So you own a handgun, and have it in a typical ‘by the bedside’ sort of location, reasonably available for defensive purposes in extreme situations.
Let’s also say that you went along to a half day introductory type class at a local gun range that gave you a quick introduction to weapons safety, some principles of marksmanship, and an understanding of how your pistol operates and what to do if it malfunctions, along with a quick discussion on your legal rights and obligations associated with the use of deadly force.
Is that enough? Are there other skills you need to develop, too? Do you ever need any sort of refresher course?
Well, these are good questions (of course!), and you could write medium-sized books to answer them reasonably completely. Today, we’re simply going to write a single short article.
The shortest answer is that your first pistol course is not nearly enough, there are many other skills you need to develop (all of which takes a lot more than a single four-hour course), and you need to regularly refresh your training to keep your skills at a reasonable level.
What Skills Should You Train to Develop
Here’s an interesting article that refers to recommended levels of training for police officers, in particular (the emphasis is ours) :
… He also outlined court decisions alleging municipal liability for training for lethal and nonlethal force.
Williamson said the DNR range basically allows for officers to stand still and fire at paper targets. In the report, Marshall and Williamson said courts have held that officers must be trained in shooting under stress, decision-making, attitude, knowledge, skill, shoot/don’t shoot scenarios, moving targets, firing while in motion, low-light or adverse light shooting, and firing shotguns. He said officers also need to be training in night shooting, use of tasers and in self-defense.
He called that “the environment in which they work.”
“We need to have scenarios in which we not only teach them when to shoot, but when not to shoot,” Williamson said. …
Marshall said the cost of bullets for training might seem high, but it does not compare to the liability from a shooting lawsuit.
Williamson said the International Association of Chiefs of Police calls for firearms training three times a year.
Okay, so you’re not a police officer, and you’re not anticipating needing to use your gun on a regular basis. But perhaps that is all the more reason to train at least as often as they do, because, unlike a policeman, your gun skills aren’t a central part of your consciousness, all day of every day you’re at work.
Let’s think about the circumstances in which you are most likely to need to use your gun for self-defense. First, it is most likely going to be at night. Second, it will probably not be at a time and situation of your choosing – it will be in a developing situation which you did not plan for and may not be controlling. Third, there is likely to be more than one bad guy you will need to defend yourself against.
If you carry a concealed handgun with you for defense outside the home, there are going to be even more challenges and variables, making the experience you encounter even more different to standing in a lane at a range and leisurely firing at static targets.
Now, some of the training this article refers to – in particular, shoot/don’t shoot scenarios, stress, movement and night/low light conditions – are hard to duplicate on a regular static range. But that is not to say that regular static range training isn’t valuable, and time pressures can help add to the stresses on you there.
Any and all competence is better than none, and the better you are at the basics such as you’d learn on a static ‘square’ range, the less challenging the extra stuff overlaid on top of it becomes.
So all range training is good, and anything you can do to add time pressures and other stress to your basic range training is a plus.
But your training should not only be limited to range work. You also need to be able to instinctively recognize and respond to the main types of semi-auto pistol malfunction, so if your gun develops a problem, you can quickly resolve the problem and get back in the fight.
You also need to understand the color code of mental awareness, how to anticipate problems and solve them before they escalate to the level of needing lethal force, and having plans in place to quite literally ‘run away’ from problems and threats if at all possible. If you are only risking the loss of your property, rather than the safety of loved ones or yourself, it is much better to be a live (and prudent!) ‘coward’ than it is to be a dead (or imprisoned!) ‘hero’.
How Much Initial Training is Needed
Of course you know that if you are shown a somewhat complicated multiple step procedure once, you will probably not be able to perfectly duplicate it the first time you try it.
That is only to be expected. You’ll need to practice and get the skills needed to become quick and competent at any process.
Shooting skills require an additional level of training beyond that normally required for most tasks. This is because when you find yourself in what is truly the ultimately most stressful of all situations, your brain changes mode from normal reasoning mode to a more instinctive mode. You need to cement the skills and actions needed in weapons handling into the ‘muscle memory’ part of your brain so that in a high stress environment, you can go through the routines instinctively.
To fix these skills at this type of level, you need somewhere between many hundreds and many thousands of repetitions. Which leads to the next point…
How Often to Train – And an Easy Training Solution
Next, how often should you train? The more the merrier; it is impossible to ‘over-train’ when seeking to develop and maintain skill at arms, just the same as it is impossible to over-train if you are a professional athlete or musician. There is no magic level of training, below which you’ll be the looser in any confrontation, and above which you’re guaranteed to be the winner. More skill improves the odds in your favor, but random chance and unexpected occurrences can and do lead to unexpected outcomes – sometimes better than you hope, and sometimes worse than you hope, no matter how trained you are.
Ideally, you’d spend time at the range every month. maybe shooting off a box of rounds per visit. More realistically, you should try to go at least twice a year. Maybe add it to the list of things you do each time daylight saving changes, or perhaps make it something you do close to your birthday and some other anniversary date more or less six months removed from your birthday.
Now for the easy training solution. Dry firing at home. Attend a training course that teaches you how to train at home using dry firing techniques, and which also stresses the essential (and not always obvious) safety precautions you must take to ensure there is no possibility of your dry fire accidentally extending to live fire.
You’ll learn how dry firing can help you become a better shooter than live firing, and the convenience of being able to practice at home will make it much easier for you to include regular dry fire practice sessions.
Dry firing at home will also allow you to practice ‘real’ scenarios in your own home – the environment in which you’re most likely to encounter a deadly threat, and to introduce low light, stress, movement, and any/every other factor you might wish.
Summary
Few of us train sufficiently to ensure we can perform adequately in a ‘nightmare’ worst-case self-defense situation, and much traditional type training is inadequate to prepare us for what might occur in a lethal confrontation with an attacker.
Realistically, few of us are motivated enough to invest the time (and money) needed to build and maintain a full set of skills at a high level of competency.
Training therefore necessarily embodies compromises, and we each have to decide where the point is that we’re happiest compromising on. As professional trainers, we of course urge you to train as much as possible, as realists, we urge you to be wise in your choices for what/how you train.
At home dry-firing practice is an invaluable supplement to traditional live fire training exercises. And ‘thought’ exercises on what you’d do in various scenarios are also essential, as is a constant level of awareness and alertness, such that hopefully you can resolve situations before they become impossible to solve short of employing deadly force.