There is no crying on the range. We've all heard that take-off from the line in A League of Their Own. It's the tough girls' (and guys') battle cry to "harden the f up," "suck it up, buttercup," show no weakness.
And I don't think that's quite right. Tears show up on the range for good, even necessary, reasons, and we shouldn't deny or try to stop them all the time.
The work of learning how to shoot can be incredibly hard, both physically and mentally. Blisters, bruises, sore muscles, and more can turn up. Laughing off a gnarly brass burn is one thing when you've lost count of how many scars you've accumulated over the years, and certainly, every new shooter should be learning how to grit their teeth and carry on - safely, please! But at the end of the day? I can't judge how bad you hurt or were shocked or scared.
As for the mental aspects, shooting is an incredibly technique-heavy skill set. There's a lot to keep track of and do well. That's exhausting all on its own, and frustrating when things don't click as you're hoping and expecting. Or even worse, when you think you've finally gotten it, but realize you actually had it all wrong. For years maybe. Tears of exhaustion, frustration, even betrayal. It happens. And sometimes a good cry is what gets you past it to move forward.
Who hasn't shot a drill or stage that hasn't gone entirely to hell? If you haven't, I submit you haven't shot enough or pushed hard enough. When that happens, and it has or it will, again and again, sometimes it's easy to shake it off and try again. Sometimes, not so much. Leaking a few tears is okay. It's walking away and not coming back, or holding in that emotion and letting it screw you up more, that's more problematic.
A few years ago, I learned that a fundamental aspect of my marksmanship technique was quite likely the anchor causing a long plateau in my improvement. I had worked really hard to get right, but right...wasn't. I cried ugly tears the entire hour ride home from the range that night. Then got up in the morning to keep learning. Driving through the bumpy road to literally rewiring my brain with a better technique and everything that went with it was really hard. It took a lot of time and a lot of work. So yes, there were tears. But I got better.
More, guns are, for many of us, inextricably tied up with notions of self defense. We use guns to protect ourselves and our loved ones...but to do that, we must learn to value ourselves and find ourselves worthy. We may have to overcome fears about hurting others - the parent, child, sibling, partner attacking, or the innocent person caught up in the middle or who could become a friendly fire victim, or even straight fears about being able to manage the responsibility and power, physical and otherwise, of the gun. None of those are easy for everyone, and the process of arriving there can be immensely emotional.
Imagine if you were so terrified of shooting in defense that you could fight against tears or fight to pull the trigger. Cry, cry if you must. Imagine if nobody had ever told you that your life meant something, that your life was valuable. Imagine the floodgates of emotion that come with that becoming, then try to tell me those tears have no place on the range when they result in someone who now believes in their worthiness to fight for themselves.
Tears aren't weak. They aren't the end of the story. Sometimes, they're the beginning.
01 August 2017
21 March 2017
Contextual Handgun: The Armed Parent/Guardian (AAR)
After action reports, AARs, for training classes are often written in the immediate aftermath, even before the student has finished unpacking and doing their laundry. I like to wait a little longer to let what I’ve just learned settle in my head a little, and so I can really pick out the details that make a particular class shine.
That strategy seemed especially appropriate for the class I took in early March 2017. The full name of the class is Contextual Handgun: The Armed Parent/Guardian (I’ll call it TAP/G here), and it’s taught by John Johnston and Melody Lauer of Citizens Defense Research. I attended the session hosted by John Murphy at FPF Training, in Culpeper, VA. It was my first time at FPF, and I’m hoping to be back for more in the future. It’s always a pleasure finding a new-to-me training range that’s easily accessible with good facilities and an organized host – thanks, John M.!
TAP/G is the first class developed and offered by Citizens Defense Research, and grew out of earlier work that Melody did with her groundbreaking Babywearing and Carrying class. As you might imagine from the name of the company, John and Melody are focused on what works for ordinary people toting guns – not law enforcement, not military, but an entirely different mission with more restrictive rules of engagement from both legal and ethical perspectives. That perspective is why I was interested in the class even though I don’t have kids and don’t spend a lot of time around them.
