I am going to start loading onto FB my newsletter. Todays covers three gunist topics, 1) Presentation for Speed and Accuracy 2) CCW Holder Saved the Day and 3) Politics - Follow the Law(s). Enjoy the long version here... Training Tip – Presentation for Speed and Accuracy I am currently helping three clients in preparation for their annual LEO qualification and all three have the exact same problems. Today I want to address the first of two issues that I know will help get them all to a near-perfect score. When we attempt to present the gun too quickly it can actually slow you down. When I ask a shooter to describe what they are doing, they say something like, “I am really feeling good and fast and smooth but then it seems like I can’t take the ‘accurate’ shot that I ‘feel that I should be able to make’ when I want to.” What I see is that they are getting to their gun asap and then yanking the gun at full speed up into a flash sight picture position and then blazing away. And missing. The reason they can’t place the shot is not because they are rushing or because they are beating their own self-imposed speed/rhythm thing. It is because they don’t have any brakes to apply to their outstretched arms at the end of the presentation. What results it a herky-jerky abrupt stop at arm’s length and then and only then is the sight picture attempted before their brain says ‘shoot now.’ It’s in their rhythm to shoot and then they do and the results are disastrous. Sometimes it almost appears that they are tossing a gallon of water to a friend and then not letting go at the last second and it just isn’t pretty. The solution is not to slow down, but to integrate a couple of newer ideas into the presentation. What we teach at Apex Arms in Defensive Handgun 2 and 3 is to begin the presentation with an explosively fast acquisition of the gun with a proper firing grip (position 1) and then after the ‘pulling up’ motion (position 2) to begin to slow down!!! We teach the 5 position presentation technique that everyone does, but from the 3 through 5 positions we suggest that the shooter needs to apply brakes to the arms and hands so that when the gun arrives at the ‘top of the escalator’ the sight picture comes into focus just at the moment of all motion stopping. Then the last thing to do is just finish the trigger press. This is vital for speed because a presentation is more than just snapping the gun up and firing. A proper presentation is to a) get the gun up and ready, b) acquire a sight alignment, c) acquire a sight picture, d) begin to press the trigger, e) achieve a surprise break. And in that order. By slowing down the last half of the presentation, we can consolidate the last part of getting the gun into position with sight alignment, sight picture, and getting the slack out of the trigger all at the same ‘end of presentation’ time. All that is left is the perfect break of the trigger press. No more herky-jerky stopping of the arms. When I demo this I exaggerate the method by really slowing down at the end of the presentation and verbalizing it as I finish and the client seems surprised that the shot appears so effortless and so quickly at the end of the presentation. When we look at the timer it always seems amazing that there is time left in the par time even when we go extra slow. For practice, dry fire practice your presentation at 25% speed until you really acquire that sight alignment, picture, and slack out of the trigger and let me know how fast you get on the range. What I predict will happen is that you we become more able to break the shot right at the end of the presentation instead of finishing and THEN beginning the shooting process. The end result will be that instead of presenting the weapon (in .65 seconds) and then sighting in and shooting (another .80 seconds) you will begin to present (in .75 seconds) and the shot will occur (.20 seconds). The result will shave lots of time, perhaps as much as a half second and the result will be a better first shot on target. Remember the military adage, slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Or as Doc Holiday is said to have said, ‘Take your time in a hurry.” See you on the range, going slower and being faster. We generally schedule a more advanced class like Defensive handgun 2 and or 3 once per month at Apex Arms, but it seems people like to have one on one coaching. We do that too! News - CCW carrier in Dollar Store saves the Day Well, despite what the media reports when it comes to gunshots fired when NOT on a firing range, once again and perhaps for the millionth time per year, another CCW holder used a handgun to save lives. As we know, about 30,000 people die annually from nearly 400,000 gun-shooting incidents but about 1,000,000 times (or more depending on the source) in the same timeframe guns are used to stop violent crimes (most of the time the sight of the gun stops the crime without a shot fired). In this occurrence, a customer stopped an armed robbery in progress last week while he was shopping at a Dollar General in Alabama. selmatimesjournal/2014/01/16/one-killed-in-attempted-robbery-in-orrville/ What does all this mean? I think it means a) carry your gun, b) be in the proper mental condition at all times (not condition white), c) you never know when or where it may happen. It also means, in this case, that one of those 30,000 deaths happened to be the bad guy. In fact, annually about half those deaths are bad guys shooting each other and many of the rest are good guys stopping them – the FBI and the CDC still consider all of the deaths a “homicide” but we call them “justified homicide” when it works out this way. Perhaps it is time to consider taking a class like Apex Arms’ Defensive Handgun 1 / CCW and get prepared in 2014. Politics – Follow the Law(s) The times, they are a changin… Yes, they certainly are. All of us ‘gunists’ have been arguing for years that a database of gun owners will only hasten a police state and ultimately a confiscation when politically expedient to do so. If you have been following the recent news coming out of California, Connecticut, and others, gun registration and confiscation is actually happening. All tinfoil hatness aside I suppose a big, fat, I told you so could be appropriate, but today’s lesson is from a different angle. Even though the government is NOT supposed to keep gun information or use it against you, whistleblower-cum-treasonist Edward Snowden and incidents like this wnd/2014/01/out-of-state-gunowner-profiled-for-traffic-stop/ suggest they do in myriad ways all under the guise of ‘law enforcement info sharing and safety’. What we need to do as gun owners is become VERY aware of what the gun laws really are, understand them, and carefully obey them. What the story out of Maryland (about the guy who was profiled by LEO because he’s a gun owner and searched without any reasonable probable cause for 55 minutes) can teach us is to not get yourself into trouble with a potentially ignorant public servant who thinks he is just doing his job while violating your rights. Someday in the (near) future, nearly any infraction with the law may leave you without a Second Amendment right (the last federal go around which failed, thank God, contained such provisions). How do you do this? Get into a good class (Apex Arms Defensive Handgun 1 / CCW for example), start reading and understanding the laws, and follow them. Then and only then can we start changing these laws back to a common sense and reasonable manner. This means getting political about it. We all have a certain apathy towards politics these days, but when it comes to guns and gun rights, if we only allow gun-ignorant and clearly gun-hating political people to drive the legal ship where do you think that ship is going to go? I would bet that any one of us gunists know more about this issue than most of the entire political establishment put together and it is time to start activating ourselves. Write. Call. Email. All of the above - before it is too late. There are approximately 550,000 elected officials in the entire country (that includes the 535 Congresscritters) but there are about 150,000,000 gun owners. It is time to politically wake up the masses and speak up about it.
Posted on: Sun, 19 Jan 2014 15:18:23 +0000
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