Originally Posted by ToddG
Todd and I talked about this in more depth on the phone but I thought this would make an interesting thread on it's own as there are minor parallels with ECQC, mainly in sustainment. Also as much as Rob gets bagged on by the internetz, one could very well opine that he actually has a far wider impact on gun owners than we do.
So I wanted to start this and see where it goes.
Craig, I don't have a lot to add except that I would tend to agree. Rob does have a much bigger impact on the general handgun owner. I was talking about this very thing with someone at PEP2 when they were griping about Rob's material. I told them for who it is aimed at it is probably very useful. We tend to forget that most people don't care to be anywhere near as much "into this" as we are. After all, if talking about ECQ stuff, why do we place such a priority on the default cover? (As well we should IMHO)
No lie, my first exposure to firearms training was one of Rob Pincus' videos the NRA sent me. I practiced it a bit before my first formal training with a USPSA shooter Some of the stuff Rob teaches is good stuff. I would train with him if there weren't some good trainers around my area already.
If I had just a couple of hours and a few rounds in which to get someone into barely OK with a handgun I'd likely use a modified Shanghai Police training program.
I am the owner of Agile/Training and Consulting
www.agiletactical.com
I agree that there are classes really well suited to someone who will take one class and never another. People who shoot/teach for a living may possibly not relate to those to whom it's more peripheral or utilitarian.
I am adamantly opposed to any defensive shooting program that teaches people to just point the gun and hope for the best. I believe that technique is irresponsible, especially in today's litigious society. Just pointing the gun in a training environment historically has led to nothing more than miss after miss after miss in the field. All of those bullets go somewhere.
In our training programs we stress that every shot fired should be fired with the gun in the eye target line and visually indexed, unless there's actual physical contact, in which case we shoot from retention. From a basic permit class to our highest level class, every round fired is aimed, using the sights, again unless from retention. As far as I can tell, this has done very well for our students. We are running about a 95% hit ratio in actual shootings and the misses have all been under highly unusual circumstances. I can't tell you if the students are actually using their sights, but I can tell you that's the only way they train and they're getting their hits in the field. Craig, you have seen the photos from our little Thai female student shooting a holdup man. She has the gun in two hands in the eye target line and hit the guy in the chest. Did she use the sights? Nobody really knows. Was she trained use the sights? Yes. Did she get her hit? Yes. Given the hit ratio I suspect that if we had more of our civilian students caught on camera we'd see more of the same thing.
If you insist that students always use the sights, that means they have to at least get the gun into the eye target line where they can see the sights. This builds a habit of getting the gun in between their eyes and the target. This leads to hits. Sighted fire can degrade into effective point shooting, but point shooting will never upgrade into precise hits under stress.
Using the sights religiously forces the student to learn to present the gun to the same place in the eye target line consistently, so that a sight picture can be acquired. Thus, before long the gun starts coming up with the sights already pretty much aligned on the target. If the sights are actually visually used, it is to verify alignment --not to achieve it. I suspect that the majority of our students that have been involved in shootings fall into the category of people who do not practice monthly. In fact, from my debriefs with them I found that many of them had not practiced at all after the class they took one, two, or three years ago. However, all of them were taught to get the gun into the eye target line and look at the sights. Apparently, that works
Nevermind, not the place for attempted comedy.
Well, you're the guy with the line about how if you're in a prison shower with ten guys and you can't keep at least five of them from raping you, the last thing you need is a carbine course, right?
I think that general line of thinking carries over to most shooting skills. If I were to design a program for the average person who's just made the "I'm going to be armed from now on" decision...
1) Basic pistol familiarity so you don't blow your toes off. If we're assuming that this is starting people from "what's a gun?" then okay, NRA basic or whatever, so you're not a menace to the guy who teaches you your first advanced skills.
2) I feel that step two, once you're past getting a basic grasp of shooting, period, should probably be a course that is nothing but drawing and firing, drawing and firing, drawing and firing. I think Mike Pannone does a CCW class with 500 draws? Something like that would be really, really productive for a lot of people because it would get them out of using garbage holsters and into a headspace where they can and will get their gun out if they have to.
3) ECQC. I know I've said this a bunch and I have some hesitations about saying it here because you started the thread and I don't want to make this weird as per my avatar but IMO this is just critical training for people. Once you can work a gun, and get it out under normal circumstances in your carry gear and put some rounds on the target successfully, you are at a point where you now need to be trained to cope with the fight that you brought your gun to.
I would also be totally fine with ECQC or EWO as step 1, then deciding you want to add a gun, learning how to work one, and then learning to access and utilize it.
This is a thread where I built a boat I designed and which I very occasionally update with accounts of using it, which is really fun as long as I'm not driving over logs and blowing up the outboard.
https://pistol-forum.com/showthread....ilding-a-skiff
Thread boiled down, in laconic fashion.
Not really. It's not a point shooting versus sighted fire thread and that's not really where I want this to go.
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