Stoppages & Malfunctions ... What?

[John Hearne]

While I like the idea of using force on force drills, we have found that most malfunctions in our SigSauer 226 Simunition weapons cannot be cleared by tap/rack/assess.

Those are caused by bad feeding and can be prevented by making sure the gun is lubed and bore-snaking them after every scenario.

A tip I picked up in the Simunitions Instructor school was to make you own inert Sims rounds. Simply get a fired case off the ground, force the "piston" back in to the case and put a bullet on top. This round will feed fine but will not fire, generating a click instead of a bang.

Something else worth doing, is to load make sure the round in the chamber is a different color than everything in the magazine. This allows you to evaluate whether they're getting first round hits or not.

[jnc36rcpd]

The armorers do clean the weapons between scenarios, but I'm not sure if any of them know what a Bore-snake is.
I do like the idea of using a different colored round for the first shot.

[Chuck Haggard]

An unmentioned part of why LEOs often have such a poor hit rate is that the bad guys initiate the gunfight. As noted in the "Violent Encounters" study, most of the coppers looked at were wounded in the initial exchange of shots. Getting shot just might fuck with your being able to shoot good.

In our shootings locally we have a very high hit rate, at one point we had nine in a row in the space of about 18 months, with 100% hits. Gunfighting is a bit tougher.

[Wayne Dobbs]

An unmentioned part of why LEOs often have such a poor hit rate is that the bad guys initiate the gunfight. As noted in the "Violent Encounters" study, most of the coppers looked at were wounded in the initial exchange of shots. Getting shot just might fuck with your being able to shoot good.

In our shootings locally we have a very high hit rate, at one point we had nine in a row in the space of about 18 months, with 100% hits. Gunfighting is a bit tougher.

Very true, Chuck. To borrow a couple of Ken Hackathorn's thoughts, you want to be in a shooting, NOT a gunfight. If we can set up things for a non-spontaneous shooting, we normally hit at much higher percentages with much better hits. When a two way exchange takes place, usually with the BG firing first, things start looking ugly very quickly.

It's hard to get across to lots of cops, but if we will teach (and they will learn) pre-combat non-verbal signals that most of the turds display and IF they will get tools in hand BEFORE "kickoff", we will see much better results with regard to officer performance and less risk to whomever and whatever is serving as the backstop that night.

[psalms144.1]

Very true, Chuck. To borrow a couple of Ken Hackathorn's thoughts, you want to be in a shooting, NOT a gunfight. If we can set up things for a non-spontaneous shooting, we normally hit at much higher percentages with much better hits. When a two way exchange takes place, usually with the BG firing first, things start looking ugly very quickly.

It's hard to get across to lots of cops, but if we will teach (and they will learn) pre-combat non-verbal signals that most of the turds display and IF they will get tools in hand BEFORE "kickoff", we will see much better results with regard to officer performance and less risk to whomever and whatever is serving as the backstop that night.

Wayne/Chuck - fantastic observations. Without pushing this into Romper Room territory, current political climate makes me concerned that folks are going to be less and less willing to be prepared and watchful for warning signs, and will instead err more towards the side of trying to de-escalate so as to not be the next person burned in effigy. I'm very concerned with the report out of NYPD of the mutt shooting out windows who them pointed his pistol at police and PULLED THE TRIGGER but did not get shot.

And, Todd, as always, thanks for the spot-on thoughts. My biggest concern whenever I set up FOF training is avoiding role players going ninja. I've literally been in FOF scenarios where BGs were hidden in the rafters behind a short wall and shot trainees in the back after they cleared (successfully) the first floor, stair well, and hallway of the second floor. Has it happened, and have officers lost their lives, yes. I believe it was Tampa or St. Pete a couple years ago when a BG sniped responders from the attic crawl space, shooting through a partially-opened ladderway.

I'd be VERY happy if I could get the guys in my "squad" (about 15 folks spread over four states in the NE) to the point where they could CONSISTENTLY draw and fire one GOOD hit from concealment in under 1.5 seconds inside 7 yards. Then I'd work retention shooting and firearms retention drills - because, as plain clothes guys, we're most likely to have issues up close. Next I'd work on getting their "splits" into the .2ish range without loss of accuracy, followed by recognition of, moving to, and shooting from cover. After that I'd like to see folks consistently able to hit discrete targets at 15-50 yards from cover.

