The Gun Digest Book of Combat Handgunnery. Massad Ayoob

to be doing.

       “Simunitions” has ushered in a new dimension in reality-based training. This Glock has been factory modified to fire only the Simunitions paint pellet rounds.

       Be able to shoot effectively from non-standard positions. National IDPA champ Ted Yost shows his form with a “cover crouch,” which gets him down behind the rear of a car faster than conventional kneeling.

      Bob Lindsey, the master police officer survival instructor, noted in the 1980s that a number of cops who were losing fights would suddenly see in their mind’s eye an image of an instructor performing a technique. They would act out that image, make it work, and prevail. He called it “modeling.” This is the main reason we do the pace-setter drill. Until then, I had followed the advice I’d been given in firearms instructor school. “Don’t shoot in front of the students,” I had been told. “If you’re as good as you’re supposed to be, it will make some of them despair of ever reaching your level. And if you blow it, you lose your credibility.”

      That had made sense. If a student asked me back then, “When do we get to see you shoot,” my standard answer was, “When you go to Bianchi Cup or Second Chance. You’re not here to see how well I can shoot. You’re here to see how well you can shoot.”

      Lindsey’s research changed my opinion on that. It was after hearing Bob’s presentation on modeling that we started the pace-setter drills at LFI. Since we’ve been doing it, the scores of the students have gone up, and fewer of the students have had problems getting all their shots into the target before the cease-fire signal.

      One thing we added was an incentive. Whatever score I shoot, if the student ties me he or she gets an autographed dollar bill with the inscription, “You tied me at my own game.” If the student beats me, it’s an autographed $5 bill that says, “You beat me at my own game.” It’s the cheapest investment I can make in their shooting skill, and it pushes them to do their best. It’s natural for a student to want to exceed the instructor…and frankly, accomplishing that is the highest compliment a student can pay to a dedicated teacher.

      My favorite award to give out is “most improved shooter.” This award is the instructor’s target, signed by all the staff. Often, the student who has accelerated “from zero to 50” has accomplished more than the already-skilled student who came to class at 100 miles an hour and was only able to get about 5 miles an hour faster.

      In the end, it’s up to you. Your skill development will be proportional to how much time you’re prepared to spend training yourself, and acquiring training from others. Getting good training is cost-effective, because despite tuition and travel expense, it saves you re-inventing the wheel. Yes, it takes a lot of years to get a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, but it would take you a helluva lot longer to figure out nuclear physics by yourself. Shooting isn’t nuclear physics, but you don’t need years in the university to learn it either. A few well-chosen weeks, backed up by your own commitment to a training regimen of live fire when you can and dry fire the rest of the time, will be the best investment in skill development you can make.

      I do this for a living, as a full-time teacher and part-time cop, part-time writer, and part-time everything else. I’m supposed to have “arrived.” But it’s never wise to kid oneself. This sort of thing, at its greatest depth, is a life-study. As soon as you think you’ve “arrived,” you stop moving forward. That’s why I budget a minimum of a week a year for myself to take training from others. It keeps me sharp, and keeps the mind open. The old saying is true: Minds, like parachutes, work best when they’re open.

       The Heart Of The Beast:Mastering Trigger Control

      Agreed: What kind of bullet we’re firing doesn’t matter unless the bullet hits the target.

      Agreed: The bullet doesn’t have to just hit, it has to hit something vital.

      Agreed: The bullet doesn’t have to just hit something vital, it has to hit something so immediately vital that the person can no longer continue to attack.

      Agreed: We’ll have a very short time frame in which to accomplish this.

      Agreed: As much as we might rather have a rifle, a shotgun, or a submachinegun to deal with this problem, the tool we’re most likely to have with us is a handgun.

      If we can agree that all these things are predicates to stopping a deadly fight with a combat handgun, then we are agreed that accuracy is extremely important. It’s like high school Logic 101: If A is true and B is true, then AB must be true.

      A lot of things will impact our ability to deliver accurate shots rapidly while under stress. Will you use a one-hand or two-hand hold on the gun? Two-hand is more accurate, but one-hand is sometimes more expedient. Will you use Weaver or Isosceles stance? There are times when it can matter, but they are relatively rare. Any basic marksmanship instructor will tell you that once you’ve brought your gun on target, there is one key element to making the shot fly true: You must pull the trigger in such a way that the gun is not jerked off target.

       Trigger control need not sacrifice speed. Here, Marty Hayes is firing four rounds in a fraction of a second from a prototype Spectre pistol. Note two .45 ACP casings in mid-air above the gun, a third below, and the muzzle flash of the fourth round.

      We know that because the bullet flies in a relatively straight path, any deviation of the sight alignment is magnified in direct geometric progression. If your trigger pull jerks the muzzle off target by the tiniest fraction of an inch, the shot may hit in the white of the target, but not the black of the center scoring area at 25 yards. “Hah,” say the clueless. “That’s a target shooter talking! Those increments don’t matter in a close-range gunfight!”

      Ya think? Then, consider this.

      You and I start the fight at the distance of only one yard, 36 inches torso to torso. You have drawn to shoot from the hip so I can’t reach your gun. Let’s assume further that your pointing skills are perfect today and your gun is dead center on my torso. You now jerk your trigger, moving the gun muzzle a mere inch to your strong-hand side. Only one yard away, your shot will miss my main body mass. It might go through the “love handle” and give me a .45 caliber suction lipectomy, or it might even hit my arm if it’s hanging to the side, but it won’t do anything to effectively stop me from harming you.

      That’s why, in real world combat shooting and not just match shooting, trigger control is so important. The trigger is the heart of the beast! If you don’t control the trigger, you don’t control even what should have been the most perfectly aligned shot!

       S&W’s wide, serrated “target trigger” is the best type for single-action target shooting, but the worst choice for double-action combat shooting.

      How can we hope to control the trigger under extreme stress? By being trained and conditioned to do it beforehand. Is it easy? No, and that’s why we’ve devoted a whole chapter to the concept.

       Understanding The Mission

      Too much combat handgun training has been borrowed from the world of target shooting. While some of the concepts survive the translation from range to street, some don’t. One that doesn’t is the targeteer’s concept of trigger