Here is a pictorial essay (people love photos with captions…thanks social media) and explanations to expound on a few points that Lee Weems and I discussed on his excellent podcast, last Sunday. You can watch this show here. We had a great time and I hope you find something useful from it. Talking through things which I don’t normally get to talk about aloud, for me, is a great way to develop ideas and see if things suck or if they hold water. Of course, immediately after the show, I thought of the things that had escaped me during the recording of the episode, and a few other side conversations with Rick Remington, Tom Givens and Louis Caras made me think of a few other things I would add as addendums, or footnotes to that episode.

THANK YOU FOR READING…if I think of anything else worthwhile to say, you’ll be the first to know! Please like, share on your social media and subscribe to my channel so that you don’t miss anything. WordPress and most of the internet has done a fantastic job of either burying or down throttling the views on defense related content, so as long as my seven regular readers keep tuning in, I’ll keep writing! Be careful out there, and stay alert.

In my recent piece on Steve Fisher’s Lowlight class, I spoke about the use cases for the regular civilian needing a weapon light. The cases were when you may only have one hand to operate your home defense weapon, because you have a small child or someone who will require one of your arms to move or defend, or if you only have one arm/hand to use! Maybe you just had shoulder/hand surgery? Any of these scenarios can necessitate alteration of gear to meet the demands of the situation (“Mission drives the gear train!” -Pat Rogers, RIP) that you may find yourself in. There are compact lights, smaller than the TLR-1 I pictured here, but again, the use/utilization is the issue I have. See the article I linked for an explanation of that argument.

5” guns aren’t GIANT, they’re roughly the same size as the venerable 1911 pistol in its original configuration. This gun, being a double stack, striker-fired 9mm, is thicker in the slide than a 1911, but not overly so. The trick with 5” guns is concealing them in normal people clothing, but it CAN be done. But that’s not an issue for the case I am talking about here. I carried a pistol similar to this, as a commissioned Reserve Peace Officer in Tennessee for several years (M&P 1.0 4.25”). Optics weren’t widespread in LE like now, especially in Appalachia, but I DID use a WML. But like I talked about in the article, on-duty LEO’s have a different job than regular folks, and it is important to know the distinction.

HOME DEFENSE

The classic home defense situation is the, “bump in the night.” You hear something strange, novel, and it cues you to either investigate, or at the very least, verbally challenge the noise to find out what it is. Hopefully it isn’t a black bear, like this poor gent. But with a pistol mounted WML, and no handheld, because you are in a sling for a surgery following a labrum tear, you may find yourself verbally challenging something at the end of your hallway, or the foot of your bed, hypothetically. Now, the laws of your jurisdiction may vary, but in mine, an unauthorized and uninvited guest to your home is there illegally, and if they are there for nefarious purposes, lethal force could be legally permissible to be used in a case of self-defense. But how do you do this, without muzzling the unknown source, who COULD be a burglar, but COULD also be your child who snuck out to go howling with their friends and you caught them sneaking back in. But my arm is in a surgical splint and sling, so how do I illuminate the unknown threat (it’s a threat at this point, because it didn’t respond to the verbal challenge and we STILL DON’T know who it is…yet) without pointing a gun at a loved one (RULE TWO: Never allow the muzzle to cross anything you are not will to destroy) and because you live in the sticks, the power is out, and you can’t just do the super un-cool Dad trick and turn the dang hall light on!

FOR MANIPULATIONS

Although my current state outlaws standard capacity magazines, having MORE than ten rounds in the pistol would be preferable. Not because you need to shoot more, but because you would need to reload LESS. If you are in your skivvies, or buck naked like most people who are sleeping are, you probably don’t have your EDC gear or your battle belt on. Ok, some of you true believers maybe sleep in the nude with a battle belt on, but I assure you, once you find a romantic interest, that’ll change! If I could use a 17 round standard capacity magazine or even larger, I would! A secondary effect of having tall sights and/or an optic is that you can rack the slide using the sights or the optic as a hook, to gain mechanical advantage, even with one hand.

OPTICS, SIGHTS AND LIGHTS

I like Holosun optics. I have seen every major brand of optic fail in classes that I have attended or taught, including Holosun, Aimpoint, Trijicon, Vortex and I’m sure some others I am forgetting. I also OWN all of those same makes of optics, and I use them with confidence. Pistol mounted optics (PMO’s) are an enthusiast’s tool; for my normy friends that want the Toyota Tacoma of guns, I would recommend a stock M&P or Glock 19, put on some sights or modify the OEM to something you can see, and press on. If they want a PMO, that’s going to require MORE training AND more maintenance than they are willing to give, so be wary. But many of the malfunctions I have seen were due to install errors, poor surface prep, under torqued screws, over-torqued screws that broke, or batteries not being changed. I change my carry gun batteries, as well as my handheld light’s batteries in November at Daylight Savings time day. Your day may be your birthday, New Year’s Eve day, whatever you like!

This is the Holosun 507 Comp and the, “Comp,” stands for, “competition,” but it really is Holosun’s response to the also popular Trijicon SRO. I like the big window, and for civilian defender duties, an open emitter, if you are an enthusiast who keeps your gear maintained, is fine. I remember my buddy Jeremy Horton, of Horton Knives, world famous blade smith, once said that he didn’t like to use stainless steel in his blades because he can get a better edge with carbon containing steel AND he feels like a person who uses his knives for serious purposes has the duty to inspect their knife and care for it regularly, so that it doesn’t rust, regardless of the environment it is in! Makes sense! Although this optic has about 6 or 8 different reticle options, I use the 2 MOA dot, which looks great to my eye, and is easy to pickup on presentation.

For iron sights, the competitor comes with low mount, or standard height, fiber optics. While they are great if you are just running irons, with a dot, they are too low. So I opted to replace them with the XS RD3 Suppressor height sights.

Like optics, I have seen Streamlight and Surefires fail too, so choose whatever you like. I dig the switchology for the TLR-1 series and I upgrade the activation paddles with the Emissary Paddle Shifters. You may like the OEM switches, but they offer upgrades for the Streamlight TLR-1 and TLR-7 series, as well as the Surefire X300 series.

STORING AND TRANSPORTING YOUR HD GUN

If you keep your gun in a quick access safe or however you store it, I think it is advisable to have something covering the trigger guard. It’s a striker-fired gun, so if you press the trigger with enough force, it will fire. To lessen the chances of an unintentional discharge, holstering this big whammer requires a special holster, called a, “LIGHT BEARING HOLSTER,” and many of the popular manufacturers make them. They run the gamut in so many colors and styles, you take your pick! My favorite comes from the Hauptman’s of PHLSTER. In addition to being true MASTER’S of concealment, the Hauptman’s are also technical innovators and I use their gear daily, and have for about a decade now.

