The Rogers Technique – The following is an explanation of the Rogers technique from M4Carbine.net member HeadHunter, an instructor at the Rogers Shooting School:
At the Rogers School, we teach the students to straddle the magazine catch with the middle finger and thumb of the right hand. We call this “making a tunnel” for the light.
The light is then pressed against the groove between the two digits rather than against the weapon itself.
This picture does not show the grip on the light itself, just the positioning of the light against the firing hand.
Seen from a front angle
The flashlight is gripped between the forefinger and the middle finger with the switch at the base of the thumb. Each person needs to find their individual grip so they can repeatedly index the light the same way.
The gripped flashlight is then placed against the tunnel formed by the thumb and middle finger of the other hand.
Note that the flashlight does NOT touch the weapon.
This accomplishes two things,
a) protects the magazine catch from the light, and
b) helps index the light repeatedly in the same spot.
The object is that the flashlight should be coaxially aligned with the bore of the weapon in both axes.
The vertical axis.
And the horizontal axis.
Note that if the flashlight isn’t coaxial to the bore, the light will shine below the weapon’s sights, typically at ranges in excess of 10 yards.
Night shooting is difficult enough without having the light and weapon pointing in different directions.
I have a high tech solution to help me repeatedly index the light the same way – a 1 inch O ring with a rubber band to keep it from sliding rearward.
Unsophisticated but it works better than anything else I have tried.
Strengths: The Rogers technique is, in my opinion, the absolute best technique when it comes to shooting accurately with a hand-held light. The technique allows the three free fingers of your weak hand to grab on to the weapon and help to stabilize it. Once mastered, it allows you to shoot every bit as good as you can with a normal two handed hold. Once mastered, it also allows you to put the hot spot of the light where it is centered around the front sight of the weapon the first time every time.
Weaknesses: The Rogers technique is probably the most difficult hand-held light technique to master. When you first try it out it is probably the most awkward and unnatural feeling technique you will try. On some weapons the Rogers technique can interfere with the function of the weapon if you don’t use the technique exactly as HeadHunter describes it. It’s particularly bad about ejecting magazines on some semi-autos. While you can use the Rogers technique with many flashlights, it really does work best with lights dedicated to the technique like the 6Z/Z2 combat lights discussed earlier or lights that have been modified with something like an o-ring you can use to pull the light to the rear with. People usually require A LOT of practice to get the light indexed with the sights using this technique. Generally they end up pointing the light at the ground or way up in the air while the sights are more or less on target until they’ve mastered the technique.
Push/Pull Technique – This is a relatively new technique that developed in response to the very small lights that have recently come on to the market like the Surefire E1B. The technique entails putting the head of the small light between the thumb and first fingers of your weak hand so that the tailcap of the small light rests against the base of your STRONG hand’s thumb. You then push slightly forward with the base of your thumb to activate the light.
Strengths: It’s essentially the only technique that allows you to use 2 hands with the super compact lights like the E1B.
Weaknesses: If you aren’t careful you can get the rear of the light into the trigger guard and actually launch a round downrange. Don’t attempt to use this technique in real life until you’ve trained EXTENSIVELY on it.
Now you’ll notice that I listed the strengths and weaknesses of each light technique. Each technique has situations where it is utterly useless. This means you MUST learn MULTIPLE techniques and become proficient with them.
I prefer the Rogers technique as my main light technique and I am a right handed shooter. If I attempt to use the technique on a corner that opens to my right, if I activate the light I am going to blast myself with the light instead of lighting the unknown space I am trying to clear. My choices here are to expose more of myself than necessary to get my light out past the corner, OR to transition to the Harries technique which allows me to keep most of myself hidden while still allowing me to search the unknown space because the light is now to the right of my weapon. (For a wrong-handed shooter it would be the opposite.)
The world is a very big place and is full of all sorts of problems and issues. When you are trying to clear the average structure it will be almost impossible to use just one light technique to get the job done. Having multiple techniques in your toolbox is VITAL for the defense minded individual. You will also encounter situations where none of the stated techniques is appropriate and you’ll have to improvise one on the spot. An example is if you have to look under something like a porch or a car. The FBI technique isn’t going to be terribly useful here, but putting the light at waist level may work for you, or even putting it at knee level.
The most critical thing I can tell you at this point is that YOU MUST TRAIN DILLIGENTLY WITH EACH OF THESE TECHNIQUES TO HAVE ANY HOPE OF USING THEM UNDER STRESS. You cannot practice it once and get it down pat. Using a light in conjunction with a handgun is DIFFICULT and it WILL NOT come easy. You need to spend LOTS OF TIME practicing these techniques with an empty weapon inside a structure and also with live fire on the range. Thankfully you can practice the techniques with live fire during daylight if your range won’t allow night shooting. You need to practice engaging multiple targets with these techniques and you need to practice shooting on the move with these techniques. You need to spend time searching a structure (like your house when nobody is home) in the dark and learning how the various angles and corners in your house make one technique a better option than the other. You need to practice getting into these techniques when drawing from concealment….
