Day 1 –
Began the day doing carbine work, basic accuracy, turning, transitions to sidearm, fundamentals of the use of LIE, and transitions to sidearm using the white light of the carbine.
Moved to doing pistol work. Basic accuracy, the wobble drill, drawing, use of the white light in conjunction with the pistol, break for some dinner. After the dinner break we went over defensive room clearing. Several individuals in the class had never done any sort of room clearing exercise before. To paraphrase Mr. Vickers, anyone who tells you that room clearing is “easy” is a yutz. Room clearing is certainly not easy. Those who have done quite a bit of room clearing before did pretty well in the shoothouse, at least during the day. Daylight ran out on us before about half of the shooters had been through the shoothouse, forcing use of the white light for those folks.
As I said earlier, many people hadn’t been through any room clearing training before. The key to defensive clearing is to take things slow and deliberately. There is a natural impulse to think you have to move really quickly and shoot really fast. That’s not the case. As Mr. Hackathorn said a couple of times, you have the rest of your life to deal with the problem. A number of shooters moved too quickly through the house and some were too quick on the trigger resulting in unarmed targets getting plugged. It’s critical to take that extra 1/4 of a second to properly identify whether or not what/whom you are about to drop the hammer on deserves to be shot. Accuracy from most shooters was decent…at least during the daylight runs through the house.
As Mr. Vickers said numerous times, stuff that you can do easily during the day takes on a whole new level of difficulty at night.
As was the case in the November class, we then ran through the drills performed during the day in the Ohio darkness. Things were actually fairly bright on the range for most of the night thanks to a very visible moon. In November as soon as the sun went down it was darker than #$%&! because of the intense cloud cover that meant no moon.
The carbine drills went fairly well, except many people failed to remember to move after their muzzle flash. Muzzle flash is, of course, a target indicator. It’s best not to hang around in the same spot where your muzzle flash just showed up. Muzzle flash from most people’s carbines was fairly minor. I, of course, had to be the exception. On three or four occasions with the carbine I ended up with a big white plume flashbulbing me and completely destroying my night vision for over half a second. This, of course, didn’t help my accuracy any.
Once again shooters who didn’t have a red dot on their carbine learned the advantages of them…and they learned that if they didn’t have the funds to purchase one that they should either:
A. Rob a 7-11 to get the money to buy one **
B. Whore out the wife to get the money to buy one **
(** Note: This is a bit of humor used to drive home an important point. Nobody was actually advocating robbery or whoring out your wife. I swear that the first person who complains about those comments is going to get a wedgie of Biblical proportions)
The live fire carbine/pistol transitions using the carbine’s white light were enlightening. To my puzzlement I was shooting my 9mm M&P more accurately with one hand in the dark than I was my carbine using a red dot and both hands. The most likely explanation for this phenomenon is that I suck.
Many in the class found that Mr. Vickers’ warnings about accuracy earlier in the day were well founded. Groups opened up dramatically. Some of the targets looked like somebody was blasting at them with buckshot from 80 yards out. Mr. Hackathorn and Mr. Vickers both said “If you find that your groups in the dark are only twice as big as they are during daylight, you’re VERY fortunate.” When you are trying to remember proper light use techniques and proper movement and you are shooting at a target you can hardly see, your accuracy tends to suffer. The more clock cycles of brain power you have to dedicate to things other than pulling the trigger, the more your accuracy will suffer.
This is precisely the reason that HSLD types drill this stuff until they can do it if they are lobotomized. The reality of the situation is that if you are in the middle of a gunfight you are going to be busy as hell, and you need to have critical techniques like light use and proper trigger manipulation perfected to an almost subconscious level.
Also worthy of note is the importance of drilling GOOD PRACTICES to that level. An important point about “training scars” was brought up earlier in the day when yours truly was supposed to transition to his sidearm during a drill but suddenly started looking at the chamber of the weapon before actually performing the transition. Get the picture here: I am ten yards away from the target. My weapon goes click instead of bang when I am trying to address an active threat.
Realistically what can I expect to accomplish at that range by looking at my weapon? If the weapon is empty, I should transition to the sidearm. If it is jammed, I should transition to my sidearm. If it is broken, I should transition to my sidearm…So what does looking at the thing buy me during an active threat except extra opportunity to be shot?
On a conscious level, that makes lots of sense…but that’s where “training scars” (A term coined by Stony) come in. Improper programming can lead to you doing things that you don’t want to do when your brain is busy with other things…things like charging into a room when you shouldn’t, or looking at your weapon when you should be drawing your handgun, etc. The phrase “perfect practice makes perfect” is often used in the shooting world, but I don’t think many people understand just how critical it is to program your “reptilian” brain with proper techniques and practices. What you program yourself with WILL come back to you when your behind is on the line.
The night run through the shoothouse was, if you’ll pardon the pun, “enlightening”. Folks learned some very valuable lessons. Folks who were, to borrow Mr. Vickers’ term, “superstars” during the daylight run through the shoothouse had issues during the night run. Again, things get much harder when you’re trying to clear rooms AND use the light properly AND keep from stumbling over stuff AND make the angles work for you AND discriminate between threats and innocents at the same time. There was also a $#!%-you-up-the-a$$ target placed by the instructors in a sneaky location to remind you never to take ANY corner for granted that ended up killing most people in the shoothouse.
