Street Encounter Skills and Tactics, Culpeper VA

[John Murphy]

Two reviews from this class:

2 day street encounter skills and tactics has come to a close. It was 2 very intense days of, applying tourniquet’s and pressure dressings. Managing unknown contacts. Issuing verbal commands, deploying pepper spray, shooting, shooting on the move, shooting moving targets, and post incident verbalization and actions.

I’ve found that I shoot far better when I’m not thinking about shooting. John Murphy does a fantastic job of giving you problems to solve and tasks to complete forcing you to focus on the problem not the shooting. Street encounter skills and tactics is a class that provides a safe, relevant, and fun 2 days of training all while building a level of unconsciousness competence into your training.
I’ve taken my fair share of classes and trained with loads of fantastic instructors. Today I saw things in class that really turned on a lightbulb for me. I’ve spend YEARS chasing faster and faster splits. Today John Murphy's genius was in full show. Being able to have a visual cue of when to stop shooting instead of a set number of shots per drill was ground breaking for me.
Most of my training has been focused on being fast and accurate today it was made evident that in self defense shooting you can be to fast and outrun your visual processing speed.
Self defense situations are highly multifaceted and can change from a good justified shoot to a bad shoot that comes with criminal charges in fractions of a second. Witnessing it first hand today was something I’ll never forget.

If you walk around with a gun in public this class is something you need. Get out and train.


John,

I really appreciate all the time and attention you give to this material. The 2 days were filled with excellent instruction, delivered with your unique ability to connect with your students.

A good sub-title for the Street Encounters Skills and Tactics class would be Critical Thinking While Armed. It really engaged all my aging mental gears as I tried to respond quickly and appropriately to the various visual cues presented.

I really got a lot out of this course. Even though I’ve been shooting for decades, I knew I lacked a solid framework for managing unknown/unwanted contacts beyond those shown on YouTube, which is where this class excels.

I particularly liked adding pepper spray to my EDC. I’ve always worried that a handgun is way too much for most encounters. I also got a lot out of the medical portion of the class - I now know how little I know about this and will get specialized training on it soon.

This stuff is really your strength.

***My Edit: "MUC" or "Managing Unknown Contacts" refers to a strategy for dealing with ambiguous contacts. The term and practice are the intellectual property of Craig Douglas of Shivworks.