Spray Painting Defensive Targets

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. I like a target that's got a lot of variety. Small shapes, big shapes, maybe shapes within shapes, or numbers, or things to focus on. Things that I can call out to a student to let them really recognize and go through that reaction, and then response to what it is I want them to do. In the case that I don't have a target that has that kinda variety, one thing that I can do is actually use just a white a piece of paper and a couple colors of spray paint to create just such a target. So let's say I wanted to work with circles for some type of drill. As long as they're approximately the same size, certainly we're not worried about an art class rendering of a perfect circle, we're not worried about exactly the same size. This gives me a lot of options. Even something as simple as that gives me the option of saying, red left. Multiple target drill. Top green, single target. Left green, another single target. Bottom green, another single target. Green, three different targets, three different recognition times from the student, three different target engagements. This is pretty simple. If I were to add a shape to the mix. Say that I put a square, now I have even more varieties, so I have more options in the way I call this target drill. I can say green as a preparatory command. Maybe someone started walking up to you that you thought might be a problem, but you hadn't really recognized them as a threat. Saying green is that person entering your space. You go to that next level of readiness. You lower your center of gravity, you might start to bring your hands up, not to threaten, not to get into a fighting pose, not to grab your gun, but simply to say, can I help you sir? Maybe that's your non-violent posture to say, I'm ready, but I'm not sure you're a threat, and I certainly can't justify presenting something like a firearm or even reaching for the firearm at that point. When I then would say square, that would be attacking that target because it presented a threat. That's the person drawing a knife, that's the person grabbing you, that's the person threatening you or someone you care about in some other way. In the same way I could say green, top, circle. And again, you would have two stages of preparation. You would know that it was going to be a green target, you would know that it was going to be at the top, and then finally you would know it was a circle. Green, middle. Now you've positively identified a threat. By over-choreographing the kinds of calls you do, you end up conditioning your students or your training partners or yourself to just one option. And immediately going, when someone says green, to the green target. Here green can just be a preparatory command. Bottom and middle, instantly you could execute, understand what you're gonna shoot at. If I were to say top, you could not execute your draw presentation in firing because you don't know if I'm gonna say square or circle. Let's put up another piece of paper and look at another variation. Now with this target, I'm gonna simulate that size difference that we talked about before, where I've got a large target here in the center and then maybe some smaller shapes and targets out here around either side. And you can see that this pretty closely replicates exactly the same situation that we have with our commercial targets when we purchase them when we have access to them. If all you have is a white piece of paper, a piece of cardboard, and some spray paint you can come very, very close to it. So if we were going to try to run our SEB drill without the actual SEB target, we have our up command, and then we have circles, and squares, and triangles, so that we could say left, circle. Again, a preparatory command and then the command of execution. If we wanted to take it to the next level, we could certainly say- And now because I've used two colors of spray paint, we can actually say, red, square or square, red. And again, scramble those commands, scramble those indications for recognition for your training partner, for your students, so that they understand they can't just draw their gun and shoot because they heard a loud noise or because you said something. Another thing I can do is actually just paint a large number on the target. That large number gives me yet another variation. So I've got a one, I've got a two, I've got red circle, I've got left triangle, I've got the up command, which is always gonna be our default command, or maybe we'll use something else, Go, threat, whatever you choose to be your default command for multiple shots into this area here, which we deem to be combat accurate on an average close threat, that's great. Now the smaller areas would obviously demand a higher balance of speed and precision. The other that's nice about a variety of target types or commands is that is takes the shooter and put them a little more off balance. They're having to apply a little more thought process, a little more cognitive energy, to actually recognizing what it is that you say. Remember that as we raise awareness our recognition becomes more powerful. So if we raise our awareness through frequent and realistic training, we become more ready to recognize a situation. The same thing goes for range commands. If all you ever say if up, to get someone to shoot, they are gonna start responding to up after the reaction of a range command much more efficiently. It's important to change those range commands and keep your student or your training partners a little bit off balance. For example, if we were to look at this target the way it's set up right now and say, right triangle, that doesn't represent any target. If they had conditioned themselves to think that that was a target, drew and fired or even drew and extended their firearm out towards this target, they were wrong. They misinterpreted something in their environment. That's the way we rationalize that. We talk about an environment where you can misunderstand a noise from a car, a noise from something falling, a noise from someone screaming in laughter as opposed to screaming for help, and if you always respond to anything that startles you by drawing a firearm, let's say you're an armed professional or someone that has a conceal permit, and you're in public and you just draw your firearm because something happened without actually being able to identify some source for that threat and something that's articulable justifying you pulling your firearm or engaging in some kind of other lethal response to protect yourself or others, then you've got a real problem. Make sure your training targets are complex enough and challenging enough, more importantly, to make sure that you and your partners are getting the most out of all of your taxable training drills. Keep your training in context, make the drills, make your targets things that will actually replicate a need for the balance of speed and precision. So now we've placed those two targets that we just made with spray paint up on the back wall here in our square range. Peter's ready to go, he's got his firearm, he's got spare magazines, he's loaded up. What we've decided to do is to go back one target. So we're not gonna do any multiple target, multiple threat scenarios. So we're only gonna have one target designated, and he's going to key off of my description of what the area I want him to be threatened by is and he's gonna react. So when I first call out, let's say, left. That would mean the left target. If I were to call out top, then he immediately knows he needs to start looking at the top row of targets, and that the left would then mean the left target. So he understands that I'm gonna continue to call out different words until he narrows it down to actually recognizing just one threat. For example, what we were calling circle red on the black target with the red dots, would obviously no longer be circle red. Unless we were only exclusively talking about the left target. So we have to designate left or right first as a target and then he's gonna understand it. May be easier to watch than explain. And of course, the large circle on the left target, we're designating as our up command for multiple shots. All other areas are getting one shot only. This is a balance of speed and precision drill with a complex set of recognition cues built in. Right, green, top, circle. Now Peter obviously went a little early there because when he went to draw his gun, he had no idea if I was going to say circle or square. That's a natural reaction. Once you're narrowed down to, that person really looks like they're trying to hurt me, you might already have gone for your gun, and then realized, oh they're not trying to hurt me, or that person is actually the one that's threatening me. That's a normal behavioral reaction, and it's normal to see that in our training when it's realistic. Left, circle, two. Up. Right, red, bottom. Left, one. Up. Right, circle, middle, red. Green, square. Eight. Triangle. Mixing up the number of actual words it takes to get to recognition obviously can also throw the shooter off as well. So if he's not expecting triangle to actually designate only one target because of the myriad of shapes and variations we have up there, it may take a minute for it to sink in that that's his threat. Right, green, two. Up. It's easy to see how just a little creativity, some spray paint, and a training partner who understands the commands you're using, can lead to some very realistic training, especially when it comes to having to recognize a threat and use some mental power to figure out exactly what your training partner's talking about, and then of course responding once you recognize that lethal threat. Taking some spray paint, taking some blank paper, cardboard, whatever it is, to the range with you next time you head out to do tactical training, might be a great idea. Go ahead and try it out. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.