Cruel Hand Luke

Investing in training is investing in yourself. You are essentially "upgrading software" any time you train. Sure it makes us feel warm and fuzzy to buy a new pistol or an optic for our rifle, but FAR more important is upgrading our mindset, skillsets and maybe most importantly our CONFIDENCE. That is one of the benefits of training that is worth far more than you pay for it. Having a gun is a good first step....but it is still little help without having the mindset to use it. Developing the skillsets to use the weapon effectively makes you a more competent user, but the increase in confidence, to KNOW that you can perform the skills under pressure is what is what allows us to not panic and to function well without falling apart under pressure. And that increase in confidence crosses over into other areas of our lives too. Training can be the ultimate "self help" program. It improves your skill, your confidence and good training even helps you think more analytically and critically.

That is a bit of a broad statment. While 2 days is generally better than 1 , one day classes are hardly not "worthwhile".

I'm in Chattanooga. I offer classes in this area and I also travel quite a bit teaching. If you'd like to discuss a "house call" I'm all ears . Of course we are also offering some 1 day pistol classes (Suarez International USA, Inc. - High Intensity Training Schools) that if you were interested in coming here we might schedule one on a Sunday for OR if you wanted to host one there it would get you free training as the host. You can check out some reviews of my classes here at TGO. If there is something I can help you with let me know.

Hey guys, I'm looking to finish up my 2012 schedule.I have some holes still left in my schedule for next year and was looking to see if there is anyone interested in hosting me for a class next year. I'm looking to see if anyone specifically in Tennessee would be interested in hosting any of the Suarez Int classes that I teach. My home base is in the Chattanooga area but I also travel all over the eastern US to offer classes. I'd like to be able to find a few new places in TN to offer classes occasionally. Classes I offer are .... Defensive Pistol Skills Close Range Gunfighting Advanced Close Range Gunfighting Zero To Five Feet Gunfighting Low Light Gunfightng Force On Force Low Light FOF CQB fighting in structures Terrorist/Active Shooter Interdiction Fighting Rifle Skills Rifle Gunfighting Advanced Rifle Gunfighting Kalashnikov Rifle Gunfighting Advanced Kalashnikov AR/M4 Gunfighting Advanced AR/M4 Gunfighting Shotgun Gunfighting Advanced Shotgun And our 1 day "High Intensity Training Schools" FOF Winning the Gunfight (1 day class) Combat Pistol Marksmanship(1 day class) Adv Combat Pistol Marksmanship(1 day class) Combat Rifle Marksmanship (1 day class) Adv Combat Rifle Marksmanship (1 day class) Dynamics of KALASHNIKOV (1 DAY CLASS) Dynamics of the Shotgun (1 Day class) Team Tactics Fundamentals (1 Day class) Vehicle Gunfighting Fundamentals (1 Day class) If you see something you like and would like to host a class let me know!

In an effort to provide an environment for ongoing training and skill maintenance and opportunity for fellowship with fellow Suarez alumni we are going to offer a few times a year 1 day training days conducted by the regional Suarez Instructors. This is also our way of saying THANK YOU for training with us. Who can attend? Anyone who has taken a Suarez International class. SUNDAY DEC 4 The INAUGURAL MEETING OF THE TN/GA/AL SUAREZ TRIBE We will work on the core skills of pistol fighting....Get off the X,Get your gun out, HIT WHAT YOU AIM AT, Keep your pistol running(clear malfunctions) and reload. What you need? Pistol, holster , 3 magazines, eye and ear protection. Ammo: 200 rounds (minimum) Time: 12PM to 4PM CENTRAL TIME (If you arrive at 12 eastern you will be an hour early!) Location: The range we use in Pisgah (Ider) Alabama right where TN, Ga and AL all come together. Location is 35 minutes SW of downtown Chattanooga. If you need directions PM me and I'll send 'em to you. Price: $50 LUNCH WILL BE PROVIDED!

Below is a review written by Chris Upchurch of the Oct 15-16 Suarez International Force on Force Gunfighting I taught in Columbia SC. Originally posted at http://www.warriortalk.com/showthread.php?91808-Force-on-Force-with-Randy-Harris-in-Columbia-SC Last weekend I had the opportunity to assist with the Force on Force class that Randy Harris taught here in Columbia, SC. Force on Force was one of the very first S.I. classes I took back in 2007. While the fundamentals are still the same, the class has evolved quite a bit since then. The other host for the class was fellow S.I instructor Alex Nieuwland. We were also joined by S.I. Staff Instructor J.D. Lester. Both of them took the course as students. There were nine other students, including some repeat customers from Alex and my previous courses in Columbia. Most were from South Carolina or neighboring states, but a few came from as far afield as Pennsylvania and Missouri. I brought my usual FoF gear. I ran a pair of KWA airsoft Glock 17s in Archangel holsters. Not only does a class like this give a good chance to practice dual carry, I also find that it takes two airsoft guns to keep one running. They may look like Glocks, but they definitely don't have the Glock level of reliability. I also brought a couple of Nok trainers, for stabbing people with. This isn't a 0-5 class, but it's still an important part of the threat spectrum. My bag also held the usual complement of blue guns, since even when working with airsoft they're useful as demo tools. I brought an airsoft mask for when I was participating in scenarios, as well as some safety sunglasses, for eye protection when I was just observing. One thing I didn't bring was any airsoft armor (no sweatshirts or other padding). This is both because I wasn't planning to participate a lot and because I like to maintain some pain as a reminder that it's a good thing not to get shot. I brought a long sleeved cover shirt (though it got warm enough I kept the sleeves rolled up when I wasn't actively participating). Other folks brought a mixture of the traditional airsoft guns and the Umarex CO2 powered pistols. They also generally brought more airsoft armor (sweatshirts) than I did, though they were getting shot a lot more. One place a couple of people were caught short was headgear. If you get an airsoft BB in part of the head the mask doesn't cover it's going to sting quite a bit. Some kind of hat or a hood on your sweatshirt is very helpful (particularly for some of our follicly challenged students). The class was hosted at Alex's house. One of the nice things about FoF is we have a lot more flexibility on the venue than classes involving live fire. Alex has a house on a nice big wooded lot with plenty of room to play. I headed over to Alex's house on Friday evening so we could make sure everything was ready. After the last minute preparations were out of the way, we hung out and drank some beer while we waited for Randy to arrive. Alex was kind enough to let me use one of his spare bedrooms, so I didn't have to make the drive across town. Randy had the other bedroom and J.D. slept on the couch. Saturday Randy started the class off with a safety lecture. Interestingly for a class involving no live fire, he started by going through the 4 safety rules. He talked about how these applied in the airsoft environment. Even though we'll be pointing airsoft guns at each other, we still don't want to be careless with our muzzles. When we point a gun at someone in FoF, it's with the intention of destroying them (as thoroughly as they can be destroyed with airsoft BBs anyway). He also went through some airsoft specific safety precautions, concentrating on eye protection. This is the one place where airsoft BBs can really hurt you. As he put it, "It's all fun and games until someone looses an eye." Accordingly everyone participating in a drill needs to wear a paintball mask, and even if you're not actively participating everyone needs to wear eye protection. To provide some context to the class, Randy talked about how S.I.'s FoF compares to other handgun training, using IDPA as an example. In an IDPA stage, the shooter faces static targets, in a known configuration. They aren't going to maneuver, or shoot back, or try to stab you. None of these things are true in a real fight. Next, Randy went through his excellent PESTS lecture. Rather than recapitulating this, I'll just point you to his recent, epic post on the subject. After the lecture, Randy had the students put up their real guns, knives, etc. Alex and I patted everyone down to make sure they didn't have any live weapons on them. The first FoF drill was the Matt Dillon drill. Two students faced off at about four yards and on command they drew and shot the other guy. The most common result was simultaneous shots, with both students getting hit. We call this the suicide drill for a reason. Randy asked the students what kind of sight picture they were getting. Nobody claimed to have had a perfect sight picture, and most admitted they weren't getting any sort of sight picture at all. Despite this, everyone was getting good hits. This developed into a short discussion of point shooting. To put the Mat Dillon drill into context, Randy went through the basics of how pistol bullets stop people: fear, pain, lower the blood pressure to the brain, sever the spinal cord, and destroy critical parts of the brain. Of these the only ones that are both sure stoppers and instantaneous are the spinal cord and the brain. Any other hit may to take some time to take effect. Beating your opponent to the draw by a fraction of a second hardly guarantees victory. In fact it probably leaves him plenty of time to try to kill you before he expires. The solution is to take advantage of the adversary's OODA loop, rather than trying to outdraw him. The OODA loop is a description of the human decision making process. We Observe a change in our environment, Orient by putting that change into the context of our knowledge and previous experience, Decide what we're going to do in response, then Act to carry out that decision. Running through this loop in personal combat takes 1.5 - 2 seconds. We can take advantage of the adversaries OODA loop by getting off the X: moving off our original position and forcing our opponent back to the beginning of the loop. While he goes through the OODA cycle, we can be drawing, maneuvering for a better position and getting shots on board. Randy showed the Pekiti takeoff, some footwork that we've borrowed from Fillapino knife fighting that can help get us off the X quicker. This is one of those things that's difficult to describe in writing, but essentially you drop your body weight and use that drop to shift one foot back to drive off of. It allows for a very quick GOTX. After the students practiced their takeoff for a bit, Randy discussed the merits of choosing different directions to get off the X in. Generally, versus an assailant armed with a firearm we prefer the forward oblique angles, since these provide the biggest change in angle, from the adversary's point of view. To test how well people were getting off the X, the students went up against Randy. Randy has one of the fastest elbow-up elbow-down drawstrokes I've ever seen, but even against this students were able to get off the X before he could shoot when they executed everything correctly. At this point we broke up into groups of two and practiced getting off the X. Initially, one student drew and fired at the spot where the other student was standing while he got off the X. Once they had this down, to make it a bit more challenging we started working GOTX against the drawn gun. This time the student playing the bad guy role could shoot as soon as he saw the other student move. Even with the gun already out, students could generally get out of the way before the shot. Up until this point we'd been focusing on the good guy getting off the X. Now we added in some return fire. After moving off the X the good guy now drew and fired a single shot in return. This managed to mess some people up. As soon as you start thinking about drawing and firing, there's a tendency to prioritize this over movement. Ideally, moving and drawing should initiate at the same moment, but if one has to happen before the other, it should be movement. After a late lunch, we resumed practicing getting off the X. To keep the student playing the bad guy from cheating, because he knows the student is going to get off the X, and can probably make a good guess about the direction, Randy had them draw and fire their first shot with their eyes closed. Since everyone seemed to have the basics down, Randy upped the ante a bit. Rather than just firing a single shot, the bad guy student fired one at the good guy's original position, then tracked began tracking them and firing a second shot. This simulates the assailant working through his OODA loop and adjusting to your movement. In return, we let the good guy fire a pair, rather than just a single shot. Once the students had worked this for a while, Randy allowed each student to fire multiple shots. We picked up some discussion of point shooting from earlier and talked about what kind of sight picture people got while getting off the X. The universal answer was that they weren't really using the sights, this was pure point shooting. To finish up the day, Randy had everyone work the GOTX drill without any sort of OODA lag on the adversary's part. They could draw and fire directly towards the good guy as he moved, without having to shoot at his original position. With this, we wrapped things up for the day. Alex arranged for a neighborhood eatery to cater a nice spaghetti dinner for us. After we were done eating, Randy got things going on the Glock Armorer class. Sunday We picked up on Sunday morning with a few more GOTX drills similar to what we'd been doing at the end of the day on Saturday to get everybody warmed up. Then we moved on to dealing with opponents armed with contact weapons (knives, clubs, etc.). The nice thing about contact weapons is that if you can stay out of arms' reach, you're safe. The problem is that's easier said than done. When confronted by a knife armed assailant, most peoples' instinct is to backpedal away. This is one of the worst ways to handle the situation. The assailant can probably run forwards faster than you can backpedal and backpedaling increases the risk that you'll trip on something and end up falling and bouncing the back of your head on the asphalt. That's a pretty good way to knock yourself out. Far better to point your toes and hips in the direction you want to go and run. Which direction? Well, there are basically two options: increase distance or change the angle. If you are far enough and have enough speed, you can just turn tail and run. Then, as you're running, draw your gun and twist around to shoot. How well turning it into a footrace like this works is going to depend on how fast you are relative to the assailant and how much distance you start off with. The other option is to take a page from our pistol GOTX techniques and change the angle. This doesn't require as much speed and it works at shorter distances (provided you're outside of arms' reach to begin with). Randy had everyone start out working this as a big group. One student was the good guy, another the bad guy and everyone else watched. After running it a couple of times the bad guy became the good guy and a new bad guy rotated in. This allowed everyone a chance to see what worked and what didn't and to get some feedback from Randy on what they were doing. One important element that became obvious pretty quick is that it works much better if you go to their non-weapon side. If you go towards the hand with the knife in it the slightest miscalculation means you'll end up running right into the knife. After everyone had a chance to go a couple of times, we broke up into pairs and worked on it some more. Next up: multiple adversaries. If you're the bad guy, working in a two-man team, from your perspective the best place for the victim is between you. If you're the good guy, the best place for the bad guys are lined up, so one bad guy is between you and the second bad guy (this is called "stacking"). Exactly how this unfolds in real life depends a lot on how each side maneuvers. To demonstrate the dynamics of this, we worked though it as a group, with two bad guys and one good guy, rotating through all the students. What generally worked best for the good guy was moving quickly and decisively. Trying to go between the bad guys generally didn't work out. The real killer, however, was waiting too long to move. When you're outnumbered you can't allow the enemy the initiative. By the time you see what he's committed to its probably too late. We broke for lunch, then returned and continued with multiple adversaries, this time three on one. The difficulty really ramps up here. This is one of the things I really love about Force on Force. Against static, paper targets, gunning down three in succession looks pretty cool. The three target array is a staple of many gun games and training courses. In reality, going up against three adversaries that actively maneuver and shoot back is extremely difficult. It's not impossible, but it's going to take a lot more than just a quick trigger finger and good target to target transitions. You need to be decisive, smart, and aggressive, and deploy good GOTX tactics to come out on top. To finish up the class, we ran through some scenarios. We had the student's hang out in Alex's garage and sent them down the driveway one at a time. I played the bad guy, allowing Randy to stand back and observe. In the first scenario, I acted as an aggressive panhandler. Randy told me to turn it into a robbery if I really got them into an advantageous position, but none of the students let me get that close. I moved to intercept the student, block his progress down the driveway and insistently ask for money. If the student got around me, I let them go, and if they gave me a really strong verbal "back off" I did (though I didn't move out of their way). Other than that I was pretty insistent. The students' responses covered quite a wide range. Those who were quick, decisive, or willing to walk of the path often got by me. Those who were more tentative usually didn't. A few of them pulled guns on me, and one of them lit me up. The next scenario was more of a straight up robbery. It also included Alex as a second opponent coming up behind the student. I stopped their forward progress and distracted them while Alex came up behind, then we proceeded with the robbery. Again, the students had a range of responses. One student managed to get in a gunfight with Alex before he ever got down to me. The quick, decisive ones managed to slip by me and avert the robbery altogether. This time, those who ended up stopping ended up in a real bad spot, trapped between me and Alex. The way it usually unfolded was almost comical: the student heard Alex coming up behind him and looked over his shoulder, he looked back at me, then back at Alex, then when he looked back at me he found himself staring down the muzzle of my airsoft gun. I was able to pull this sort of thing off several times. Our last scenario was a carjacking. The setup was that the students were coming out of the gym and getting in their car. J.D. Lester parked his car in Alex's driveway. The students were given a duffel bag with their gym gear in it and they had to come out of the garage and get in the car. Alex or I were crouching down on the far side of the car and when the students were occupied with the car door we ran around the back and tried to jack them. Despite being hypervigilant in a way that only a scenario-based self-defense class can make you, most students didn't walk around and check for someone hiding behind the car. Most of them did manage to pick up on the BG before he got right up to them, but in a few cases the assailant got within arms' reach. With this, we wrapped things up. Alex and I pitched our upcoming classes (including Randy's 0-5 class in Columbia next April) and Randy handed out the certificates. Conclusions As usual, Randy ran a great class. The students were enthusiastic and eager to learn. IThe curriculum did a good job of getting the students to understand the usual S.I. fundamentals of getting off the X and point shooting. One of the big differences from the last time I took the full Force on Force class is the addition of the scenarios on Sunday afternoon. I think they did a real good job reinforcing Randy's PESTS lecture and emphasizing the need for quick, decisive movement. If you keep moving it's going to go a lot better for your than if you stand around dithering. One thing several incidents during the class reinforced was that airsoft magazines are nowhere near as durable as the real thing. Students broke several mags, both from traditional airsoft guns and from the Umarexes. Generally the culprit was accidentally dropping the mag, usually during the draw. Another problem we saw a couple of times was difficulty with the safeties. In particular, the sliding safety on the Umarex guns sometimes gets engaged as you put it in the holster. Another reason to grind that thing down and perhaps glue it in the fire position. I think the venue (Alex's yard) worked out quite well for this class. There was plenty of room to spread out and work on drills in pairs or small groups. I'd like to thank Alex for hosting it, and for putting me (and Randy, and J.D.) up for the night. Hopefully we didn't do too much damage. In sum, I would highly recommend this class, along with anything else Randy Harris teaches.

