Lessons Learned in Training #1
Have a look at the picture below. Notice anything odd?
The battery tray on this Holosun optic ejected in the middle of a shooting drill
This is not my gun. It belongs to a student. We were nearing the end of a 3-hour class, and in the middle of the last drill, he stopped and complained that he couldn’t see his dot. He then attempted to turn the dot back on, to no avail. So, I took the gun from him and inspected it.
As you can see from the image, the battery tray is completely missing! Luckily, we were on a concrete range and were able to locate the battery tray, battery, and the tiny screw holding it in place. If we had been outdoors on gravel, grass, or dirt, he would’ve been screwed.
I then helped him reassemble the battery tray. Because we were on the last drill, we ended the class there.
Let’s talk about what we can learn from this.
Loctite. Loctite. Loctite. When dealing with optics, we often think about applying thread locker to the mounting plate screws and the screws that connect the optic to the plate. In this case, the side-mounted battery tray is also held in place by a tiny screw. My guess is that as the student continued shooting his gun, that screw slowly backed itself out due to recoil (something that would be easy to miss unless checked regularly) until it finally came all the way out and the battery tray with it. A small dab of blue Loctite on the battery tray screw could’ve prevented this.
On that note, when I was explaining this to the student, he asked, “Will I be able to get the screw back out?” Excellent question. Make sure to use the appropriate type of Loctite for the situation. In this case, Blue Loctite 242 works great and is not permanent. For screws that you plan to never remove, you can use Red Loctite 271. It’s more permanent than the blue stuff; however, it can be removed with a little heat.
Backup iron sights. When the student realized his dot was off, he froze. He simply stopped shooting the drill. This is problematic.
Look at the rear sights on his pistol. They are not tall enough to be usable with an optic. If he was using taller iron sights like these, as soon as he realized he had no dot, he could’ve simply switched to using those and finished the drill. Instead, he panicked and froze.
That freeze response. Thankfully this was just training. The student encountered a problem he didn’t expect or know how to handle and simply gave up.
Now imagine if this was a gunfight instead of training. That’s not going to end well. What’s your plan for when your optic goes down? Are you just going to give up? You can’t call a tactical timeout and rebuild your gun in the middle of the fight. Some knowledge of alternate sighting methods would be extremely valuable in this situation. Take that for what it’s worth.
Backup batteries. When I first reassembled and installed the optic’s battery tray, the optic wouldn’t turn on. A new battery solved that problem. You never know when that battery is going to go bad. Have a spare or two in your range bag, just in case.
Are you running an optic on your carry gun? Do you train with it? Are you familiar with some of the best practices for using a red/green dot sight on a pistol? If the answer is no, get out and take a class with a reputable instructor.
Not sure who to train with? Head over to the contact page and ask away! I’m happy to refer you to any of the various instructors I’ve trained with.
12-Round Skills Check
For the TLDR people out there, here is the 12-Round Skills Check that I have developed. If you want to know the “why” behind it, read until the end.
You will need 12 rounds, two magazines, a dummy round, a shot timer, and a way to record your times (and probably a calculator). You may use any target with a designated high-center mass and a head box.
Here are some examples of targets you can use.
An example of the target I use most often for the Skills Check.
Another target I commonly use for this Skills Check to add a bit of realism. Note the presence of scoring rings for high center mass and head.
An IDPA target will work too. Anything outside the -0 is a miss and does not count.
If you use a USPSA target, divide the large center mass A-Zone in half horizontally. Only hits in the upper half count.
If your target does not have designated scoring zones, you can use a B8 repair center for the center mass shots and a playing card (horizontal) for the head shots. If you want to increase the difficulty, a 3x5 note card, shipping label, or playing card may be placed vertically in the center mass position to simulate the heart and aortic arch. Use a 3” circle or even a business card placed horizontally for the head. I use these 3x5 stickers and these 3” circle stickers from Amazon (Thanks Aqil Qadir, Ryan McCann and Chuck Haggard).
