Blog

In a self-defense scenario you probably are not going to start out with weapon in hand, with a confirmed round in the chamber, safety off, standing in your favorite shooting stance. You can improve the chances of that with good situational awareness. But sometimes you just start in a bad situation. On the asphalt of the grocery store, after just been struck in the back of the head head. At knifepoint. Surrounded. When under stress, our minds operate at a diminished capacity. It’s easy to come up with a plan for these situations at home. Not so easy in the moment, unsure if you were attacked or if you were hit by accident, unsure if the law allows you to shoot or not, knowing you are facing jail if you guess wrong. Under stress we revert to our training, and only through training can we perform well in a self-defense

I once met a guy during a class, who bragged about how he practiced 2000 rounds a day. He said he owned his own online firearms store and apparently could afford to do this. Yet he wasn’t better than anyone else in the class. When the instructor later recommended some ways to get better as a shooter, such as using a shot timer, he had never heard of that before. The Importance of Active Learning in Shooting Practice Assuming his bragging was true, and even if not I’m sure others do this, this demonstrates the need for active learning. Even if you were to hypothetically shoot 2000 rounds a day, what goes does that do you if your stance is incorrect, or shooting at the same speed over time? In reality, at least for close range shooting, you don’t really need to shoot very many live rounds as a percentage

I don’t shoot at an indoor range very often because I can’t do most of my drills. Watch a gunfight on YouTube, how often do both shooters just stand there unmoving? It’s better to practice standing still than not at all, but if you are serious about shooting you need to move. Unfortunately, most indoor ranges either can’t or won’t support many drills that are important to self defense. While Interactive Gun Range won’t completely solve this for you, you can get a lot more out of your intermediate level practice with it than you can at an indoor range. Interactive Gun Range even tracks which stance and what equipment you were using, for record keeping over time. Essential Drills for Intermediate and Advanced Training In these drills, clear checkpoints means to scan your surroundings after a course of fire. The purpose is to clear tunnel vision you get from

List of drills: Outdoor drills part 1 While encouraging my cousin to get professional training as a shooter, he refused with “I’m a crack shot.” My reply was “Hitting a punching bag does not make you a boxer” and “I’ve never seen a gun fight where both parties stand still, aim calmly, with as much time as needed, to hit a stationary target.” We all prepare, to a greater or lesser degree, to need a firearm for combat shooting. Combat shooting forms the basis of my outdoor drills. Some highlights and explanations: Target Identification Be sure your target is actually armed and that your use of force is justified. Even police mistake cell phones for guns. Interactive Gun Range provides a superior experience to using numbers or math to identify targets, presenting actual visual differences to shoot at. Clear Checkpoints In a stressful situation we get tunnel vision. This is

When it comes to the use of force, your life and freedom depend on you being able to analyze when the use of force is warranted, and you may have to do this in a split-second, without warning, in an emergency situation. Everything you say and do, both before and after the shooting, will be analyzed in detail by the other side in a civil and/or criminal case. The time to learn and practice is before the event occurs. Police are protected by “Qualified Immunity,” lawsuits may be defended by and paid out by the government, police are seen as the good guys automatically by jurors, and sometimes the penalty is just losing their job. You and I don’t have these protections. All the more important to understand this topic, be aware of your surroundings, and mentally train yourself before an incident occurs. Before an incident First, you need to