(Wasn't sure where to put this, Mods obviously feel free to move it)
Helped teach a low-light / intermediate pistol class last week over several nights. A few observations that seemed to come about because of how low light / flashlight training happens in other environments.
- Saw a lot of issues with people getting the beams, especially the hot spot where they wanted them such as into other rooms or dark holes while unintentionally wasting the light on near walls. Spent a fair amount of time working on this while working them through indoor simulators ("shoot houses").
- There's discussion about trying to work through barriers created by the presence of brighter lights & darker holes in several places. Setting up the problem in buildings can be easy; however, setting it up on a range might not be all that easy. The instructor I ws teaching with - Walt W - identified a solution and made it workable. He developed a mount that would solidly attach to a turning target frame in order to send nearly all of its lumens back uprange at the shooter.
Now the tudent had to burn through the light in order to illuminate the target & engage it. Merely slinging some light that direction (a common problem) wouldn't work, one needed some semblance of propper technique to get enough light on the bad guy.
Enough lumens:
Not enough lumens:
The target / light set-up ...
Walt adapted this onto one of the Northern Lights tactical robot targets. The students got charged by the flashlight weilding target while trying to engage it. If I can figure out how to get the video over here I will.
Fwiw, after the first (8am to 8pm), the class was run from 1pm to 11pm. It was square range in the afternoon & early evening, then live fire low light square work, followed by simulators and finished off with practical application of flashlight / search techniques in the house, the woods, and a lengthy, deep, rocky draw.
Anyway, just wanted to bring up the light direction issue and a way to reinforce proper technique.