I usually try to work in a "oh kitten" drill once or twice a year. I have everyone throw their mags in an ammo can, then their buddies load three magazines with a random number of live and dummy rounds. The shooters then grab three magazines, head to the line, and execute a pre-set drill, and have to recognize and work through the problems they encounter. Surprisingly, the folks who stand there with an empty pistol at full extension during quals do fairly well on these drills, so I attribute SOME of their non-performance during qualification to the training scar of "I'm on the line, I only do what I'm told to do, because SAFETY!"

I also teach, demo, and dry-fire drill strong and weak hand weapon manipulation, but it's a couple of minutes each quarter as a "think about this" drill.

Regards,

Kevin

[Erick Gelhaus]

Thanks for the responses. I talked with Nyeti before posting this. As a left hander, I was surprised that I missed the first thought he had ... the left hander who swapped hands had seen clearance drills demonstrated by right handers more oft than not. True, the last training with repeatedly working through the various stoppages was fall 2013 and there weren't any left hand instructors teaching in that cycle.

That training cycle, other training and the qual course includes SHO and WHO work, courtesy of Uncle Scotty's influence.

Other insight that I hadn't considered was that this might have been too much material, too quickly. None of these were new shooters, they've all been in our program for 7 to 25 + years.

Last fall and again this spring, most everyone got the joy of Sims stoppages, albeit unintentionally. I'll take another look for commentary I need to respond to, again, thank you all.

[Chuck Haggard]

The instructors not doing a left handed demo was the first thing I also thought of.

Any instructor that can't teach basic students to work the gun left and right handed shouldn't be teaching IMHO

[Erick Gelhaus]

Unload / Reload the Gun vs Tap, Rack & Roll &/or Lock, Rip, Rack, Reload ....

Have seen it done with Glocks in all manner of dirty, filthiness and it seems that it works every time. Seems. Have gotten it to work with my own and a few other M&Ps, in similar states. Not sure sure it is a big enough sample.

What about ... the various H&K polymer frames? 1911 pattern guns? Sigs? Browning HiPowers? Berettas? 4 digit Smiths? Ruger LCPs?
If you've got insight on those, please share.

Those are most, but not all of the pistols we've got in service with just shy of 300 cops. IF we change from what we've taught, we've got to ensure it works that wide of a spread. Fwiw, none of the outside instructors we've brought in for our staff have suggested a switch.

[Chuck Haggard]

I was teaching "Tap-Roll/Rack-Bang (or to be politically correct -Reassess/Whatever/YouKnowWhatIMean...) and Rip-Rack-Reload towards the end of my time as our rangemaster, that was from working with a group of shooters in the 325ish range.

It worked.

I also taught running the side instead of hitting the slide stop on reloads. Not because of "fine motor" and all that stuff, but because that reload and "Tap-Roll-Rack..." malf immediate action both fed off of the palm heel smacking the magazine baseplate. In my observation it was easier for the non-dedicated shooters to work both issues from that start point.

I know for a WELL trained shooter the slide stop is faster, but I have also noted that needing to reload isn't any more common in OISs than needing to get the gun working again when it chokes. I'm actually finding that needing to reload in a police shooting seems to be a rather rare event, and although I can't put numbers on it, since semi-autos have come into being the major police issued sidearm it looks like malfs may be at least as common as needing to reload, if not more so.

I talked to Keith Jones awhile back and one of the topics of discussion was his history of the cop gunfights in Hoosieropolis. He tracked like 143 of them, and even in the revolver days they only had one guy that needed to reload to finish the deal.

Anyway, a theory I am working on.........

[heyscooter]

Last fall and again this spring, most everyone got the joy of Sims stoppages, albeit unintentionally. I'll take another look for commentary I need to respond to, again, thank you all.

Just as an addendum to my original post, my agency switched to UTM sim rounds, which perform remarkably better, and last time I played with them did not seem to have the same amount of problems. Your mileage may vary, etc etc.

Those are caused by bad feeding and can be prevented by making sure the gun is lubed and bore-snaking them after every scenario.

Totally valid point, sim guns can definitely go belly up pretty quickly.