Turns out that the real key to the class material is in the first part of its name: Contextual Handgun. As introduced early in the classroom time that kicked off the weekend, the context in which we operate drives everything, whether it’s the mission, the gear, or the options available. In other words, we can’t find the best path to our goals unless we’ve identified and articulated them, and taken a look at the entire landscape between where we are now and where we’re trying to get to. The particular context for this class, the armed parent/guardian, was simply an application of the general framework that John and Melody emphasized throughout the class.
The lecture we started out with on day one was an excellent overview of the concept of contextualizing self-defense when children of all ages are in the mix, with application for anyone who might face a self-defense encounter when others are present. John and Melody also identified the goals of the class and contextualized (there’s that word again) the problems of self-defense where children are present into the concepts that are taught in more standard defensive pistol classes. While the material is covered in enough depth for someone completely new to the world of self-defense, it’s perhaps more appreciated by someone who already has a bit of a background and wants to understand how to expand and apply it.
After lunch, we braved the cold for an afternoon of reviewing and practicing the base skills needed to work with a pistol from concealment. The standards here were perhaps a bit tougher than I’ve seen in other classes, in preparation for day two’s shooting requirements, but were achievable by all students in our class, regardless of training background. I especially appreciated shooting a standard law enforcement qualification as the ending exercise for the day, to set a repeatable, objective baseline of shooting skill.
Day two of most defensive pistol classes generally get into the more difficult shooting problems faced by concealed carriers – the use of concealment garments, understanding cover, one-handed shooting, etc. TAP/G held true here by getting into more specific gun-handling knowledge and skills necessary when children are in the mix. The day started with a short additional lecture about aiming points, bridging the gap from fundamentals practice on less humanoid targets, and included a practical demonstration of why ammunition choice matters. Getting behind guns ourselves, we then learned how to manage kids of all ages, whether small enough to be carried or larger than the shooter, while maintaining a high level of performance downrange. Each skill built on one that we had practiced earlier, leaving us with some highly complex tasks that made clear why the day one fundamentals were so important to be able to perform reflexively.
The techniques taught largely fell into the “duh, why didn’t I think of that?” category: simple, easy to implement and remember, and highly effective. They weren’t obvious walking into the class, but now that I know them, I know I won’t forget them because they make so much sense. While geared towards people with children, I was able to immediately think of many applications of the same techniques in my own life. The tools for dealing with ‘big kids’ are, after all, not very different than you might consider for dealing with, well, big kid-like adults.
While we certainly worked hard on learning the relevant shooting skills, John and Melody also took the time to explain why each technique worked and when it would be most useful. As was hammered home all weekend, one of the key drivers for any self-defense is context both for deciding what to do at a certain point in time and for articulating that action at a later time. I found this particularly useful for some of the more potentially controversial solutions or ones that had a very narrow applicability.
Instead of providing “do this” pronouncements, TAP/G is a more nuanced class and requires an appropriately thoughtful approach to using a gun to defend yourself and others. Here, we faced not only the prospect of killing or dying in self-defense, but the consequences of being involved in or responding to an attack involving children and loved ones. Taking on the responsibility of wielding deadly force is and should be a weighty decision, and all the more so when you consider that you may have to choose the lesser of evils when defending more than one individual. TAP/G provides the background to help students think through those issues and the skills to apply their decisions.
The class was capped by the TAP/G qualification, based on the law enforcement qualification we shot at the end of day one but incorporating all of the new skills and techniques we learned in day two. I found it a useful review, reinforcing that I had indeed learned the skills enough to remember and use them. It also gave me a baseline of performance with my actual carry gear, so that I now objectively know how well I shoot with it when including the distractions that are part of managing a defensive shooting encounter with people I need to protect.
Because in the end, we return to the underlying theme of TAP/G, in what I hope to be a series of classes from Citizens Defense Research: do your skills, your gear, and your strategy fit the context?
That strategy seemed especially appropriate for the class I took in early March 2017. The full name of the class is Contextual Handgun: The Armed Parent/Guardian (I’ll call it TAP/G here), and it’s taught by John Johnston and Melody Lauer of Citizens Defense Research. I attended the session hosted by John Murphy at FPF Training, in Culpeper, VA. It was my first time at FPF, and I’m hoping to be back for more in the future. It’s always a pleasure finding a new-to-me training range that’s easily accessible with good facilities and an organized host – thanks, John M.!
