paulee
07-17-12, 09:09
I have just returned from Home Defense 1 & 2 at CSAT. This is the first time this course was taught in 3 days, so we were a beta test for Paul and the CSAT staff. The normal procedure is to take part 1, put together your gear and your plan, then return a few months later for part 2, to see how well it works. So in this case, there was a bit of “drinking from the fire hose”.
We had a mixed bag of attendees, from an Air Force officer, to law enforcement, to regular folks like me. Two husband and wife teams were present, and a wide range of shooting experience, from bullseye competitors to people who had first picked up a gun less than 6 months ago. We had people from all over, Georgia, Texas, Indiana, and a couple of guys from New York.
We began on Friday at 8 am in the classroom with a discussion of deadly force, and pretty quickly got derailed into the arcane legal matter of how to define it, justify it, and what’s acceptable in different locales. And this brought up a pretty sobering realization: Paul had several case studies for us of home invasions that became murders, and anyone can read the news to see how dangerous it is out there, and that there are some people who are just plain sociopaths. The people in this course were not your run of the mill, “Good things happen to good people” bunny lovers and tree huggers. They had taken on the responsibility of their own safety, and were seeking out additional training to be prepared for the worst, and yet we were more concerned with whether or not we would get in trouble with the law for defending ourselves from someone who had invaded our home with bad intentions! A sad commentary on life in America today.
We spent the rest of the morning covering equipment selection, active shooter bags, and medical kits. Paul also covered ways to make your house a hard target. As he put it, if it’s too hard to get to you, they may just leave, and if they’re willing to work that hard to get to you, then they must have really bad intentions. This also cuts down on the likelihood of the neighborhood drunk coming home and mistaking your house for his, and you running into him in the hallway at 3am.
Medical kits were assembled, with Paul pointing out that the only way medical support would arrive on the scene was if you brought it yourself, so you better have everything that you need to stop the bleeding. The most important tool was the tourniquet, followed by packing and Kerlix. Also included was a strobe for link up with law enforcement after the incident was over.
After lunch, we met at the pistol pits for weapons familiarization and for Paul to get a baseline on everyone’s skill level.
We then split into two groups to work pieing techniques, and some core scenarios at the sim house. Everything was run dry so they could check our mechanics before going live.
At the sim house, Paul walked us through the basics. When you look at it, there are really just a few scenarios involved in defending your home: Repelling an invasion, fighting your way in, and fighting your way from one point in your home to another. Choke points and strong holds were also discussed.
In the shoot house, we worked on pieing, dynamic entries, how to open doors, and target discrimination. Paul teaches to look at the whole body, then the hands, then the waistline, then the immediate area. We need to know who we’re dealing with, if they have a weapon, and if they can produce one quickly. The hard part in all this is remembering to use your front sight and aim center mass. There is a tendency to focus so much on the gun, that that is where all your shots wind up. And it’s pretty embarrassing to blast the target, then look and see that in their other hand, there’s a badge. So target discrimination is a big thing. After our dry runs, we went hot in the shoot house before calling it a day.
The next morning, we started back in the classroom to discuss the importance of weapons safety when moving around. It’s one thing to follow the 4 basic safety rules on a square range, it’s quite another to do so when moving through a 360 degree battlefield. This is where position Sul can be your friend.
Back to the two houses, we worked pieing in the sim house, as well as the scenarios that Paul had covered the day previously. When fighting from one point to another inside the house, we had the added stimulus of Paul on the loud speaker calling for help. We then had to work through link up procedures with the police. As Paul pointed out, it would really suck to go through shooting someone in your home, save and secure your family, then get shot by the cavalry!
At the shoot house, we worked our entries with live fire, and also got some practice shooting while using our lights. And this brings up an interesting dilemma. Why not just run a weapon mounted light?
Well there are a couple of reasons for that. One, when shining your light on something, you’re pointing your gun at whatever that is, and it could be a family member.
Two, lights are a two way deal. While they allow you to i.d. the threat, it also tells them where you are. If they shoot at the light, they’re shooting at you, unless you’ve gone to the Homey-be-bad school of shooting, and have the gun held off to the side at a weird angle, and turned sideways.
So that also makes you reconsider several flashlight techniques that put the light next to the gun. Then you have to decide if you want to run it turned on, or just do spot checks with it. Some advocate the use of a strobe type light, and while that may make it harder for them to zero in on you, it can also make it tough for you to i.d. the threat and scan them effectively.
It was at this point in the course that I really got my money’s worth, when I discovered that the system I was running with my bag and gun, which I had so carefully thought out and planned, would not work. Better to find out now, then when someone was shooting at me.
So I spent that night brainstorming with some classmates to come up with a better way. Paul and the staff had explained how they ran their personal systems, and at first glance, any regular person would look at it and claim that they were paranoid, or a little bit off. Who does that kind of crazy super-soldier stuff?
