Know yourself.
Habits you are training that can be serious liabilities.
Take a look around at anybody on social media that is involved with guns and you will see a lot of interesting things. Often we see shooters that are taking their safety and practice seriously. There is much to be commended about what a number of people are putting out. But some things are being done without understanding why they are being done.
Let’s take unholstering, drawing and engaging a target. Most shooters only ever train for full extension of the arms and engaging the target at full distance. In addition to this they stage their support hand as close to the holster as possible to make their draw faster. These are good habits if. I will dive into the if in just a moment. I was listening to a nationally famous podcaster, former cop/instructor with a federal agency. On one show he was asked what drills you should practice on the range. In his top 5 was; moving to behind cover, drawing (on the move) then maneuvering on your attacker. This is absolutely one of the top five drills you should practice. Also, it relates to our if. One more thing. Practicing drills with little to no context time after time after time to reduce your split times etc. is good at one thing and great at another thing. 1 It may help you become smoother, more efficient IE faster. 2 It can (unless you know how not to) train you to ignore the broader context of an actual fight and simply to react instinctively to a stimulus, rather than think your way through a problem.
IF you assume that your bad guy is so far away from you that you can draw and fully extend before he can get to you AND you can’t move to cover before you would take rounds this might be the best way to go about this.
Honestly the draw that we have described above has its time and place and should be practiced to a high degree of proficiency. However, it’s stuff you should learn in your first 40-48 hours of training, as a small part of a comprehensive understanding of techniques in the broader context of decision making. That is to say it’s freshman level stuff. Another way of saying this; freshman (let’s use “fundamental” moving forward) level stuff is a lot of what you should practice, but you must know how to put it into a broader context of situational awareness and decision making. Without those parts of the puzzle, the fundamental draw could get you killed against an attacker of average speed, wearing nondescript clothing, who wants to get into spitting distance of you before you even realize there is a problem.
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