22 May 02

>From a LEO friend in the Midwest on force-on-force training.

"Our current cycle of in-service training has been devoted to refining our response to active shooters in a building. Officers were split up into four-person teams, two armed with shotguns (Remington 870s) and two with handguns. All the weapons were modified to fire the Simunitions FX paintball rounds. I played the role of bad guy and was armed only with a blank gun.

Over the next year, we will be swapping out shotguns for Bushmaster's version of the M4. However, we have not incorporated these rifles into force-on-force training yet.

As they have been trained, most officers used their sights. Due to the excitement, our perennial trigger jerkers jerked their triggers much worse than in a typical range exercise. They were unable to shoot accurately even at close range. They made unpopular partners!

Contrary to popular myth, stress didn't affect stance. Weaver shooters shot Weaver, and Isosceles shooters shot Isosceles.

One of our ‘problem children' who has been highly vocal in opposing rifles, short-stroked his shotgun TWICE, causing a jam each time, resulting in his being shot once and his partner being shot the next time. During the debriefing, I pointed out to him that the short-stroking of pump shotguns is one of the problems that will be eliminated when we get autoloading rifles in the system. He angrily replied, ‘In a REAL situation, that would NEVER happen to me. I was just nervous because it was an exercise, and I was being graded!'

Oh my! Washouts like him often hide behind their ‘armor of ignorance,' and they will even deny reality in an effort to defend themselves."

Lessons:

DURING YOUR NEXT GUNFIGHT, YOU'LL DO ABOUT AS WELL AS YOU DID ON YOUR WORSE DAY AT THE RANGE. All their self-deceptive fantasies notwithstanding, poor shooters do not magically turn into masterful experts during real gunfights. Habitually poor shooters are even poorer during the real thing. We all need to reconsider "minimum standards."

THE REALIZATION OF IGNORANCE IS THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM. WITHOUT REPENTANCE, THERE IS NO LEARNING. Inveterate excuse makers are invariably identified as losers by their peers and are generally held in contempt. We all must accept the truth that some of what we "know" is wrong.

THERE IS NO "NATURAL" SHOOTING STANCE AND NO SUCH THING AS "INSTINCTIVE" SHOOTING. Under stress, shooters revert to what they have been trained to do.

For better or worse, RIFLES ARE COMING INTO ROUTINE USE BY AMERICAN POLICE. Shotguns and staple guns are rapidly being replaced. That is the current trend, and we must all be prepared to train our officers to be safe and effective with the new equipment, regardless of our personal likes and dislikes.

/John