Competition as Defensive Firearms Training

Here with Ken Murray, author of Training at the Speed of Life and one of the industry's most respected experts in the area of scenario training and reality-based training. Ken, a lot of people like to go to the competition shooting and maybe the defensive-oriented competition shooting and consider it scenario training or consider it reality-based training. What are your thoughts there? Well, kind of two minds on all of that, that it may be useful for developing some skills, but in a lot of ways, I've found that the competition shooting changes it into a game. And what you find is that you begin to devolve into the rules of the game rather than practice for the reality of encounters. There are all sorts of things that, with conventional munitions, my controversial self says things like, I would much spend, much rather spend a lot of time off the range than on the range because in a range situation, you're going to find that there are so many rules that will actually get in the way of doing things that you can do in a gunfight. For example, I had a law enforcement student one time who had a scenario, he was a wildlife officer, a fish and game officer, and the scenario was, he was patrolling a forest and there was a guy shooting at eagles. So he approached the guy, took a good covered position, asked the guy to put down the gun and come and talk to him. And the guy said, well, I can't put down the gun. If I put down the gun, you're going to find out I'm a convicted felon. A convicted felon with a gun, I'm going to prison. So the gunfight's on. So they got into this gunfight. He found himself up against a tree, malfunctioned his pistol because he was pressed up against the tree. Did a reload, dumped the magazine, reloaded his pistol. Did the exact same thing. Went through this with a couple of magazines and very quickly found himself out of ammunition. So now there he is hyperventilating with an empty pistol against a tree, looking over, going, basically blowing his own whistle, saying, it's over. I said, well, it's not over. You've got a situation here. You've got an empty gun and a guy with a gun. Now what? So he's going, well, what what should I do? Get on my cell phone to call Domino's and get them to deliver some more ammo? I said, I don't know, does Domino's deliver ammunition around here? Pretty cool Domino's, if they do that. He goes, well, no, they don't. So will that work? He goes, no, they won't. Well, what else can we do? Well, I don't know. I said, why don't you take a big, deep breath, start expanding your options. Start, look around. Tell me what your options are. Well, he looks down, Rob. And what do you think he sees that his feet? Ammunition? Ammunition. What does he ask me? Whether or not he's allowed to use it? Can I pick that up? Right. Now where does that come from? Yeah. And I think that's the crux of it. And that's the frustration I have sometimes with that environment. We get so tied into the rules of the game and change our gear or change our tactics or change our techniques. And the habits, the bad habits, the double tapping and stopping your shooting. The unloading as soon as you finish a string of fire, the something's on the ground so we can't use it anymore habits that come from that training environment, which really isn't a pure training environment, can really do a lot of damage. I think this is something we definitely agree on Summation, competition as training? It might get your skill level up to a higher level of proficiency, but I think that we over-mystify gun fighting too much. I think that we should keep things very, very simple. Your combat-focused shooting principles for instance, are brilliant when it comes to this sort of thing. When is it good enough? I think that with the competition shooting, most people who are going to get into gunfights, most people who are going to carry guns, aren't competition shooters. I see people coming down to gun stores, buying a gun, looking at it, taking a four-hour concealed carry course and then putting a gun on their hip, thinking that I'm ready for a gunfight now. Not by a long shot. There's so many things that they haven't even begun to consider. That's that's your first step and I applaud that step, but now what? Now where do we go? And to whom do we go? And I think that we need to choose carefully and choose wisely. Absolutely.