This one is getting closer....only about month to go .

This class will take your shooting and gun handling to the next level. This class is pure shooting. Point shooting up close ... sighted fire at distance. Shooting on the move. Shooting from cover. From Getting off the X and dealing with close range ambush/mugging to getting behind cover and making a long shot (50+ yards) on the "active shooter". This class covers reloads and shooting from various positions and with both strong and weak hand only. This class WILL make you a better shooter and gun handler.

This is going bad quickly. He was looking kind of nervous. The fence and the verbage did not dissuade him and now I'm getting forward pressure fom him as he gives some classic "facial grooming". He shows me the triangle as he reaches for something...no time to stand around....get off the X and do something ...here we Explode off the X Acquire Better Position Take the Fight to them and we FIGHT! Getting off the X and the ruthless counter attack completely disrupts the bad guy's OODA loop...... a burst to the chest from the TSD Glock completely disrupts the bad guy's internal organs..... Now we Assess (is he down? Did it work? ) Scan (Does he have friends? Are they behind me?) Top Off (How's my Ammo?) Instead of turning my back on him I orbit around him to check my 6 so I can Scan, Topoff and Treat injuries or Talk to who needs to be talked to without ever losing sight of the bad guy.

STOP encroachment........ Step to 3 or 9..... We see where stepping off the X and off the line of force now opens up what was previously behind us. If we allow ourselves to get sucked into tunnelling in on the known threat the unknown might be maneuvering up on us......so step to the known threats flank as you talk to check your six! From here if they continue to show threat signs I will bust off the X to my 10 o'clock in order to stack them and limit the # 2 man's abilty to engage me. Hopefully he won't shoot through his buddy to hit me......

At this point we have tried to evade and avoid we have stopped their encroachment and used the fence and our feet to stop their encroachment, get better position, and check our 6 o'clock. We have been working on deescalating the situation if possible. A fight we can avoid and walk away from is a fight won. If confronted with an agitated individual then maintaining a calm demeanor and making sure you do not instigate a fight may well be your best strategy. Be polite and try to break contact. We obviously want to avoid a streetfight with no rules if we can. But many victims get sucked into talking far longer than is productive or practical. There is a time to talk . There is a time to act. And there is not a whole lot of overlap between the two. Sometimes verbal deescalation is not possible. Sometimes ballistic deescalation is the right answer. If you need to fight you need to fight. If your attempt at verbal deescalation is going nowhere and he is still manuevering and now if they give us either a shift in weight (the precurser to a physical or contact weapon attack) or a furtive movement to their waisteline/belt line (reaching for a weapon) we will then... EXPLODE OFF THE X. I use the term "explode" because it plants the seed in your mind that this is a rapid dynamic movement . It is not a shuffle. It is not a waddle. It is not a plodding movement. It is an EXPLOSION off the spot you were previously standing on. If the fight is on, then the blade, bullets or blows that the bad guy will try to deliver are going to be addressed to your last known address. You do not want to be there when they arrive. We certainly do not want to stand rooted in place and play "Rock'em Sock'em Robots" when bullets and blades are involved! Also if done quickly without warning this will have them reacting to you instead of them just following their "script" of how they assumed this would play out. That buys us time. It buys us the time to take the initiative and counterattack. It helps us to turn the predator into the prey. By exploding off the X we get out of the way of the initial attack and begin our immediate counter attack as we... ACQUIRE BETTER POSITION. I used to say "Acquire dominant position". And while that is a laudable goal I have to be realistic and admit that when caught in a reactive situation acquiring dominant position may not always be possible. But I can almost always get BETTER position than I previously had. Even if it is just getting out of the way of the initial attack that is BETTER position than we previously had. Ideally though we will use our head start we got from stepping to 3 or 9 o'clock to allow us to not only get off the X but to move to flank them. A rapid forward oblique movement not only works to make us harder to hit initially but also gives us better position for a physical counter attack. This movement makes a firearm based counter attack simpler too since the marksmanship problem just got easier due to us getting farther from his weapon and getting the muzzle of our weapon closer to him at the same time. It also tends to rock them back on their heels and have them reacting to your attack, not carrying out their own attack. TAKE THE FIGHT TO THEM. This is really a mindset issue. We can not win a fight by playing defense only. Muhammed Ali may have beaten George Foreman by laying on the ropes and letting Foreman throw punch after punch until he was gassed but that does not work in a street fight with weapons involved.That was a boxing match with rules not a street fight and Foreman was not shanking Ali with a butcher knife for the first 8 rounds..... If we are to stop them NOW then we need to STOP them now.That requires us to do as much damage in a short amount of time as possible. The only way to do that is ruthless counterattack. Do not hit them once and look for the result. Hit them until they are out of the fight. Shoot them to the ground. Stab them to the ground. Knee and elbow them to the ground. Whatever you have, use it until they are no longer a threat and make your escape. This is fast and dirty and if you are timid or worried about hurting them they WILL hurt you. You are trying to destroy them as quickly as you can. At this point we employ what is widely taught and is known in some circles as the "Wyatt Protocol" as coined by Lyle Wyatt of Andy Stanford's old company Options for Personal Security. I have used a modified version as the original stopped at TAC LOAD which I replace with the term TOP OFF. I personally do not like the term TAC LOAD as it plants the seed of having two mags in the same hand at the same time which I really do not think is a good idea under extreme stress. And how do you TAC LOAD a tube fed gun like a lever action rifle or a pump action shotgun? You don't. You top it off. So I use that verbage. It is very specific and paints a very specific picture in your mind. We essentailly teach a "reload with retention" instead of the "old school" circa 1980 Tac Load. We simply take the partially depleted mag out, stow it , grab new mag and insert. DONE. This is far simpler and less fumble prone under stress than "Get new mag. Bring it to gun. Take out old mag. Insert new mag. Stow old mag. Put support hand back on gun". So that is why I do not use the "TAC LOAD" term. I also add a few more "T"s to cover a few more bases. We will..... FIGHT Pretty self explanatory. Take it to them HARD and don't stop until they are down and no longer a threat. ASSESS Did it work? Are they down? SCAN Do they have friends? Are they behind me? Is he still down? then we TOP OFF your weapon (How's my ammo?) TREAT INJURIES (How am I? How are my friends/family?) TAKE COVER (what here can I get behind that will stop bullets?) TAKE OFF (Can I safely escape now?) TALK TO WHO NEEDS TO BE TALKED TO (You, Go call 911!, You, get down! , "Ma'am , you appear to be injured, Officer, that man tried to kill me! I was in fear for my life, etc) I view these last four not as a list but as a wheel. Depending on the situation any one of those may be more important than the others and roll to the top. Did you beat them down with hands and elbows and knees? Then TOPPING OFF is not relevant so TAKE OFF might rotate to the top. Maybe there is a dumpster or a vehicle close by that would make good cover. It then might be best to TAKE COVER first and then TOP OFF. Or it might be that the lone bad guy is down but you were wounded and bleeding profusely. TREAT INJURIES might take precedence over TALKING or TAKING OFF in this situation. We simply employ the appropriate "T" for the particular situation we find ourselves in. And there we have it from A to Z (or from P to T) from pre fight through talking to responding officers. As we see there is quite a bit more to winning a fight than shooting small groups. And a great many fights can be avoided by simply recognizing a criminal assault in the early stages and either avoiding, escaping or getting to better position. If your training is all about shooting tiny groups on paper then you really are spending 95% of your time working on the last 5% of the problem. So get out and work on your awareness. Practice your pre fight skills.Interact with other live adversaries in Force on Force training . Make the after action assessment (Is he down ? Does he have friends? Are they behind me? How's my ammo? and How am I? ) a regular checklist in your training regimen. Remember there is a lot more to self defense than just shooting. And remember be careful out there because PESTS EAT FAST.

