Review – Beyond The Muzzle
I’m part of a team that teaches instructor-level classes to law enforcement officers in California. Depending on the subject, these courses range from two to four days in length. While we keep the students very busy and create numerous opportunities for them to develop and practice their skills as instructors, there is never enough time to teach them everything we’d like to know about being a good instructor. Beyond the Muzzle is primarily aimed [...]
A Smaller Icon — Springfield’s Prodigy Compact
Springfield's Prodigy line of double-stack 1911 pistols has been around for two years; they are producing variants. My previous reviews of the Prodigy are here Part 1 and Part 2. The variations we now see include ported models and those coming from the factory in different finishes — olive drab [...]
Killing Our Students
This post is respectfully dedicated to all law enforcement officers killed by other law enforcement officers. May GOD forgive us. I have never used this bully pulpit to promote my personal livelihood of being in the firearms and tactics instruction business. Occasionally, I’ll make reference to something we learned in [...]
REALITY CHECK | Step-Up
Training is a constant adaptation of using what resources you have to teach what you want your students to know or be capable of doing. The “doing” process in the field or in fighting needs to be rigidly flexible as fights are never the same from one day to the [...]
Back-Up Guns
I did the cop-thing for about a decade and since then have continued to teach firearms tactics and work with law enforcement officers for an additional 30 years. Over the last 40 years some things have changed, yet many things haven’t. It’s often referred to as “100 years of tradition, [...]
REALITY CHECK II | Dangerous People
Sacrifice is the surrender of something for the sake of gaining something else. At a firearm’s instructor development school here in Oregon a regional law enforcement officer and lead instructor of the class said, “we might need to sacrifice safety for realism in firearms training.” WE MIGHT? I got an [...]
REALITY CHECK II | Plastic Practice
Probably one of the biggest shortcomings of law enforcement is the lack of training or time in the area of firearms. Mainly, it’s due to budgets, manpower and lack of range facilities. Here, I won’t address the lack of interest from management or officers’ reticence for training on their own [...]
REALITY CHECK II | The 13th Letter
The number 13 is often considered unlucky, as in Friday the 13th, or then again, it could promote something tasty like in the extra doughnut in a baker’s dozen. The 13th letter is “M” and I use Ms already in training in the “M&M” mode and have for years. Following [...]
REALITY CHECK II | Drawing?
If you need the gun just draw it. This sounds simple enough — except for the trouble we get into while just drawing it or just putting it away. Yeah I know; simple — yes — except, I can think of a whole bunch of times cops have shot themselves [...]
Hitting The Reset Button
We’ve sometimes raised eyebrows when we’ve dared to speak the obvious about a situation, trend, policy, lack of leadership, great leadership and even about how we address cops who are about to retire … let me expand on retirement. It’s become sort of routine to applaud, congratulate, back-slap and otherwise [...]
Success
During my police career, I was sometimes accused of being a suck-up or told, “You just seem to get every job you want around here. How come?” I used to tell them if networking, learning more about a topic than other people, making myself available if help was needed or [...]