TAP/G is the first class developed and offered by Citizens Defense Research, and grew out of earlier work that Melody did with her groundbreaking Babywearing and Carrying class. As you might imagine from the name of the company, John and Melody are focused on what works for ordinary people toting guns – not law enforcement, not military, but an entirely different mission with more restrictive rules of engagement from both legal and ethical perspectives. That perspective is why I was interested in the class even though I don’t have kids and don’t spend a lot of time around them.
Turns out that the real key to the class material is in the first part of its name: Contextual Handgun. As introduced early in the classroom time that kicked off the weekend, the context in which we operate drives everything, whether it’s the mission, the gear, or the options available. In other words, we can’t find the best path to our goals unless we’ve identified and articulated them, and taken a look at the entire landscape between where we are now and where we’re trying to get to. The particular context for this class, the armed parent/guardian, was simply an application of the general framework that John and Melody emphasized throughout the class.
The lecture we started out with on day one was an excellent overview of the concept of contextualizing self-defense when children of all ages are in the mix, with application for anyone who might face a self-defense encounter when others are present. John and Melody also identified the goals of the class and contextualized (there’s that word again) the problems of self-defense where children are present into the concepts that are taught in more standard defensive pistol classes. While the material is covered in enough depth for someone completely new to the world of self-defense, it’s perhaps more appreciated by someone who already has a bit of a background and wants to understand how to expand and apply it.
After lunch, we braved the cold for an afternoon of reviewing and practicing the base skills needed to work with a pistol from concealment. The standards here were perhaps a bit tougher than I’ve seen in other classes, in preparation for day two’s shooting requirements, but were achievable by all students in our class, regardless of training background. I especially appreciated shooting a standard law enforcement qualification as the ending exercise for the day, to set a repeatable, objective baseline of shooting skill.
Day two of most defensive pistol classes generally get into the more difficult shooting problems faced by concealed carriers – the use of concealment garments, understanding cover, one-handed shooting, etc. TAP/G held true here by getting into more specific gun-handling knowledge and skills necessary when children are in the mix. The day started with a short additional lecture about aiming points, bridging the gap from fundamentals practice on less humanoid targets, and included a practical demonstration of why ammunition choice matters. Getting behind guns ourselves, we then learned how to manage kids of all ages, whether small enough to be carried or larger than the shooter, while maintaining a high level of performance downrange. Each skill built on one that we had practiced earlier, leaving us with some highly complex tasks that made clear why the day one fundamentals were so important to be able to perform reflexively.
The techniques taught largely fell into the “duh, why didn’t I think of that?” category: simple, easy to implement and remember, and highly effective. They weren’t obvious walking into the class, but now that I know them, I know I won’t forget them because they make so much sense. While geared towards people with children, I was able to immediately think of many applications of the same techniques in my own life. The tools for dealing with ‘big kids’ are, after all, not very different than you might consider for dealing with, well, big kid-like adults.
While we certainly worked hard on learning the relevant shooting skills, John and Melody also took the time to explain why each technique worked and when it would be most useful. As was hammered home all weekend, one of the key drivers for any self-defense is context both for deciding what to do at a certain point in time and for articulating that action at a later time. I found this particularly useful for some of the more potentially controversial solutions or ones that had a very narrow applicability.
Instead of providing “do this” pronouncements, TAP/G is a more nuanced class and requires an appropriately thoughtful approach to using a gun to defend yourself and others. Here, we faced not only the prospect of killing or dying in self-defense, but the consequences of being involved in or responding to an attack involving children and loved ones. Taking on the responsibility of wielding deadly force is and should be a weighty decision, and all the more so when you consider that you may have to choose the lesser of evils when defending more than one individual. TAP/G provides the background to help students think through those issues and the skills to apply their decisions.