Starting to see my point? You need to train on these techniques in a wide variety of situations and scenarios that you can find yourself in.
You need to practice weapon manipulations with the light. Most of the techniques leave you shooting the weapon with one hand, but when the time comes to reload or clear a malfunction you are going to want to use both hands. This means you have to do something with that light. A lot of people teach tucking the light under the strong arm and then using the weak hand as normal and this is very effective. Some teach putting the light back into its holster (assuming you are carrying your hand held light in a dedicated readily accessible light holster). Some teach dropping the light on the ground and then simply drawing a second light from your belt. Generally the folks I’ve met who use this tactic carry a minimum of THREE lights on them at all times. My personal favorite technique is to use the lanyard on the weapon light.
If you remember I listed the lanyard available from the factory on the 6Z/Z2 combat lights as a desirable feature. It is a desirable feature because it allows you to let go of the light and use your weak hand to do something like reload your weapon or clear a malfunction without losing the light and it allows you to get the light back into play very quickly when you are loaded up again. Now some people’s physiology is not suited to performing something like a reload with a light strapped to the inside of their palm like I do. Because of this you really need to be able to do the tuck or the reholster even if your main lights have a lanyard on them.
Again, knowing these techniques in concept is not difficult….but reading a description of them or even seeing them used is not going to prepare you to use them under stress. IF you do not make a discipline of training on this stuff you will NOT be able to use it effectively. Worse still, you may fall victim to a common foul up.
One of the most problematic aspects of using a hand-held light with a handgun is indexing the light and the sights of the weapon on the same spot. Often individuals only manage to get the weapon indexed properly initially. Under stress they have a bad habit of noticing that their light is indexed improperly and then moving the light until the hotspot is where they want it… but they also move the weapon. Under stress they aren’t looking at their sights and are instead treating the light like a really big laser sight and are assuming that the light and the weapon are pointed at the same place. They then proceed to launch rounds into the dirt, into the walls, over the head of the target, over the berm, and anywhere else you can imagine except the intended target. In a real fight you won’t have an instructor by your side spotting your shots and telling you what you are doing wrong. Again: It is CRITICAL that you train on these techniques. There are no shortcuts or magic fixes.
Weapon lights, of course, make all of this much simpler. You don’t have to worry about all these complex hand techniques and you can use a normal two handed hold with a weapon light…and you can also perform standard weapon manipulation drills without worrying about what you do with the light.
BUT….that doesn’t mean you don’t need handheld light or handheld light techniques if you have a weapon light. Weapon lights are useful in only in certain narrow circumstances. If you have to have your weapon out for clearing a structure or if you need it pointed at somebody a weapon light is a good thing…but that’s not an appropriate action for the majority of circumstances. Naturally you can’t go around pointing firearms at suspicious situations so depending on a weapon light as your ONLY light is a really bad idea.
While on the topic of weapon lights for handguns it’s critical to mention something else: If you are going to use a weapon mounted light on your handgun, use a holster that can accommodate your weapon mounted light. This business of putting the light on after you clear leather and taking it back off when you need to holster up is ASKING for problems. A number of police officers have managed to shoot themselves in the hand while attempting to take weapon lights on and off under stress. If you don’t have a holster that can accommodate a weapon mounted light, you can still use the weapon mounted light with the FBI or neck index techniques very well.
Training – General principles of white light use
It has been said multiple times by this point but it bears repeating now: White light is a target indicator. Whenever you use it you are exposing yourself to whatever is out there in the dark potentially waiting to hurt you. As a general principle you want to use as little white light as you can get away with. The failing most common among the untrained or the poorly trained (and the frightened) is to lean entirely too much on the white light. Thankfully because most of the criminal types are not meat eating gunfighters and are more interested in escape than a body count the improper use of lights doesn’t routinely have dire consequences. Nevertheless, it’s not good to plan on encountering just the stupid or the scared.
There is a balance to be reached in the use of white light. It’s almost impossible to navigate (especially in unfamiliar surroundings) entirely in the dark and you’re darn sure not going to be able to clear the room without using SOME white light. (Unless you have night vision) It’s also not a good idea to walk around with the light turned on all the time so you can see where you are going. The compromise is to use short bursts of light to allow you to navigate in the dark. The bursts of light should be around ½ a second, which is just enough to allow you to see what you need to see…and you are moving the whole time so that if a bad guy does see the burst of light you aren’t where it was. Some folks call this “flashing”, some call it “strobing”.
