12 June 03

More from the IALEFI Conference in Orlando, FL:

Dave Grossman has a knack for putting into words what so many of us have danced around for years but to which we've never attached descriptive labels. Dave and Gary Klugiewicz have both expressed the concern that too much of the training, ostensibly designed to prepare students for emergencies, is done in the abstract. They go on to say that, at some point, training must be conducted under stress, so that it will be useable to the student when he must apply it under stress. It's called "Stress Inoculation," and it is the term we've been looking for. Psychomotor skills that are intended to be useful to a student in an emergency must be pushed from the frontal lobes into the midbrain. Thus, in training, stress needs to be manufactured, so that the student can be immersed in it as he trains. As I said, most of us do it now. We just didn't know how to describe it. Thanks to Gary and Dave!

Another of my colleagues brought up a second point that I wish I had thought of and articulated before now. In the middle of a gun battle, it is likely that the shooter will neither hear the sound of his own shots nor feel the recoil of his pistol. Tunnel vision and auditory exclusion have been documented for a long time now and are familiar to all of us. In fact, many are the instances where an officer has pressed the trigger on his empty pistol multiple times before realizing that it was not firing any more and has, long since, needed to be reloaded.

We should, of course, be focused on our pistol's front sight, but we need to make it a practice of mentally noting, in our peripheral vision, the ejected case flying up and out. So long as we note the case departing the outline of the slide, we can be confident that the pistol just fired, even when we can neither hear the report nor feel the recoil. Again, it is something many of us are already doing. Now we know why it is important, just how important it is, and why our students need to make a practice of it.

/John