A Beginner’s Guide to USPSA Stage Strategy.

I get frustrated sometimes with the lousy advice given to beginners in practical shooting who want to learn how to optimize their movement during a stage. We dole out lots and lots of advice over holsters and optimal powder charges for 9mm Major, but very little over “Here’s how you shoot a stage.”

So I wrote something to use as a starting point for stage strategy for newcomers to Production Division, over at the Beretta Blog.

 

Upcoming Training: Warrior Club At Training Grounds.

This will be a bit different for me. In the past, I’ve written about how quasi-military training is NOT what we armed citizens really need to learn, primarily because we don’t have to do the same things that the military does. The job of the military is to use overwhelming firepower to beat an enemy into submission in order to take over their territory. That, thankfully, is not my job as an armed civilian. My job as an armed citizen is to avoid contact with the criminal element as much as I can, but if I can’t, I need to use enough force to break contact wit the bad guy (up to and including lethal force) until law enforcement arrives to bring closure to the situation. Two wildly different goals such as that demand wildly different training styles. Yes, the fundamentals of sight alignment, trigger press and so on may be the same, but the reasons WHY we are learning those things are completely different.

However, the horrific suicide statistics in the United States, especially suicides that use a gun, have touched me deeply. I lost a good friend to suicide, and I think it’s high time that we as gun owners step up to the plate and do something about this tragedy in our midst before something is done to us and our rights are yet again diminished.

Men returning home from the horrors of World War Two found solace and comfort in the safe spaces of the Rotary Club and the Elks Lodge and dozens of other service organizations, but men returning home from our years-long involvement in Afghanistan and elsewhere have no such refuges to cling to. This is why I’m interested in what Training Grounds is doing with their Warrior Club.

There is a Warrior buried within all of us. Find yours as you and your team go through intense, fun and unique training exercises, designed to push you and build camaraderie among friends. Fun, fast paced and designed to teach multiple skills in a short amount of time. You will leave amazed at the new skill you’ve learned or the old skills you’ve improved on.

Social media and all the other wonders of our internet-based society are keeping locked up in our homes, away from the contact of real people. While I have gained some very close friends via social media, the fact is, they live all over the globe, and they aren’t available to be if I want to chat over a cup of coffee. We need more opportunities where men can come together and bond in-person, face-to-face and realize that they don’t have to tackle the problems of the modern world by themselves. This movement has to start somewhere, so why not have it start on the friendly confines of the firing range?

Stay tuned.

Content Dump.

I’m quite proud of this piece I did for NRA Family on making shooting resolutions for the New Year. You’re already resolving to lose weight and exercise more this year, so why not resolve to shoot more as well?

I really liked the Ruger PC Carbine I reviewed for Shooting Illustrated (and so did my editors, because they named it their Rifle Of The Year). However one thing I found in testing it was that the one short section of Picatinny rail on it wasn’t enough. Fortunately, Catalyst Arms has rectified that shortcoming with a couple of rather nifty gadgets that are a “must have” for the Ruger PC Carbine owner.

Context Is King

Throughout the hundreds and hundreds of hours of firearms training classes I’ve had, there’s been exactly ONE class that has attempted to apply the skills of marksmanship and speed to my everyday life: The Armed Parent/Guardian class from Citizens Defense Research.

I find that a little ridiculous. Yes, marksmanship is a skill and yes, you can learn it in a class, but there are reasons WHY people come to a class, and one of the biggest reasons out there right now is personal protection. Yes, people get hooked on training and turn into “hobbyists” (and Lord knows I’m one of them) but most gun owners need a reason to train that goes beyond the training itself.

Our lives do not exist in a vacuum. However, the square ranges we train on encourage us to think that what’s learned on the square range stays on the square range. In our pursuit of perfection, we forget that most people don’t share our passion for the .2 second split and the sub-second draw: They just want to keep their loved ones safe in an uncertain, unsafe world.

For instance, I enjoy the skill and the art of cooking, but my dinner menu is based on the constraints of time, budget and my family’s tastes in food. I’m not a chef in a restaurant, cooking what I want and serving it up to masses who have come to sample my creations. Instead, my skill and preferences in cooking are moderated by the people around me. My cooking doesn’t exist in the kitchen, my cooking only becomes important when I serve it up on the dinner table to my family.

So here’s my question to the firearms training community: If your absolute closest friend or relative, the person who brings you the most joy in your life, came to you and said they wanted to learn how to defend their life with a firearm, what would you teach them? More importantly, how would you make sure they started carrying their gun everywhere they could? Would you feel like you failed if you found out that, despite all your teaching, they still kept their gun in it’s box under their bed? What would you change to make sure they were safe, and not just “felt safe because they owned a gun”?

And why aren’t you doing that now?