Processing Power

Brian Hill and Caleb Giddings probably won’t be co-teaching a class any time soon, but they both arrived at the same idea from different angles. Caleb thinks the Failure To Stop is the single most relevant drill for the armed civilian, and Brian is not a fan of the draw to single shot as a metric of performance. Both of them touch on two very important concepts that are easy to overlook in the shot timer über allës world of firearms training: Task fixation and confirming your hits.

Let’s start with task fixation. ECQC is a must-do for any serious student of applied violence because not only it will show you just how much you suck in a fight, it will also show you how some people can’t think their way out of a bad situation.

One thing I noticed when I took the class was that no one thought to call the cops to end the scenario: Everyone was raring to wrassle, and wrassle they did. Those students were fixated on the task of close-quarters hand to hand combat because that’s what they thought they were going to learn in this class. Nobody stopped and said “Huh, this isn’t working, maybe it’s time for Plan B.” Instead, they went with Plan A, only harder, and as a result, they failed. 

This assumes that a) we have a Plan B ready to go, which means we have more than one file card in our brain for any given situation and b) we have enough processing power to spare so we can use it to assess the situation as it is happening and make adjustments as needed. 

This is where part two, confirming your hits comes in. As armed civilians, we need to know for certain that yes, that bullet is going to land where I want it to land when it leaves the barrel. This means that we need to know where it is going to land when the primer is touched off an ignition begins, which in turn means we need to know that the sights were on target when the trigger released the sear and started all of these processes. 

If your sights were not on target when the bullet left the barrel, you’re going to miss. Plain and simple. We avoid this outcome by confirming the sight picture as we press the trigger. Not “sight picture, then trigger press,” but press the trigger while maintaining your sight picture. 

If that means we slow down a bit, that’s fine. You can’t miss fast enough to win in a practical pistol match, and the same is true in a lethal force encounter. 

See your sights on target. Confirm that they’re on target as you are pressing the trigger. If that’s not happening, keep doing dry fire practice. The goal is automaticity, so the processing power we HAD been using to work on sight picture and trigger can be used for things like “Huh, that’s not working, let me try something different.”