The class was capped by the TAP/G qualification, based on the law enforcement qualification we shot at the end of day one but incorporating all of the new skills and techniques we learned in day two. I found it a useful review, reinforcing that I had indeed learned the skills enough to remember and use them. It also gave me a baseline of performance with my actual carry gear, so that I now objectively know how well I shoot with it when including the distractions that are part of managing a defensive shooting encounter with people I need to protect.
Because in the end, we return to the underlying theme of TAP/G, in what I hope to be a series of classes from Citizens Defense Research: do your skills, your gear, and your strategy fit the context?
12 October 2016
Every Girl Should Learn How to Shoot - Part 4 of 4
Read part 1, part 2, and part 3 first if you haven't already.
And as I said, I’ve found some of the best people in the world by being around firearms. It’s not all kittens and rainbows, but the best here really are the best. Let me share a little of my piece of the community with you.
At one of my local monthly matches, a regular competitor is a police officer who I have seen show up straight from his overnight shift to shoot with us. He told me that yeah, he was pretty tired, but he couldn’t let go the opportunity to shoot because the dangers of his job don’t wait for him to be fresh and wide awake. Some of why my friend comes is love of the game, but much of it is his dedication to honing a skill that he knows he needs to stay alive and do his job. And he’s not the only one.
By day, my coach is a law enforcement training officer. One of his current crop of recruits is pursuing her dream to become a police officer, but has been challenged by severe dyslexia combined with additional vision problems. She’s been working especially hard in training these past few months, including extra one-on-one training and spending hours of her own time practicing and visualizing. Last week, she made a breakthrough and jumped from the back of the class to the top. Because she didn’t give up, even when others were ready to suggest that she could do good for her community in other roles.
But many of us don’t need to practice shooting for our professions. While we might be interested in self-defense applications, a lot of us are ultimately out on the range for fun. Safety is always first, and competition is called that for a reason – wanting to win is a thing, and not a bad one. It’s not the only thing, however, and that common attitude leads to some of the greatest acts of individual generosity I’ve seen anywhere.
For instance, shooters have raised thousands and more for various causes close to our hearts. From the Salute to Valor 3 gun match that raised more than thirty thousand dollars for a selection of charities benefitting veterans across the United States to the many clubs that annually run food and toy drives for local families, shooters have formed a community that takes care of its own and others.
Shooters give on an even more micro level too. When I had an unexpected several-day layover in Los Angeles trying to get home in the middle of a snowstorm, a friend told me, “I’ve got friends down there! Let me ask them what you should do…” I had barely found a last-minute hotel for my stay by the time enough volunteers and gear had been offered to outfit both me and my husband to shoot a match the next day. What could have been a miserable few days in an airport hotel turned out to be more fun than I could have imagined.
One of the best parts of that side trip was following it up a few weeks later with an intended trip west to shoot Phoenix Handgunner, at the invitation of my friends Jaci and Jess. They put me up, fed me, and made me feel completely at home even though I knew about four people there (and they were half of them) and had never shot that match format before.
I was reminded of my earlier trips to A Girl and a Gun Club’s national conference with my friend Tracy, who also picked me up from the airport, drove me all over, and helped me navigate a whole new crowd and event. While I enjoyed meeting and spending time with other friends, new and old, during those events, those trips were particularly special to me because of those I spent the most time with.
The shenanigans I have with my shooting girlfriends are fun, but even better is how those trips are only crystallized moments of the support we provide to each other whether as shooters working to improve our skills, as women navigating a male-dominated industry, or in our lives off the range.
Most of my friends growing up were boys and like many of you, my circle shrank as I got older. In the gun community, I found not just men I’m proud to call friends, but women with whom I could form an instant bond. It’s not just that I’ve found friends with a common hobby, it’s all of the other things I’ve talked about this evening. I’m delighted to have discovered these confident, competent, thoughtful women with a take-no-prisoners attitude towards life. Like I said, it’s not all puppies and ice cream, but these gems are what makes it all worthwhile.
Every girl should learn how to shoot. She’ll get to meet some really cool people and make some lifelong friends.
Thank you for being another step on my journey, and I hope I’ve brought you some inspiration for your own. I know many of you have already started shooting but if you haven’t, I hear there are some good folks to learn from around here. And as you start putting more rounds downrange, I hope you, too, discover for yourself why every girl should learn how to shoot.
