The Path to Becomming a Competent Self-Defense Shooter

Sometimes in our initial interview people ask me what level class is appropriate for them. This is always a difficult question and while I try to answer it as best I can, without seeing them shooting, it does naturally lead to the deeper questions of, “What skills should a competent self-defense shooter have?”

The first skill is safety. Safety on an instinctual level. You should have the four cardinal rules of safety memorized and routinized. Routinized means you know how to move with a gun in your hand while constantly evaluating the world around you and applying the fundamental four rules of firearms safety. On a range we have safety procedures to simplify this for new shooters but in the wild you will need much more advanced skills. I see this rule flagrantly violated in firearms stores every day.

Look, I get it, the stores are tight. Your customers are green and don’t like being told they’re not competent. As an employee or owner, you’ve already checked the weapon. Still, letting people violate basic gun safety rules lets them start thinking there are times when it’s ok to point guns at people that aren’t a threat. While there are rare exceptions to what I’m about to say in very controlled environments, generally the firearms safety rules are sacrosanct. You don’t get to outthink them because you checked the weapon was clear. If the student follows the rules 100% of the time, we all stay safe. If the student starts to think they know better, that is carelessness creeping and it puts us all in danger. So, know your safety rules and follow them 100% of the time, no exceptions.

Next, learn the fundamentals of marksmanship. Grip, sights (as is appropriate for you sighting system), trigger control, breath, stance, and follow through. Knowing these things will help you evaluate your shooting. Most mistakes boil down to grip, particurly the durability of the grip. A really good grip will overcome poor trigger control for the most part. Under fight for your life kinds of stress, your trigger control will degrade so I prefer the gross motor skill of grip.

After the fundamentals, learn to understand the relationship between distance and sight acquisition. At extremely close range, generally under seven yards, practice gross sight picture acquisition and drop a controlled pair of shots quickly. This should be practiced until you can consistently hit a 6” circle at any distance, up to 25 yrds. The farther the distance, the more time and information will be required to gain the proper sight picture. Time yourself, set goals, improve, rinse and repeat. Close up work, within 7 yrds, is a fast technique more reliant on proprioceptive indexing than precise sight alignment. A sight picture over the top of the gun will probably do with iron sights and practice. If you’re using a dot you have no excuse because you should be practiced in getting your dot up and on target instantly, you’ll just need a slightly more controlled relationship between your grip and your trigger press to maintain sight alignment at distance. This process is best practiced at home with dry fire and possibly an ergonometer/laser trainer like the Mantis X and Mantis Laser Academy.

Once you can reliably drop a controlled pair at different distances and know your speeds, start practicing one handed shooting. Contrary to popular belief, the single most important reason for a self-defense shooter to be good at one handed shooting is the flashlight. Remember, pointing guns at people that aren’t threatening you is felony assault. If you carry a weapon light on your gun, it is not a searchlight. Use it like one and you might very well get some jail time. That means self-defense shooters don’t have a lot of use for a flashlight on their gun. I do have them on my guns, but I change guns a lot and don’t want to have more than a handful of holsters. So most of my holsters index on the light rather than the gun, making fast change out easy in class. Holsters are like guns. You need to use them a lot to get smooth and efficient with them, changing them constantly will almost ensure that you will never be what you could with more dedicated practice.

Constantly switching up your gun/holster will mess with your routinization cycle and that will reduce your speed and efficiency. This is why I’ve never been a fan of gun collectors. If you have 10 pistols, I promise you, you’re not the shooter you could be if you had one or two pistols you trained with consistently. I’m a big fan of having the same gun in different sizes if you have a ccw. The grip, trigger, magazine release and recoil functions will be as similar as possible leading to improvements in your functional mechanics (think speed reloads, ect.) and predictive shooting, while still allowing you the flexibility of a more compact gun for your carry purposes.

There are other good reasons not to get lost in the trap of many guns if you mission is to be the best self-defense shooter you can. One is budget. We all have one, they come in different sizes of course. But at the end of the day, you will abuse equipment if you train at the levels required to make your movements instinctual. Red dots will get smacked 1000’s of times and the weak ones will fail; plastic sights will break off and be replaced by better more durable equivalents. This reminds of a portion of the Marine Corp’s rifle creed which the Coast Guard was also using when I went through boot camp. The purpose of the creed is to instill the absolute importance of your relationship to your gear when you’re in a life-or-death situation and to view your weapon as the life saving tool that it is. It’s worth reviewing a section of the creed here, just substitute pistol for rifle as you read:

My rifle is human, even as I am human, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its strengths, its weaknesses, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will ever guard it against the ravages of weather and damage as I will ever guard my legs, my arms, my eyes and my heart against damage. I will keep my rifle clean and ready. We will become a part of each other…

If the creed seems a little over the top for you, I get it. But the fact is, you must learn to use your pistol on an instinctual level if you hope to have a chance to prevail in a fight. If you are legally protecting yourself there will normally be another armed individual involved in equation and you need to be faster and more accurate than they are. A pistol you’re not 100% in tune with, will cause you to move inefficiently under stress. You must become a part of each other and that means knowing what can and will break under pressure and how to fix it yourself. You need the experience that only comes with heavy use to be able to predict what will happen with your tool as you bang it around. Which can only be learned by using the pistol hard, cleaning it well, inspecting it, repairing it, and improving the weak points. Just like you must do with yourself. So, the creed really isn’t as strange as it may seem.