Answer: People who have thought this stuff out well in advance, and devised a system that allows them to get themselves and all their necessary gear to the fight. Then they practiced it until they had worked out all the kinks. A gunfight is no time to try and devise new tactics.
So what would be necessary gear?
Well first off, your gun. And spare ammo. A light, and medical supplies. Enough that allow you to stop someone bleeding. A tourniquet will quickly stop bleeding, and combat gauze will work for penetrating wounds to the abdomen where a tourniquet isn’t practical. How will you call for help? Better have a phone. How will you let the responding officers know where to find you? “Come in and look for the guy with a gun.”???? Better have a strobe. Now try and carry all that in two hands. Good luck.
“No problem, I’ll just toss it all in a bag.” Yup. Then you shoot yourself feeling for your gun. So you better have a holster that covers the trigger guard, and put it somewhere that it won’t get hung up on anything when you’re trying to draw it. Can you find what you need in the dark, with the chaos of your screaming family, and all amped up on adrenaline after you have been involved in a shooting?
We met again at 5 am to work low light shooting at the shoothouse. This provided more feedback, as I discovered that the finger ring I was using to run my flashlight provided several ADs of my light while I was swinging it back and forth trying to manipulate doorknobs. While you may be lucky enough that it won’t alert anyone to your presence, I did manage to blind myself a couple of times. Another shooter actually lost his when opening a door. So there was another great idea that I had that was discarded.
After breakfast, we split to the shoot house and sim house to run through the scenarios again, this time with medical thrown in. At the sim house, Paul had added in a role player that we had to deal with.
What we all discovered was that there was a lot to process and remember, just to execute the basics, the last thing you wanted to be doing was fighting with your gear, or looking through your stuff for your supplies.
Afterwards, we all met in the barracks for a debrief, and also for Paul to get feedback from us. Various suggestions were made, and Paul explained exactly why he had set things up the way he had. This course is actually a combination of several others, and they were trying to shoehorn 6 days of training into 3. Also, this isn’t the sort of thing that you can rush a large group of people through, and get good results, and maintain safety standards. Paul told us that he spent 2 weeks working mechanics of entering rooms and movement before being allowed to fire a single shot.
An extremely enjoyable and informative weekend that I would be willing to do again.
My biggest takeaways were how to set up my gear so that I was fighting with my gear, not fighting against it, also the following gems:
The only reason to push the fight is to save lives, otherwise, hold your position, and make them pay dearly if they try to come to you.
The only things that will be present at the fight are the things that you bring with you.
Solve the tactical problem first, then worry about medical and taking care of people.
We had a mixed bag of attendees, from an Air Force officer, to law enforcement, to regular folks like me. Two husband and wife teams were present, and a wide range of shooting experience, from bullseye competitors to people who had first picked up a gun less than 6 months ago. We had people from all over, Georgia, Texas, Indiana, and a couple of guys from New York.
We began on Friday at 8 am in the classroom with a discussion of deadly force, and pretty quickly got derailed into the arcane legal matter of how to define it, justify it, and what’s acceptable in different locales. And this brought up a pretty sobering realization: Paul had several case studies for us of home invasions that became murders, and anyone can read the news to see how dangerous it is out there, and that there are some people who are just plain sociopaths. The people in this course were not your run of the mill, “Good things happen to good people” bunny lovers and tree huggers. They had taken on the responsibility of their own safety, and were seeking out additional training to be prepared for the worst, and yet we were more concerned with whether or not we would get in trouble with the law for defending ourselves from someone who had invaded our home with bad intentions! A sad commentary on life in America today.
We spent the rest of the morning covering equipment selection, active shooter bags, and medical kits. Paul also covered ways to make your house a hard target. As he put it, if it’s too hard to get to you, they may just leave, and if they’re willing to work that hard to get to you, then they must have really bad intentions. This also cuts down on the likelihood of the neighborhood drunk coming home and mistaking your house for his, and you running into him in the hallway at 3am.
Medical kits were assembled, with Paul pointing out that the only way medical support would arrive on the scene was if you brought it yourself, so you better have everything that you need to stop the bleeding. The most important tool was the tourniquet, followed by packing and Kerlix. Also included was a strobe for link up with law enforcement after the incident was over.
After lunch, we met at the pistol pits for weapons familiarization and for Paul to get a baseline on everyone’s skill level.
We then split into two groups to work pieing techniques, and some core scenarios at the sim house. Everything was run dry so they could check our mechanics before going live.
At the sim house, Paul walked us through the basics. When you look at it, there are really just a few scenarios involved in defending your home: Repelling an invasion, fighting your way in, and fighting your way from one point in your home to another. Choke points and strong holds were also discussed.