Begin by loading six rounds into each of the magazines, and randomly place the dummy round in either magazine. So, you should have one magazine with six rounds and one with six plus the dummy. Make sure the dummy round is not the first or last round loaded in the magazine. This works best if you have a friend or training partner load your magazines for you. Then load your gun with either of the two magazines and holster up. Stow the other magazine in a pouch or pocket; however you would typically carry it. You now have EXACTLY the number of rounds needed to complete the 12-Round Skills Check. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge, wink, wink: You will have to perform a reload at some point; you will have to clear a malfunction at some point.
Use a shot timer as your start signal and record your time for each string. All sequences are to be fired from concealment. At the end of the last sequence, add up your times. You must get all hits in the scoring zone to pass. The sequences are as follows:
3-yards; single lateral step, draw and fire two shots center mass.
Repeat first sequence moving in the opposite direction.
5-yards; Failure Drill - draw and fire two shots center mass, transition to a head shot.
7-yards; Half-Bill Drill - draw and fire three shots center mass.
10-yards; draw and fire a single shot to the head.
Repeat number 5.
And here are the standards:
Beginner - 30+ seconds
Intermediate - 25-30 seconds
Expert - 20-25 seconds
Master - < 20 seconds
S.M.A.S.H. (Super Master All-Superior Handgunner) - Do it with a pocket pistol. Do it strong hand only. Do it on smaller targets. You get the idea.
Good luck! And now, the why.
It started with a conversation I had with Aqil (Aq) Qadir. Aq is a Rangemaster Staff Instructor, as well as the founder and lead instructor at Citizens Safety Academy. I have been lucky enough to train with him several times where he was either the instructor, co-instructor, AI, or hosting a class. I’ve also been on the line with him as a fellow student. I now consider him a mentor and a friend.
In one of those instances, during a break in class, I decided to use the opportunity to pick Aq’s brain. I don’t recall the entire conversation or the exact words he used, but it was something along the lines of “you need a way to evaluate/test your students.” Or help them measure their skillsets and progress.
I thought long and hard about that. What standards do I use? FBI Qual? Rangemaster Baseline Assessment? Karl Rehn’s 3 Seconds or Less? All of those are good and well-established standards. However, after careful consideration, reviewing notes from various classes, and re-reading Karl Rehn’s book (Strategies and Standards for Defensive Handgun Training), I ultimately decided on creating my own standards in order to more specifically meet my students’ needs.
That brings me to my next consideration: Have you ever thought about what guns people are actually carrying? I’m not talking about instructors and fellow training junkies. Those classes are usually filled with Glock 19s/17s, Smith & Wesson M&Ps, and other mid-to-full size pistols, plus the inevitable new WhizzBang 5000 flavor of the month. I’m talking about regular earth people. These are people with normal 9-5 jobs whose primary concern is taking care of their family. These are what Aqil Qadir and Tiffany Johnson refer to as “Gateway Students.”
With that in mind, the two guns I see most often in my classes are the Glock 43X and the Sig Sauer P365 (or any of its variants). After that, it’s a veritable plethora of hand-me-downs and pawn shop specials. I see a lot of 1st generation M&P Shields, Ruger EC9s, and similar single-stack “my dad/brother/husband gave me this” guns. More recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of Smith & Wesson Bodyguard 2.0s. The standards needed to fit these people and these guns.
The third consideration was what skills the students are learning. These are not full-on 8-hour “Tactical Defensive Pistol”-type classes; I only have three hours with them. Emphasis is placed on learning a smooth and efficient, purposeful draw-stroke, keeping the gun in the fight (reloads and malfunctions), and an introduction to defensive marksmanship (the classic speed vs. accuracy).
Now that we’ve laid the foundation, let’s break it down a bit further. Why 12 rounds? Originally, I wanted it to be 10 rounds. It went from 10 rounds to 12 when I added the last element, the 10-yard head shot. Ten is a nice even number, and anything with fives and tens works nicely when ammo comes in boxes of 50. It also allows for these standards to be run in just about any modern semi-automatic handgun. Run it with an LCP. Run it with a 1911. Run it with a Glock. It doesn’t matter. But run YOUR gun. Whatever you brought to the fight is what you’ve got.
And now the skills. In Karl Rehn’s book, he lists ten skills that we should be training. He also discusses how individual drills and standards can only test so many of them; it’s virtually impossible to test all ten at once. I compared that list with the skills I wanted students to take away in my classes and created a sequence of drills that matched, as best as possible, all of the things I have laid out so far.
