Philosophy Is The Talk On A Cereal Box.
Creating the Cadre Sessions has given me a chance to think about my own particular teaching style. Every instructor starts off mimicking a style, be it of the NRA/USCCA instructor who taught them or some other trainer they’ve learned from. Quite frankly, most never progress beyond that, parroting things like pinning the trigger or no-look re-holstering because that’s how they learned it. I’m at the point now where I see some things appearing in what I teach that are unique to me, and I thought I’d write them down to see how I progress as an instructor.
Teach To A Narrative
I like to have my students be able to explain to themselves or others why they did something. Why do you look the gun into the holster? Why is shooting multiple rounds into the target the default? Why did you draw your gun (or pepper spray, or whatever) when you did?
This is important because when the responding officer pulls up at the aftermath of your violent incident, he’s going to write out a story called “a police report.” That’s the first story. The second story is the one you tell your lawyer and the third story is the one you tell the investigating officer. That’s three stories at a minimum, and we haven’t entered the courtroom yet, and quite frankly, I hope my students never do.
Those stories need to be three things: Truthful, accurate and reasonable. The more you can do that in a way that makes you the hero of each story, the better your chances of never seeing the inside of a courtroom. I want to give my students the knowledge and skills to make sure their stories have a happy ending.
Encourage Automaticity
The less you have to think about the actions of actually driving a car, the greater your chances of never getting into trouble. Think about the last time you almost had an accident: Chances are, you never thought “Oh my goodness, I should apply a slight pressure on the steering wheel to move my car into the right lane so that oncoming car which jumped the curb doesn’t hit me!”
No, you just did it without thinking because you’ve been driving your whole life. That’s automaticity, and it’s the sort of behaviour I like to see in my students. They don’t think about sights, grip and trigger, they just do it. This leaves the brainpower that had been consumed by those tasks free to perform other tasks, such as situational awareness and other problem-solving opportunities.
Efficient Techniques
Most of the actions our bodies naturally perform during combat are leftover from our days on the veldt. Hunkering down into the “tactical turtle” works great if you’re about to have an Australopithecus from a rival tribe cave your skull in with a rock, but it sucks if you’re trying to align your sights with your eyes. We have evolved since those days on the veldt and have been using projectiles for thousands of years. Maybe we should reflect that fact in our training.
What is an efficient technique? One that has been proven to deliver the desired results with the lowest expenditure of resources. To borrow from Colin Chapman, the genius behind the success of Lotus’s F1 team, “Simplify, and add lightness.”
Or to put it another way, Elon Musk describes it as “The best part is no part.”
No complicated range kata. No seven-step methods. Simple training, performed properly and repeatedly. Benchmarks to see if the students are understanding what I’m trying to teach them. Stress-testing and competition (yes, I said it) to see if those techniques really work, and more importantly, where they don’t work, and why. I’d much rather have a technique fail at the range than have it fail when everything is on the line.
On a related note, the prevalence of ego in the firearms training world amazes me. So many instructors believe that They Have Figured It Out And Have The Correct Method. They are, in essence, John Kreese, and not Mr. Miyagi. They don’t change their teaching to reflect new input because all of us are isolated from the effects of our ignorance. The chances of our students having a lethal force encounter is quite low. In fact, I *want* what I teach to be theoretical. I want my students to live safer-than-average lives, and I want to never have to draw a gun in anger. However, I want to be ready for it if I should. If properly getting ready for this undesirable outcome means changing something in my curriculum, great. I’d much rather be proven wrong than be found dead.