In the shoot house, we worked on pieing, dynamic entries, how to open doors, and target discrimination. Paul teaches to look at the whole body, then the hands, then the waistline, then the immediate area. We need to know who we’re dealing with, if they have a weapon, and if they can produce one quickly. The hard part in all this is remembering to use your front sight and aim center mass. There is a tendency to focus so much on the gun, that that is where all your shots wind up. And it’s pretty embarrassing to blast the target, then look and see that in their other hand, there’s a badge. So target discrimination is a big thing. After our dry runs, we went hot in the shoot house before calling it a day.
The next morning, we started back in the classroom to discuss the importance of weapons safety when moving around. It’s one thing to follow the 4 basic safety rules on a square range, it’s quite another to do so when moving through a 360 degree battlefield. This is where position Sul can be your friend.
Back to the two houses, we worked pieing in the sim house, as well as the scenarios that Paul had covered the day previously. When fighting from one point to another inside the house, we had the added stimulus of Paul on the loud speaker calling for help. We then had to work through link up procedures with the police. As Paul pointed out, it would really suck to go through shooting someone in your home, save and secure your family, then get shot by the cavalry!
At the shoot house, we worked our entries with live fire, and also got some practice shooting while using our lights. And this brings up an interesting dilemma. Why not just run a weapon mounted light?
Well there are a couple of reasons for that. One, when shining your light on something, you’re pointing your gun at whatever that is, and it could be a family member.
Two, lights are a two way deal. While they allow you to i.d. the threat, it also tells them where you are. If they shoot at the light, they’re shooting at you, unless you’ve gone to the Homey-be-bad school of shooting, and have the gun held off to the side at a weird angle, and turned sideways.
So that also makes you reconsider several flashlight techniques that put the light next to the gun. Then you have to decide if you want to run it turned on, or just do spot checks with it. Some advocate the use of a strobe type light, and while that may make it harder for them to zero in on you, it can also make it tough for you to i.d. the threat and scan them effectively.
It was at this point in the course that I really got my money’s worth, when I discovered that the system I was running with my bag and gun, which I had so carefully thought out and planned, would not work. Better to find out now, then when someone was shooting at me.
So I spent that night brainstorming with some classmates to come up with a better way. Paul and the staff had explained how they ran their personal systems, and at first glance, any regular person would look at it and claim that they were paranoid, or a little bit off. Who does that kind of crazy super-soldier stuff?
Answer: People who have thought this stuff out well in advance, and devised a system that allows them to get themselves and all their necessary gear to the fight. Then they practiced it until they had worked out all the kinks. A gunfight is no time to try and devise new tactics.
So what would be necessary gear?
Well first off, your gun. And spare ammo. A light, and medical supplies. Enough that allow you to stop someone bleeding. A tourniquet will quickly stop bleeding, and combat gauze will work for penetrating wounds to the abdomen where a tourniquet isn’t practical. How will you call for help? Better have a phone. How will you let the responding officers know where to find you? “Come in and look for the guy with a gun.”???? Better have a strobe. Now try and carry all that in two hands. Good luck.
“No problem, I’ll just toss it all in a bag.” Yup. Then you shoot yourself feeling for your gun. So you better have a holster that covers the trigger guard, and put it somewhere that it won’t get hung up on anything when you’re trying to draw it. Can you find what you need in the dark, with the chaos of your screaming family, and all amped up on adrenaline after you have been involved in a shooting?
We met again at 5 am to work low light shooting at the shoothouse. This provided more feedback, as I discovered that the finger ring I was using to run my flashlight provided several ADs of my light while I was swinging it back and forth trying to manipulate doorknobs. While you may be lucky enough that it won’t alert anyone to your presence, I did manage to blind myself a couple of times. Another shooter actually lost his when opening a door. So there was another great idea that I had that was discarded.
After breakfast, we split to the shoot house and sim house to run through the scenarios again, this time with medical thrown in. At the sim house, Paul had added in a role player that we had to deal with.
What we all discovered was that there was a lot to process and remember, just to execute the basics, the last thing you wanted to be doing was fighting with your gear, or looking through your stuff for your supplies.
Afterwards, we all met in the barracks for a debrief, and also for Paul to get feedback from us. Various suggestions were made, and Paul explained exactly why he had set things up the way he had. This course is actually a combination of several others, and they were trying to shoehorn 6 days of training into 3. Also, this isn’t the sort of thing that you can rush a large group of people through, and get good results, and maintain safety standards. Paul told us that he spent 2 weeks working mechanics of entering rooms and movement before being allowed to fire a single shot.
An extremely enjoyable and informative weekend that I would be willing to do again.
My biggest takeaways were how to set up my gear so that I was fighting with my gear, not fighting against it, also the following gems:
The only reason to push the fight is to save lives, otherwise, hold your position, and make them pay dearly if they try to come to you.
The only things that will be present at the fight are the things that you bring with you.
Solve the tactical problem first, then worry about medical and taking care of people.