then AB must be true.
A lot of things will impact our ability to deliver accurate shots rapidly while under stress. Will you use a one-hand or two-hand hold on the gun? Two-hand is more accurate, but one-hand is sometimes more expedient. Will you use Weaver or Isosceles stance? There are times when it can matter, but they are relatively rare. Any basic marksmanship instructor will tell you that once you’ve brought your gun on target, there is one key element to making the shot fly true: You must pull the trigger in such a way that the gun is not jerked off target.
Trigger control need not sacrifice speed. Here, Marty Hayes is firing four rounds in a fraction of a second from a prototype Spectre pistol. Note two .45 ACP casings in mid-air above the gun, a third below, and the muzzle flash of the fourth round.
We know that because the bullet flies in a relatively straight path, any deviation of the sight alignment is magnified in direct geometric progression. If your trigger pull jerks the muzzle off target by the tiniest fraction of an inch, the shot may hit in the white of the target, but not the black of the
