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Training in 2 Dimensions and Fighting in 3
by T.J. Pilling
Training
days are great. New shooters are thrilled to be at the range and
love the opportunity to shoot. TQ-15’s, B-27, s, steel
reactionary targets, we shoot it all. Thousands of rounds go down
range shooting at targets the industry provides us. You can’t
gripe about the price, paper targets run 33 cents each and even the
IPSC are only 45 cents when bought in bulk. We even use the
“tactical pie plates” at different levels. They are small, cheap
and easy to replace. They force the shooter to use the sights and
focus on trigger control. I’ve always been hooked on the
reactionary steel targets. When hit you hear the ring of the
steel, you see the white latex paint fly off and you know immediately
that you have had a hit. If you use small enough targets, or back
the shooters off they can be just as beneficial as any paper targets
are. Between relays you just walk down with the roller and you’re
back in business, no fuss no muss.
Rick Cutler, a great
instructor with Tiger Valley, conducted the last evening class we
did. Rick was teaching a two-hour module on "Undercover
Carry". Shooters worked with the weapons they normally carry on a
daily basis. I set up a situation in the next bay that they would
have to resolve with gunfire. Shooters were brought one at a time
into the bay with limited information about what they were about to
do. They were told that the targets they were about to engage
reacted like a real person when engaged. If you failed to hit
vital areas, the target didn’t drop. We were shooting Clint
Smith's 3 dimensional targets that you cover with a t-shirt. A
balloon holds the target up; there are three zones where balloons can
be placed. When asked if they had ever seen this type of target,
most said “no”. The basis for the engagement was that they had
come home to find 3 bad guys in the living area of the house, two in
one direction and one at an off angle, all armed with knives.
Now
this is in no way meant to demean those who shot the class. Most
never had formal training, other then the 2.5 hours they had just
received from us. What happened is an indictment of training
techniques and trainers, myself included. Some shooters ran the
targets well. They fired one shot at each target and each target
dropped, end of story, or maybe not. Again this is not a
scientific test since we didn’t see what would happen with the same
shooters if a problem had risen. What we saw soon after was
interesting. Some shooters would start shooting at one target and
forget about the others. Five, six or seven shots at one target
with all the time in the world for the other targets, if they were real
you'd be chopped to shreds. Some fired the standard “double tap”
at each target and were back to the holster before you could say, hey,
two are still standing. When targets turned sideways in the wind,
shooting stopped with raised hands for the RO to straighten the target
front ways. When questioned without the stress of the situation
and asked point blank why they had done what they did, most had no
explanation.
Holy shit, why don’t I use these targets more
often? Answer, they are a pain in the butt to set up and are
time-consuming to work with. Note to self, who cares? Are
we turning out shooters who only understand the dynamics of paper
shooting? Are we jumping in their butts if they don’t turn out
“A” zone hits on bulls eye targets and forgetting the fact that bulls
eyes don’t attack them? Like it or not, time consuming or not, in
the future we are going to use real life targets at the end of our
classes. Watching shooters not press the attack, raise hands for
targets that are not lined up, double tap and re-holster with no regard
for target incapacitation sent chills through my spine. Yes,
accuracy and speed are important, but recognizing when and how to shoot
during an engagement is just as important. What good is it to
shoot all “A” zone during practice and stop shooting during a real deal
because it doesn’t look like what you experienced during
training? NOT ANYMORE…
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Elm Fork Wednesday Night Classes
Tiger
Valley's October "Undercover Carry" class went great, with some
interesting details covered in the above article "Training in 2
Dimensions and Fighting in 3".
November 14's class is "Low Light
Pistol". This event will expose students to the tactics and
techniques required to successfully employ a handgun in a low-light
environment. The majority of armed encounters occur under
low-light conditions and success requires the skills to properly
identify and engage targets. Required equipment is a handgun,
holster, 200 rounds of ammunition, eye and ear protection, and a
light. Any hand-held flashlight is acceptable and a
weapons-mounted light is not required.
November
19 is "Combat Pistol". Learn real-life tactics for dealing with
with real-life situations. Practice fighting out of a vehicle,
multiple adversary engagements, and skills beyond fast and effective
bullet placement.
We'll have a number of scenarios running simultaneously to
provide a wide range of challenges and opportunities to make you a more
effective in real-life situations. Pistol, holster, 3 magazines,
200 rounds of ammo, and safety gear are required.
All of these Wednesday night classes are held at the Elm Fork shooting range in Dallas from 6:30 PM to 9 PM. The cost is $65 and pre-registration is not required.
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Upcoming One Day Pistol Tune-Up Classes
Tiger Valley is offering two special one-day pistol tune up classes in December.
"Pistol
Tune Up - Fundamentals" is designed for students with a reasonable
level of range competency but who have not had extensive formal
firearms instruction. This course will evaluate your current
fundamental pistol skills and provide professional instruction in the
latest pistol techniques and give you ample opportunity to practice
these new skills.