IN CLOSING

Another benefit of a 5” gun is you get a pistol that recoils minimally when fired with one hand, and tracks back to target without a tremendous amount of steering. Had I included this caveat piece in my original essay on Steve’s class, it probably would’ve had even fewer views than usual, because articles that exceed 3000 words, well, they are only read by the ENTHUSIASTS. Try as I might, I have never been a TLDR (too long, didn’t read) guy. But who would want a Doctor that performs surgery on people’s heads and mouth’s to be a person that doesn’t read the directions? I sure wouldn’t! Being an, “enthusiast,” isn’t a bad thing…I remember when I first started Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, people would call the students who weren’t competitors or full time martial artists, “enthusiasts,” in a pejorative way. Like somehow the people who had to go to their normal jobs the next day were somehow less than their full-time martial artist counterparts. By merely accepting the responsibility and burden of maintaining your own personal security, outside of the requirements of your chosen profession, you are an enthusiast. Don’t be ashamed to be called an, “enthusiast,” by some of the, “professional,” gun toters out there who look at us in the armed civilian community as, “less than.” And most of all, keep on pursuing your studies and your practice with zeal and enthusiasm, YOU BIG ENTHUSIAST!

THANK YOU FOR READING! Please, like, share on your social media feeds, and subscribe to my RSS feed here so you don’t miss any of my posts. Social media and even google itself does a fantastic job of down throttling pro-gun media sources, so we have to get the message out somehow! -Dr. House

Ask anyone who, back in the days of Yore, carried a revolver in some professional capacity, and they will tell you that the cognoscenti of the era often preferred the 3” revolver over the longer 4” or 6” barreled guns that were used in a patrol capacity, or the 1 7/8” or 2” guns that were used by plainclothes or off-duty officers. You get the benefit of more barrel to burn powder, which gives a higher muzzle velocity but less muzzle blast, and more sight radius, without a tremendous amount of bulk that the larger guns inherently possess.

Now, in the, “Revolver Renaissance,” there are more and more people and companies who are recognizing the utility and benefits of using a 3” barreled gun. Whether for everyday carry purposes, for a nightstand gun, or just plain fun, the 3” guns are useful.

For this essay, I decided to take three popular 3” revolvers that cover the gamut from modestly priced to exorbitantly priced, and shoot them with HIGH DESERT CARTRIDGE COMPANY jacketed wadcutters (my home base indoor range only allows jacketed or plated/coated bullets). I used, “THE TEST,” that was created by Ken Hackathorn years back and popularized about 15 years ago by Larry Vickers, who commented that he felt it was a good indicator of skill with a pistol. After I shot 3 iterations of THE TEST, I fired 3 iterations of Tom Givens’ OLD WEST CARD TEST (shot on regulation sized playing cards). Along the way here, I will tell you about these revolving pistols, and what they do and do not do well in my hands.

FIRST, THE COMPETITORS

THE TEST

So just to review, “THE TEST” is preferably shot cold. Meaning no warm-up. From ten yards, and from the TRUE low ready (the gun pointed in front of where the feet of the target would be) the goal is to shoot SIX rounds, in SIX seconds or less, and then score the target appropriately. “Proficient,” is considered 90% or better. The non-revolving pistol version is shot from ten yards as well, but TEN rounds are fired, and the par time is TEN seconds. Easy enough? Try it! Let me know how you fare!

THOUGHTS

These are all good guns. Shooting iron sights is tough…now that I am soundly in middle age (50 y/o) I have discovered that the preaching I have heard from Tom and others of, “SIGHTS YOU CAN SEE,” which I really used to take for granted, is a problem now. Three years ago I started to wear progressive corrective lenses. I had LASIK surgery 20 years ago, and since then I have had 20/10 distance vision, which I still have. But I cannot read or see print clearly on my phone inside about 3 feet without glasses. Pretty normal problems for middle aged people from what I understand talking to my peers. The problem with progressive lenses is that up close, unless I look WAY up, with my neck hyper-extended, through the bottom half of my glasses, the front sight is not clear. The target, is crystal clear though when my head is neutral. So, when Tom says, “Get the gun up at eye level, look at the bumpy things on the top of the pistol and press the trigger to deliver effective rounds on target.” So this still works…it just doesn’t work as well as the old days for me when the front sight was CRYSTAL clear. I can say that the gold bead DOES make a difference, as does the bright fluorescent red paint pen on serrated front sights. Everyone has a spectrum of eyesight conditions and you will have to find what works for you!

I blew THE TEST with the revolvers. With pistols, especially pistols with red dots, I can smoke it consistently shooting it clean or down a point or two in the 6-7 second range. With 6 seconds, time is tight!

HIGH DESERT CARTRIDGE COMPANY (HDCC)

I am consistently impressed with HDCC and Steve Shields, the owner. They are semi local to me in WA State, and I like to support local businesses when I can. I use a GARMIN Chronograph at the range to collect data and this is what I found, firing a five round string from each revolver:

As you can see, in terms of velocities from each of the different revolvers, the numbers are similar. The recoil impulse in all three guns was very mild and tolerable. I fired a total of 100 rounds through the three guns in one session, and my hands still felt great afterwards. Ignition reliability was 100%, and the cases were nickel plated and ejected after firing with ease. The round I used is here and has a published velocity of 725 feet per second. I have more of this round on hand, and I like it!

Steve also makes a 148 grain poly coated SOLID base wadcutter that is slightly slower at 715 feet per second. I will get some of those next, and test them the same way, with THE TEST and the CARD TRICK.

FINAL THOUGHTS

IF I SHOT these same drills again tomorrow morning, I may pass all six of them. I find that as soon as I take my timer out of my bag, my performance is either awesome, or not quite! I DO notice that the more I use that timer though, the less that BEEP shocks me, and the more I react appropriately and in the right alignment to send my shots straight and true. If I sit down and shoot slowly, at a 3” circular paster, these rounds all shoot POA/POI out to 20 yards. That works!