We see the obvious connection between mindset and awareness. They had not realized that they COULD be victimized and therefore did not recognize it for what it was when it began. To everyone else in the world YOU are "other people. If it can happen to them it can happen to YOU. It does not just happen in BAD parts of town. There isn't much to steal in the BAD part of town. So if the bad guys want to find victims worth robbing they come to the GOOD part of town. So be aware that you can find yourself the victim of crime and prepare for it now. A good thing to do is start training yourself to recognize threats before they are obvious. A big part of recognizing the threat is understanding what to look for. Unfortunately while many self defense schools pay lip service to awareness many really do not offer any structure for dealing with it other than advice to "pay attention" and be able to "shoot tight groups". Unfortunately those are two differnet sides of the Grand Canyon with a huge chasm in between.You basicly set people up to maybe pick up on something that looks out of place and then their next link in the chain is to use their gun. If that is all you have in the tool box then you will likely shoot someone who did not need to be shot . The other end of the scale is "paralysis by analysis" where you wait far to long to act. That comes from not being familiar enough with what you are witnessing to make decisions in a timely manner. We do not have to wait until we can determine the caliber of his pistol by carefully measuring the diameter of the muzzle to act. So I prefer to offer some structure based on sound principles to help mitigate the attendant fear of the unknown and anxiety that can happen when we are approached by an unknown person on the street. Often we can read the cues that teh bad guy is giving off and make reasonable predictions about what is coming next. Unfortunately many people have never been exposed to the cues so they do not know what to look for. Who here likes to watch boxing? When does a boxing match start? When the first punch lands? How about when the first punch is thrown? No? When does it start? When the bell rings. "Well that is obvious, but the bad guys are not going to tell me when they are about to assault me" you say. I say if you know what to look for they will tell you by their actions. Let's say we are deaf boxing fans that cannot hear the bell ring. Even though we cannot hear the bell ring can we still determine when the match starts? Of course. How? We see the two fighters approach and begin MANUEVERING on each other. The fight does not start at the first blow. It starts when the manuevering begins. Often out in the real world the victim never sees the manuevering or when they do see it they do not recognize it for what it really is and do not realize the fight has started until the first blow lands. At this juncture I will unveil our structure for dealing with people who approach you on the street. We would largely consider those people to be.....PESTS. People have a hard time remembering long lists of things. Often though if you can use a mnemonic device like an acronym then people can remember lists easier. The term "chunking" refers to this. If we look at a list of 16 number we may not be able to easily remember them . Look at 1776186119171941 and try to remember it. Difficult? Now look at it like this 1776 1861 1917 1941. Now instaed of 16 unconnected numbers it is simply four years with significance in American history. Or look at 12 unrelated letters. ATFFBICIADEA . But by chunking it together we have ATF FBI CIA DEA. Much easier to remember? So I take the core concepts of making it more difficult for someone to approach you and gain an advantage and apply an acronym to it and we get PESTS. I then combine that with 2 other words -EAT and FAST and it gives us an A to Z (or P to T) checklist from prefight to post fight. It plays out like this.... Pay Attention Evade/Escape Stop their encroachment Tape Loop (Tell them you can't help them or tell them to back off) Step to 3 or 9 o'clock / step off the X and orbit them If this does not dissuade them and the fight is on the we will Explode off the X Acquire better postion Take the fight to them and then we Fight Assess Scan and either Take Off or Take Cover or Top off or Treat Injuries or Talk to whoever needs to be talked to PAY ATTENTION This is or should be obvious. As we said earlier. If you are engrossed in texting or listening to your IPOD or whatever else that keeps you in Condition White in public then you are going to make a much more desirable victim than someone who is alert. If you never see it coming (remember the victim card..."I never saw it coming") then you have done a lot of the perpetrators work for him. EVADE / ESCPAPE If you are paying attention and see the guy who looks a little nervous and out of place who is paying too much attention to you and then looks around as if looking for witnesses and then begins to approach you then that might be a clue that something is up. At this point you might want to evade him by either putting something between you and him or escape by simply leaving the area. When someone not in your peer group or socio- economic/cultural group approaches you in public you really need to ask "Why me"? Usually when you approach people in public people will want to approach someone they are comfortable with and who are in roughly the same groups. If I have the choice between asking directions from someone who looks pretty much like me or from someone who does not then people will usually go to what they know and are comfortable with. So we really need to ask ourselves "why?" when someone approaches who seems to have nothing in common with us. This is NOT racial. That can be a COMPONENT, but not the entire picture.If we are at the NAACP businessmen of the year awards and suddenly a big bald white dude with white wifebeater t shirt, black BDU pants and combat boots, spiderweb tattoos on both elbows and an SS tattoo on his neck and a glock stuck in his belt comes in the door we need to be looking for an exit due to the TOTALITY OF CIRCUMSTANCE. The fact that the guy is white is not the issue. It is all the other info combined with that fact that makes him not only out of place, but also a likely threat. So if we can evade or escape then that will prevent us from having to risk fighting this guy. The way they approach will also give us information. Most polite people will stop a few yards away and show their hands before approaching to ask directions. Even then they will still maintain some distance. The criminal on the other hand will want to get as close as he can. If we recognize the threat but cannot evade or escape then we will want to... STOP THEIR ENCROACHMENT Distance can be your friend or your enemy. The closer someone gets to you the easier it is for them to injure you. Most muggers will not haul out a bullhorn and hail you from across the parking lot telling you to stop so they can come rob you. If they did you'd just run away. Instead they want to get as close as they can so that they can not only close the distance and show a weapon and physically control you, but they have to get close to take your stuff (or you). Here is where we see the use of a weapon or violence as INSTRUMENTAL. The mere use of the weapon is not the objective. The weapon is an instrument to get something else. If they had better verbal skills they'd be talking you out of your money like Bernie Madoff. But since they don't they will close the distance and show a weapon to get you to comply. As such they need to get close so you cannot escape and so that no one else that may be a witness sees exactly what is going on. The closer they get the more difficult it is to counter any kind of physical attack. In class I have a couple of time and distance exercises that the students perform to see for themselves how big a deal maintaining at least two arms length distance is (and more is better). Inside that distance someone can stab you before you even realize the attack is coming. So how exactly do we maintain distance and stop encroachment? Draw our gun on anyone who looks suspicious? Not if you plan to stay out of jail. Geoff Thompson was a bouncer in the UK who coined the term "The Fence". The Fence looks like a two handed "stop sign" that appears to witnesses like we are putting our hands up in a submissive manner. But it also allows us to get our hands up between us and the threat and monitor and intercept physical attacks. The FENCE is what keeps the badguy from reaching the house (our body). It allows us to either cover up our head if they launch an attack and it allows us a chambering to throw preemptive blows from if that becomes necessary. Would you find it easier to punch someone who has both hands in their pockets or somoone who has both hands up between you and him? Probably the guy with hands in pockets becasue he cannot get them out and up before you hit him . The other guy will be much harder to land a blow on because you will have to fight through the hands to hit him. It forms both a physical AND psychological barrier. It also makes a great launching point for preemptive strikes. Your hands are already up and all you have to do is launch from there if things start to spiral out of control to a point where all the info he is feeding you cause you to determine you need to strike first. TAPE LOOP/ (Tell them you can't help them or tell them to back off) The term tape loop refers to having a pre planned response for when people approach you trying to engage you in conversation. The "Tape Loop" plays on auto pilot without the need for you to have to think of things to say in respnse to the individual that is approaching. A simple "I'm sorry Sir, I can't help you" goes a long way toward heading off further conversation. Often a criminal will try to engage us in conversation to get closer and gain a positional advantage. During this a key to look for is facial grooming. If they are touching their face, chin, mouth, forehead as they are talking then there is a good chance that they are practicing deception. Watch videos of interrogations. The guys who are lying will often touch their faces in a "nervous tick" like way. This is usually a sign they are lying or trying to somehow deceive you. If you see this then you need to recognize it for what it is and break contact if possible. "I'm sorry Sir I can't help you" and be on your way if possible. A key element to this is not having to stop and think about a response to what he is saying. If they can lure you into a conversation with them then they can hold your attention while posssible accomplices manuever up behind you. Even if they are alone you do not want to get bogged down in a discussion with them. While your conscious mind is occupied thinking of answers to questions you have essentially turned off your ability to quickly respond to an attack. Your accessing areas of your brain to answer the questions slows your ability to access other areas that control the motor movements to react. When do we shoot the hostage taker? While he is answering a question. This is the point where we are deescalating the situation if possible. If confronted with an agitated contact then maintaining a calm demeanor and making sure you do not instigate a fight may well be your best strategy. Be polite and try to break contact. We obviously want to avoid a streetfight with no rules if we can. But many victims get sucked into talking far longer than is productive or practical. There is a time to talk. There is a time to act. And there is not a whole lot of overlap between the two. If you need to fight you need to fight. If your attempt at verbal deescalation is going nowhere and he is still manuevering and now reaching for a weapon it is time to stop talking and If "I'm sorry Sir I can't help you" does not get the desired result then we may follow it up with something a little less polite like BACK OFF! If that does not send them looking for easier pickings then that is an awful lot of info they are feeding you. If at this point they have not broken off the encounter we need to ask ourselves "why are they still here?". And we need to move our feet...NOW. STEP TO 3 OR 9 O'CLOCK/Step off the X and orbit them As mentioned before, if we stand still talking to the individual who approaches us it is easy for his cohorts to approach us from behind. A simple solution to this is to step laterally to either 3 or 9 o'clock and continue moving around them in an elliptical motion. This will expose to you what was previously behind you. I prefer to think of it as orbiting the known threat. If we stand still and turn our head we will be opening ourselves up to a sucker punch or a tackle attempt. On the other hand if we maintain a squared up posture to the known threat and step off the line of force to 3 o'clock and then step again to 3 o'clock we will not only see what was previously behind us but we will essentially be moving to flank the known threat. Bad guys will recognize this. It is not the behavior of a good victim. It will often completely change their perception of the situation and kick them back to Observe in the OODA cycle. It is also a good way to keep your feet moving in preparation to get off the X in case the "interview" goes badly.

