Rob Pincus at 2015 NRA Annual Meetings

Good morning. Afternoon, yeah. So it's a Sunday. Sunday is always the smaller of the smallest by far of all the presentations. I really appreciate you guys coming in.

By Sunday afternoon most people are kinda tired. Maybe you're tired and you're just here cause you can sit down for an hour, it's fine. And also we had a lot of people come through the last couple of days. So I really appreciate you guys taking the time to come in and see what we have to talk about here in terms of defensive shooting skill development. The NRA annual convention, annual meetings and exhibits.

The official name is always a highlight for me of the year for a couple of different reasons. These presentations that they give me the opportunity to talk about a couple of different concepts. This one and the home defense are really the core of what we teach. It's the core of the information that we communicate through Personal Defense Network. It's the core of what we teach through ICE training company.

And especially this presentation is the core of our flagship program, the combat focus shooting program. So being able to talk about that and educate people that maybe can't get to our classes, we know that the price to train the ammunition, hundreds of dollars a day, plus many hundreds of rounds a day. All that adds up, you gotta be away from your family. You gotta take off work, you gotta do those things. So the opportunity to talk to you for an hour or two about some of these concepts is really important for me.

Because this may be what motivates you to come out and take a class from one of these instructors that I'm gonna introduce you to later or any of the other instructors that are out there in the industry that may not be affiliated with us but are teaching good, solid, defensive shooting skills. And we actually just had a question from one of you that's in the audience about another school, another program that exists that teaches some things differently from what I teach. Can I ask, any doctors in the audience today? Anybody ever been to a doctor in the audience today. We'll get some class participation.

So think about, I don't know what, we had a doctor in this presentation on Friday. And I asked him, I said, how far back do you have to go to where there was one doctor in the village so to speak? And he said, well, probably about 300 years ago. But that's when specialization started happening inside of the medical community apparently. And I never asked that question before but what I have talked about is this concept of specialization, that at some point in the distant past.

Few generations, several generations ago, there was one doctor, that doctor took care of broken arms birth and babies, headaches, demonic possession whatever else they were worried about 300, 400, 500 years ago. That one doctor took care of everything. Probably took care of the animals too, right? So now today we have different specialists for like left knees and right knees, right? There's too much information out there and there's too much specialization.

There's too much knowledge to fit into one human head and there's too much going on in the medical community to help people be helpful and fit and live long happy lives or live as long as they can be, as happy as they can be as fit as they can. For one person to teach everything. And for one person to do everything. And shooting is like that. Shooting's a much younger area of research and a much younger area of science.

But shooting also has specializations, right? You wouldn't expect the person that's teaching long range precision rifle to necessarily be really good at teaching defensive pistol shooting. But even defensive pistol shooting is different from marksmanship or basic pistol use. And that's important to understand too. And that probably wasn't the case, nearly as much 30 years ago.

And in fact, if you look at specifically at what now is the defensive firearms training industry, it was started by people who were competitive shooters. Now they may have come from a military or law enforcement background, but their activity was competition. And they were designing programs that overlap very closely with what we now know as USPSA or IPSec and eventually IDPA. That was based on the idea that the way we were training on the ranges was the way we were gonna compete so that we got better at the defensive shooting. That was the idea.

What has happened, is there's been a lot of evolution over the last 30 years. 30 to 40 years, in what we know about how fights actually happen. What we know about how the body and brain react and respond together when fights are happening. We know obviously the guns have evolved quite a bit, over the last 30, 40 years. We have a whole new generation of modern striker fired polymer, reliable, mid-length, pole, mid-weight type trigger guns.

So there's a lot of things that are different. And if you're still teaching exactly the same thing that you were teaching 40 years ago and you're still using the same techniques you were using 40 years ago before we had dash camera videos. Before we had good high-quality surveillance camera videos in every convenience store, every bank, every street corner practically in some cities. Before we had all this information, high level reality-based training with simunitions and role-players and things like this. We know so much more today than we did 40 years ago about shooting and defensive shooting in particular.

If you're still teaching the same thing, you're just not teaching what people need. And that's the truth. What you're probably teaching is target shooting. How many of you are target shooters, gun enthusiast, gun collectors? Okay, I'm a gun collector, I'm a gun enthusiast I do target shooting, I do recreational shooting.

How many of you primarily own guns for personal defense or defense of other people that you care about, defense of our way of life ultimately? That's what the second amendment is about. It's not about competition shooting. It's not about hunting. It's not about sport shooting.

It's not about the American tradition. It's about the defense. It's about defense of our way of life. And it starts with defense of our lives. Let me say that again.

Hands in the air, if the last gun you're gonna give up is the gun that you would rely on for personal defense. Not the heirloom, not the hunting gun. Okay, cool. So keep your hands up for a second. How many of you that say that have more than five guns?

We're at the NRA show and you're still here on Sunday afternoons. That's just about everybody, right? Okay, so you have more than five guns and you primarily own guns for defense. Put your hands down, if you have taken a defensive firearms class that was not required by the military law enforcement or to get a permit. Okay, everybody with your hand up in the air, sell a gun, go take a class.

Sell a gun. And the only reason I say sell a gun and take the class, is because, if you haven't taken the time, effort and energy to go get training, one of the reasons might be budget. But if you've got 10, 12, 15, 20 guns in your house, and you're saying you're primarily interested in personal defense or the home defense, defense of others defense of your way of life, you've got 20 guns. You've never taken a class. You are a gun collector.

Nothing wrong with being a gun collector, but don't raise your hand and say you primarily own guns for personal defense. I think there's an integrity check that you should do. Training and practice are incredibly important. Can you watch videos of Personal Defense Network? Can you go read the books?

Can you go do all that stuff and then go practice on your own and get good? Sure, it's possible. But you're gonna dramatically increase your odds of getting really good, if you get the right kind of training and you get the right kind of coaching and you get some supervised practice to develop those skills in the way that we're gonna talk about today. Or whichever way you choose to follow. There are a lot of good programs out there.

The information you're gonna see in this presentation is primarily drawn from the combat focus shooting program and the stuff that our defensive firearms coaches teach in our intro to home defense handgun in our intro to concealed carry handgun classes. So when it comes to practice, when it comes to skill development, when it comes to training, when you've taken the opportunity to go out and take that class.