And as I said, I’ve found some of the best people in the world by being around firearms. It’s not all kittens and rainbows, but the best here really are the best. Let me share a little of my piece of the community with you.
At one of my local monthly matches, a regular competitor is a police officer who I have seen show up straight from his overnight shift to shoot with us. He told me that yeah, he was pretty tired, but he couldn’t let go the opportunity to shoot because the dangers of his job don’t wait for him to be fresh and wide awake. Some of why my friend comes is love of the game, but much of it is his dedication to honing a skill that he knows he needs to stay alive and do his job. And he’s not the only one.
By day, my coach is a law enforcement training officer. One of his current crop of recruits is pursuing her dream to become a police officer, but has been challenged by severe dyslexia combined with additional vision problems. She’s been working especially hard in training these past few months, including extra one-on-one training and spending hours of her own time practicing and visualizing. Last week, she made a breakthrough and jumped from the back of the class to the top. Because she didn’t give up, even when others were ready to suggest that she could do good for her community in other roles.
But many of us don’t need to practice shooting for our professions. While we might be interested in self-defense applications, a lot of us are ultimately out on the range for fun. Safety is always first, and competition is called that for a reason – wanting to win is a thing, and not a bad one. It’s not the only thing, however, and that common attitude leads to some of the greatest acts of individual generosity I’ve seen anywhere.
For instance, shooters have raised thousands and more for various causes close to our hearts. From the Salute to Valor 3 gun match that raised more than thirty thousand dollars for a selection of charities benefitting veterans across the United States to the many clubs that annually run food and toy drives for local families, shooters have formed a community that takes care of its own and others.
Shooters give on an even more micro level too. When I had an unexpected several-day layover in Los Angeles trying to get home in the middle of a snowstorm, a friend told me, “I’ve got friends down there! Let me ask them what you should do…” I had barely found a last-minute hotel for my stay by the time enough volunteers and gear had been offered to outfit both me and my husband to shoot a match the next day. What could have been a miserable few days in an airport hotel turned out to be more fun than I could have imagined.
One of the best parts of that side trip was following it up a few weeks later with an intended trip west to shoot Phoenix Handgunner, at the invitation of my friends Jaci and Jess. They put me up, fed me, and made me feel completely at home even though I knew about four people there (and they were half of them) and had never shot that match format before.
I was reminded of my earlier trips to A Girl and a Gun Club’s national conference with my friend Tracy, who also picked me up from the airport, drove me all over, and helped me navigate a whole new crowd and event. While I enjoyed meeting and spending time with other friends, new and old, during those events, those trips were particularly special to me because of those I spent the most time with.
The shenanigans I have with my shooting girlfriends are fun, but even better is how those trips are only crystallized moments of the support we provide to each other whether as shooters working to improve our skills, as women navigating a male-dominated industry, or in our lives off the range.
Most of my friends growing up were boys and like many of you, my circle shrank as I got older. In the gun community, I found not just men I’m proud to call friends, but women with whom I could form an instant bond. It’s not just that I’ve found friends with a common hobby, it’s all of the other things I’ve talked about this evening. I’m delighted to have discovered these confident, competent, thoughtful women with a take-no-prisoners attitude towards life. Like I said, it’s not all puppies and ice cream, but these gems are what makes it all worthwhile.
Every girl should learn how to shoot. She’ll get to meet some really cool people and make some lifelong friends.
Thank you for being another step on my journey, and I hope I’ve brought you some inspiration for your own. I know many of you have already started shooting but if you haven’t, I hear there are some good folks to learn from around here. And as you start putting more rounds downrange, I hope you, too, discover for yourself why every girl should learn how to shoot.
Every Girl Should Learn How to Shoot - Part 3 of 4
Read part 1 and part 2 first if you haven't already.
The complicated web of laws and rules relating to carry, the heavy responsibility of choosing a potentially lethal self-defense tool, the difficulty in finding a gun to carry, figuring out how to carry and conceal it, and getting confident enough to shoot it well were almost enough to make me swear off concealed carry. After all, I got into guns for fun and I thought I lived a pretty sheltered and secure life.