THANK YOU FOR READING! Please, like, share on your social media feeds, and subscribe to my RSS feed here so you don’t miss any of my posts. Social media and even google itself does a fantastic job of down throttling pro-gun media sources, so we have to get the message out somehow! -Dr. House

When I look back at the ~11 years I have been writing for my own site, and for the previous ten or so years I wrote for print publications and for Tactical Response, I would write AAR’s and reviews for classes that were comprehensive. They were more of a, “notes from class,” summary. As I’ve been in the training lane for about 30 plus years now, and in the higher education field as a student and as a Medical University Professor for about half of that 30, I have a pretty good grasp of education. It isn’t novel for me to take additional continuing education in a variety of fields, whether those have been related to firearms training, surgery, medicine, dentistry, pharmacology, forensics or philosophy classes these days that are more geared towards my vocation. So now, instead of vomiting up a list of, “First we did this, then we did that, then they said this, then they said that,” I thought it would be more interesting for both of us (me writing this, and you, the one person who will read this far) to hear about what Steve’s teachings illuminated for me or inspired me to do, STOP doing or think more about. And then relate it all back to my professional experience as a shotgun messenger, reserve peace officer AND professional second responder in the fire service/EMS AND in my current capacity as an average schmuck who has taken many hours worth of civilian sector disaster preparedness, self defense and martial arts training.

FOR THE NORMAL FOLKS…

As my mentor Tom Givens is fond of saying, “Many lethal force encounters take place during the hours of darkness…NOT necessarily in low light conditions. I have seen the sights of my pistol better at 11pm under the lights of a filling station than I have on some sunny days.” As I’ve learned doing this writing thing over the years, if Tom Givens said it before, just quote it and move on! I can’t say it any more succinctly than Tom can! The Surefire Stiletto Pro that I carry as my EDC utility light CAN be used in any of the techniques we used in class (in fact, that IS what I used for the class, along with my old police issue Streamlight STINGER and my Streamlight SL20, which I left in my range bag because I was embarrassed for anyone to see it in its 300 lumen glory AND because it was older than most of the LEO’s in the class!

So, building on Tom’s case of the hypothetical gas station robbery, that may take place on the fueling pad by the gas pumps, why do you need a light? If it’s nighttime and there is plenty of ambient light to be seen by the badguys, but can also see them. Outside the penumbra of fueling pad cover, you may need a direct beam flashlight to see what’s out there. But why are you worried about what’s out there? The dude trying to rob you is in front of you or to the side/rear of you. Again, no light required. Many of the EDC crowd that advocate weapon mounted lights (WML) for regular folks (I am NOT talking about on-duty LEO’s or military folks here) say that they need a WML to be able to ID a target. How much more positive identification of a target do you need? If the dude is going to rob you or carjack you, he is going to be close enough to touch you or close enough to verbally communicate with you. Again, no light required for that…you’ll know who is speaking to you or attacking you.

When I worked in the armored truck industry, there were guys that started carrying Glock lights (the old incandescent models) and the USP light. WML holsters were nylon, very crude and almost completely lacked retention. They sure thought they looked cool though! One overlooked thing about openly carried duty guns most lay people don’t think about is that hip carried duty guns get beat up. Our proprioception doesn’t work well for something that is carried on our hip, outside of our peripheral vision, that sticks out 3-4” further than the rest of the side of our body. So that duty gun is constantly getting whacked into door frames, steering wheels, cargo, etc. One of my coworkers actually LOST his Glock 22 from one of these low quality holsters and didn’t even realize it was gone, until the gun had been spotted on the street by some bystander who called the Seattle PD to report that it was missing. The culprit? A crappy holster. The point? Carrying a WML in the rig at the time, didn’t help him. WML utilization for an armored truck guard is the exact same as it is for a normal citizen. They do not have any enforcement powers, so a light, outside of a handheld, isn’t necessary nor prudent.

My argument is that WML don’t have utility for normal civilians outside of a dedicated home defense gun, and even then, I’d say there is nothing a handheld can’t do that a WML can OTHER THAN BE OPERATED with one hand. If you have a baby or a loved one who is immobile and you have only one hand to spare, a pistol with a WML and a pressure switch would be useful. The only other application that MAY hold water for the civilian is from my buddy Greg Ellifritz who uses a pistol with a WML when he goes to the movie. For him, that makes sense. I’m a movie snob…I like sitting in the back row, right under the projection window, dead center, and I will often buy the seats next to me so I don’t have to sit next to anyone else. I personally would be more concerned with the prospect of making a 100% accurate long range shot from the back row of the theater than I would be worried about positively ID the person shooting. But Greg is much more fun than I am, and he probably wouldn’t walk out of the movie theatre like I would if he couldn’t get the seat he liked, so for that, I support the big man’s choice to use a WML for that purpose! In most theaters, if the screen is on, even in dark scenes, anyone who is low (around the screen and fire exits underneath/behind the screen) will be backlit.

The issue that many people in the EDC community overlook and run off of the flawed reasoning of, “the DEVRGU use the blah blah WML and I do too!” Is that the military special operations community isn’t subject to following the laws of the United States, since they aren’t operating domestically. As my friend Lee Weems has said, “If you are not legally justified to be shooting someone, you aren’t legally justified to be pointing a firearm at someone.” Do you know what doesn’t require you to admittedly use deadly force (pointing a WML at someone) and in fact doesn’t even require a report to the police? Pointing a handheld flashlight at someone! With cameras being everywhere, do you want to end up on John Correia’s ACTIVE SELF PROTECTION YouTube channel showing his millions of viewers how NOT to do the right thing? My goal is to never be in a self defense situation of any kind!

An overlooked skill with a WML that many people just don’t grok, even LEO users who SHOULD know better is that just because it may be excusable in an on-duty context to muzzle someone who doesn’t need to be muzzled, you still shouldn’t do it. You CAN illuminate with the secondary spill of the light, depending on the head of the light/the light’s power and the distance to the person, while effectively keeping the gun pointed in a TRUE, “Low Ready,” position, where the muzzle is not covering the suspect. For laypeople, the argument stands though…with cameras everywhere, why not take action that removes any and all doubt? It would be hard to confuse a handheld flashlight for a WML equipped pistol and much easier to explain to a jury of your peers.

I HAVE personally pointed a powerful handheld light at many people on the street (mostly while innocuously walking my dog or hiking in the trails) in the city and said in a loud voice, “NO THANK YOU,” or, “GO AWAY.” And it makes them go away, look away and/or gives you, the user, the initiative and choice of what to do next. If they press an attack, you’re hopefully one step ahead…if they don’t, mission accomplished. Either way, your goal is to go home safely at the end of the day. Anything else is contrary to your mission as an everyday person.

BACK TO STEVE

Like I said earlier, I don’t want to give away Steve’s secret sauce recipe. If you haven’t had any lowlight training, you should catch Steve next time you can. If you are an LEO, Steve’s material would be beneficial. The main push of the class is to help the students understand that they can use light to control people, places and spaces and increase their effectiveness by using the light correctly. BUT ALSO remembering that if you are in the dark (and nobody is using night vision equipment) and you can’t see the bad guy, he probably can’t see you either! So again, use the light to control the interaction!