Students also learned that there really IS such a thing as “too much” light…as some folks with really bright lights ended up zapping their own vision with bright light that bounced off of white barrels making up the walls of the shoothouse. Most interior walls in the US are painted with light colors that reflect a lot of light. Mr. Hackathorn pointed out that a lot of people on the internet are “absolutely queer” about how many lumens a light can generate…which goes to show that they’ve not done much room clearing. A light that can do double duty as the Bat Signal is actually a HINDERANCE to you inside buildings. For a general purpose tactical light, I’d say the maximum you want to go is about 80 lumens. Much more than that and you have problems. If you go much under 60 lumens you’re not going to have enough light to get the job done…as the individual with the “49 cent Wal-Mart special” light found out. =)
We finished up the night with muzzle-flash demonstrations, debunking of light as a “weapon” and proper uses of the light for location and identification.
The muzzle flash demo was enlightening to those who had never seen it before. Most of the target ammo used by most folks produced some fairly nasty muzzle flash. The Blazer Brass 9mm ammo I was using was pretty bad, making it difficult for me to see the target after I pulled the trigger. This slowed me down and hurt my accuracy. Various defensive ammo was also shot for comparison. Winchester’s “Ranger” loadings and Speer’s Gold-Dot loadings produced the least objectionable muzzle-flash.
Again, Golden Saber’s 230 grain hollowpoint in .45 ACP was absolutely horrid, flashbulbing the entire line. Here again the point was made that the majority of people who pick ammo do so giving absolutely no thought to how the ammo performs in the dark. While the muzzle flash of a round isn’t THE most important factor in evaluating its performance, it is ABSOLUTELY A CRITICAL PART OF AMMUNITION PERFORMANCE THAT SHOULD NOT BE OVERLOOKED. Statistics show that most fights happen at night…and having ammo that renders you blind at night when you use it is not a good idea.
To debunk the notion of handheld tactical lights “blinding” someone and rendering them unable to hurt you, Mr. Hackathorn set a light up to blaze right in Greg Bell’s eyes and had Greg fire 5 rounds at the target…and wouldn’t you know it? All 5 were kill shots.
Gear observations from the instructors:
-
Aimpoints are THE red dot optic of choice. Period.
-
Magnifiers suck.
-
2 MOA vs. 4 MOA isn’t really something people need to worry about. LAV pointed out that he used 4 MOA dots with great success and accuracy for a very long time, and that when you have a 2 MOA dot dialed up bright enough to see in bright daylight, it’s pretty much a 4 MOA dot at that point anyway.
-
The M&P is the “pistol of the future”…IF “S&W doesn’t $!@#% it up.”
-
The Surefire 6P and similar lights are pretty much the best combat lights going.
-
If you use the push-pull technique with some of the really small Surefire lights, be darned careful that you don’t end up pulling the back end of the light against the trigger of your weapon. It’s happened before.
-
Light placement on the carbine is a continually evolving process. Everybody is always looking for a better mousetrap.
-
Crimson Trace lasergrips are the heat.
-
Stick to Glocks in 9mm
-
Full-auto has real issues in LE and military use when doing CQB type stuff. To paraphrase Mr. Vickers, the nice 2 and 3 round bursts you do on the range turn into 9 or 10 round bursts under stress, which is why his former unit did the vast majority of their shooting on semi-auto. Mr. Hackathorn related an incident where an officer thought he fired 5 or 6 rounds in a fight using full auto, only to find out later that he fired EIGHTEEN rounds.
-
You won’t be able to count your rounds in a gunfight. It’s also a bad idea to make a definitive statement about how many rounds you fired in a gunfight. If you are going to hazard a guess, make damned sure you use terms like “to the best of my recollection I fired maybe x or y rounds, but I really don’t remember to be honest”, etc.
-
If you want a reliable AR carbine out of the box that will give long life and excellent service, stick to Colt’s 6920.
-
If water gets on a CT grip diode it can block the beam or make it less visible. Be aware of that and have a backup plan.
-
If you don’t have night sights on your handgun or a red dot on your carbine, you are f**king yourself as far as low light capability goes.
-
Merely having night sights and a red dot optic or a laser on your weapon does NOT mean you are prepared for night fighting. Having that stuff and not training with it is just as much f**king yourself as not having the proper tools. Tools are not a substitute for training.
My personal observations:
- If you haven’t tried out CT laser grips, DO IT. NOW. Until you’ve used them you just can’t appreciate how unbelievably awesome they are and how big an aid in accuracy they can be. For instance:
I brought my CT grip equipped S&W 442 to the range with me and some ammo to shoot it with. In pitch black conditions with practically no moonlight left (the moon moved behind the horizon at the very end of class) I was using my 442 to accurately put rounds on the center of steel targets I could BARELY SEE from 20 yards.
I was MORE accurate with my 442 than I was with my non-CT equipped M&P. It was unbelievable…and it wasn’t just me. I handed my 442 to other shooters and they were using this tiny, nasty recoiling revolver with useless sights and a heavy DA trigger pull ACCURATELY in the pitch friggin’ darkness. It’s un-friggin’-believable the kind of performance enhancement the CT grips are for a J frame. You simply can’t appreciate how awesome they are until you’ve used them.
Part of the accuracy enhancement they provide is instant feedback on how you are pulling the trigger.
-
There is IMMENSE REPEAT VALUE in the low light level 1 course.
-
Here and now I’d like to encourage Mr. Vickers and/or Mr. Hackathorn to come up with a course that focuses intensely on topics like defensive room clearing. That is a course EVERY defense minded individual can use and the practice is SORELY needed by most of us. I believe low light level II is more along those lines, but I’m not entirely sure. In any case, it’s a compicated enough topic that I think there’s plenty of room for a course dedicated solely to it.
I wish I could type more but Ken is going to be here to pick us up in 45 minutes, and I have to get ready. I’ll report more later.