Know Your Lane, Know Yourself and You Will Be Invincible
A cursory search on the Internet will turn up articles spouting off about how the training done by military veterans and experienced law enforcement officers is far superior to that done by armed citizens. To quote one of the more inflammatory articles (No, I won’t give him the honour of a link).
“Do you honestly think that the 300-pound ‘Instructor’ with ketchup & mustard stains on his shirt knows anything about shooting under stress or how to enter a room when he himself can’t fit through a normal doorway without turning sideways?”
Yeah, nice to see you supporting the armed citizenry there, dude. Keep it up.
Moreover, is studying Battle Drill #6 and learning how to clear a structure anywhere NEAR the top of my list of priorities? No. It is, however, way up on the list of priorities for the military and for law enforcement, because we as a society have tasked them with the job of actively pursuing the violent elements which threaten us.
Actively pursuing a violent element is NOT the job of the armed citizenry. Okay, that is currently not our job. That may change. For the nonce, though, our job is simple: Avoid contact with the violent elements of society, but if contact is unavoidable, stop the threat using an appropriate amount of force.
Completely different job, completely different training. My job is to be protective, not proactive. No, I have not been in a gunfight. Moreover, it is my goal to never be in one. To borrow from Steve Tarani (and if the high-speed, low drag crowd wants to knock his resume, go for it), as an armed citizen, if I go to guns, chances are, I’ve done something very, very wrong. I don’t go chasing after the bad guy, I have other people who do that for me, and God bless ‘em for doing it. All I ask in return is that those who do so don’t call me a “300-pound ‘Instructor’ with ketchup & mustard stains on my shirt.”
Is that too much to ask?
As for shooting under stress as an armed citizen vs. shooting under stress as a Tier One operator, one of the biggest takeaways I had from my class with Matt Pranka of X-Ray Alpha (and good luck impinging HIS reputation) was that his former unit, (appropriately nicknamed “The Unit”), relied on competition shooters to teach them how to be shoot accurately under stress. The same competition shooters who teach armed citizens teach also train the absolute tip of the spear, and compete in matches that I can compete in along with just about any other legal gun owner.
So much for that “only ones” fallacy.
Can we armed citizens learn from military and law enforcement trainers? Absolutely. Do you need to be military or law enforcement to be an effective trainer for armed citizens? Absolutely not.