But much as I thought I could avoid “bad places” and “bad people”, it became increasingly clear to me that I could not always avoid them. During this time in my life, I worked in downtown Philadelphia at a job where leaving at 6 or 6:30 in the evening was considered early. Parking in that particular part of town was pretty slim, and the best option I could reliably use was about four blocks away, through an area that on one side more or less shut down in the evenings and on the other side hosted quite a bit of Philly's night life. The neighborhood was pretty good, but not unknown for muggings and other attacks. My employer was not large enough to offer escorts to parking. Oh, and I was taking night classes in North Philly.
You can easily see I’m not exactly in prime physical shape to fight off a larger, more physical attacker. What you can’t see are the many old injuries that I was still rehabbing and that made it difficult for me to run, not to mention the knee I blew right about that time.
I had a hard time getting that job, and I thought finishing my masters’ degree could help me find a better one but until then, I was stuck. And I knew that all of the ninja hand-to-hand skills in the world wouldn’t do much against someone larger and stronger than me. Maybe my safe lifestyle wasn’t and couldn’t be as safe as I thought.
And maybe that little weekend hobby of mine really was the answer, especially since my employer was too small to even think about a gun policy. I knew I’d feel silly if I knew how to shoot and didn’t have a gun when I needed one, but now I started feeling like I really might need one. I figured that as difficult as getting comfortable with the laws and rules were, I was a smart cookie. I’d passed the bar. I could figure it out.
As for knowing someone might die because of my self-defense choices? It’s not something I look forward to, but I’ve come to believe that if I were involved in a fight with one winner, I’d want to do whatever it takes to come out on top. I’ve worked too hard to be who and what I am to let some criminal take that away from me. Victim selection is on them, not me. Consequences are on them, not me.
So all that was left was figuring out what to carry and how. Back then, there weren’t as many tiny guns on the market and I didn’t think I could conceal anything “big”, so I bought myself a cute little Kahr. A heavy leather gun belt and a long wait for a custom holster later, I had myself six rounds in a slim package, but very little knowledge in how to use it.
I mentioned earlier this evening that I took some basic classes early in my shooting career. That thankfully included some beginner defensive pistol instruction, where I learned how to safely draw a concealed gun from a holster, how to shoot around walls, how to shoot while moving, all sorts of cool stuff.
It didn’t take me very long, though, to realize that learning them once wasn’t a good way to know how to use those skills if I really needed them. Since the range we went to back then didn’t allow “action” shooting, I knew I had to find some way to practice.
One way I found was to take more classes. Even if they covered material I’d gotten from another instructor, hearing it over and over helped, not to mention all of the supervised shooting with immediate feedback. I still take a class or two every year to tune up my shooting and review and expand my related knowledge.
I also learned back then about the concept of dry fire, or practicing safely without live ammunition. At first, I used it just to learn how to run my gun: rack the slide, lock it back, insert magazines, things like that. A far cry from what my dry fire routine looks like these days, but it was the first step on the journey that’s taken me from barely able to hit the target to hammering up to six accurate, close-up shots in under a second...
...then having fun with pistol targets fifty yards away.
And finally, I learned about the wide world of competitive shooting. There, I could do all of the things I was learning in classes or might need to know for self-defense. It wasn’t really “practice” in that I could do the same thing over and over again until I perfected it, but it was something close and came with some real pressure.
While a match is just a game, your shooting is timed and scored, and there will often be people watching you. The results aren’t really important in the grand scheme of things and most of the audience is full of well-wishers, but they still add a little extra edge. And I won’t lie, I’m a little competitive. Having some numbers I could improve and some people to try to beat certainly helped drive my improvement.
It didn’t take long for competitive shooting, especially the action pistol sports, to become my passion and to change the course of my life. In the last few years, I’ve called competitive shooting and everything I did around it a second job, but it wasn’t really work. I loved everything about it: the people, the events, the gear, the practice.