Lights are all the rage these days. People post their nightstand, pocket everyday carry item dumps, and they all have a light. Whether they carry that actually or if it’s just for the photo, that is a great question! I tend to carry a light whenever I have pants on, which is most days! I use my light far more often to check the mail at night, not fall down the stairs in my front walkway, find something on the floor/ground that has been dropped, or at work to look in someone’s mouth when I am not in the operatory. But like any kind of technology, they are an electronic item and they will fail. If you don’t have a handheld light that has at least a tactical level of light, you may need one! A handgun accompanying capable light should allow you to see someone’s face, hands and waistline to at least 25 yards…but 50 yards would be better! This is easily accomplished with most of the commonly carried EDC lights.

Depending on where you live in the world, you spend at least half of your day during hours of darkness…but you don’t have to be afraid of the dark. We have black bears, mountain lions, rumored Sasquatches, and orcas here (in the water). I worry far more about the humans that go bump in the night than I do about the creatures that go bump in the night! Luckily, most humans, who go about in the dark to carry out unsavory behavior, in some strange nearly religious significance, are afraid or at least apprehensive of bright light! And that’s a good thing! But like any kind of skill, the utilization of light for defensive purposes takes teaching and practice. And my very tall friend Steve Fisher is just the man to learn it all from! The greatest philosophical quote of Steve’s from this class I recorded was, “The GUN will save your life; the LIGHT will save someone else’s!”

THANK YOU FOR READING! Please, like, share on your social media feeds, and subscribe to my RSS feed here so you don’t miss any of my posts. Social media and even google itself does a fantastic job of down throttling pro-gun media sources, so we have to get the message out somehow! -Dr. House

First off, recall that I live in a, “BAN STATE,” meaning that if you are buying magazines in the store or online, you won’t find any that exceed ten rounds in capacity here. And of course, it is illegal to bring them in from a free state. So you’re stuck with ten rounds. Not the end of the world, as according to who you ask, the average number of rounds fired in a civilian defensive encounter is some number between one and three, and as many as 11 total! Obviously, if there is more than one attacker, you might need to fire more rounds. That goes without saying…we all hope that the squad of attackers will break contact when one of them is shot, but I don’t know if I’d hang my hat on that. That would be a perfect, best world scenario, but nobody that takes defensive preparedness seriously plans for the, “best case scenario.” If that were true, we’d all spend 100% of our time working on our verbal deescalation techniques and move on. But verbal deescalation techniques don’t work 100% of the time…and neither does the careful application of gunfire. But, when forced, we have to choose the BEST, worst decision out of a list of options, and we have to do that in a flash, with no time to weigh our options. This is why pre-planned responses are a worthwhile endeavor to consider and formulate.

In the state I live in, the criminals here are undeterred by the justice system, and law enforcement is so overwhelmed with their dwindling numbers (we are dead last in the number of LEO’s per capita) that ambush attacks go off here, daily, and they are often unreported or under-reported by the left wing media. And it isn’t getting any better as time goes on. Meanwhile, the legislature and the governor/attorney general do whatever they can to further neuter the law-abiding’s ability to lawfully defend themselves, while they continue to go lighter and lighter on violent criminal offenders. It makes no sense! But you didn’t come here to read about politics.

I firmly believe in carrying a pistol you are capable of getting yourself out of trouble with. Meaning, if I am attacked in an ambush fashion…most violent attacks are ambushes. If you are walking to your car and someone yells out your name and begins to shoot at you, that’s an ambush. You are at a deficit to react, so you better have your ears on, so to speak. Being distracted by any number of things while traversing transitional spaces is just silly, while cars drive in and out around you, having your head down in your phone is just asking for something bad to happen.

If you are sitting in your living room and someone starts kicking in your front door while screaming at you, that’s an ambush. They utilized the element of surprise to catch you (the victim) at a moment of disadvantage.

The core idea around the ambush attack in a general sense relies on concealment of some kind…this could be literal concealment, or this could just be someone parking up the block from the home they intend to invade. Or ducking down amongst parked cars in a parking lot works and even simply being, “hidden in plain sight,” when the ambushing attacker was there all along, you just didn’t see them there. The next factor of an ambush is timing, or waiting for the right moment to strike. If you are leaving the shooting range, and someone is going to rob you for the contents of your pockets and your range bag, the time to do that would probably NOT be when you are walking back to your truck with a long gun, and you just put a fresh magazine into the weapon and ran the bolt/applied the safety. Initiating the attack at that point would most definitely result in loud noises and defeat for the attacker. Similarly, attacking someone inside of the entryway of a Walgreen’s wouldn’t be ideal either. The bad guy isn’t trying to get caught…so they want to have as few witnesses as possible. They also want to get you alone; if they have to move out of the way for customers entering and exiting the store, it is hard to accomplish their task and they also run the risk of some random person intervening and ultimately spoiling their plan. The last element of the ambush attack is sudden action… the cat pounces. We’ve all seen it, whether it is the family pet locking in and attacking the faux mouse, or the tiger on the African Savanah clobbering a grazing herbivore, there is an acceleration of action and movement that immediately precedes the attack. Human behavior IS animal behavior after all. Don’t get it twisted!

HOW TO NOT GET AMBUSHED

We have all heard of these mental games we can play to be mindful of our surroundings. Like Tom Givens teaches, ask yourself, “Who is around me and what are they doing?” Or the counting game…look around you and count the people in your proximity (one, two, three, four etc.) and be mindful of what they are up to. In the decade or so that I spent in the armored transport industry, I used to play mental scenarios in my head in the real world, when I was sitting in the truck at one of the hundred and fifty or so, various locations we would traverse in a day. I would look at avenues of approach, gaps in between buildings, blind corners, unusually parked vehicles and other obstacles that would provide concealment for the attackers or hard cover for me. The most successful armored car attacks took place in actually quite simple ways. They aren’t the Hollywood flash of glitz and effects that are so pervasive in the entertainment media. The worst one I saw in my time there took place in an area where instead of using the size of the truck to dominate a space in a busy parking lot, the crew decided to go for the speedy approach, where they move at top speed to try and get done sooner than every other route (yeah these guys exist). So because they didn’t hog up space in the parking lot, the messenger (the crew member that runs the money to and from the truck is called the messenger…the third crewman who carries a long gun is called the shotgun messenger) who was working alone had to run between two parked vehicles, one of which was a van. When he opened the door, the van door immediately slid open and unleashed a fusillade of gunfire that killed the messenger, and because the crew was in such a hurry, they left the front bulkhead door open which meant that the ambushing robbers now had access to the cab and driver of the truck. Both crew members were killed and the robbers had unfettered access to the contents of the truck. So to recap my previous points, the elements of their ambush were, 1. CONCEALMENT: the robbers created a choke point through manipulation of the scene to funnel the truck and the crew to exactly where they wanted them, AND they did it in such a way that their vanilla appearing vehicle parked in a conventional location for the area didn’t trigger any alarm bells 2. TIMING: the robbers waited to spring their trap until the window existed when the messenger was exiting the truck and the door was open. Had the door closed, they would’ve killed the messenger or had a hostage, but they still wouldn’t have access to the money in the truck. Their goal is to get paid…they’ll kill to do it, but most of these financially motivated criminals aren’t looking to JUST kill someone. Had they triggered the trap and initiated the ambush sooner, the truck would’ve just kept on trucking! Or if they triggered the ambush when the messenger was returning to the truck, there would’ve been perhaps an exchange of gunfire but the attackers would be at a geometric/spatial disadvantage AND the truck (the goal) would be again, trucking away 3. SUDDEN ACTION: the door opening and an immediate volley of high powered projectiles raining in on the messenger and the truck cab wasn’t what was expected. Had they known that was the move, they could’ve taken other defensive actions or even pulled the UNO REVERSE card on the robbers.

