Drills with Long Guns and Pistols

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. Up! Up! Practicing with your rifle, particularly with your rifle and your pistol, is incredibly important if you ever intend to be able to use a rifle for self-defense or the defense of others, whether it's in your home or in public. Running through a variety of drills to help you deal with malfunctions, deal with reloads, and of course dealing with transitions between the rifle and the pistol is incredibly important.

One thing to keep in mind is you're still training for exactly the same incident, regardless of whether you have a long gun or a pistol. But to think that just because you're training with a rifle, you're going to have to train at a further range, particularly an extreme range, for self-defense, isn't realistic. The situations that you might find yourself in, particularly in your home, are going to be consistent. What's not going to be consistent is what firearm you choose to use to defend yourself. So having a rifle doesn't automatically mean that you're going to just train at 50 or 100 or some extreme number of yards away from the target.

You're still just as likely to have an extreme close quarters encounter, particularly in your home, which is where you're most likely to have a rifle. So we still don't want to train much further than this away from the target and in fact, we're going to get much closer as we do our drills. We're going to start with a standard drill, multiple shots aimed at center of mass or high center chest as we like to say in the Combat Focus Shooting system, that high center chest is where we really want to be. If we are further away, then yeah, we're going to hold on the center of the mass that we have the shoot at. One of the advantages of a rifle is that you can be more precise.

Taking that more precise shot, regardless of the distance, is one of the advantages you have, but it's not necessarily what you're going to do. Just because you have a rifle does not mean you're going to train for head shots, for example, or for an extreme unorthodox shot. If you have a threat trying to hurt you or someone that you're trying to defend, you're still going to take exactly the same shot regardless of whether you have a pistol or a rifle. You may be able to take it faster with a rifle. You may be slower with a rifle, depending on the type of optics or the type of rifle you're using than you would be with a pistol.

This is merely an issue of which firearm do you have with you at the time that you need to defend yourself? Up! Transitioning with a rifle to your sidearm, if you happen to be wearing a pistol, is incredibly important. Knowing how and when to do this is simply a matter of being on the range with both the rifle and the pistol and knowing when to switch. Now what you just saw was Brad went ahead and took a one-handed shot with his sidearm.

He felt confident, given the balance of speed and precision of this incident, on making a shot that was combat accurate in an efficient time with one hand fully extended with his pistol. If he did not feel confident, he would need to drop the rifle. The next time Brad needs to reload, or next time he has a malfunction, he's going to make a transition, simply dropping his rifle because it does not have a carry strap or a sling. On the other hand, John is wearing a sling, he's wearing a three point sling that will allow him to transition more quickly and without losing the rifle or risking damage to the rifle, which in a critical incident would not be of a great concern. He's simply going to let go of the rifle, reach down to his pistol and transition and be able to take that two-handed shot.

Up! Up! Of course one of the problems we have, and this is the difference between tactical training and administrative training, is that people don't want to drop their rifles. So this rifle that Brad has is very pretty, has nice wood, has some old-school bluing on it that makes it look antique-ish, but he ran out of rounds. This is no good to us anymore.

Dropping the rifle is what we need to do. We need to drop it and immediately go to our pistol. We can't afford to be taking time to lay it down, we can't be worried about putting the rifle down. And the problem isn't that you'll be worried about putting the rifle down nicely in the middle of a critical incident. The problem is the habit.

And if you get into the habit of putting the gun down when you're in that critical incident and need to be shooting, you're going to do exactly the same thing. So we want to get into the habit of dropping the rifle, or perhaps investing in a sling or carry strap for the rifle so we don't have to drop it. Up! Up! When you're on a rifle range, between strings of fire, it's great to go back from your pistol to your long gun.

Whether you're fixing a malfunction or you're actually going back to actually loading the rifle if it had gone dry, that's fine. You don't want to get into a habit when you're just shooting a pistol of topping off, or the so-called tactical reload between strings of fire. You want to have as many opportunities as you can to experience slide lock. That does not mean, however, when your primary goal of that range session is practicing with a rifle, that you're not going to, between strings of fire, get the rifle back into operation. If you're in the middle of that operation and the instructor should call out a command to fire or whatever you're using as your random cue if you're training by yourself to fire should come about, you don't need to finish the reload.

