This weekend I was eavesdropping on the boy who was playing Xbox online with a friend from school. For those that don’t understand what this is, you can play a video game, via the internet, against (or with) a friend who is at home and also has an Xbox and the same game. This particular game allows you to create your own levels, with all of your own parameters, weapons, vehicles, etc. Again, for those that don’t understand, imagine playing Monopoly against the guy that designed it. Or Trivial Pursuit against the guy that wrote all the questions. By creating the level and the parameters and rules, the boy was in the same position.
One of the other features of playing online is that you can put on a McDonalds-drive-through-style headset (presumably to familiarize excessive players with their future career options) and talk with your friend(s) on the other end. Those in the room with you, in this case me, can see the screen as you see it and hear your side of the conversation, but not the voice of the other player(s). As such, I could only hear what the boy was saying, and see for myself how often he was “killing” the other kid and the score on the screen. The boy’s end of the conversation went largely like this:
“No, c’mon, just ten more minutes. Please!”
“You said you’d play for ten more minutes. OK, how about ten more points?”
“Awe, man, please stay!”
“Hey, where’d you go? You quit? Why?”
There are multiple lessons in child (and frankly adult) psychology here, but what I want to focus on is how this pertains to shooting, training, instructing, and related pursuits. What the boy did here was stack the deck in his favor. That cliche has an actual meaning, which is to take a deck of cards, count the number of players, and insert cards in the deck such that the most favorable hand will be dealt to the cheat. By creating his own level, that he played repeatedly on his own to memorize, and stocking it with weapons he was most familiar with, the boy did the 21st century equivalent of stacking the deck in his favor.
Many people do similar things on the range, and in their training, but in this case they are only really cheating themselves or, if they have others who’s safety depends on them (like partners in LE, teammates in .mil, or family members for those so burdened) they are cheating these people as well. The most common, and often discussed, method of doing this is to only shoot drills that we are good at. We don’t practice weak-hand because we’re less likely to get the group size we’re used to. We don’t practice malfunction clearance because it’s boring. The list goes on. But what I see happening more and more now is even more insipid, and that is instructors designing drills that reinforce their methodology, or constructing a methodology around drills that they want to excel at.
This goes hand-in-hand with the “range as laboratory” I’ve been commenting on for quite some time. People getting obsessed with minutia, either in TTPs or in guns & gear. Adding .07 oz. to their buffer, tuning their hand-loads to just barely cycle the slide, etc. are all examples of the guns & gear side. One example of the TTP side is the drills master. Teaching to, and perfecting, a series of short drills that one can demonstrate how well their methodology works with and then spend 2-3 days teaching that methodology to those drills and then counting the improvement the students make over the course of the class as examples of success. Yes, you just proved that your method works on your drills. Congratulations. Now many of these shooters will go home, continue to train to these drills, and continue to espouse the benefits of that methodology based on same. But if they never attend a class with another instructor, never shoot a different set of drills designed to reinforce a different methodology, or they never take those TTPs to a match, a shoot house, or a force-on-force class, how are they really going to test them?
Competition shooters suffer similar problems. They find a discipline that they like best (typically the one that plays to their initial strengths, without even realizing what they are doing) and get immersed. They do not cross disciplines, and often snipe at those from the other game, or make fun of the guys that cross the lines and maybe don’t do as well. God forbid they try the other man’s game. I have seen this go both ways, where shooters from one simply can’t grasp the basics of the other. I’m not even talking about the scoring here (it seems you need a phd these days to understand handgun competition scoring) but just the basics of how the stages are run such as fault lines vs. use of cover, tactical sequence, etc. So they go back to where they are comfortable, tell all their buddies “those other guys are assholes and their game is gay”, and I suppose generally feel better about themselves.