If you want to ask me what the best firearm is for self-defense is. I would tell you: It’s the one you have at hand when you need it and have spent the most time with. Every other consideration is a dramatic secondary. The $4000 2011 pistol isn’t 4 times better than the $600 Glock if the Glock fits your hand, you have a good red dot, and you’re well trained/practiced. It isn’t even 1/3 better. It’s about 2” of grouping at 25 yards and .1 to .2 seconds on your controlled pairs, if you’re good enough to be bumping up on the limits of your firearm, that's great! Maybe you should consider another psitol. If your just ok, it isn’t even that stark a difference, so don’t worry about it. Keep practicing, measuring yourself to established goals, and push your results until you can't figure it out anymore. Then get a good instructor to help you.

That said, buy something reliable. If you’ve got an all-in budget of $1500, get a reliable but basic pistol and a good red dot. When properly used, the dot will make you faster and more accurate. There is no real argument about that. So often I see people buy a higher end gun and put a lower end dot on it. They’re doing it wrong. If your dot goes down in the middle of the fight, your average hit ratio just dropped some 40% according to research on officer involved shootings. So, buy a good dot. I’d rather have a Glock 19 with a Trijicon than a Walther PDP SF with a Chinese clone. Trust me, I’ve tried them and I do have a chinese clone on my PDP. I continue to trial them on some of my guns. But my bedside pistol has an RMR on it for a reason, they just don’t fail and the battery gives me tons of warning before it goes out. You will see me use lower end dots from time to time on pistols I use for class or competition, but they won’t be on the guns I plan on using for self-defense. Remember we all have a budget and I can’t quite swing for seven $700 RMR’s but I can swing for one for when it matters. Are you in this to protect yourself and your family or are you into this to look cool? In a society that tends to encourage people to buy things for reasons more related to social status than efficacy, it’s a question you need to be honest with yourself about.

While we’re talking about red dots, make sure you take a course from a reputable instructor if you want to use a dot. Look for a good competitive shooter instructor or a California P.O.S.T. qualified instructor. I’d estimate 80% of the shooting population uses them wrong, including many instructors I’ve met. They do it for an interesting reason. Without a lot of practice finding the dot can be challenging. This leads beginners to treat the dot’s window like a camera view finder and try to see the world through its tiny little window because they’re afraid to lose the dot inside it.  Properly used you will learn to be target focused and absorb information through both eyes to see the entire field of view in front of you. At that point I can tape the dot over and you’ll not be bothered by it because the little window of information will be more than compensated for by your other eye. There is a lot more to this, and I havea nother blog post about it, but experience has shown me that most people will use a dot like an iron sight because it works and is a lot more comfortable than having to accept you’re going to suck for a while until you learn to stay target focused and resist the temptation to go back to the view finder way of using a dot.

But this is an overview not a class so let’s set optics aside for a minute and get back to the shooting skills. If you can throw a reliable controlled pair within a six inch circle at any distance up to 25 yards and shoot one handed with either hand, practice your speed reload. It’s vital. An inoperable gun will get you killed. A fast reload is right around one second and will require, you guessed it, a lot of training at home with snap caps.

Next, we need to practice shooting from retention. This I where our trusty laser tool and home training helps. You won’t find many ranges that will allow you to shoot from retention because they can’t have rounds sailing off into the wild blue yonder. Some of our courses will allow it under very supervised conditions directly against the shooting berm.

At this point the student is ready for holster work. Learning to draw safely, get your sights up instinctually, and then reholster safely is harder than it sounds. Most pistols have their own safety mechanisms and manual of arms. If you rock a double action/single action, that’s one way. If you rock a striker fired pistol, that’s another. Is a 1911 your preference? That a different pattern of handling. I hope you’re starting to see a this point why having one of every kind of pistol and thinking you be able to instinctually operate them safely at speed is a fallacy. It just doesn’t happen. I’m not saying I don’t have all those guns. I do. But I don’t carry them interchangeably and I shoot them a lot more than most folks do, including cops, military, and other professionals. Also, I own a lot of guns to give my students an overview of sizes and styles, so my collection, in part, really isn’t for me. One holster, one gun, one premium optics system give the average shooter the best chance of properly deploying their system and getting better, which is really what this is about: you as a shooter.

If you’ve come this far, you’re ready to start competing. Competition, particularly the every other Wednesday practice sessions run by Dave Bunn at Livermore Rod and Gun Club, are a great way to put those skills you developed by dry firing at home to the test. Alternatively, Field and Hearth LLC has Friday self-defense practice sessions that will focus on individual skills with an instructor that is there to focus on you without making you hang out to set up and break down the competition stages. Either way, get out there and do some training that stacks and varies the skills you’ve been working on thus far. As you gain proficiency in all the previously mentioned areas, you ready to integrate movement and more complicated scenarios. More on that later…

All the best,

Edward