THE ARMORED TRANSPORT INDUSTRY AS A HYPER-STAKES VERSION OF THE REGULAR CIVILIAN DEFENDER…

If you’ve ever taken classes with me and I speak about the armored truck industry, I’ve said it is a hyper-real version of everyday life. Meaning, it’s two or three dudes, who are usually friends or at least friendly, who are going from point A to point B, to either deliver or pickup something of value, and then take the pickup to another location. So it is essentially a massive checklist of errands, in both populated and often rural areas. There are the same hazards that any normal person would face…traffic, road ragers, rioters/demonstrations, extreme weather. The big difference is that when YOU (the average American John or Judy) are out running errands, very few people are going to want to carjack you for your Costco load of groceries. When you are in the armored transport business, you have cash, coin, precious metals, precious stones, sometimes documents, bonds, software, and a few other weird things that someone is wanting moved safely from the point of business, to usually a financial institution. And you have the candy everybody wants. So you will attract the criminal element from the low level dipshits who have caviar dreams, all of the way up to the more sophisticated criminals who have an inroad to the inside baseball that gives them an advantage in terms of timing. Everything else relative to the ambush in concealment and sudden action, are similar. Just as an aside here, if you REALLY want the best deep dive into how to dissuade a bad guy from selecting you as their victim, as well as how to spot the behaviors that indicate what the criminal element will do next, check out Craig Douglas/The Shivworks Collective. Craig and the crew do a fantastic job with their MUC (Managing Unknown Contacts) material and they are world renowned for it, by some of the most dangerous people on the planet. Check them out!

FOILED AMBUSH

I’ve had some crazy stories happen to me in my years of service in the armored transport industry as well as during my decades as a professional first responder. When I look back, probably like lots of middle aged men, I am both shocked and impressed that I made it out of several times relatively unscathed. Like most intelligent humans I learn best from my mistakes, so here is an incident where I was the victim of an ambush robbery that turned out great for me, but only by being extremely lucky.

This was in 1997. I was working a morning route with another fella who was fifteen years my senior and was a bit of a space cadet. Meaning, he was on the clock but he wasn’t really awake until he’d had about 64 ounces of coffee and made 2-3 bathroom stops. I, on the other hand, was full of JOLT cola and ready to leap over the Swiss Alps if given the chance. So we went to a bank, prior to them opening for business, to deliver a substantial amount of cash as well as pickup bundles of circulated cash and canvas bags of circulated quarters. When we pulled up to the bank, the lot was empty except for the employee parking spots. As was customary (the bank had tinted windows…great for that southern exposure but terrible to assess what is happening inside the bank) the staff would see/hear us and they would open the door to let us in. We used a large aluminum handtruck to transport that amount of money. It was so weighed down that it didn’t matter which hand you used to push it; if you needed to let go of the cart and draw your gun, the cart simply stopped with a, “THUNK,” and remained where ever it was you let go of it. There was no worry of it rolling away…

I went inside of the bank and dropped their cash, and picked up the deposit of circulated cash and coin. There was ALOT of it. More than I expected. I stacked fifteen bags of quarters onto the cart, then put the large bails of cash into my canvas bag that I hung from the bail of the handtruck and headed for the door (bears mention here that coins, when tightly packed into rolls and stacked into boxes, OR packed densely into canvas bags, do a good job of stopping incoming pistol rounds. I found this out the hard way when a coworker touched off a 158 grain lead SWCHP from an issued .38 revolver into a bag in the cargo bay). Again, as before the bank employee tended the door for me. First the inner door from the lobby, then the outer door from the foyer to the outside. I was pushing/pulling the cart, while maintaining my awareness. I saw nothing odd as I looked around the periphery of the truck, and the parking lot, and the riverside parking spots across the adjacent street. Nothing. I turned my back to the truck to pull/drag the handtruck over the door frame to get it outside, and when I wheeled around and faced the truck/started pushing the cart towards the truck, I saw a midsized, blue sedan with two male occupants, and unfortunately they were WEARING RED BANDANAS and sunglasses over their faces. I looked at my partner…he had his Rayban Aviators on and his expression was blank; there was no movement from him. I figured this was it…I was going to die in a hail of gunfire from these assholes that got the drop on us. So I did what I thought best at the time; I crouched into as narrow a profile as possible behind the handtruck and I jammed the earplugs that I kept in my body armor carrier in my ears (for long truck trips to minimize my hearing loss from the diesel engine) I looked at the car with the bad guys in it, then drew my pistol and got down behind the handtruck stacked high with bagged quarters, and picked my spot on the passenger’s chest/where the red bandana ended. About this time, my partner woke up/snapped to reality, and he threw the truck into DRIVE, and drove over several parking blocks and the sidewalk to put the messenger door next to where I was now kneeling behind my hand truck. Simultaneously the blue sedan gunned it and turned aggressively and lit out of the parking lot, quickly. I holstered, opened the door of the truck and offloaded the cart into the truck, and we drove off to the next stop, and enroutenwe radioed dispatch to give them a description of the vehicle and their direction of travel.