Then there are those that won’t even *try* competitive shooting. They’ve heard from all their gurus that it’s bad for their “tactics”, they’ve watched youtube videos and armchair quarterbacked all the “bad habits” they see the shooters getting into. But most often you get the guy that might come out for one or two matches, run like a soup sandwich, focus on all the wrong things, and then proclaim the whole thing tactically unsound and bad for their training regimen. I have yet to see a guy attend a first competitive shooting event, place well, perform well, and then never show up again. Not all of these guys are “training junkies”, to be fair. Many are simply internut junkies who would not do well in a dynamic shooting environment no matter if it was competition, force-on-force, drills, or real life. But there is that group that fires thousands of rounds a year in short, often static, clinical drills who attends a match, falls apart, and declares the whole thing “stupid” and never shows up again.
Speaking of force-on-force... Among the competition side there are the guys that are good. Damn good. Maybe even good at multiple disciplines. I’m not talking about your sponsored, professional shooters here as they are an anomaly not even worth discussing. I’m talking about the local guy, well respected in his game(s), considered a “good shooter”, etc. Poopoos the “tactical training” guys as Walter Mitty types, wouldn’t be caught dead with a Simmunitions or Airsoft gun in his hand, but who believes that endless brown cardboard badguys have prepared him for a gunfight. When... if... these guys do show up to a force-on-force class they typically drill the good guy, or get drilled themselves, right out of the gate. Why? Because when all you have is a hammer, and all you ever do is pound nails, when you have a hammer in your hand anything that even remotely looks like a nail is getting pounded down. Except when that nail is behind you all the while and puts two in your back as you enter the house.
So we’ve all heard it. Get outside your comfort zone. We’ve all heard the stock examples mentioned above like weak-hand training, malfunction clearance training, etc. But what few seem to step outside themselves and evaluate is the bigger picture, and how it’s not just about te individual drill or scenario that is cheating them, it’s their whole approach that’s off-kilter.
If you’re the training junkie that thinks competition is stupid and drills are where it’s at, go shoot a match. Even if you hate it, go back. It’s probably GOOD that you hate it as it probably means if you put your thinking cap on you might even learn something. Even if you go, and ignore the competitive aspect of it, and follow your own basic TTPs within the required framework, go. Go again. Endeavor to find a way to test yourself. I’ve seen training junkies go to a match and say “well it rewards speed over accuracy and I believe in accuracy”, only to look at their scoresheet afterwards and wonder “then how on earth to you explain all these misses...”
If you’re the competition guy, go try the other discipline(s). If you shoot IPSC, go shoot an IDPA match. Go back again. Don’t go home and whine to your buddies, go show those IDPA guys how “easy” their game is and clean their clocks. If it’s so easy then it shouldn’t be a challenge at all right? Oh, “the rules are too confusing”. Really? So the game that’s so easy and so stupid and only “played” by idiots has rules that those same idiots can understand, but you can’t? What does that say about you? And IDPA guys, same thing. Go shoot an IPSC match. Oh, “but I’m just in it for the training/triggertime”. Then why are you so upset that you didn’t “win”? Why not just go, use cover, perform tac-reloads, engage in tactical sequence, run to slide-lock, etc.? Because the other shooters might make fun of you? C’mon.
If you’re the competition guy that DOES get to both disciplines, or if you’re the training junkie attending all those drills classes, and classes where everyone stands in a line and shoots their own one target, get to a force-on-force. Get to a shoot-house. Get to a weapons-retention. Go experience what the other side is doing and learn to apply it. If you’re only shooting to shoot matches and only shooting matches to win, that’s certainly your prerogative. But here’s a competition guy that went and got some training, albeit a brief taste here and there, but he did it and he came away with lessons he found valuable. You never know where your next game-winning technique may come from.
http://www.thetacticalwire.com/features/224256
You owe it to yourself, at the very least, to get as much exposure as you can to as many shooting disciplines as you can. All of the above is specifically related to handguns, but can be expanded to carbines and rifles as well. Go take a “sniper” or “precision” or “practical rifle” class and see how well it reinforces the fundamentals with your M4. Pistol, rifle, shotgun, whatever, get out there and get involved in as many disciplines and shooting events as you can. Yes, we all should be having fun doing what we do, and truth be told that’s the reason the vast majority show up to any event, but if your end-goal is survival, and how to implement firearms as part of that end-goal, you need to find ways to test yourself in all aspects to discover your deficiencies in the clinical environment before you discover them in the final seconds of your life.
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