It’s used to navigate and to see what you need to see inside a room. You can’t simply enter a room that you haven’t checked out at all…that’s asking for disaster.
Generally you want to try and use the LIE principle in low light. LIE stands for:
Locate – ½ second burst of light to locate a potential threat
Identify – 1 second burst of light to determine whether or not the potential threat you located needs to be shot
Engage – pulling the trigger, with the light off if possible. (It’s not always possible)
After each of these steps you MOVE so as not to be in the same location as the light or the muzzle flash. (muzzle flash is also a target indicator)
Now this process if done at speed is extremely difficult for the guy on the other side of the light to figure out.
General Principles — “Enough” Light
This is where it all gets really mushy. There’s simply no way to put into words how you tell what is “enough” light and what is “too much” light. A good general rule is that you need less light than you feel like you need, but that can only take you so far. You really have to get out there and practice this stuff to develop the judgment necessary to figure out what is “too much” and what is “enough”.
There are ways to accomplish this that just about anyone can practice. One of the best things you can do is get a buddy to come to your house and set up about five targets in your house. Have him go through the house and identify good hiding places for bad guys or other challenging areas in your house and then set up targets there. Use cardboard cutouts or spray-paint templates (there are many available) to put empty hands and hands holding weapons on the targets. Only one or two of the targets should have weapons. Then go through and clear your house using an EMPTY WEAPON and your white light. The goal here is to force you to examine familiar surroundings in a new light and to get you learning to use the white light minimally to navigate and to identify threats, it will get you using your white light techniques, and it may even get your heart rate and breathing up giving you a tiny taste of some of the stress that will be in play should you have to do it for real. The goal should be to go through the house multiple times (with different target placements, of course) using less light than the previous run to find out how much light you truly need.
Professional training is, of course, better than this approach, but this approach is better than nothing….and nothing is what most people do for low light training. 12 shots with Welder’s goggles on (an actual LE night fire qualification in one of the states in our nation) is NOT low light training. Shooting at night with patrol cars behind you lighting up the target isn’t low light training. If you’re not at least trying to replicate the circumstances you’ll face should things really go sideways you are cheating yourself. There are no shortcuts here. You have to be willing to put in the time and the effort to get these concepts down.
Training — The importance of darkness
While it is true that you can practice hand-held light techniques and use of the LIE method (incorporating movement) during daylight hours, you MUST take the time to run through some drills at night, even if you can only manage dry-fire drills. (Note: At some point you need to test your carry ammo in the dark to see what it does in the muzzle flash department and how that impacts your ability to see and effectively engage a target.)
The majority of the concern here is learning how your eyes and your equipment work at night. You need to spend time in different levels of darkness to figure out how the continually changing environment affects your ability to see a threat, your ability to see your sights, and how much white light you need to use. Everybody’s eyes are different. We all see the world uniquely. I may be able to see much better than you can in the dark or vice versa…as such I may not need as much white light to navigate as you need, or you may need less than I do.
If you make a dedicated effort to familiarize yourself with how your eyes and your equipment works in actual darkness you will begin to get a feel for how much light you need to use in the myriad of lighting circumstances that exist in our environment at any time. As I’ve said a number of times you can only get the benefit of this stuff if you actually try it.
Dedicated low light training on a range with quality instructors is the BEST way to accomplish this…but if that isn’t an option for you and if you are resourceful and committed enough there are other ways to help develop the skills I’ve outlined.
Training – Accuracy in low light
Accuracy becomes extremely important in low light conditions. When you take a group of relatively good shooters and run them through a series of drills in the daylight and then you take the exact same shooters and run the exact same drills in low light the best of them will shoot only about ½ as good as he did during the day. Everything gets more complicated in the dark. Accuracy is no exception.
The accuracy standards you hold yourself to during the day will come back to either help you or hurt you in low light. If your concept of combat accuracy is hitting paper at 7 yards on a stationary target in the daylight you are going to be up that bad, bad creek without a paddle at night. You need to be able to keep your shots within the A zone of an IDPA target, essentially shooting groups you can cover with your hand during the day to have any hope of acceptable accuracy at night.
When you get people under stress, trying to remember how to hold their handheld light and to use it in a tactically sound fashion, typically trigger control suffers immensely. The more clock cycles of brain power you have to dedicate to these other tasks, the less likely it is that you’ll give the proper attention to properly controlling the trigger. Trigger control is the fundamental building block of accuracy and without exercising proper trigger control you won’t hit a bloody thing you mean to hit….that means you need to develop these other skills to an almost reflexive level through PERFECT PRACTICE if you want to have the best shot at making the hits you’ll need to stop a threat.