You immediately transition and go back to a pistol. Certainly we realize that that can happen. You could be in the middle of reloading and have to shoot. If your gun isn't working and you have another one that will work, you drop it and you go back to that side arm. Up!

As we look at these targets, we can see that a higher degree of precision for that pace of shooting was attainable because we had a long gun over a pistol when we were further back. Of course the shooters were going through transitions and not only dropped some shots out of our preferred target area with the rifle, but primarily with the pistol. Particularly going over to this target, as you can see after a transition, we had a lot of hits off of the combat accurate area that we're looking for. That's a problem with rifle over pistol. If you are shooting a rifle at a given distance and you feel like you're within your balance of speed and precision model to get the hits you need to get, and you switch to a pistol, you might need to slow way down.

Or you might even be in a situation where you can't use a pistol. What we're going to do now is move up closer and actually take a look at what this is going to look like when we're at more reasonable, practical, plausible combat distances with a rifle. Eventually you're going to see that you might be able to shoot faster with a pistol at extreme close ranges than you can with a rifle because of different sighting systems and the speed with which you can bring the pistol into action versus the rifle. We're going to take a look at that. And also keep in mind that on this range we are using a pistol caliber carbine here.

This AR type is a nine millimeter, the same as the handgun that John is using. Brad is using a revolver that shoots the same .38 special rounds that his lever action does. That may or may not be the case in your world. You may not have interchangeable magazines. You may be using actual rifle calibers, and then actual pistol calibers in your pistol, in your sidearm.

So keep in mind, you may not have that interoperability of ammunition versus one platform to the other. We've moved up to a more practical, defensive shooting distance, certainly a more plausible distance for any situation which would occur in the home. What the shooters are going to do now is not use their sidearm. They're going to assume that they only have their long guns and they're going to have to do their lateral movement and actually do a reload drill, get their gun back into operation as fast as they can. Up!

Up! Up! Up! Up! Once we've established our comfort level with hitting the primary target area on our target, we want to move to the next level of actually balancing speed and precision and changing that up.

We're going to make the targets less predictable and we're also going to change the size of the target. And of course, distance stays the same. The other environmental factors, the conditions which affect the shooters, the firearm they're using, all those things, are going to stay the same. But we are going to take a look at what happens when we change the target. Up!

Four! Get the hit. That's the problem with transitioning from one pace of shooting to another. If you don't consciously slow down, change your balance of speed and precision so that you get the hit you need to get, you run the risk of missing, even at this close range with a long gun. Two!

Up! Now we've gotten even closer. We've gotten much closer to what would be a reasonable engagement distance for a threat inside your home. Maybe even closer than this, but we've gotten back to where we do most of our primary pistol shooting, somewhere between eight and 12 feet. Now, exactly the same thing is happening here.

Except what we've got is John has switched to a rifle caliber. So he's got rifle caliber magazines. Exact same platform, same manual arms, same malfunction drill, same reload drills. But what he's done is he's switched to a rifle. He does not have compatibility between the magazines or the ammunition with his sidearm, with his pistol.

We are going to have the guys go back to transitioning to their pistols when they need to. And we're going to run through the same drills now at an even more realistic distance. Load and make ready. Up! Up!

Up! Four! Three! Up! Up!

Now again, at this distance, Brad's choice was to go ahead and just shoot one handed with the pistol. The first shot was off, but by slowing down, concentrating, controlling deviation more, he got the second hit. So the question remains, would he be faster and more efficient if he just dropped the rifle, went to the pistol and extended to shoot? That's a hard habit to break. It's a hard habit to get into.

It's certainly counterintuitive when you have a rifle that you've practiced with and trained with, and you try to take good care of and keep operational, but in a critical incident, that extra second or extra half-second or that missed shot could be very damaging to somebody you care about, or even yourself. Up! Two! Up! Two!

Up! One! Good hits. By going through drills like this over and over and over again, eventually students will find their balance of speed and precision. They'll understand how much deviation they need.

So regardless of what led up to that, they both each got good hits on the less predictable and smaller size target. Now, once they found their pace, the trick is to keep it consistent and be able to transition from that main shot that we have which is our default training, which is the main mass area, the high center chest of our target, to an unorthodox target in case the situation demands it. Up! Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.