This would’ve been a fine ambush and payday for the badguys except a few things went screwy for them. 1. CONCEALMENT As Tom Givens says, people think that the bad guy materialized out of nowhere… These guys materialized from the employee car parking! Their car was non-descript, and it didn’t stick out, so I didn’t even notice it in the employee line of cars. I also didn’t notice it was occupied…they may have been crouched down, or out of the vehicle in another place, looking out. I’m not sure, but it got past me. 2. TIMING was on point…they were in the same airspace as me when I had the money they wanted. Their planning sucked though. The parking lot was designed in such a way, not for tactical advantage but probably just how the real estate played out, that when I exited the bank, I was a long way from them. Without significant 4×4 and torque, they would’ve had to walk/and get the money from me. Meaning they were going to have to walk/run to me. I had hard cover to stay behind…they didn’t. 3. SUDDEN ACTION was either robbed from THEM or they popped out too soon. Had they popped out while I was loading the truck, that would’ve been a problem for me, but I saw them when they were about a car length from the back of the armored truck and probably two car lengths (about 30 feet) from me. My backstop beyond their tree from my hasty currency bunker was a dirt embankment and a 200 year old oak tree. Over penetration wasn’t a worry for me if anything made it out of the car. I think what foiled their plan the most was that the actions from my truck crew they anticipated were:

A. I put my hands up, give up the money, and they abscond with the cash

B. I run to the truck door, and attempt to throw the money in and have the truck drive off, and they flank or try and maneuver into the truck with me left behind

C. I run to the truck door, throw the money and all the coin in the truck and they flank or try and maneuver into the truck and I try and get away with the truck

D. I throw the bag to them and they drive off…

None of those things happened. Had my partner been awake, the plan could’ve been short circuited in about ten other ways. It was an instructive encounter.

Luckily for you (hopefully) you don’t work in the armored truck industry and you don’t have to worry about people killing you for the contents of your coal bag, your handtruck or your armored truck. You just have to worry about getting home safely at the end of the day. So you probably don’t need a full sized USP .45 (like I had in the aforementioned ambush robbery attempt) but the pistol I am talking about here, has the same payload of that pistol, and with the developments we have in defensive ammunition, it is probably as effective as the Federal 230 grain Hydrashoks I used then. Did I mention it is about half the size? Ok maybe not quite half.

TO USE IT, YOU NEED IT ON YOU, NOT IN A CIGAR BOX ON YOUR NIGHTSTAND OR IN YOUR GLOVE BOX

The Shield X is portable. I’d say it is just slightly larger than the original Shield, but it is more pointable. The backstrap to the trigger reach is shorter.

I wish I had more rounds with which to repel the next ambush attack I find myself in. But most of all, I hope to see the signs and either avoid the attack altogether or not even be there in the first place! But with 11 rounds in a compact carry piece that gives up nothing in terms of controllability or accuracy, I’m happy with it. I carry a spare magazine and I practice weekly and attend formal training several times a year. Mostly, I proceed through life with caution. Although at this age I am more likely to fall in the woods or get into a carwreck on my commute, the existential threats here posed by humans cannot be overlooked. Until the courts catch up the true demands of the People, this is the society we have to live in. So stay frosty out there!

THANKS FOR READING!!! I hope you enjoy my work and if you do, please like, share on your social media (I am not on any social media platforms anymore) and subscribe to my feed. I have lots more work to publish on how to stay ready in a ban state, so stay tuned!

I tend to go in hard on things…sometimes quasi-obsessively. For example, in the past two decades, I spent probably about 1/3 of the weekends in any given year either teaching some type of self-defense course or participating in some type of self defense event either as a student, or as a competitor (in the case of BJJ). It was a busy time. I think that lots of it was that I was chasing ideas, trying to see how, “this next guy,” does things. What does he say, do or teach that is different than the last 12 guys I trained with, and maybe even more significantly, how does it differ or sound from the previous guys who have served as my mentors in the past? The people whose form and concepts I most closely identified with and used as a, “home base,” and basis of comparison for parallel or competing techniques. I have used this prevailing philosophy to guide my training over the past 35 years, and in that time I have had highs, lows, losses and plateaus. I’ve also had times where life just brought me other challenges and hobby training took a back seat. Even though I have found myself in several existential threat situations OUTSIDE of my career as a professional first responder, I have still considered my training to be my hobby. When I was a kid, it was martial arts/guns, horror movies/sci-fi, comic books, model rocketry and the saxophone…after I went into public safety, it was a hobby that had an overlap into my professional career choices, and now that I am comfortably set into my middle age years as a health care provider, it is back to being an elective hobby…but I still run into miscreants and others who who’d do me harm, if given the chance. So let’s call it a hobby with significant overlap into the, “self-improvement,” realm, but landing squarely in the realm of, “lifelong pursuit of martial arts.”

In Musashi’s line 16 from the aforementioned, “The Way of Walking Alone,” he states, “Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.” He never states what is useful. If you think about this, it will vary greatly from person to person. Everyone has their reasoning for what a weapon collection is, and also what practice is. We can safely assume by, “practice,” that Musashi was talking about training and/or practice. “Collecting weapons,” is a strange thing to consider in modern times, because what defines a collection is extremely subjective. I’ve seen news stories where they describe the massive arsenal that the police recovered or confiscated, and I’ve known guys that carried more guns and ammo than that in their pickup. And the amount of practice someone does? Again, highly variable. Musashi likely was thinking along the lines of not allowing so much training and practice consume your life to the point that your entire life is ONLY training and practice. That’d be weird, you won’t have any friends, or money, you won’t bathe and you’ll probably die of dehydration or starvation because you’ve forgotten to eat. I jest, but you get the point. Everyone’s idea of what is enough training/practice is different. Most hobby shooters in the training circles shoot FAR MORE than even the most well-funded, well-trained police departments. They also tend to get into the least amount of trouble beyond a defensive gun use where display of a firearm ends the altercation. After some point (different for everyone) the situational awareness increase that comes with certain types of defensive training goes a long way towards preparing to deal with existential threats. Of course, on the flip side of that coin, there are 80 year old UNTRAINED women and men who defend themselves with firearms, successfully, every year. So it again boils down to a philosophical question (like many topics in the defensive space do). “What are you prepared to do?”

We learned a number of things in K.A.’s class that are foreign to many, outside the practical shooting sports worlds. For example, EXTENSIVE one handed shooting conditioning. In most of the widespread concealed carry centric courses, weak hand shooting is mentioned, and strong hand only shooting is covered but mostly just given lip service and perhaps, a magazine or two worth of familiarization. Also, skills like drawing, hitting a low probability target under time pressure, while a bunch of your peers watch, and quietly judge you? Well, that’s also a consideration (everyone in our class was super cool so there wasn’t any smarminess that sometimes happens in classes). K.A. was quick to point out, “Will you need these skills in real life? I don’t know…you might.”