The best thing you can do to aid your accuracy in low light is to hold yourself to a VERY HIGH accuracy standard during daylight shooting understanding the whole time that under stress and in conditions of low light your accuracy will degrade from the peak you experience on the range. If the best you can manage during daylight hours with nobody shooting back at you is barely keeping it on paper, then you are royally screwed when the fertilizer hits the fan.
Training – Lasers
I mentioned earlier that lasers take some dedicated practice to learn to use properly, and now I’ll expand on that. Lasers shoot a beam of light in a straight line. Firearms shoot a bullet in an arc. This means that the laser will not necessarily be where the bullet strikes. Lasers are meant to be an aiming reference similar to how a red dot operates on a carbine. The red dot on a carbine doesn’t cover the exact spot that the bullet strikes at all ranges, and the laser on a handgun won’t cover the exact spot the bullet will strike at all ranges.
This means that how you zero the laser has implications for how you will shoot in real life. If we look again at my S&W 442 you’ll see that there is an offset between the bore and the laser diode:
This offset is noticeable at ranges of 5 yards or less. At extremely close range the laser is going to be low and to the right of where the bore is aimed. Part of your laser training should be live fire to determine the effect of this offset with your carry ammo and to learn how to deal with it.
The offset will be most extreme at extremely close range, but because the laser can only be zeroed at one spot in the bullet’s trajectory there will be offset issues at every range except the range at which you choose to zero your laser. Generally once you get out past 5 yards the offset is minimal out to well beyond handgun distances, but if you are trying to make an extremely precise shot you still need to know the offset. For most people the offset is well within the margin of error inherently present in their shooting, but it’s still worthwhile to understand your setup and how it works. Use a rest if possible to remove shooter issues from the equation as much as possible.
So at what range should you zero your laser? It depends on personal preference. From the factory the CT grips are supposedly zeroed at 50 feet. Some advocate making your zero at precisely 15 yards, others at 25 yards, and others at 7 yards. It all depends on what you are comfortable with and what works best for you. The most important thing is to learn how your setup works and to train with it.
Another common failing people have when using a laser is trying to make the laser absolutely still. This is never going to happen. What you must learn to do is to work within the acceptable “wobble zone” of the laser, essentially learning to keep its movement within the acceptable hit area you are working with. The tendency to try and get the laser still and then hurry the shot right as the dot stops is what typically leads to people snatching the unholy hell out of the trigger. You need to be able to make a good trigger pull even while the sights/laser are moving around while you simply keep the sights/laser within the A zone to make the necessary shot.
You also need to realize that lasers are a target indicator. That bright red dot shining out in the night can give away your position or telegraph your movement. This is why the Crimson Trace grips are preferred as a laser solution. They are activated by a pressure switch rather than a traditional on/off switch allowing you to quickly engage the laser when you have to shoot and to leave the laser off when you don’t need to shoot. If your weapon isn’t lined up on a threat, your laser shouldn’t be on.
Moisture can affect lasers dramatically. If you get a drop of water on the laser diode it can completely block the laser or can cause the laser to spider web or take on odd shapes at longer ranges, reducing the laser’s useful range and precision. You should make a practice of checking your laser for function and making sure the dot is appearing properly as part of your every-time-you-walk-out-the-door equipment check.
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And there you have it. Again, this is meant only to be a starting point for those who haven’t had the benefit of good low light training. Unfortunately good low light training is hard to find and while the knowledge is out there it’s often difficult for the beginner to find.
Everything presented here is based on the low light training I have received, including the excellent Vickers/Hackathorn low light training courses. The information is a blend of what I’ve learned from subject matter experts like Mr. Vickers and Mr. Hackathorn and some of what I’ve figured out while under their instruction and on my own. Many of the things mentioned in this writeup can also be found in the AAR’s of the low light classes located on M4Carbine.net.
A note of caution: This writeup is not a substitute for actual low light training conducted by a competent instructor. Hopefully it will give the seeker of knowledge enough information to start out on the right track and will encourage them to seek out quality instruction in this area. Reading is good, but practice is ESSENTIAL for any of this to do you any good.
JW777 has attended over 600 hours of firearms training with with top quality instructors like Larry Vickers, Ken Hackathorn, and several instructors at Blackwater USA, including the Blackwater Carbine Instructor’s course, two sessions of the Vickers/Hackathorn Low Light I course, and the only session of the Vickers/Hackathorn Low Light II course. JW777 is a member of the NRA and the Virginia Citizen’s Defense League. Currently, JW777 serves as a moderator on AR15.com.