The subject of self defense is a broad one that encompasses many areas. There is not just one way to defend yourself. People can spend a lifetime working on one area or another and still there is much more to learn. Most people spend their training time working on a "delivery system" of one type or another. For some it is the gun, for others the knife, for many it is the empty hands and others might be the stick. When we look at delivery systems we really are looking at what we will use to end the fight. As our friend Sonny Puzikas says most people spend 95% of their time working on the last 5% of the solution. Having spent most of my life in pursuit of martial excellence I find this to not only be true, but also profound. No matter how hard you hit (which is important) and no matter how well you shoot (also important) the point where these attributes come into play is not at the beginning but rather well into the fight. The following is the structured strategy that I use and teach for dealing with people of unknown intent who approach you on the street. I have been using this in both Suarez International classes and Tennessee Handgun Carry Permit classes for the last 5 years. I have actually had students use this material out in public at lunch on the first day of class when approached by a panhandler. In fact the student actually thought I had set the whole thing up. He did not realize that this encounter was in fact REAL. The student used the verbal and positioning skills we discussed that morning in class and the encounter ended with the panhandler walking away. When I arrived at lunch the student asked where I had found the guy who approached him. I didn't know what he was talking about.The student thought that I had set that encounter up since I had told them that it was something they could very well end up using at the gas station or at lunch that day..... He then realized that his encounter was not staged but had been real and that the material we had just discussed in that morning in class made it easier to make himself less enticing to an unknown and possibly dangerous individual . I did not originate all of the material. In fact it is largely taken from Craig Douglas's Managing Unknown Contacts. I simply organize it a little differently in order to make it more structured and easy for the end user to remember. Without further adieu I present "Pests Eat Fast." In the martial arts and self defense world we often want to know how to end fights. But scant attention is really paid to avoiding fights. In civilian America there are two most likely scenarios for you to employ armed violence against an aggressor.One will be in your home. The other is being approached on the street by muggers or aggressive panhandlers or maybe by individuals who are "protecting turf". First we'll look at the home invasion. How can we limit our exposure to this? Be smart. Don't thoughtlessly brag to anyone who will listen about what you have and then tell them where you live. If you have $100,000 in gold bullion it is not a good idea to tell everyone you know. What do most home invasions have in common? The perpetrator knew in advance what the victim had that was of value and the perpetrator thought it was worth the risk he would be taking in trying to acquire it. Home invasions are not normally fishing expeditions. It is likely a directed assault with the purpose to gain some specific resource that they believed to be there. Usually it will be either drugs or money. So if we do not advertise what we have of value we will make ourselves less likely targets in our home. Add to this some simple measures like good locks on doors, actually LOCKING THE DOORS, motion sensing lights outside, maybe a dog that will bark and bite and you have gone a long way toward making yourself a less inviting target. We want to have a layered defense where our assailants will not have an easy time of it if they decide to try to take whatever it is that they think we have of value. Which house is easier to rob? The one with the door standing wide open or the one with a fence, motion sensing lights, solid locked deadbolt doors, a barking dog, and armed occupants? Now aside from the home robbery scenario our most likely place to be victimized will be on the street after being approached by an unknown person. This could be an aggressive panhandler looking for a handout or it could be a potential mugger sizing us up as victims. This is often referred to as the interview phase. Here the potential assailant is assessing his potential client and determining whether they would make a good target. Some might be familiar with the phenomena of sharks "bumping" prey before they bite it to see if it is in fact edible. The same thing applies here. In this phase the criminal will likely be feeling you out to see if you are worth the risk. There is no "benefit package" to a job as a street criminal. There is no 401K and there is no medical plan. If you get injured in the process of acquiring resources (robbing someone) then your ability to acquire more resources will be somewhat limited until you can heal. And during that time you will be a more inviting target to other criminals who now may see you as a potential victim.....no honor among thieves. Another worry is if you show up at the hospital with a stab wound, or worse a gunshot wound, the hospital will call the police and there will be a discussion with the responding officers you'd rather avoid if you are somone making a living victimizing your fellow man. Of course it goes without saying that if there is a catastrophic failure in the victim selection process and you choose a victim that kills you then there is no recovering from that. So what is a criminal to do? Simply make sure you choose victims well. So who makes a good victim? Someone who is not aware of their surroundings, and someone who is less likely to fight back effectively makes a much better victim than a prize fighter who is paying attention. This usually means that people who are either injured, elderly, obviously not a physical threat, and unlikely to be armed and unlikely to offer resisitance are going to be right at the top of the list for victims. Why? The likelihood of success is high and risk of injury is low. If you were going to choose a victim who would it be? The 6'4" powerlifter with the Navy SEAL Trident tattoo on his forearm and a bulge on his waistline that is probably a large caliber pistol or the 5'7" overweight upper middle class 50 year old guy sitting in his car not paying attention to anything but his text messaging on his phone? One of these guys will probably never see you coming and the other will probably smoke you. Which is which? Who would YOU choose? So just like with our houses we can make a layered defense. The biggest part of this total defense package is making good lifestyle decisions. We use a specific term for this. It is called the "Three Stupids Rule".I first heard this from John Farnam. Simply put it is.... 1. Don't go STUPID places. 2. Don't do STUPID things. 3. Don't hang with STUPID people. If we avoid stupid people, places and things then we are much less likely to have bad things happen to us. If you decide to go to the worst part of town at 3AM in your $90,000 sports car to buy cigarretes then that might fall under stupid things. If you are riding with a friend who needs to make a quick run to the ATM and then stop off at a shady apartment complex in the bad part of town to "run inside for just a minute" then that might be a stupid place. And any time you are with people who are likely to say "hold my beer and check this out" that is probably in the realm of stupid people. We can see where often one of the "STUPIDS" will often involve the others. Frankly, stupid people tend to be at stupid places and do stupid things quite often so avoiding them altogether makes us less vulnerable to bad things happening to us. I usually add as a companion rule to the Three Stupids Rule the exhortation to avoid Drugs, Whores, and Booze. Point number one is avoiding drugs. I'm not just referring here to "just say no" as I am referring to the danger of violence and death at the periphery of the drug trade. If you want to occasionally partake of marijauna in the privacy of your own home, you can maybe argue as to whether that is really hurting anyone. While I see the libertarian side of this it does not mean I think it is a good idea. If you are going to do it then please do not do it and then drive to the convenience store for doughnuts. We can maybe argue that you are hurting no one but your own brain cells. But the issue is really the stupid people, places and things that you will come in contact with when you are involved in that lifestyle. I personally knew 2 people when I was in college who ended up dead simply due to their involvement in some capacity with the drug trade. One died of an overdose. It was more than a week before they found him. We just thought he hadn't been around for a while because he was studying for mid term exams.While God may have given us the plants and seed bearing herbs to use (a verse from Genesis I have heard used to justify marijuana use) Chrystal Meth is not something that is positive in any way for you to ingest. If they key ingredients are toxic on their own then do you really want to mix it and ingest it? The other guy I mention was murdered in a drug deal. He was murdered after being lured to an abandoned apartment complex for what he thought would be a simple money for drug transaction. The other participants saw him as a willing victim who would deliver cash to them at a place where no one would hear him scream. He produced the money and they produced weapons and killed him. As I say, there is violence at the periphery of the drug trade. The guy you got the weed from may be a friendly acquaintance. The guy he got it from is probably not quite so nice. And the guys he got it from will leave someone cut into little pieces in a garbage bag if they feel they have been disrespected, cheated or taken advantage of. These are NOT the kind of people you want to have to come into contact with if it can be avoided. Point two is avoiding whores. I'm not only referring to the street walking types, but also to picking up random people in bars. Not only is there the very real concern for contracting sexually transmitted diseases, but the possibility of angry boyfirends, husbands, ex boyfriends and ex husbands, girlfriends and wives, etc. You probably do not want to be sitting there flirting with his girl when the guy who has decided he's had enough of her running around on him shows up with a gun. Being involved with women (or men) who are involved in other relationships is the fast track to ending up in a violent confrontation with the other point of that love traingle. A guy who lived in my apartment building in college was stabbed in the heart with a steak knife and died after an argument with his lover over his running around on them. Best advice is to avoid problems like that it altogether if possible. And point number three is booze. I'm not some kind of Puritan who says you should never drink. If you do then be responsible and don't drink to excess in public. Quite simply if you are drunk in public you will be far more likely to be victimized. Your ability to recognize an altercation beginning or an ambush being set will be greatly reduced. Also your physical ability to react to it will be slowed as the alcohol has a negative effect on your reaction time. Who would you rather pick as a victim? Would you rather try to rob the stumbling drunk guy who doesn't even realize you are closing in on him or the stone cold sober guy who is already alerted to your presence and moving to get better position? Alcohol also lowers people's inhibitions and makes people do things they would not ordinarily do. Having worked as a bouncer in a bar for several years in my 20s, I can tell you for certain that some people are just not physically well adapted to drinking. The world is full of angry drunks and things you'd normally overlook when sober are reasons to fight when intoxicated. We never had to break up fights between sober people in the bar..... So we can see here where just like the 3 stupids often overlap, drugs, whores and booze also have a great bit of overlap and often paralell and overlap the three stupids. Again, I worked in the bar and entertainment industry long enough to see that the three stupids and drugs, whores and booze led to many a confrontation that would otherwise never have happened and often led to violence that both parties would have avoided had they not come together through involvement with those other things. As I often say...."Things like that just don't happen in church". Thus endeth the sermon. So if we make a habit of making good decisions regarding lifestyle and we do not work in an occupation that puts us in regular close contact with the criminal element, then we can pretty well limit our exposure to violence. Now with good decison making on our side our biggest area of vulnerability will be being approached while out in public by persons of unknown intent. From my own experience this will most likely be in a parking lot or at a gas station in urban areas though it could honsetly be anywhere people are milling about. The key to either avoiding a fight or to getting a tactical advantage before the fight starts is awareness . Many schools teach "awareness". Many use Jeff Cooper's Color Code. The colors are 1. White-you are oblivious to the world around you. 2. Yellow- a condition of relaxed awareness 3. Orange- a specific person place or thing has caused you to feel uneasy or threatened 4. Red - the fight is on. The color code is a sliding scale of awareness. You will be constantly shifting from yellow to orange out in public if you are paying attention. You will go from "people watching" to focusing on a potenetial problem, asessing the possibilities and returning to people watching. No big production, just paying attention to the information that is there for all to see. It is much like driving on the interstate. You are aware of cars around you but not keyed to a particular one until it starts to veer into your lane or drive erratticly. At that point you shift focus to it to determine whether it is someone loading their CD player, texting, or a drunk driver. You may tap your break to create space and avoid them or you might even get off at the next exit. But if you are not paying attention to begin with you might get your first clue about the other driver when he veers into your lane and hits your car..... Some people live in condition white. Many simply move about like herd animals with their head down their whole lives and then wonder what happened when they find themselves the victim of crime. We assume that there must be , as Tom Givens puts it , a "Victim Card" issued because they almost invariably say the same thing. 1"I never saw it coming". 2."All of a sudden there they were". 3. " Why would anyone want to hurt me?" 4."These things only happen to other people".