SKILL BUILDING VERSUS TACTICAL CLASSES

Most people get it wrong. They say things like, “I am attending a tactical training class.” What they mean to say is that they are attending a skill building class or just a firearms training class. Learning how to draw, pay attention to the universal firearms safety rules and also loading, clearing malfunctions, shooting with both hands and single hands, those are all skills. There aren’t any tactic(s) in there, those are all skills, whereas tactics are specific methods or actions used to achieve a goal or gain advantage in a situation. K.A.’s class was very much a skill based course, that while coming primarily from the application of his defensive pistol based skills applied to competition, this inspired me to wonder what got him to where he is, and how I can sharpen my skills to be a better defensive shooter.

“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world.”

When I worked for Tactical Response, the gear list for the class had at the top of it, “ONE OPEN MIND.” After working for James for a number of years, I understood this to be an evolution of the often repeated BJJ maxim of, “Leave your ego off the mat.” It’s harder than it sounds…nobody wants to look like the guy or gal that doesn’t know what they’re doing, and it’s worse when there is an audience, but without ego getting involved, it is easier to make great strides in training.

I had a first-hand experience when I first started BJJ that reinforced that idea. I attended training at an AOJ (Art of Jujitsu) school, where my Professor, Felix Garcia, is a black belt under Gui Mendes. Professor Mendes would come give seminars at our academy with his cadre of very competent competitors, to teach blocks that tied into what they were currently studying at the time. If you’ve ever attended an AOJ seminar, you know that at the end of the seminar, the AOJ Professors and coaches will accept challenges from anyone in attendance. I was a zero stripe white belt at the time…I had about 3 months of experience. My Son and I attended classes regularly, several nights a week, but like so many of the Father/child attendees at our academy, we were new, and basically anonymous.

At the end of the seminar, I raised my hand to challenge any of the AOJ staff. As Professor Jonatha Alves saw my hand and waved me to the mat, I saw my Son look terrified and I think he believed I was going to die. It would be an extremely bad business model to kill off (effortlessly BTW) students at their seminars, but I knew that I was safe in their capable hands. I then spent the next five minutes of the round pushing the Professor to no avail, around the mat in our respective quadrant of the academy. I felt like Cool Hand Luke…I was giving it my all and I tried really hard to make something connect, but Professor Jonatha was a great sport and let me work, but also showed me where I was going wrong…again and again and again. I just kept coming back, hitting him with nothing. At the end of the round, I shook his hand, hugged him, and rejoined the line. Shortly after, the seminar ended. As is customary in BJJ classes in true martial arts gyms, you shake the hand of every participant and thank them for the training. Somehow, everyone remembered my name now, and congratulated me on getting out there in the very deep end of the pool, and my amazing loss! And although I looked like a complete sweaty try-hard to everyone who knows what BJJ is supposed to look like, I learned what not to do, and also I learned firsthand what it felt like to risk my ego, and still come out unscathed! It didn’t hurt…it was instructive.

I think most of the attendees in KA’s class also risked their ego to test themselves against the standards and evaluations that were given in the class. While it would be easy to stomp off, get mad, be frustrated, and carry that negative grief through the rest of the class, it is preferable to think, “That didn’t work,” or, “I need to spend some time hammering these dents out of my routine.” I had several, AH-HA moments in this class, and I am sure that I will think of some more as time marches on, but here are some thoughts in no particular order.

DRAW STROKE FOR EFFICIENCY vs. DRAWSTROKE FOR WEAPON RETENTION

For about 20 years now, I have used the 4-step drawstroke in my defensive pistol work. STEP ONE…establish a full firing grip on the gun and harness and move the cover garment. STEP TWO…draw the gun back to the high retention position. STEP THREE…the hands meet at the mid sternum level and then press the gun from the center chess into the eyeline, picking up the front sight/dot along the way. STEP FOUR…complete the press out and engage the trigger. I watched KA and several others in the class complete their draws, including my friends and colleagues like Rick Remington, John Johnston, Mirko Muggli, Matt Rakestraw, and I thought, “I seem to be moving in molasses compared to them! Where am I going wrong?” KA outlined HIS method of the drawstroke and referred to the STEP TWO section of the draw as a, “culdesac,” you CAN take if there is a close range issue you will need to fire from retention on, but in the absence of a close range problem, you can skip directly from STEP ONE to STEP THREE!!! “EUREKA!!!” I thought back to another class, taught by Gabe White when homeboy John Hearne said to me, “Dude, you’re a solid shooter but your draw is SLOW. Fix that.” He was right then and he’s still right now! I didn’t have a path then to fix my draw speed, but now, I had an idea. Eliminating 25% of that movement with my long arms would shave time off and bring the gun to my eyeline at the threat, quicker.

PREDICTIVE SHOOTING

This is an industry buzz word I have heard a bunch lately but I haven’t given a ton of thought to, because I didn’t know what it meant. I understand it now, thanks to KA to mean an out branching of the Colonel Jeff Cooper idea of the hammer pair…meaning two shots fired using one sight picture, and relying on index and a best guess of the learned recoil characteristics of THAT gun in YOUR hands to fire the shot, cycle/recoil, and return to the starting position to send an additional shot or shots along that same trajectory to the target. Fortuitously, I had great success with this. I have been using some flavor of the 9mm M&P for nearly two decades now, so I know how the gun recoils in my hand(s) and how it feels as I work my way through the magazine. I was able to pick up the dot, send my shots and see my gun return to the starting position with little deviation which resulted in a tight pattern on the IDPA target. Sub-3 second Bill Drill here I come! Right? Well, kinda…

Drawing and Shooting FAST is hard

Being a primarily defensive shooter, with very little competition experience, and practicing at a range that doesn’t allow drawing from the holster (except in competition and in coursework) and requires a rate of fire not to exceed one shot per second (except for hammers/double taps, not to exceed one volley per second) my shooting speed has slowed down. I take round accountability very seriously, since I came from a public safety background, AND I have treated lots of injuries from RULE 4 violations in extremis. I am VERY weary of pressing off shots willy-nilly, without an extreme level of control. Probably too much. The prescription for the class under KA’s watchful eye was to push the envelope. For me, that meant generating split times that exceeded my normal splits of 1.00 seconds! Many of the folks in this class were probably in the .16 to .20 range with regularity, so there was some fast shooting indeed. I did my best to take my foot off the brake, but my core programming would always say in my inner voice, “WATCH IT…” This may be inconsequential, or as KA often said throughout the course, “Will you need this skill? I don’t know. You MIGHT!” As my buddy Rick Remington remarked (who was also the most-excellent host of this class) said, “Most gun toters would be better off refining/speeding up their draw to a solid first shot than spending time worrying about fast splits.”