"Pistol Tune Up - Advanced Skills" is for
students with significant exposure to the modern operation of
handguns. Tiger Valley's Level 1 pistol class or an equivalent is
suggested as a pre-requisite for this class. The course will
emphasize advanced skills including multiple target engagements,
shooting on the move, fast reloading techniques, and will be a
fast-paced class.
The time limitations of a one day class
prevent these "Tune Up" classes from being replacements for our 2-day
Level 1 and Level 2 pistol classes, but provide an easily scheduled
one-day opportunity to improve your skills.
Both classes require pre-registration, are $200 with 14-day advance purchase, and will be held at Elm Fork. Pre-register
by simply mailing a check to our office address (listed at the bottom
of this newsletter). Payment via our online store will soon be
available. Pistol, holster, 3
magazines, and safety gear is required. Bring 500 rounds for the
Fundamentals and 700 rounds for the Advanced class.
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Trigger Time!
by Wayne Dobbs
Well,
we are finally at the end of our series on the fundamentals of pistol
shooting in defense of our lives. This month’s topic came last
for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s very hard
to write about without being able to have hands on time with you as a
student. Also, this month’s topic, trigger control, is hard to
effectively teach, hard to efficiently learn for many folks and it’s
the very first skill to deteriorate when you don’t properly and
regularly work on your fundamental skills. Finally, this subject
is a tough one for me to deal with because I think good trigger control
is probably the single most critical fundamental skill that’s involved
with shooting a pistol really well.
When it’s all said and done
in the firearms training world out there, I’ve found that many, if not
most of the trainers out there are sometimes deficient on how they
teach trigger control. The standard mantra chanted is to “squeeze
the trigger” or we yell at somebody struggling on the line to “quit
jerking the trigger”. All of those “encouragements” are well and
good…and almost totally useless! It’s not popular these days to
speak the truth, but the truth is you don’t learn a physical skill by
hearing somebody tell it to you. Physical skills are learned by
doing them and they should be taught by somebody with a level of
competence that knows the difference between the right way and the
wrong one and has the ability to correct mistakes on the spot.
Properly managing a pistol’s trigger is much more difficult than that
of a rifle and therefore, I think it requires somebody who is a good
fundamental pistol shot to teach that particular skill. It often
requires the patience of Job on the part of shooter and teacher to get
it communicated and performed properly on a consistent basis! Ask
me how I know….
Why, you may ask is trigger control so
critical? There are several reasons, some of which are obvious
and some a little less so. First, the sight radius on a pistol is
much smaller than that of a rifle, which means small sighting errors
are magnified much more than a similar error would be with a
rifle. Good trigger control minimizes these errors by not adding
gross movement to the piece when it’s fired. Next, a pistol
generally moves around, or “wobbles” quite a bit more than does a rifle
and again, gross movement is imparted to the wobbling piece by poor
trigger control. Finally, the biggest reason that a pistol
requires good trigger work is that there is generally a big difference
between what the gun weighs as opposed to the amount of trigger pull
weight required to break a shot. Consider a stock Glock: the gun
weighs about two pounds loaded and the standard trigger is about six to
seven pounds. No, Virginia, the standard connector does not give
you a 5.5# trigger out of the box! So, what you have is a
wobbling, short sight radius piece with a trigger two to four times the
weight of the gun. Not a pretty picture and one that requires
considerable effort to shoot well. When you consider these
factors, it should be clear why typical stress loaded pistol shooting
events have such poor accuracy performances. It’s also why I
train folks to such a rigid accuracy standard in training, because I
know that in a fight, their performance is going to deteriorate by
about 100%. In other words, group sizes will likely DOUBLE in a
stress encounter. If we can get them performing at an excellent
standard of accuracy within reasonable time frames, then I feel much
better about their ability to hit adequately when the big moment
comes. Folks that accept “patterns” all over a monster-sized
silhouette are already displaying significant fundamental inadequacy
and will only get much worse when scared.
For some ideas about
learning trigger control improvement from an article, let me say that
it begins with a solid, centered and neutral grip on the gun (see the
article on that topic for a refresher) and with the trigger finger
completely independent of the grip effort of the shooting hand.
That’s often overlooked which results in folks increasing grip effort
as they pull the trigger, which starts moving the gun down and usually
to the support side. With regard to the trigger finger, it should
ideally be placed with the pad of the first digit squarely on the face
of the trigger and the proximal part of the trigger finger (closest
segment to your hand) should be parallel with the slide, with no
contact between the trigger finger’s “body” and that of the frame.
