Skill Maintenance With SIRT Training Guns

If you are gonna do live fire training obviously, you need a couple of things. Firearms for sure, you're doing an alarm defense training that's gonna be a necessity anyway, but you need access to a range and you need ammunition. Over the last year, both have been hard to come by under certain circumstances depending on where you are in the country, and what kind of ammunition you're looking for. Even finding simple, what is usually plentiful nine millimeter training ammunition has been hard at times, and undoubtedly, that's gonna happen again in the future. So during an ammunition drought, tools like the sirt pistol or the sirt stick, can be great for skill development but, you have to really be careful about thinking what am I training, and why am I using a non-life fire option, instead of a live fire option?

When it comes to balancing speed and precision, trigger press, learning to tie together, stimuli and responses like slide lock, leading to a reload or a failure to fire leading to a tap and a rack, and then reassessing to decide if you're gonna engage or not, all of those things, really need to be done live fire. You can do some maintenance. You can make the, rationalization I guess would be the best word for me to use, that you're getting some value out of doing it dry fire, but the reality is you need the bang and you need the physics of the gun. So what are you really doing when you're using something like a sirt pistol or the sirt stick, to best maintain your skills? Because that's really the best thing you can do.

Once you've learned the developed skills in a live fire environment you can maintain them with something like the sirt pistol or the sirt stick very, very easily. And of course, you can do a lot of this with even a dummy gun or your unloaded and cleared gun we always recommend you still do that in a safe area pointing the gun in a safe direction and have someone else check to see that your gun is empty and there's no live fire ammo in the environment at all. So what are the kinds of things you can train really well with these? well presentation from the holster is probably one of the best examples. You can present from the holster whether your appendix, behind the back, whether you're at a three o'clock, wherever you carry inside of a purse, you can pull that gun out to the ready position.

You can practice that after a good startle reaction, simulation, or other cue, you can practice your verbal issues. When you're talking about giving someone commands, getting your family behind you, telling someone to stop, maybe dialing the phone and calling the police, simulated of course, while the gun's in the ready position. You can practice your movement, while you're in the ready position. You can practice going through, maybe moving to your barricade area in your house. Obviously you can do scenarios with your family and those kinds of things using these as props.

If I put the sirt pistol into the sirt stick, we can talk about what about the long gun. Well really, it's exactly the same thing. While I could theoretically practice changing magazines the reality is, I'm not getting that bolt lock this magazine isn't gonna drop free. So what type of magazine change or reload would I be practicing? Well, if I imagine that I had just engaged a target and that target was down, and at that point I might decide to not do an emergency reload but do what's often called a tactical reload, or simply topping off the gun.

So I find that fresh mag, come back up, pull this partial mag out, insert the new full mag and make sure that it's seated and going through that simulation is something that's very easy to do with this stick. You can practice manipulating a white light or a laser. You can practice deploying your iron backup sites if you have those on a gun. You can practice using your sling, taking your sling on and off. You can do things like that and of course, the equivalent of presentation from the holster, with the sirt stick, is running that safety.

So again, being in the ready position, identifying a threat bringing the gun up and making sure you're running that safety as you bring the gun up, you take your shots, come back down. Safety goes back on, that's one of the nice features of this is one of the most important consistency issues. Make sure that safety goes off and on when you come from the compressed ready to the shooting position and come back down you can practice that really well with this. If you run a nineteen-eleven, you can do the same thing obviously, any kind of a single action handgun practice, driving that gun out getting the safety off to the first shot. Now, you need to be careful about practicing some things that you might not be practicing very realistically.

One of the things I always talk about with the sirt pistol of course, is photons don't have much recoil what does that mean? That means if I bring this gun up and rapid fire, I'm really not getting as much value as I might think I am, right? I'd bring that gun up and I take rapid fire shots with this gun, seeing my aiming dot, on the target. Seeing the laser dot show up next to it, I might get a false impression of my true balance of speed and precision is because I'm not actually getting recoil. And again, if you think that you're gonna, come up and shoot, and then pretend you got bolt lock, and then have to rip this magazine out and then find a new magazine and come back up, and you're not really running a charging handle, well, then you're not really practicing the reload are you, you're actually practicing things that aren't part of the reload and that's not what you wanna do when it comes to maintaining your skills, especially during an ammunition drought, when it might be awhile before you get back on in a live fire range.

Think about the tools you have, think about the training you've done and what you need to do, to maintain your skills. When you're trying to maintain them, during an ammunition drought.