PREPARATION

I am a creature of habit and order. I set out my clothes for the next day, every night before I go to bed. The Keurig is set…I have a valet on my nightstand that I use to organize my EDC equipment pocket it all before I leave the house. Before I perform a surgery, I do the exact same process, to make sure my light is charged/and my magnifiers are focused at my focal length, and that my mask is in place. The point being, I’m pretty organized and habitual. With that said, I don’t have a routine I do when I go to the line to shoot a drill. MOST OF THE TIME, I just say, “F*** it, let’s go! It normally works out for me. I don’t do anything once I put my loaded gun into my holster in the morning other than make sure my optic is working and that the gun is loaded…and it cost me an evaluation event. I screwed up my counting. I’ve seen this happen in Tom Givens’ classes before the Casino Drill, but I have never had it happen myself! But I sure did in this class. The funny part was, after I screwed it up royally, and was laughing and saying, “WTF!?!” I completed the drill and I saw where my shots went, and they were dead nuts centered! I shoot better when I don’t care about the score anymore! So for the rest of the weekend after that blunder, I always drew at speed, checked the mag and made sure the chamber was loaded, and the optic was powered on and still centered and not loose. No more worries with the rest of the drills.

IT WAS A MARATHON FULL OF SPRINTS

Sprinting is hard. Shooting single evaluation drills is also hard. It is mentally taxing and requires great concentration to go from zero to 100mph, complete what is required, and then calm back down. It’s a strange adaptation. I tend to start calm, stay calm, and end calm, most of the time. I think I broke my sympathetic nervous system years ago, and it takes a lot of danger, novelty and/or epinephrine to get me to really feel a spike in nervous system tone. So cuing myself to start at the, “B,” of, “BEEP,” is challenging. I recall I actually start moving around the, “EP,” of the beep. I don’t think anything is going to overcome that other than the line from, “Man On Fire,” which was the line from the swim training of, “the gunshot sets you free.”

Along that same line, I can’t recall a class I’ve ever taken before that was quite as fulfilling and but also very mentally taxing and fatiguing. I devoted computing power to tasks I THOUGHT I had automated. I will definitely spend more of my practice time in focused mode, with a higher percentage of time spent on the Rangemaster Drill of the Month, the IDPA 5×5, and other drills (I won’t say what KA had us do; people should go into it cold like we did…don’t study for the test; you WILL have time to redeem yourself).

SPRINGER’S FINAL THOUGHTS

I’ve been in a training lull without much motivation to do anything beyond marksmanship lately…I have become that old guy at the bench shooting playing cards at 25 yards. Stacking injuries, a busy work schedule and a practice range that offers time but very constricted activity has all been a detriment to my regular training and practice routine. KA’s class has given me MORE to think about, that I never considered before. I enjoy thinking deeply about the world…that’s why I earned a BA in Philosophy when my career path required a science degree (I got one of those too). KA ALSO is a graduate student of Eastern and Western philosophy and he ties those connections into his training. Thinking about thinking isn’t new…neither is thinking about the finer aspects of human on human warfare. This banter you see on YT between the latest talking heads is not new at all. Just in my lifetime, these conversations have already been penned by people like Jeff Cooper, Charles Askins, William Aprill, Todd Green, James Yeager, Paul Gomez and hundreds of others who went before them and us. There are even more extant thinkers that have forgotten more about this subject than most would believe (try to stump a Tom Givens, John Farnam or Mas Ayoob…I have TRIED; they’ve heard it all before, or done it or tell you who did it before). There is very little under the sun that is truly new, or novel. Yes, technology has improved, but the application of it and the purpose of that application is largely unchanged. What IS new is what have you NOT thought about, or tried or tested, or done to change your way of thinking? I recommend that whether you are a student of defensive pistol craft like me, or an action sports competitor, AND YOU LIKE TO THINK, take KA’s class. You’ll be glad you did.

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I’ve talked a bit in past pieces (here), and my recent podcast appearance (here) about Jeff Cooper’s idea of, “Preoccupation with inconsequential increments.” In Colonel Cooper’s own words, he defined PII as:

This peculiarity lies in attributing importance to measurable deviations so small as to be meaningless. You see it in the people who shoot test groups in rifles, awarding a prize to a group which is only thousandths of an inch smaller than those unrewarded. One sees it in speed records awarded in one-thousandths of one mile-per-hour. One sees it in basketball scores which, nearing the century mark, are separated by less than three points. In all such cases Score A is “better” than Score B, but who cares?

An increment may be termed inconsequential when it has no significant relationship to the purpose of the exercise. Of course if the purpose of the exercise is in itself inconsequential some may not think this to be foolish. A very distinguished general at Quantico once caused the sign to be placed over the exit door of every office asking, in brilliant scarlet and gold, “What are you trying to do?” There was a man who knew more about human nature than most.

Since becoming interested, and practiced in using pistol mounted optics, I’ve deep dived into what ranges to zero the dot at, whether (or not) to slave the dot to the iron sights and whether it is better and more appropriate to have the dot in the middle of the optic window, where the dot is clearest, optically.

I then test all of these different ideas and gather data in weekly range practice sessions using various drills, and in a weekly competition course that is timed, and is coupled with turning targets that only face the shooter for an unknown interval of time.

What difference does the study of all of these variables matter, in terms of actual scored shooting in a competition environment? Not much, actually. I think the variability in my week to week scores has far more to do with my fatigue level, how sore I am at the end of the work day, and my relative mental sharpness. If the match took place first thing in the morning, on my day off, the results might be a bit more consistent and clear. In an emergency where a pistol has to be used in defense of life, my worst day on the competition roster is still quite good enough for self defense purposes, as I routinely score by earning 90% or better of the available points in the course.

It is probably more than adequate to be able to shoot a standard playing card five times, in five seconds from five yards for most all necessary accuracy purposes. If you can pull that feat of precision off, you can most likely achieve any reasonable accuracy exercise out to 25 yards on a IDPA/IPSC size target. And although it is easy to get down a rabbit hole about obsessing with these small numbers, the time spent could probably be more productively used elsewhere. This is more of a message to myself, as I tend to get pretty far out in the weeds with thinking about these things. At the end of the day, sight alignment, trigger control and follow through are what rules the day and anything else is just additional baggage.

I do love the SIG FUSE though…

THANK YOU FOR READING! If you enjoy my work, please subscribe to future posts, and if you care to share my writing on social media, I appreciate you. I’m not active on social media anymore, so I appreciate the signal boost. Take care, and thanks again.

-Dr. House