I’ve been fortunate to meet some of my closest friends through the gun world, and have had the amazing opportunity to represent companies from as big as SIG Sauer and Lucas Oil to as small as PHLster and my local gun store, King Shooters Supply, as a sponsored shooter. I spend most weekends shooting or at a gun-related event, like this one, so much so that I actually quit my day job to develop and run a new indoor range near my home. It’s a scary ride so far, but I’m already much happier than I was in my prior career.
Every girl should learn how to shoot. In the process of learning to protect herself, she might also find herself.
The complicated web of laws and rules relating to carry, the heavy responsibility of choosing a potentially lethal self-defense tool, the difficulty in finding a gun to carry, figuring out how to carry and conceal it, and getting confident enough to shoot it well were almost enough to make me swear off concealed carry. After all, I got into guns for fun and I thought I lived a pretty sheltered and secure life.
But much as I thought I could avoid “bad places” and “bad people”, it became increasingly clear to me that I could not always avoid them. During this time in my life, I worked in downtown Philadelphia at a job where leaving at 6 or 6:30 in the evening was considered early. Parking in that particular part of town was pretty slim, and the best option I could reliably use was about four blocks away, through an area that on one side more or less shut down in the evenings and on the other side hosted quite a bit of Philly's night life. The neighborhood was pretty good, but not unknown for muggings and other attacks. My employer was not large enough to offer escorts to parking. Oh, and I was taking night classes in North Philly.
You can easily see I’m not exactly in prime physical shape to fight off a larger, more physical attacker. What you can’t see are the many old injuries that I was still rehabbing and that made it difficult for me to run, not to mention the knee I blew right about that time.
I had a hard time getting that job, and I thought finishing my masters’ degree could help me find a better one but until then, I was stuck. And I knew that all of the ninja hand-to-hand skills in the world wouldn’t do much against someone larger and stronger than me. Maybe my safe lifestyle wasn’t and couldn’t be as safe as I thought.
And maybe that little weekend hobby of mine really was the answer, especially since my employer was too small to even think about a gun policy. I knew I’d feel silly if I knew how to shoot and didn’t have a gun when I needed one, but now I started feeling like I really might need one. I figured that as difficult as getting comfortable with the laws and rules were, I was a smart cookie. I’d passed the bar. I could figure it out.
As for knowing someone might die because of my self-defense choices? It’s not something I look forward to, but I’ve come to believe that if I were involved in a fight with one winner, I’d want to do whatever it takes to come out on top. I’ve worked too hard to be who and what I am to let some criminal take that away from me. Victim selection is on them, not me. Consequences are on them, not me.
So all that was left was figuring out what to carry and how. Back then, there weren’t as many tiny guns on the market and I didn’t think I could conceal anything “big”, so I bought myself a cute little Kahr. A heavy leather gun belt and a long wait for a custom holster later, I had myself six rounds in a slim package, but very little knowledge in how to use it.
I mentioned earlier this evening that I took some basic classes early in my shooting career. That thankfully included some beginner defensive pistol instruction, where I learned how to safely draw a concealed gun from a holster, how to shoot around walls, how to shoot while moving, all sorts of cool stuff.
It didn’t take me very long, though, to realize that learning them once wasn’t a good way to know how to use those skills if I really needed them. Since the range we went to back then didn’t allow “action” shooting, I knew I had to find some way to practice.
One way I found was to take more classes. Even if they covered material I’d gotten from another instructor, hearing it over and over helped, not to mention all of the supervised shooting with immediate feedback. I still take a class or two every year to tune up my shooting and review and expand my related knowledge.
I also learned back then about the concept of dry fire, or practicing safely without live ammunition. At first, I used it just to learn how to run my gun: rack the slide, lock it back, insert magazines, things like that. A far cry from what my dry fire routine looks like these days, but it was the first step on the journey that’s taken me from barely able to hit the target to hammering up to six accurate, close-up shots in under a second...
...then having fun with pistol targets fifty yards away.
And finally, I learned about the wide world of competitive shooting. There, I could do all of the things I was learning in classes or might need to know for self-defense. It wasn’t really “practice” in that I could do the same thing over and over again until I perfected it, but it was something close and came with some real pressure.