Some folks put the end of their finger on the trigger (too little
on the trigger) or they have the finger’s middle portion or joint
across the face of the trigger (too much on the trigger). Both of
these mistakes will cause the gun to torque laterally during the press
and will cause misses to one side or the other. You may need to
slightly adjust your grip or select another pistol platform to achieve
this fit. This is important to me because you want to keep the
finger pivoting normally and not at the main hand/knuckle junction or
you will create unpredictable results. Right now somebody is
getting out a Caswell shooter diagnostic card and looking to see if I’m
correct. All I will say is that those are virtually useless in
diagnosing or remediating shooter errors because nothing is usually as
simple as just one thing going wrong. Plus, if you note, those
are for one handed bull’s eye shooting. Use those cards for dry
fire or live fire targets and you’ll get further ahead!
Now that
you’ve established a correct grip and trigger/trigger finger contact
what’s next? Slack is next and you must learn to smoothly and
quickly remove that mechanical slack between the contact with the
trigger and where the sear/trigger/bar/cruciform plate/whatever is
fully engaged. Once the slack is removed, we smoothly and evenly
increase pressure on the trigger in the engagement phase until the shot
breaks. Sounds easy, huh? Well, here is where “El Snatcho”
looms (to use a Larry Vickers term)! We see this wobbling pistol
with the sights somewhat aligned (or maybe perfectly aligned) and we
see it drifting around, over and about the target we wish to drill with
our rounds. Our little reptilian brains say, “NOW!” when it looks
good and we snatch, whack, spank, slap or yank that trigger to get that
shot off before the sights go sour on us. We are ALWAYS rewarded
by a bad shot when we do that! It doesn’t work, hasn’t worked and never
will work! Folks keep trying it (some for all their shooting
lives) and that is why firearms instructors are foul tempered and
impatient! Well, maybe not all the time, but I’ve spent my share
of time being frustrated with folks forcing shots by overpowering the
trigger. It’s like Tony Romo forcing balls: you have bad results
and success for the other side!
You have to discipline
yourself to accept the wobble zone of the piece, keep the sights
aligned adequately for the shot requirements and most of all; you must
steadily and smoothly increase pressure as you maintain the sights
status quo until the shot breaks cleanly. There is no way to tell
you how to consistently do that in an article, but I can do it in a
class or training session with you. That’s a shameless plug by
the way to come to a Level I Pistol class to see what I’m talking
about. Once you’ve learned how to correctly press a trigger, it’s
your responsibility to go and make it a subconscious routine in your
shooting activities. You won’t achieve that in a class, but you
will start down the road to this capability. It’s like a golf
swing in that you can learn from a pro and then you have to go and
practice that swing and drive balls. By the way, I hate golf, but
I’ve found that there are lots of parallels between the physical/mental
learning processes in both golf and shooting.
I would suggest
that once you’ve been taught a correct press of the trigger that you
practice just the press without a target and in a relaxed setting with
your eyes closed. Your activity is to smoothly take up the slack,
steadily increase pressure until the shot breaks and then hold the
trigger to the rear, cycle the slide with the off hand with the trigger
still to the rear and then allow the trigger to move forward until it
resets. Next, take up any slack that’s there and smoothly press
again. Do several thousand CORRECT repetitions and you’ll be on
your way. I really suggest that you don’t involve any targets or
visual feedback until you’ve built that subconscious routine.
Once you have achieved this level, involve a blank sheet of paper and
practice delivering a shot as soon as the sights align…without whacking
that trigger. Next, you can involve a target in the dry fire
process. All of this takes time and discipline and most folks
won’t do it. It’s a physical and mental skill and if you learn it
incorrectly or train incorrectly, then all you do is become an expert
at doing it wrong! It’s like me learning to play golf by watching
a video or hanging out with my hacker buddies: it’s not going to
produce a good golfer and neither will "learning" to shoot without
competent instruction produce a really good shooter.
There’s
a lot of hard work involved on both the student and the trainer’s parts
to learn this fundamental and both have to be committed to the
task. Now you see why all those cops have been missing!
This
has been a great time for me to discuss these topics with you over the
past few months and I would love to hear from you with your comments or
questions. Feel free to email me (Detwd114@yahoo.com or Wayne.Dobbs@yahoo.com) and I will get back to you! In the meantime, solid grip and smooth trigger presses!
(Editor's note. Click on these article titles if you missed Wayne's previous four handgun articles, "Fundamentals - Not Those Again!", "What's Your Stance", "Oh, Say Can You See... The Sights", and "Let's Get a Grip".)
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Previous
Newsletters Available Online!
Check out our previous
newsletters for fantastic training videos, equipment
reviews, and special articles. Find them here.
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Upcoming
Events
November
December
| 13 |
Pistol Tune-Up - Fundamentals (Elm Fork) |
| 13 | Pistol Tune-Up - Advanced Skills (Waco) |
| 14 |
Level 1 Shotgun (Waco)
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Tiger Valley LLC.
Range Address: Hwy 84 at Joe Russell Rd. | Prairie Hill, TX 76678
Mailing Address: 6309 Scottsboro Ln. | Garland, TX 75044
Cell: (972)977-9512 |