November 12-13, 2011 ADVANCED CLOSE RANGE GUNFIGHTING Chattanooga, Tennessee Instructor: Randy Harris Price: $400 NEW TRAINING COURSE!! This course is pure shooting at all ranges. We will spend the morning of the first day polishing up our pistol shooting fundamentals and then spend the remainder of the weekend taking our skills to higher levels. This is a physically demanding course that builds upon what you have already trained in other pistol classes. Course material includes methods for increasing speed and accuracy. Although the course is titled "Close Range" to deep within the CRG family of classes, we will do some long range shooting . . . like 75 yards and 100 yards! We will teach you to hit at all possible distances. We will also point shoot from belly to belly distance, while ignoring the use of sights both station stationary, on the move and on the run. We will study the various Threat-Focused Point Shooting systems (Point Shooting) as well as Sight-Focused Shooting Systems and their seamless integration and applications in a total Close Range Gunfighting program. We will shoot from field expedient positions (including one handed, behind cover, etc.). We'll examine special problems such as confined area shooting, shooting in crowded environments and other difficult problems. All attendees should have a high level of skill and a reflexive understanding of safety measures. There is little or no lecturing and the majority of the time is trigger time. Come join us in this exciting and cutting edge training event. This course requires prior attendance at an intermediate level Suarez International Pistol class. DURATION: 2 Days TIME: 9:00AM to 5:00PM (CENTRAL) PREREQUISITES: Requires prior attendance at an intermediate level Suarez International Pistol class AMMUNITION: Approx 800 rounds (Minimum) YOU NEED TO BRING: Spare clothing appropriate to the weather, lunch/snacks and water (minimum of 1 gallon per person) for the entire day, baseball or other style hat, sun screen, bug repellent, allergy medication (if needed), chair (if you have a problem with sitting on the ground, note taking paper/pen/pencil and a boo boo kit (band aids, gauze pads, antiseptic wipes, antibiotic ointment and tape) REQUIREMENTS: Modern Defensive Pistol, Holster specifically made for that pistol - and designed to be worn on the belt, 3 Magazines and Magazine Pouch, A Belt of the same width as the belt loops for the holster and magazine pouches, Range Safety Gear (Eye protection, and ear protection) More info and to enroll..........November 12-13, 2011 Advanced Close Range Gunfighting - Chattanooga, TN

Saturday Afternoon After lunch we moved out to the range and started by making sure everyone was sighted in. Those who had been in the Thursday-Friday class were pretty well dialed in, but the new students needed some work. I thought my EOTech was pretty well dialed in, but I popped off a few rounds at one of the targets' heads to make sure. After getting everyone's sights dialed in we promptly moved up to a range where the sights were irrelevant. We did some snap shooting using the Caveman EOTech/aiming over the optic methods. Getting used to aiming over the optic took some work for some folks, but after a little while everyone was getting good hits. We moved back to 25 yards and did some work from both standing and kneeling, then moved back to 50 and shot standing, kneeling and prone. Once everyone was comfortable in the three positions Randy had us moving between them, shooting a pair from standing followed by a pair from kneeling, or starting kneeling and going to prone. Eventually we worked up to shooting two from standing, two from kneeling, two from prone, doing a proactive reload, then shooting two from prone, two from kneeling and two from standing. During these drills my EOTech started flaking out. It turned itself off several times and I had to turn it back on between drills. During the standing, kneeling, prone, reload, prone, kneeling, standing drill it started off fine but the dot disappeared during the reload. These problems did serve to reinforce my decision to used fixed back-up iron sights rather than flip up. I have them set up for a lower 1/3 co-witness so all I have to do when the dot isn't there is drop my head about half an inch. The transition is very quick, much quicker than flipping up sights or using a QD mount. By this point, however, I had enough of the flaky optic and between drills I made use of the QD mount and took it off the rifle entirely. Back up at 7 yards, we did some failure to stop drills, shooting the body than switching to the head. At this range the body is an easy shot with Caveman EOTech or shooting over the optic, but you need more precision for the headshot, so this drill also tested the ability to switch between sighting methods. During these drills I realized just how long it had been since I'd done much shooting with iron sights that have a rear aperture. I'm much more used to AK or pistol style sights with a rear notch. It took a bit of time to reaccustom myself to the aperture sights. We worked on ambidextrous shooting, firing from the right shoulder, doing a partial transition (moving the buttstock to the other shoulder but keeping the hands in position) and firing. Then doing full transition (switching hands) and shooting, doing a partial transition back to the other shoulder and firing, then completing the full transition and firing the last shot. We worked this back and forth several times. Next, we started moving and shooting. First we did the pacing drill, where you walk left and right in front of the target, switching shoulders as appropriate. After everyone had this down, we started getting off the X to the right (3-o'clock). During some of these drills several times i managed to knock the safety of my rifle on as I swapped my hands during the shoulder transfer. I'm not used to having a safety over there on my AK. I guess I need to do some weapon-specific shoulder transfer practice. During these drills, the student with the AR-10 suffered a badly stuck case. Initially the extractor slipped off the rim, so he tried to knock if out with another student's range rod. He didn't get it out, but in the process he got the extractor back over the case rim, so we were able to bang the stock on the ground and mortar it out. We went back to getting off the X, to the left this time. Then Randy demonstrated the Pekiti takeoff footwork for getting off the X faster. We practiced this dry quite a bit, then went live with it to both the right and left. Randy also added in an after action drill, checking to see if the guy you just shot is really down, if he has friends (including looking behind you) if you need to reload, and if you have any injuries. As we did this, the AR-10 suffered another problem: the hammer began sticking back and refused to drop after the first shot. After opening the gun up we figured out that it was hanging up on the disconnector hook, rather than dropping onto the sear when the trigger was reset. At this point the Armalite had suffered extraction problems during the Thursday-Friday class (bad enough that the student borrowed one of Randy's rifles), the stuck case, and now this trigger group problem. The student just decided to give up on the AR-10 for this class and borrowed Randy's rifle again. We wrapped everything up and headed out. Most of the class headed down to a nice steakhouse in Fort Payne for dinner. There was good food, great fellowship, and lots of interesting discussion. After dinner, I did something rather uncharacteristic of me: I cleaned a gun during a class. With Glocks and AKs I've never bothered, but I hadn't really given this rifle a thorough cleaning since before the Long Gun Point Shooting Progressions last May. Since then it had probably had 800 rounds of Wolf through it. I'd wiped the internals off a bit with a rag on a few occasions (including during the Armorer class on Friday) but never gotten out the solvent and really scrubbed the thing. Clearly the AR does not have to be white-glove clean to run. However, I did have one non-operator induced malfunction during the day when the bolt hung up on the top round of the magazine, so I figured scrubbing it might slicking everything up a bit. Sunday We started out the day with some malfunction clearance. Everyone laid their rifles out on the ground pointing downrange and Randy and I set up various malfunctions: empty chamber, unseated magazine, failure to eject (aka: a stovepipe), failure to extract (aka: a double feed) and a spent case stuck between the charging handle and the bolt. The students had to pick up each rifle and fire it twice, clearing the malfunction in the process. The first three can be cleared fairly easily with a tap-rack. The failure to eject requires getting the magazine out, then reloading. The case stuck in the charging handle requires locking the bolt back and briskly closing the charging handle. It's also a demonstration of why we don't necessarily want to tap-rack every malfunction on an AR like we do with a pistol, since racking a weapon in this condition will just wedge the case in further. If you get a click but no bang, tap rack. If you just get a mushy trigger, rip the mag out and see what you've got. Next up was transitions to pistol. If you're carrying a pistol and are within effective pistol range (varies depending on how good a shooter you are) going to pistol is going to be faster than reloading and empty gun or fixing many malfunctions. Most of the guys in the class were running two point slings, but one was running a single point. For the two-point sling guys I demoed the standard S.I. over the head transition and the students practiced it dry until they had it down. We loaded up a mags with two rounds and practiced shooting the rifle dry then transitioning. It's very important to actually shoot the rifle dry for two reasons: first, it gives you the stimulus (the rifle not working) that we want you to react to with a transition. Second, it means we don't have to apply the safety before transitioning. The safety on an AR will not engage when the hammer is forward. Where is the hammer going to be if your gun malfunctions? In a majority of cases its going to be forward. I don't want anyone out there in a real gunfight standing there trying to engage a safety that's not going to go on when they should be transitioning to pistol. Finally, in the even the student fails to engage the safety on a hot weapon before transitioning, there's a chance some bit of gear is going to get inside the trigger guard and the gun will go off. One of our competitors recently had a student shoot themselves in just this way. We moved on to using the gun as an impact weapon. This is one area where the AR class differs a bit form our AK classes. With an AK, using the buttstock is a major part of our impact weapon drills. In an AR, the stock contains a critical part of the gun's operating system, so we don't want to risk damaging it. With the AR we do a lot more work with the muzzle end of the gun. Randy showed us some simple strikes, including how to throw the buttstock and protect it by throwing and elbow along with the stock. After practicing these a bit, he had us work on some weapon retention techniques if someone grabs your gun by the muzzle. Lastly, we practiced blocking incoming contact weapon strikes and counterattacking with the muzzle. We'd gotten off the X to the right and left (3 and 9 o'clock) yesterday. Today we added in the forward and rearward obliques. We worked our way around the clock face (the 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 o'clock directions) practicing moving off the X and shooting. The rearward angles add a bit of complication, but the basic principles were the same as what we did yesterday. I had bought some new batteries and put them in my EOTech this morning. That got the scope working initially, but the reticule quickly dimmed and eventually I was taking more time trying to pick up the dim dot than I would have shooting with irons. I decided I was done with thins thing. I popped the sight off and went back to irons for the rest of the class. Until now, we'd done all our engagements facing directly towards the adversary. In the real world, bad guys may pop up to the left, right, or rear as well. We practiced from a standing position with the targets off our left shoulder, behind us, and off our right shoulder. In standing we got off the X and shot on the move. We did the same thing from kneeling. Here, you lack the mobility you've got in standing so it's just a matter of getting the gun on target as quickly as possible and shooting the threat. We moved back to about 25 yards to shoot from prone (so we didn't send rounds over the berm. For targets to the left and right we didn't truly have the shooters turn 90 degrees, since that would be a safety hazard (unlike standing and kneeling you can't really face someone and avert your muzzle in prone). Instead we had them pointing slightly forward of the line. For a target behind you when prone we did this one at a time, with all the spectators on the one side of the shooter so they could swing their rifle round safely and shoot from supine. After spending most of the morning blasting away at close range targets, Randy wanted to exercise their accuracy shooting a bit, so we put up a set of three steel targets and moved out to 50 yards. Before the drill he was dinking around a bit with his pistol (an iron sighted Gen 4 G17) and asked if I had my RMRed Glock. I drew it and banged all three steel targets with one shot each (something I don't think any of the students did with their rifles on the first try). RMRed pistols are just spectacular. After that bit of fun, Randy had the students shoot from standing, kneeling, and prone, and moving between them, much as we did yesterday. At this point we ventured into the team portion of the program. We have entire classes dedicated to team tactics, but we like to throw a bit of this stuff into the intermediate and advanced rifle classes as well. This is not necessarily because we expect our students to form fire teams and fight as light infantry. It's more a method of adding a additional elements they have to think about. Up to this point, the students have only had to think about running their rifles and moving. In the team drills you have to be aware of where you are in relation to your teammates, what they're doing, what you should be doing, communicating, managing your ammo supply, etc. How well you're able to run your rifle when you can dedicate your full attention to doing that isn't really a very good test of how well you can run your rifle in a fight. Being able to run your rifle while you've got a bunch of other stuff to think about is. We started off with a basic peel drill. The students lined up in a file facing one of the targets (a file runs up and down range, with each man behind the other, a line runs across the range, with each man beside the other). The first student fired four rounds at the target, brought his rifle up to high-noon ready, turned and walked to the back of the file. He taps the second man in the file on the shoulder as he goes by as a signal to start shooting. As each man moves to the back the entire file migrates up range. We shot this drill a couple of times, then moved on to a variation. Instead of going to the back of the file the students lined up across the range in prone and, once the last man was back at the line, everyone opened up on the targets. This sort of simulates breaking contact with a hostile force, then ambushing them. For the next drill we had everyone line up shoulder to shoulder, facing downrange. Much like with the peel drill, the fellow on the left end of the line fired, then moved down to the right end of the line. The difference here is he was moving across the range, rather than down it. Once they had this down, we combined the two drills. They started out in a file, the first man shot and moved back to form the start of a line going across the range. As students shot they moved back from the file and took up a position on the right end of the line. Once the last man was in the line, the first one fired, then moved back to form a file behind the last guy. Keeping this up they moved back and to the right alternating between a file and a line. Up until this point these had clearly been team drills, rather than actual team tactics. While they were modeled on tactics one might actually use (like the Australian peel) the spacing was way too close and things were very structured and staged. Now we moved on to somewhat more tactically realistic exercises. First up was the Columbian special forces drill. The students started out at about 60 yards and fired a shot at a steel gong from prone. Once they hit it, they moved up to a piece of cover a bit further down range (the range outhouse) performed a proactive reload, and fired six shots at a paper target. They continued moving downrange to various pieces of cover, firing six shots from each. The magazine they loaded back at the outhouse had around 26 rounds in it, so they ran out while firing the six shots from the closest piece of cover and had to transition to pistol. When they fired their six shots from the closes piece of cover, they fire the pistol at the steel gong to end the drill. Then we counted the number of holes in the paper target. Everyone had at least 28 holes in the paper. Back to the team drills, Randy had the students practice bounding and bumping. Both of these are ways that two elements (whether they be individuals or teams) can move forward with one always covering the other. In bounding, the shooters leapfrog past each other. So if there are two shooters and four pieces of cover (A, B, C, & D), the first shooter moves to A, then the second shooter moves to B while the first shooter covers him from A. The first shooter moves to A to C while the second covers him from B. The second shooter moves from B to D while the first shooter covers him from C, and so on. In bumping, the first shooter goes when the second shooter gets to his piece of cover. So, the first shooter would move to A and cover the second shooter while he moves up to A. When the second shooter gets there he provides cover fire from A while the first shooter moves to B. The first shooter provides cover fire from B while the second shooter moves up. When the second shooter gets to B he provides cover fire from there while the first shooter moves up to C, and so on. Both of these require proper communication to make sure people are moving at the right times and there's always at least one gun up and firing, even when someone needs to reload. To get everyone accustomed to this, we ran bumping and bounding drills just moving down the firing line about 7 yards from the target. One student would engage the first target while the second bounded past him to the second target. The other student would bound past him to the third target, and so on. Once the students had been introduced to bumping and bounding, we went back and shot the Columbian SF drill in pairs. First the students bumped downrange, alternating pieces of cover (the cover was set up so there was no danger of anyone getting in their partner's line of fire). Then they did the same thing bounding. Finally, we moved back up to the targets and had the students work some one-handed reloads. This is awkward and slow and nobody is ever going to be quick and elegant with it. However, it's important to have done it at least once, if only so you know it's possible and won't just give up if your arm is injured and your rifle stops working. For a bit of added torture, randy also had them also do the one-handed reloads lying on their backs, as if whatever injured your arm also dropped you to the ground. This finished up the class. Randy handed out the certificates and we went our separate ways. Conclusion As usual, Randy did a great job with this class. The advanced rifle classes really push the curriculum about as far as it can go, particularly when you've got a good group of students. My rifle ran reliably, with only one non-operator induced malfunction. The other 5.56mm ARs did the same. The only troublesome one was the Armalite AR-10 in .308. It probably helped that most of these rifles got taken apart and lubed during the armorer course on Friday night. Unfortunately, my optic was not as reliable as my rifle. I originally bought this EOTech about four years ago, but I only ran it for about a year before I swapped it out for an Aimpoint Micro. It's been sitting on the shelf ever since. When I got this AR earlier this year I pulled it out and put it on the rifle. It's given me nothing but trouble ever since. I'll be calling EOTech customer service and seeing what they can do for me (at this point the optic is out of warranty). I guess this was a good chance to polish up my iron sighted shooting skills. As I mentioned earlier, the flaky optic did serve to confirm my preference for fixed, rather than flip-up, BUIS (at least on rifles with non-magnified optics where you can set it up for a lower 1/3 cowitness). The transition to irons when I realized I couldn't see the dot was very quick. Overall, this was a great course and Randy did a great job teaching it. While S.I. is best known for our AK stuff, we've also got a cadre of instructors who really know the AR well and a curriculum that teaches you to run the rifle and employ it to it's fullest extent.

