Last month I had the pleasure of attending an instructor development class that is unique in the industry. Dustin Solomon, creator of the Nuro and author of several books on training shooters, invited me to a class to “murder-board it”, as he put it. The Nuro is a training device that combines a shot timer with visible lasers. I’ll go into that in more detail later, but I’m sure you can picture why that might be a useful tool to have.
The rest of the class was also handpicked by Dusty and included one of my original instructors and mentors, John Holschen. John has been using the Nuro system for over a year now and has some pretty strong opinions on it. As many of you likely know, John is one of the most skilled tactical trainers in the industry, having worked for many years with many different groups in and out of the military. His specialty (if I may be so bold) is the big picture. Rather than improving your split times, he would rather improve your decision-making times. Why save .10 or less of a second when you can gain 2 seconds or more?When I met John (almost 30 years ago) he was 50% of the cadre at Insights Training Center, and between him and Greg Hamilton, I benefitted from a lot of really excellent training in pistol, carbine, and personal tactics. It is not an exaggeration to say that John’s training has literally kept me from being shot a few times.
Other members of the class who I got to spend some good time with included Justin from the Blog Swift Silent Deadly, and Rich Brown from the American Warrior Society Podcast. I have friends in common with both those guys, but had never met them before so it was a real treat to put faces to names and get to train with them. One other guy who I was very pleased to meet was Jon Marvell. I did not know of Jon before the class, but we have some shared background and I found Jon to be as easy going and humble a guy as you could hope to hang out with. Jon is part of the Building Shooters team, and was a great asset to have on the range and around the table.
The class itself was hosted by Keith Tyler, who opened his private range (and home) to us. It is a great range setup, and him and his wife fed us and generally took great care of us during our visit to TN. Keith runs TFIAcademy and if you are looking for a great place to take some classes, take a look at them.
The weather did not cooperate, but given the number of Marines in the class, I suppose rain was inevitable. Most of the class involved shooting at a 3″ negative circle target at 7 yards. Using the Nuro, we recorded a baseline draw and split times to the target and then tried to stay within .1 of a second of those times, regardless of the external stimulus that the Nuro was giving us.
Let’s back up for a minute. The Nuro itself is basically a shot timer with three lasers attached to it. It can be programmed in all sorts of ways, but the basic function is to project a laser beam onto the target. That beam can mean many things, from issuing a challenge to shooting until the threat goes away. One laser is red and the other two are green, but you can make them mean whatever you like. Once the laser comes on, the clock starts and the Nuro will record how long it took you to start shooting, as well as how long it took you to stop shooting after the laser goes away, plus all the splits in between.
You can run one Nuro per target, or multiple units and multiple targets (or potential targets). If you are running multiple units and multiple shooters, an “Iso” will allow your Nuro to only record your shots and no one else’s. The Iso is a wrist-worn device that isolates your shots and connects to the Nuro with Bluetooth. An entire line can be run from a tablet and everyone can face the same challenges, or they can be different for each shooter. Individual shooters can also very easily run their Nuro manually from their shooting position. Though we started with one target, we soon progressed to 3 targets, and the need to pay attention to all of them, while reacting appropriately to the situations the Nuro gave us.
Because of the interactive nature of the drills, combined with a shooter/coach pairing, I did not get as many photos as I would have liked. That white bag cover thing on the tripod is the Nuro unit. They are waterproof to some extent, but keeping water off of them made life easier for us to read and use the controls. The Nuro can be used in almost any way your imagination can conceive of, but I think it is best as a live fire bridge between standard range training and Simunitions scenarios. It allows for a lot of repetitions in a relatively short time (unlike most sims training) and it also allows for cognitive decision training (unlike most range training).
Great write up – sounds like a lot of good potential!
Thanks. I do think there is a lot of potential with the system.
that sounds like a super cool setup. Looking forward to seeing more on it
I’ve been seeing John talking about this over the past few months in the Rangemaster Instructors Facebook group, interesting to see how things are shaking out with more people getting involved. My first exposure to the use of lasers in shoot decisions was in Street Encounters a couple years ago with Murphy. Definitely a change of pace from the typical shot timer or “up” command.