Applied Defensive Handgun Skills:
By John Holschen
AI: Martha and Tim

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Upon inquiring of a long-time professional mentor, and trusted friend, (Brett Harnish), whom I most needed to study under to develop my skills beyond where I had laboriously grown them over these past 30 years of study. I was given a list of a very few names, one of the names of most importance, was John Holschen.

John Holschen’s past is easily found online, I will be brief here, so as to have more words to go into greater detail about his unique thoughts on using the NURO, to train in the visual awareness and thought process needed in the complex and fluid environment in which a violent encounter takes place. John served in US Army SF, wearing the Green Beret, later contracted during GWOT, as well as designed training programs for others going into harm’s way; He has often been mentioned as an industry leader in the concept of training thinking shooters behind a gun. He owns a gun shop and range facility in Washington State as well as travels to teach. I found him a brilliant thinker and careful crafter of his words used to instruct. He was articulate and direct in his approach.

Mr. Holschen was visiting VA this year as a guest of John Murphy’s FPF Training Program in Culpepper, VA. I am a frequent student at that range, with Murph as well as his hosted guest instructors. Murph has been an excellent partner to clients in VA not only serving up excellent training himself, but getting the residents world class education opportunities from other greats in the industry while He is on the road teaching at other locations.

We opened day one with an hour-long classroom session, followed by introductions all around, the class was limited to 12 shooters, most I knew to be higher than average performers. We broke into 3 groups of 4 students each, to run relays on 3 NURO stations. Dustin Salomon’s NURO is a programable laser projector, controlled by a relay pad, the lasers are projected on multiple targets, in our class three targets for each group of four students, the three groups each had their own stations run by John or one of the AI’s, with two projectors for each station. Instructions stated: Green was a lethal threat to be engaged at the earliest opportunity, Red was an unknown contact, and Red/Green simultaneously was a threatening contact that hadn’t risen to lethal response, but you could acquire a grip on your gun or draw to low ready and give commands. Par time was under three seconds to decide and act on threat, with a .5 second window once the situation changed to stop; (firing on a target ½ second after the laser was off was considered shooting a non-threat). No non-threats were to be muzzled at any time. The NURO could change any indicator to any other at any time, or simply not illuminate any target or all targets.

The pre-class email was well thought out and thorough, I memorized as much of it as I could and felt it really upped my understanding and class experience. It was obvious a few either did not read it, or the material being taught was complex enough that they didn’t have the ability to follow it closely.

One thing all of the participants struggled with to one degree or another: feeling a need to shoot/engage. I know exactly when I realized I shouldn’t be striving to be quick enough to engage a threat, instead I allowed my decision making to be the focus and attempted to widen my view to take everything in, only focusing down to make precise shots and then back out to re-assessing the entire “movie” playing in front of me. I made mistakes, shot a few no shoots, a few past the .5 second window, a few times I never noticed new threats emerging as I was focused elsewhere for too long, but I felt I got enough reps to start learning to successfully handle the complexity the NUROs were putting out.
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Masterful teaching: John was balanced in being critical of errors, yet took the time to explain each student’s failures, this was a thinking class and you really needed to put a lot of brain power into the situations you found yourself in. A successful student needed solid fundamentals on the gun to be successful in this course, those who were a bit lower-level shooters really struggled and I think that held back their ability to develop their mental process. Tim and Martha were both exceptional AI’s, they obviously knew the program well, I got the exact same level of expertise from both as they rotated throgh the three squad stations; yet they still had their own personalities that shown through. I enjoyed working with all three.
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Building on the last scenario and increasing complexity: The lessons were stacked, once you started to grasp the overall pace, a bit of complexity was added. Once we had been through a few scenarios movement was added, then targets that had been inline were moved to create depth, with some close, others further, we were taught to stack threats, so it wasn’t two against one, but to use your enemies for cover, later the use of and movement to cover/concealment was required; also if you engaged a threat and didn’t transition to a failure drill in a certain number of rounds you were reminded that center mass shots were not effective, and you wasted time/ammo. You can absolutely feel that the instructors cared if, and how you are taking in the information. None of the cadre were overly excited cheerleaders, yet when you made really good decisions and your shooting was tight, they let you know it. With only three students shooting at a time, you had a bit of pressure and competition, that either helped or hurt you depending on the type of person you are.
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I felt extremely fortunate to be able to take this training in. Early in the first day, one of the students coined the term: “The Three John’s”, to describe Holschen, Hearne, and Murphy, who are all using similar visual stimulus to lead decision making in lethal encounters. I have now had all three courses and can say all three are sufficiently different that you should visit each if you have the resources. Each helped me see the others in a new way and I feel like they all build on a similar foundation. I will absolutely be studying with John Holschen again, I expect he will be invited back as there were a lot of people I shoot and train with locally who tried to book the course only to find it filled.

I had a two-hour phone call the night after I got home with my mentor and coach Tim Chandler, he asked my thoughts on many details of the course, what specific items meant to me, how I would practice these things moving forward, only to find he had seen the material several times at Tac-Con, (Tim is always examining, always testing). He informed me that he had long expected John Holschen to be the step I needed to grow my skill and was happy to find I actually understood what was being taught in the way he had hoped I would grasp it. In final, I am blessed to be able to continue learning with exceptional teachers, who are opening new ways to instruct and using scientific data to create neural pathways to better decision making under high stress, life and death encounters. Highly recommend getting to this course.