A review can be found here....Advanced AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting with Randy Harris in Chattanooga, TN. Here it is printed for those who want to read it here. This weekend I "assisted" Randy Harris with the Advanced AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting class. I put assisted in quotation marks because I didn't do all that much in terms of teaching. I was mainly the demo dummy and an extra set of eyes during some drills. I also had the opportunity to shoot some of the others. This class was part of Red, White and Blue September, a 4 day block of AR focused instruction. It also included the regular AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting on Thursday and Friday class and the AR15/M4 Armorer class on Friday night. I couldn't make it out to help with the Thursday-Friday class, but I did show up in time for the Armorer class (if you want to hear about AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting you can read my AAR of the class from last May). I believe this is the first time the advanced version of the AR class has been offered. Much like with the AR class last May, I came out to this one as part of my quest to become more comfortable with the AR platform. I'm primarily an AK guy, but as an instructor I really need to be able to run both. The AR I brought is a BCM upper with a 16" lightweight barrel and mid-length gas system on a Palmetto State Armory stripped lower I put together. It's most unusual feature is probably the fixed Sully Stock, which I really like. It's very solid and is the same length as my AKs. It's also fitted with Magpul handguards, a US Palm battlegrip, a Surefire G2 flashlight, and an EOTech on a LaRue mount. I fed it with PMags carried either in a Dale Fricke kydex belt pouch or a Sneakybag. My pistol was my EDC gun: a Glock 17 with the slide worked over by TSD for an RMR in a Seraphim holster. The rest of the class mostly shot 5.56mm ARs (including a very nice LaRue upper on a Spikes lower). One student had an Armalite AR-10 in .308. Several students had Aimpoints, one was using a Trijicon Reflex, and one was using irons. Support gear ranged from belt pouches, to a TIB, to a plate carrier (sans plates). There was one 1911, but the rest of the students carried Glocks. Saturday Morning Some of the students in the class were holdovers from the Thursday-Friday class, but not all, so after the safety brief Randy started out with some dry work to make sure everyone was on the same page. We started with the standing position, mounting the gun from different ready positions and practicing reloads. Then Randy had folks switch over to the left shoulder (everyone in the class normally shot right-handed) and mount and reload the gun over there. Suarez International is big on ambidexterous shooting and Randy always emphasizes it right from the start in his rifle classes. As usual, this is where things start getting interesting for people who don't have mags accessible to both hands. We moved on to the kneeling position and worked reloads from both sides. It's not enough to be able to shoot from various positions, you need to be able to run the gun from these positions as well. Rounding out the position shooting, we did some work in prone. Randy also went over Spetsnaz prone and had the students try it out. Next up Randy had the students work on addressing targets in any direction. Kneeling and particularly prone limit your mobility and in real life you are not guaranteed that threats will only come from "downrange". You need to be able to adapt the position to shoot in any direction in case someone pops out from beside or behind you. From kneeling this is mostly a matter of switching shoulders and twisting your torso, or perhaps dropping one knee and raising the other as you pivot. From prone you may have to roll over on your back and shoot from supine. To further emphasize ambidexterity, Randy had us do the slalom drill. The students line up with 2-3 yards between each person slaloms through the line, treating each student as a corner to be pied, switching shoulders as necessary. Randy talked about some non-traditional sighting measures: the "Caveman EOTech" and shooting over the top of your optic. In the caveman EOTech you use the front sight tower, rather than the sight itself, as an aiming tool. At close ranges you can look over the rear sight and superimpose the front sight tower on the target and make good hits without taking the time to line up the sights. The equivalent for folks with optics is to look over the top of your optical sight and use the sight itself as a reference point just below your line of sight. He had the students try these out using a handy post. These really come into play once you start moving. Randy went through the standard S.I. get off the X lecture, talking about why we need to move, and why we like to move to the forward oblique angles. Finally, Randy had the students practice one-handed reloads. Rifles are fundamentally two-handed tools, but we need to be able to run them one handed in the event we get shot in the arm. With this, we broke for lunch at a local Subway.

This one is a week away! Look forward to seeing you there!

We will likely be running the Trauma Medicine for CCW in the Chattanooga area sometime in 2012. time next year in the Chattanooga area.

Excellent. Look forward to seeing you in class!