Here is a breakdown of those skills and how they are tested in the 12-Round Skills Check:
Movement - lateral step
Drawstroke - the entire sequence is run from the holster/concealment
Accuracy - designated scoring zones; all shots must be hits
Speed - the sequence is timed
Marksmanship - use of various sight alignments; recoil control; trigger press
Precision - increased distance/smaller target
Target transition - failure drill
Automaticity - reload/malfunction clearance (occurs randomly vs predictively)
Repeatability - prove it wasn’t just luck by doing it twice (first and last sequences)
That’s quite a bit in one 12-round drill. If you remove the 10-yard shots at the end, you can make it a 10-round drill, but you lose the precision element.
If you’re wondering about the automaticity part (thank you John Hearne for the fancy word), it has to do with how I’ve seen reload and malfunction drills taught in the past. Very often, the drills are set up as 1-reload-1, or 2-reload-2, etc. In any case, the student knows EXACTLY when the reload is coming. The same is done with malfunctions; we set up a nice pretty-looking stovepipe, attempt to fire, and then clear the already known malfunction. I designed the 12-Round Skills Check so that both the reload and the malfunction happen randomly. Are the students doing a pre-prescribed action or are they reacting to a stimulus? There’s your automaticity.
(Side note: I recently read Shooting to Live, by W.E. Fairbairn and E.A. Sykes. It turns out, they were using this same technique with police recruits almost 100 years ago! Tatiana Whitlock also does a similar drill in her classes she calls “Schrodinger’s Cat”. You should go train with her. Moral of the story, none of this stuff is novel. We stand on the shoulders of giants, as they say.)
I have personally shot these standards over 50 times with various guns. I’ve used a Glock 19 with iron sights, Glock 19 with Holosun optic, HK VP9 with Holosun optic, Taurus GX4, Sig Sauer P365XL, and Shadow Systems MR920 with Holosun optic. That’s a pretty decent variety of iron sights and optics, and micro compact to full size handguns. I’ve also run several students, friends, and even a fellow instructor through them. So, I’ve collected a lot of data in establishing the standards.
Here is what I’ve seen:
I don’t always shoot at “Master” level (and they’re MY standards). On one particular run, I got all the way to the last sequence with a total time of around 13 seconds. In my head I was celebrating the new record time I was about to set. When I did the last sequence, I got a click instead of a bang. Instead of doing a tap-rack (automaticity), I ejected the magazine thinking I had improperly loaded for the drill. By the time I realized there was still a round in the magazine and figured out the click was from the dummy round in the chamber, my 2-3 second sequence turned into well over 8 seconds.
With newer shooters, don’t worry about the times. Maybe don’t even tell them the time standards. If they shoot over 30 seconds and you tell them they need to get to 20, what are they going to think?
You can sort of game it, but not really. And that was intentional. For example, you start with six rounds; you fire four in the first two sequences. Knowing that you need to fire three rounds in the next sequence, a proactive reload may be in order. However, where is that dummy round? You may have moved one problem to the side in exchange for another.
Depending on how you play it (and with a little luck from the dummy round), you may not have to do an emergency reload. I’ve seen/had runs where a proactive reload resulted in a slide lock after firing the prescribed amount of rounds. I’ve also seen it turn into a nightmare situation of emergency reload followed by dummy round. Want to see your failure drill go from 3 seconds to 10+? It happens.
Of the times I have recorded (I don’t always write them down), the fastest is 18.12 seconds on a 3x5 shipping label and 3” head circle sticker overlaid on a silhouette target. The average time is 25.13 seconds with a median of 24.8.
Lastly, I have no doubt that some of you reading this will absolutely smoke these standards on your first attempt. And that’s a good thing. If that’s you, great! Try it again with smaller targets. Try it strong-hand only. Try it from low-ready, weak-hand only. Try it with a pocket pistol, micro 9mm, Ruger LCP, etc. Got a J-frame? Spin the cylinder after the first string. You’ll also need to reload twice. You get the idea.
Overall, just have fun with it. Get out and shoot. I’ll see ya on the range!