Scary training video

[The Butler did it]

My first post , I will bite on tit

[Kid Shelleen]

What a Mucking Foron.

Ok I'm off to the corner.

[Michael Bane]

This is really long, but I think it's apropos here...an article I wrote for HANDGUNS Magazine 'way back when...

I got shot at once, and I don’t think it made me a better person.

In truth, I don’t remember all that much about it, except for the exact sound the bullet made as it whizzed on past me to dice up a bunch of Caribbean greenery. It was a combination of sizzle and low frequency hum, like an angry hornet on PCP. The thunderclap sound came later. Years later! Decades later!

I also remember a rush of something between heat and fear; then I was lying in a ditch while a bunch of Army Rangers chuckled mightily at my distress and assured me that nobody in the Cuban army could shoot worth a crap anyway.

I bring this up not to launch into an orgy of war stories, but because I’m concerned about what appears to be a trend in high-end LEO and even civilian training these days—sending students downrange and lobbing a couple of shots at them to “show ‘em what it’s like to be shot at.”

Really…

The basic rationale is that unless you’re a Crip, Blood or in the music business, you’re unlikely to have been shot at on a regular basis, or even at all. Knowing what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a bullet, the reasoning goes, will give you an advantage should the proverbial salad greens hit the food processor. Proponents of this theory, a couple of whom are people I enormously respect (well, most of the time), suggest it’s no different that full contact sparring in the dojo, where learning how to take a hit is a critical part of the training.


Setting aside the fact that in my many years in a dojo I was never once punched by a fist exceeding 1000 feet per second—although there was this one cute woman from Korea who might have come pretty close—let me toss out a couple of observations.

The first is the very prosaic notion that all machines break. You could be the best shot in the world; I could trust you more than my mommy, my gunsmith or the Dalai Lama; you could bolt the gun into a Ransom Rest set in concrete, and…all machines still break! If I’ve learned anything from the hundreds of thousands of rounds I’ve sent downrange over the years, it’s that no matter how absolutely positively perfect a gun is, no matter how many bucks I laid out or which celebrity gun mechanic put the thing together, Murphy always wins. Sights shift in dovetails, barrels wear, and even if the machine works, stuff happens. And I prefer not to be standing downrange when it does. I mean, one lousy earthquake and there’s a new hole in your head. Wouldn’t that just suck?

Then there’s the more pressing question of training—what it is, what it is not, and what its limitations really are. I think we have a tendency to ratchet up training exercises because we confuse the training with the real thing. Training is like getting a merit badge for learning survival techniques. It might be a good prerequisite for heading out into the backcountry, but it doesn’t tell you a darn thing about how you’re going to perform under life-threatening stress.

As Lawrence Gonzales, a fellow traveler down some strange paths, notes in the intro to his book, Deep Survival: Who Lives; Who Dies & Why, “It's easy to imagine that wilderness survival would involve equipment, training, and experience. It turns out that at the moment of truth, those might be good things to have but they won't be decisive.”

Think about that for a minute. Standing downrange and letting people you know and trust shoot at you prepares you for…standing downrange and letting people you know and trust shoot at you! If you’re ever set upon by lethally minded friends, well, there you are! Otherwise, you’re likely to be in the crapper with everyone else, because the training is not, was not, will not and cannot be the real thing.

If you’d really like to add some reality to your training in a way that might actually save your butt some day, investigate force-on-force training with either firearms modified for Simunitions or AirSoft guns that shoot plastic pellets. Hey, people will be shooting at you for real, and while you might not have to die as a consequence of your bad tactical actions, you are going to get punished! And you are going to learn, as best as possible, how to function in a tactical environment.

Which is, of course, the next best thing to having a Spectre gunship show up and turn a huge chunk of the rainforest, including one hapless Cuban sniper, into coleslaw while we guys in the ditch applauded heartily. And for the record, I consider it sheer luck that my pants were still dry!

Michael B

[Frisco]

I have a ferly simple rule:

If someone, ANYONE, shoots at ME...I shoot THEM.

If my MOMMA took to tossin' bullets at me...I'd be hard pressed not to double tap her.

That may be a ridiculous scenario, but none of you KNOW my Momma!

I have been shot at.  Not pleasant.  In each case, I returned fire.  Let's just say, it is hard wired into my survival process.

To think that is is effective training, is like saying porn videos are realistic training for pickin' up chicks.  BOOM CHICKA WA WA.

Stupid, stupid, stupd.

Then again....was it just me, or did I not see slides reciprocating, or impacts in the dirt behind the targets???

[Hazcat]

Then again....was it just me, or did I not see slides reciprocating, or impacts in the dirt behind the targets???

Frisco,  Better get some new glasses .  There are definitely rounds impacting dirt.

[Sponsor]

[Frisco]

Frisco,  Better get some new glasses .  There are definitely rounds impacting dirt.

My glasses are fine.  I watched it on my laptop with the wireless connection first, which sucks.  I re-watched it on my desktop and saw it clearly.

Damned fools.

[Hazcat]

Ya know what is a wonder to me, Frisco is where they found this many untrained shooters and ROs to pull this off.  After all any shooter trained in even just the barest 4 basic rules would know not to do this.

Well at least they will all have an excuse if they ever go to court for anything.  They are all certainly Non Compass Mentus! (sp)

[Ichiban]

It's been well documented that when someone in "authority" tells people to do something they know isn't right they will go ahead and do it anyway.  I suspect that the RO told the shooters that it was okay this once and just be really super careful.  After all, someone that "knows" told them it was okay.

Sheeple with guns.  Not a pleasant thought.

[Pathfinder]

Ya know what is a wonder to me, Frisco is where they found this many untrained shooters and ROs to pull this off.  After all any shooter trained in even just the barest 4 basic rules would know not to do this.

Well at least they will all have an excuse if they ever go to court for anything.  They are all certainly Non Compass Mentus! (sp)

Technically, Haz, I don't see where they violated any of the rules. IPSC et al. gets smart and does the same thing only with non-shoot cardboard targets.

Here's a link to the survival podcast forum where a couple of folks, including former Blackwater types, make their cases.
http://thesurvivalpodcast.com/forum/index.php?topic=6300.0;topicseen

Note: Tactical Response is one of their sponsors, ModernSurvival is the owner of the site (sponsored by Tact Resp), Blackdog62 is either a former "operator" or has done a huge amount of reading and talking to operators - I give him the benefit of the doubt and consider him to have walked the walk. The rest of us appear to have been trained ala the comments here.

Bottom line: Tactical Response has not addressed this video yet so far as I know - shame, it would be nice to know the particulars, since this video has gone viral.

[Hazcat]

Path,

One of the basic rules is to make sure that no one is down range. 

As far as comparing it to a 'show' like Mundan, well that's pretty weak.  How many years has the photog practiced with those people and vis versa?

I fail to see any reason to have a photog in that position.  Remotes will do it just fine.