There are no pre requisites for this class. As such we have experienced folks come to class and we may have folks who may have bought their first gun the day before the class. As such we prefer the OWB but if you are already used to carrying in an IWB that is OK. On the camping. It is free. It is pretty "primitive" as it will be you setting up a tent. But they do have water and showers available. As for schedule , my classes for the rest of the year in the Chattanooga area will be this one, a 4 day "event" class that will be AR15/AR15armorer/Advanced Ar15 Sep 15-18 , and Advanced Close Range Gunfighting in November. I'll post a complete schedule here as soon as I get my 2012 dates set. Hopefully that will be done in the next month. You can also check out the whole Suarez Int schedule Class Schedule and just look for classes I'm teaching. For convenience I'll put up all my stuff on that schedule here.... Zero To 5 Feet in Ohio....http://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/july23-242011-zerotofivefeet-pistolgunfighting-pierpontoh.aspx Defensive Pistol Skills in Chattanooga areahttp://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/july30-312011-defensivepistolskills-chattanoogatn.aspx AK in Louisville Ky http://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/august13-142011-kalashnikovriflegunfighting-louisvilleky.aspx Rifle Gunfighting in Crestview Floridahttp://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/august27-282011-riflegunfighting-crestviewfl.aspx Close Range Gunfighting in Jacksonville Fl http://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/september10-112011-closerangegunfighting-jacksonvillefl.aspx AR 15 week in Chattanooga area http://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/valueclass-september15-18-2011-threeclasseschattanoogatn.aspx Winning the Fight FOF class in Atlantahttp://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/september30-2011-winningthefight-atlantaga.aspx Zero To 5 Feet in Atlanta http://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/oct1-2011-zerotofivefeet-pistolgunfighting-atlantaga.aspx Glock armorer and Force on Force in Columbia South Carolina http://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/valueclass-may14-152011-bothclassesincrestviewfl-1.aspx The November class in Chattanooga is not up on the schedule yet.

This one is just over a week away! Still time to get signed up. On site camping is available for those who want to. Lookng forward to seeing everyone there!

If you have a place to shoot or know of a place to do the class I'd love to do one up there!

This one is coming up soon! A review of the Defensive Pistol Skills written by a TGO member can be found here....http://www.tngunowners.com/forums/tactics-training/51739-did-little-training-suarez-international-weekend.html

Red White and Blue September Suarez International AR15 Week NEW CLASSES! Special deal ! From the folks that brought you the groundbreaking Red October study in the Kalashnikov comes Red White and Blue September. Where Red October focused on the Soviet AK pattern rifle Red White and Blue September will be an exhaustive study in the combat application of the "AMERICAN Rifle" the AR15/M4 . You've heard the myths and misconceptions now come learn the truth. Learn to run the AR from a combative perspective not a target shooting perspective. If all you care to do is shoot from a bench then this class will probably scare you off. If you are looking for standing, kneeling and prone slow fire then the Boy Scouts have you covered. We will look at the most efficient and effective ways to operate , manipulate and maintain the AR15 series of rifles both as an individual, and in team tactics. This is NOT police academy LCD level training. This is NOT just rehashed military manual training that is so common in the industry. These classes employ all the facets that make our AK program the best AK program going but restructuring it for the advantages (and idiosyncracies) of the AR. You wouldn't run an AK like an AR and we are not going to run an AR like an AK. Since we are not constrained by institutional dogma and closed society inbreeding we are not limited in what we can do in development and we have developed a comprehensive curriculum to make YOU as effective with your AR as possible. What we did for the AK we will do with the AR. September 15-16, 2011 AR15/M4 RIFLE GUNFIGHTING Price: $400 Chattanooga, Tennessee Instructor: Randy Harris In this class we explore the capabilities/strengths and weaknesses of the AR15/M16/M4 Weapons systems. In Suarez International fashion, sacred cows end up as dinner while we methodically address history, operation and the tricks and tips of professional operators who have used and continue to use this venerable, most American of Assault Rifles. Expect to be surprised to find out just how reliable the AR can be if proper care and operational protocols are followed. This is not your usual re-hashed presentation of the pistol with a rifle that you get in other schools, nor is it SWAT material only suitable for use in a team format. This material is focused for the lone operator regardless of his official status. DURATION: 2 Days TIME: 9:00AM to 5:00PM (Central) PREREQUISITES: NONE AMMUNITION: Appx 500 rounds (Minimum) and 50 rounds of pistol ammunition YOU NEED TO BRING: Spare clothing appropriate to the weather, lunch/snacks and water (minimum of 1 gallon per person) for the entire day, baseball or other style hat, sun screen, bug repellent, allergy medication (if needed), chair (if you have a problem with sitting on the ground, note taking paper/pen/pencil and a boo boo kit (band aids, gauze pads, antiseptic wipes, antibiotic ointment and tape) REQUIREMENTS: AR-15/M-4 type rifle, (3) magazines and any ancillary rifle gear. Pistol, Holster, Pistol Magazines. Eye and Ear Protection. NOTE: Chest Rig/Tactical Vests are not allowed with CCW Holsters. If you wish to use a Chest Rig or a Tactical Vest, use a vest mounted holster or a thigh holster. To sign up....http://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/september15-2011-ar15-m4gunfighting-chattanoogatn.aspx September 16, 2011 AR15/M4 ARMORER Price: $100 Chattanooga, Tennessee Instructor: Randy Harris and Ryan Acuff This class will present a definitive study on the AR-15/M4 rifle. Students will be shown assembly, disassemble and repair, as well as operational characteristics of the weapon. DURATION: 4 hours TIME: 6:00PM to 10:00PM Central PREREQUISITES: NONE AMMUNITION: N/A YOU NEED TO BRING: Note taking supplies, water, snacks, anything to keep you comfortable. REQUIREMENTS: Bring your own rifle - everything else will be provided. To sign up....http://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/october152011-glockarmorer4hour-columbiasc-2.aspx September 17-18, 2011 ADVANCED AR15/M4 GUNFIGHTING Price: $400 Chattanooga, Tennessee Instructor: Randy Harris Advanced AR15/M4 Gunfighting is the most advanced level rifle training available outside of Special Operations schools. This class will consist of all new material and take your rifle fighting skills, both as a firearm and as an alternative force tool, far beyond what you would think possible. While we will be using and teaching with AR-pattern rifles, you are not required to bring an AR. Bring ANY semi auto rifle you have. Not for Beginners. Students must own the basic combat rifle skill-set and be in reasonable physical condition for this class. If in doubt, attend the introductory class scheduled immediately before. This class will leave you gasping for air with a red-hot smoking rifle barrel. DURATION: 2 Days TIME: 9:00AM to 5:00PM (CST) PREREQUISITES: Students must have attended a Suarez International Intermediate rifle class AMMUNITION: RIFLE: Approx. 500 rounds (Min) PISTOL: Approx. 100 rounds (Min) YOU NEED TO BRING: Spare clothing appropriate to the weather, lunch/snacks and water (minimum of 1 gallon per person) for the entire day, baseball or other style hat, sun screen, bug repellent, allergy medication (if needed), chair (if you have a problem with sitting on the ground, note taking paper/pen/pencil and a boo boo kit (band aids, gauze pads, antiseptic wipes, antibiotic ointment and tape) REQUIREMENTS: AR pattern rifle, (3) magazines and any ancillary rifle gear. Pistol, Holster, Pistol Magazines. Eye and Ear Protection. Note: Chest Rig/Tactical Vests are not allowed with CCW Holsters. If you wish to use a Chest Rig or a Tactical Vest, use a vest mounted holster or a thigh holster. To sign up...http://www.suarezinternationalstore.com/september17-2011-advancedar15m4gunfighting-chattanoogatn.aspx ALL 3 Sessions AR Gunfighting, AR Armorer, and Advanced AR Gunfighting special price $750 !!!!

