Posted: 9/12/2015 8:10:31 AM EDT
All instructors steal from each other. I stole this one....or some of it 
When many of us were kids, we played cops/robbers, cowboys/Indians, or some other pretend shooting games. As we grew up, we watched TV shows and movies that had gunfights. For many, this created an unrealistic predetermined scenario called "my gunfight". "My gunfight" is a dream scenario where you mentally play out exactly how a self-defense shooting will go. It's human nature to think about those things and you have to think about them when training. That is similar to how instructors come up with some drills or how stages are developed at matches. The downside is that some will run "my gunfight" through their head so many times that they stop thinking about the variables or other scenarios and get a false sense of security. In other words, they picture: the bad guy kicks in the front door, homeowner shoots bad guy twice in the chest, bad guy drops dead. Pretty clean and neat scenario. What if there are 2 bad guys? What if you were asleep? What if your gun is in another room? What if you miss? What if your hits are ineffective? What if you are at someone else's house? and so on. Sometimes I'll tell a student that we are about to run a certain drill, walk them through it, run it a couple of times, then I'll unexpectedly change it mid stream. Just one change can often short-circuit them. With practice, the student learns to keep fighting through the unexpected events. There is sometimes a brief pause to assess, but they learn to keep fighting and not just freeze under stress. That brief pause is important because the other person who just ran into the middle of a gunfight might not be a bad guy. Obviously you can't dream up every single possible scenario and train for it, so you have to train on the basics like good shot placement, footwork, awareness, multiple targets, stress inoculation, and the most important one....have a loaded gun within arm's reach. |