We trained to drop things in the Academy and do so occasionally at in-service. I incorporate dropping a "pizza " into one of my classes. It's against human nature to abandon resources but a little forethought and a smidge of training overcomes it pretty quick.
Sorta around sometimes for some of your shitty mod needs.
I had an incident at the Quality Inn in Renton WA at around 1am where one or more guys were yelling and pounding on my door. I had the best position to defend myself, and was holding my flashlight in my left hand and my handgun in my right. The cell phone was back next to the bed, charging. I recall thinking how I really needed to call 911, but didn’t want to leave my position. Fortunately the situation resolved safely, but it made me think hard about the need for arms, illumination, AND communication.
Last edited by Clusterfrack; 03-26-2019 at 03:21 PM.
“There is no growth in the comfort zone.”--Jocko Willink
"You can never have too many knives." --Joe Ambercrombie
Since 2009 I've been using Otterboxes on my phones. As a result, I have alot of confidence that just tossing my phone on to hard surfaces won't hurt it. My current phone (iPhone SE) has been run over twice by vehicles at work and still works fine without any broken glass. My fiance reacted in horror once when I was trying to hang a mirror and just tossed the phone onto the tile floor. If you get a quality case, the unconscious stress of dropping the phone will diminish greatly.
I'm actually one of the few guys at work that intentionally holds my flashlight in my right hand during calls except traffic stops. Every now and then someone points out my "rookie error." My response is that if I need my pistol (WML mounted), I will drop the light by necessity to draw the gun two handed vs a one handed grip as a result of sympathetic response.
That's a completely different problem than being willing to drop something you're carrying.Originally Posted by Hieronymous
"Gunfighting is a thinking man's game. So we might want to bring thinking back into it."-MDFA
Beware of my temper, and the dog that I've found...
Most of the time I feel those stages don't do a whole lot. There was, however, one stage where you started holding in each hand a plastic bag filled with what sounded like rather fragile glass objects. When the timer beeped, I really didn't want to drop those bags, and had to force myself to do so.
That was a great stage. Learning occurred.
You can believe what you want, but as has been pointed out in this thread, the default setting people have is to hold onto what they are holding in their hands when a sudden event begins. Takes a bit of work to break that habit.
I hear you and accept your point.
My original point was that I'm not married to my cellphone in particular, as had seemed to be the case with OP's thread title and assertion.
At the old NTI, one scenario was to arrive at your friend's house with pizza and see the entry way had blood all over it. You were supposed them to in and see what's up. There was soms disagreement as some folks said they would stay outside and call the law. However, you had to go in - so do it.
I threw the pizza to the side and went in for the usuall peeking around corners and shooting suspicious folks. You were critiqued at the end and the RO complimented me on ditching the pizza. Many of the well trained actually carried it through the house.
On the other hand, at Givens', there was scenario with a stuffed baby you had to get to safety. A well known person got into trouble for throwing said infant, 20 feet to get the child behind a truck. The RO gave him a bad grade.
During John Murphy's ASAT at the beginning of this month, we did use empty ammunition trays as a prop phone in part of the evolutions.
+1 for the otterbox - it is darn near indestructible.
And I recently took a low light shooting class where I used my cell phone as the flashlight since it is what I'll likely have on me. You can even make it record video & sound whenever you have the light on (and use it to peak around corners without exposing your body). Probably never actually be useful, but fun to play with.
This conditioned response of calling 911 *immediately* needs to go away.
I'm a private pilot and one of the emergency management mantras that was drilled into me was to 1) AVIATE then 2) NAVIGATE then 3) communicate.
Roughly translated into defensive tactics it would go like this:
1. Handle the threat immediately in front of you
2. Maintain and improve your situational awareness. Where are other threats? Where are your family members?
3. Worry about calling 911 after the first two are under control
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