Sunday We started out the day with a review of the material we covered yesterday, which evolved into a discussion of the context for civilian use of the AR. Unlike a pistol, we're probably not going to carry a rifle on our person all the time. A rifle lives in the closet or the trunk until a situation where you need it. Those situations are probably limited to home defense and SHTF scenarios. While Katrina is the default example for a SHTF situation these days, the tornados that hit the area where we were training about a month prior (much damage was visible on our drive to the range each day) provided a more immediate real world example. In these sorts of situations you might be glad to have something with a bit more reach than a pistol. Randy had a personal example of this. After the tornadoes, he some trouble getting home from work that day because the police closed off the road due to downed limbs and powerlines ahead. He was on the verge of walking the last half-mile into his subdivision when they opened up the roadblock. Now, he wouldn't have had to fight his way through half a mile of zombie cannibal looters, but I'm sure having a get-home bag, which included a rifle, probably made him feel a little better. We moved out to the range and Randy started the students off with some dry practice in the various shooting positions. The first live drill exercised the different shooting positions from both shoulders. From 50 yards, the students shot five shots standing from their strong side, five shots kneeling, did a mag change, then did five shots prone. Then they switched to the support side shoulder and did five prone, another mag change, five kneeling, and five standing. Positions shooting from the support side shoulder and reloading while prone were clearly new to a lot of folks. I suggested that the students running shoulder bags swing their bag out in front of them when shooting prone. This makes mags a lot more accessible and even offers the possibility of using the bag to shoot off of (it's probably too low to put the forend on, but you can plunk the mag down on it for a bit more height). After giving everyone some experience on the support side, Randy concentrated on strong side position shooting for the next few drills. They worked shooting standing from 50 yards, then kneeling, then prone. The shoulder bag users really liked swinging the bag up for the prone work. One of the things that really differentiates SI is our emphasis on dynamic movement. We had been putting together the building blocks for this on the first day with the caveman EOTech and shoulder transfers. Now it was time to pull it all together and shoot on the move. As with most things, the first step is to do it dry: take three steps to the right, turn and transfer to the left shoulder, then take three steps to the left, turn and transfer to the right shoulder. Once everyone had it down (and everyone was doing it pretty much in unison so we didn’t have shooters bumping into each other) we did it live. Three shots as you take three steps to the right, then three shots as you take three steps to the left. As Randy emphasized, this is just a drill. You’re not going to pace back and forth in front of an adversary while shooting on the move. This is just a way of practicing shooting on the move and transferring the gun from shoulder to shoulder during movement. A more realistic application for these skills is shooting while getting off the X (GOTX). The “X†is where you were standing at the start of the fight, where the attacker expects you to be, and where all of the death and destruction he can muster is bearing down on. Standing there and shooting it out with him is like playing rock-em sock-em robots with guns. It’s not going to end well for you. It might not end well for him either, but which is more important to you: shooting the bad guy, or not getting shot yourself? The way to avoid this is not to be standing on that X. We need to move, and move far enough and fast enough to change what the attacker sees so that he has to reorient himself and reacquire you as a target. In the meantime, we put a bunch of rounds into him so that he never gets that chance. The key here is to use the caveman EOTech skills we introduced on Saturday. These let you move much faster than you can if you’re intent on maintaining a traditional sight picture, yet they’re sufficiently accurate for shooting at the ranges where getting off the X is an appropriate response. This is all pretty easy if you’re going towards your strong side. Unfortunately, that won’t always be an option. If there’s a wall to your right when your fight comes, you better know how to get off the X to your left. This is where the shoulder transition comes in. You can do the partial transfer (moving the stock but not switching your hands) and get the first shot off almost as quickly as you can going to the right. After taking more than one or two steps, this is going to get more and more awkward, so it’s usually best to swap hands after the first shot. We ran this several times getting off the X to the right (our dominant side for all but one student) then did it several more times going to the left. After giving everyone their first taste of getting off the X, we broke for lunch. After lunch, Randy talked about the after action assessment. Plenty of people have gotten killed because they shoot the bad guy they see, then relax before the fight is really over. The guy you just shot may get back up or he may have friends. We need to remain aware, check for additional threats, and keep an eye on the guy(s) we just shot. Randy teaches this using the F.A.S.T. acronym (also known as the Wyatt protocol). This stands for Fight, Assess, Scan, and Take cover, Top off, Treat injuries, Talk to anyone who needs to be talked to. The Fight part of this is what we’d been working on the entire class so far. Assess means check out any attackers you shot at. Ask yourself “Did I hit him? Did it work?†Scan for any additional threats. Look left and right, moving your muzzle and eyes together in the contact ready position. There’s no sense looking with just your eyes and having to drive the gun to the target if you spot an additional attacker. Real life is not a square range where there are only targets in one direction, so you need to check behind you as well. This is where the Sul position comes in. Drop the muzzle down and you can turn around and safely look for threats behind you. The key here is to step forward when you turn, rather than pivoting in place or stepping backward. This will give you a little extra space between you and any potential adversary behind you. The various ‘T’s might not always be applicable to a situation, and the order they are performed in may vary. We want to get to a better position and Take cover if possible. Top off by performing a proactive reload to get your gun ready in case additional threats show up. Check yourself and your friends or loved ones for any injuries and Treat them if necessary (we do not advocate treating the attacker, he can fend for himself). By Talk to anyone who needs to be talked to, we mean calling 911, talking to witnesses, responding police officers, etc. We ran the GOTX some more (just to the strong side this time) following it up with an after action assessment. One of the traps it’s easy to fall into is turning the scan a ‘tactical pirouette’. You swing from side to side then turn around, but you aren’t really looking, just going through the motions. To drive this point home, I made some silly faces or held up my knife during some of the scans, then asked folks what they saw. Next up was transitioning to pistol. Transitioning to a pistol is much faster and simpler than reloading a rifle or clearing a malfunction. Most civilian rifle work is going to occur well within pistol range, and civilians generally can make the choice to carry a pistol in any circumstance when they’ve got a rifle on them, so this makes sense as a default when your gun doesn’t work. SI recommends a simple two-point sling and for most folks we recommend not tying yourself to your rifle. You may have to drop the rifle quickly when responding police officers show up, lest you get shot by the cops, and you may need to employ the rifle for home defense in situations where you don’t have time to climb into your nifty tactical sling. There are circumstances where being tied to your rifle makes sense, particularly if you may get blown up by a roadside bomb. It’s nice to have your rifle close at hand when you regain consciousness and the post-IED ambush starts. For those of us not operating in areas with an IED threat, not being tied to our rifle is generally the better choice. One fellow in the class was running a one point sling that tied him to the gun, so all he had to do to transition is drop the rifle. If you’re not tied to the rifle, you’re going to have to do something with it when you transition. The method we teach is to bring the rifle up over your head and drop it so it hangs diagonally across your back. This gets the rifle out of your way, gives you two hands to access your pistol, and is reliable even at a dead run. For this to work properly, you need a long enough sling. Most folks showed up with their slings adjusted on the short side (especially folks who were used to using the sling as a shooting aid) but we were able to get everyone adjusted out long enough (though some were pretty marginal). We ran through this dry a bunch of times, until everyone was able to do it safely, without muzzle sweeping the next guy in line. Then we went live with it. Now some folks run transition drills with full magazines and have the student put the safety on before transitioning. There are two problems with this. First, if you are doing anything dynamic, there’s a good chance the safety could get knocked off on some piece of gear. Second, you’re building in a training scar. For any malfunction on an AR where you get a click instead of a bang, you won’t be able to engage the safety. You don’t want to be standing there in the middle of a gunfight with your transition disrupted because you can’t get the safety on like you do in training. Train like you fight. The way we do this is to have each student load a mag with two rounds. They chamber the first one so they’ve got one in the chamber and one in the mag. Randy emphasized that he wanted students to try to fire a burst of at least four shots. This fires the two rounds in the rifle and makes absolutely sure it was empty. It’s important to be absolutely sure you’ve shot the rifle dry and it’s safe to transition. This also simulates a real gunfight, where it will probably take several failed trigger presses before you realize the gun doesn’t work. The first time we did this live, one student found his pistol wouldn’t shoot. I examined it and it turned out the bump pad on a new 1911 mag was preventing the magazine from going all the way in. Luckily he had several mags with a different bump pad on them that worked. A fair number of the people in this class were wearing thigh holsters. Many of them were adjusted way too low, closer to the knee than the hip. These shooters really had to stretch to reach their pistols. Thigh holsters should be run high enough that you can easily grasp the pistol’s grip. Closer to the hip is better. I could also tell which student had put a lot of time in practicing with his thigh rig and which students were new to this carry position. I think this is a pretty good argument for keeping the position of your pistol on your tactical rig as close as possible to your CCW rig. It’s one of the reasons I like running a shoulder bag so I can wear my actual EDC holster. I’m planning to go with a war belt for my more ‘tactical’ use rather than a chest rig for similar reasons. We’d talked about malfunctions on Saturday, now it was time to give students some hands on experience with them. We divided the students up into groups and set out four rifles. While the student faced uprange, the instructors would set up four different malfunctions (an empty chamber, unseated magazine, stovepipe, and a failure to eject). The student had to turn around and fix each rifle in turn. Everyone managed to fix all the malfunctions and get the rifles going, but several people went to removing the magazine and reloading the rifle on malfunctions that could have been fixed with a simple tap-rack. Another problem occurred when a student clearing a double feed locked the bolt back to make it easier to get the mag out. He didn’t send the bolt forward until after he inserted a new mag, so it just rammed the top round from the mag into the back of the round that was still in the chamber. You’ve got to make sure to cycle the bolt and get everything out of the gun on these kinds of malfunctions. The last drill of the day was the combat rundown. We ran this drill one student at a time. They started at 100 yards with 25 rounds in their rifle. First, they dropped prone for their first shot. They moved up to 75 and shot from sitting behind a barrel, then to 50 and shot kneeling from behind a tree, then standing at 25 yards from behind a barricade, then moved out from cover, fired their last five shots on the move, then transitioned to pistol and put five more in the target from about five yards. As Randy pointed out, this is just a drill. Assaulting over open ground like this by yourself would be suicide. It gives you a chance to practice moving with the rifle and getting in and out of different positions. It’s also a big, fun drill to cap things off with. Visually impressive too; I had several students ask me to take pictures while they ran it. Hopefully some of them will be willing to post some of them in this thread. We finished up by presenting the certificates and asking what the students thought of the class. Everyone seemed pretty happy with it. The number one request was for cooler weather. Conclusions The AR often gets knocked for its reliability, but I was favorably impressed with how well most of these rifles ran. There were only two that gave significant problems. One was the AR in 7.62x39mm. This gun had some major magazine issues. When you turn a mag over, you shouldn’t have four or five rounds pour out. The problem was the follower was getting hung up on the transition between the curved portion and the straight portion of the magazine. The AR just wasn’t designed for such a tapered cartridge. The 7.62x39mm wants to feed through nice, curved magazines like the AK uses. When you try to run it through a mag that has a straight section to fit in the AR magwell, it’s going to cause issues. This gun also suffered quite a few stuck cases, some of which had to be beaten out with a range rod. During the transition drills, the student with this rifle finally got so frustrated with it he gave up and switched to his AK. That, I think, is the ideal solution. If you want to shoot 7.62x39mm, use a rifle designed for it. The other troublesome rifle was one shooting Tula ammo. Hearing this, one might immediately jump on the “don’t shoot steel case in your AR†bandwagon, but none of the problems he had were extraction or chambering related issues you would expect if the case material was the problem. Instead, he was getting failures to fire. The firing pin strikes in the primers were nice and deep, so this was probably just a bad batch of primers. This gun also had a hammer pin start to walk out during the second day. Randy hammered it back in. Other than these two guns, almost all the malfunctions we saw were operator induced. Failing to fully seat the magazine was the most common. We even had a discussion of whether not having a magazine in the gun when you started the drill counted as a malfunction (consensus was no). Aside from the fact that some calibers don’t work in ARs, the most obvious learning point from the class was some of the gear issues. This is not intended as a criticisim of any of the students. Part of the reason to come to this class is to test how well your gear works. I’m not trying to knock anyone here, just to draw out some lessons for future students. Suarez International is not gear focused. Yes, SI sells gear though One Source Tactical, but we aren’t going to tell you, “you must have this doohickey on your rifle or you will die!†We won’t look at you askance if your dump pouch isn’t the brand that OST sells. While we don’t care what brand of gear you bring, over the years we’ve found some setups work better than others. Most folks brought rifles that worked pretty well. The biggest problem was having too much stuff bolted to your gun, but that’s easy to fix at the class with a screwdriver or hex wrench. A sling is pretty much mandatory, an optic is a nice addition, and maybe a flashlight if this is a home-defense gun. That’s about it. The most common piece of additional equipment on the rifles in this class was the vertical foregrip. At SI we’re big advocates of the floating support hand. Basically, your support hand moves in and out depending on what you’re doing at the time. A VFG (or the MagPul AFG) tends to inhibit this. While there’s a bit of physical aspect to this, preventing you from sliding your hand easily forward and back, it seems to be as much mental as physical. A VFG tends to glue the support hand in one particular spot, even if that’s not the best spot for that hand at the time. Where this is really evident is during shoulder transfers. Hands stay on the VFG even if it’s a really long stretch, when it would be much easier to just grab the magwell instead. The most troublesome accessory was a magnified optic with a very small field of view mounted on top of a carry handle. For what we’re doing, iron sights or a red dot are really much more useful than a magnified optic, especially one over four power. The top of the carry handle is a pretty lousy place to mount any sort of optic, as its way too high for any sort of reasonable cheek weld. Another issue we ran into on some rifles was the stock length. The A2 stock, in particular, is really too long for the kind of shooting and manipulations we do. The A1 stock is workable, and a collapsible stock not extended all the way is pretty good. I got some interest on the Sully stock on my AR, which (in the configuration I have) is just about the right length. I discussed slings earlier. There’s really no need to go for anything fancy here, as long as it’s long enough. Something like the Saiga sling OST sells, which is basically six feet of webbing and a couple of buckles works fine. A good test to see if your sling is long enough is to loop it behind your neck and hold the rifle horizontally across your chest. If the gun hangs at around belly button level the sling is about right As far as support gear goes, the key is to have mags available to both hands, for doing reloads on the support side shoulder. A shoulder bag works for this because you can swing it around and access mags with your strong hand. Chest rigs place the mags where they’re easily accessible to both hands. On a belt rig, put one mag carrier on the strong side for support shoulder reloads. You also need a way to stow expended mags. Putting them back into mag pouches is far from ideal, both because it’s generally difficult, and because of the danger of grabbing an expended mag when you wanted a new one. If you’re using a shoulder bag, it works pretty well as a dump pouch (again, swing it around for the support side reload. With chest or belt rigs, a dump pouch of some sort is best. One solution to the ambidexterity problem is to put the dump pouch in the 6 o’clock position, accessible to both hands. Another solution with a chest rig is to tuck the expended mag behind the chest panel until you have a chance to move it to the dump pouch. I certainly got a lot out of helping Randy teach the class. It was great to see how someone who really knows the platform taught it. Just as important, I got to see how a fairly big, diverse group of students responded to that instruction. What worked well, what things tripped them up, etc. I hope they learned half as much from me as I did from them. I'd like to thank Randy for letting me sit in on this excellent class. I'd highly recommend AR15/M4 Rifle Gunfighting and anything else Randy teaches.