Thanks to Arclight, Dropkick, and others who posted their thoughts on last night’s Practice Session at the NRA Range. The topic of the month was target identification, which can often become a forgotten aspect of practical shooting.
|
|
|
One thing that really hit home during the class was that, contrary to internet myth, the speed of your draw actually does matter when target discrimination becomes part of the equation. As we progressively decreased the amount of time that students were given to identify the target and decide whether to engage, it was the guys with the fastest draws who made the fewest mistakes and got the most hits.
You can read the reviews at FT&T. Again, thanks to everyone who took the time to write an AAR for a short 3-hour practice session.
Train hard & stay safe! ToddG
Todd your highlighted sentence is one of the big reasons I have always been an advocate of positioning your equipment consistently every time you carry. The more things you have to think about at the beginning of the assault the longer it’s going to take you to effectively respond. If I can let the draw go on auto pilot and not spend time playing patty cake with my waist line looking for were I concealed my weapon today, the more of my mind can be concentrating on target identification, shoot don’t shoot, finding cover etc. The less light we have to work with the more equipment needs to be deployed and the longer the process is going to take.
Keith Code’s books on motorcycle racing(another high-stress environment) use the concept of your “attention budget”. If you’re spending it all on basic skills, you have none left for strategy, tactics, and decision-making. As your skills improve and become automatic, you have more attention to “spend” on other aspects of the situation.
In a somewhat formalized sense, this “attention budget” concept is supported in neurological research.
This course challenged both your attention budget and your time budget. The difference is that the latter can be improved in your favor through practice and reducing the time expended on the action part, leaving more time for the assessment stage.
The comment by rsa-otc, to simplistically paraphrase it, ‘the more things one has to think about before making a decision the longer that decison takes to make,’ is often referred to as “Hicks’ Law.” According to the information taught in the ROE/RUF Tactical Training Seminar (a joint military/interagency program involving operational military personnel, military lawyers, and federal, state, and local LE personnel that taught use of force to military personnel, in which I served as a legal and firearms instructor, which was in turn based on an FBI training program begun by John Hall and Tom Petrowski at the Legal Training Unit at Quantico), Hicks was a psychologist who came up with the theory as part of his Ph.d dissertation (as best I can recall).
Sounds like common sense to me. The “attention budget” explanation is a superb way to describe this. Individuals responding to a deadly threat must train heavily so that in a life threatening crisis they don’t have to rely on cognitive processing, which even in its fastest form is too slow for a deadly encounter, but rather can “go on autopilot” to an extent by engaging in “experiential thinking,” (a term coined by Hays Parks, renowned international attorney and Vietnam Marine). Experiential thinking refers to trained responses, the byproduct of thorough and complete training in the basics of firearms manipulation. Many shooting schools teach you what to do from the point the decision to shoot is made forward (to paraphrase Bill Rogers) or what I’d call the skills portion of a deadly encounter. While important this is only half the picture, at best. Complete training includes the decision making portion, what we referred to as the judgment element of “Judgment Based Engagement Training.” An individual can be a superb shooter, but without realistic judgment based training will either take too long to make the proper judgment or will make poor judgments due to the compressed time requirement, rendering a superb skill set moot. Target identification or judgment based training is critical.
I’m glad that Todd has included this element in his training program. Must be his “lawyer brain” in action. Some people use drugs as their youthful indescretion, others go to law school. Either way we should forgive him, it was years ago and he’s apparently put it to good use…hahaha!