While a match is just a game, your shooting is timed and scored, and there will often be people watching you. The results aren’t really important in the grand scheme of things and most of the audience is full of well-wishers, but they still add a little extra edge. And I won’t lie, I’m a little competitive. Having some numbers I could improve and some people to try to beat certainly helped drive my improvement.
It didn’t take long for competitive shooting, especially the action pistol sports, to become my passion and to change the course of my life. In the last few years, I’ve called competitive shooting and everything I did around it a second job, but it wasn’t really work. I loved everything about it: the people, the events, the gear, the practice.
I’ve been fortunate to meet some of my closest friends through the gun world, and have had the amazing opportunity to represent companies from as big as SIG Sauer and Lucas Oil to as small as PHLster and my local gun store, King Shooters Supply, as a sponsored shooter. I spend most weekends shooting or at a gun-related event, like this one, so much so that I actually quit my day job to develop and run a new indoor range near my home. It’s a scary ride so far, but I’m already much happier than I was in my prior career.
Every girl should learn how to shoot. In the process of learning to protect herself, she might also find herself.
Read on for part 4...
Every Girl Should Learn How to Shoot - Part 2 of 4
Read part 1 first if you haven't already.
As shooting became a more serious hobby, I became increasingly aware of the legal and political implications of my new weekend activity.
Although I was having so much fun shooting, I had to be discreet about gun ownership at work and among friends. Guns were, are, polarizing and have only become increasingly so in this post-Sandy Hook, post-Virginia Tech, post-Aurora, post-Orlando world. They are viewed by many as instruments of death and destruction, as weapons for murderers and terrorists.
Remember how I said I didn’t grow up with guns? Well, I did grow up in a community where guns were simply unremarkable. We knew enough hunters that venison wasn’t unusual, and there were definitely kids out of school on the first day of deer season. I’m sure we had friends or neighbors that owned guns, but nobody talked about them not out of shame, but because guns just weren’t really a topic of conversation in my semi-rural western New York world.
Then when I did start shooting, I was fresh out of the bubble that was studying for the bar exam, days in which I interacted with video lectures, workbooks, brownie sundaes, and sometimes even my husband. I was a little rusty at remembering what normal people were like, people who weren’t immersed in memorizing arcane facts and applying merciless logic all day. It just never occurred to me in the beginning that guns might be difficult or controversial.
I learned quickly.
See, I live near a state border and while the range we shot at was in the same state I lived in, the fast route was to go through another state and the convenient route for a little dinner or shopping after shooting was also through that state. If you’re familiar at all with traveling with guns, you can already spot the potential problems.
In my home state, I can only travel directly between home and range unless I have a license to carry firearms. That definitely means no dinner stops or errand-running after shooting a few boxes of ammo, but fortunately, the license is relatively easy to get. It does take some processing time and they called my references, but Pennsylvania is a “shall-issue” state, so if you can buy a gun you’re almost certainly going to be able to get the license too. That solved the “dinner and a lane rental” problem if I stayed on my side of the state line, but not the “shooting after shopping” problem if I wanted to head next door.
We don’t exactly have border crossings between PA and Delaware and my home and the range I shot at back then were both close to the line, so it’s easy to accidentally an interstate trip if you make a wrong turn, even if it wasn’t faster for me to go through Delaware and back to PA. I could legally do that if I locked up guns in the trunk and didn’t stop but hello? Shopping? I still liked it back then.
With my Pennsylvania permit, I could leave guns in the car all I liked as long as I stayed in PA, and only had to worry about my own comfort level with how well secured they were. Delaware, however, doesn’t recognize Pennsylvania licenses, and is a “may-issue” state and you might not be approved for a license even after publishing your name in newspaper notices. [Note: As of this posting, Delaware no longer allows any non-resident to receive a permit in any case.] The only other option was to find yet another state’s non-resident permit that would be accepted by Delaware.
That was the moment I realized how hard it could get to be a law-abiding gun owner.
And I hadn’t even gotten into thinking about using a gun for self-defense yet. I just wanted to be able to toss my .22 in the trunk and stop at the range after a trip to Home Depot. Law school hadn’t prepared me for the complexities of non-reciprocal licensing since in most every other area I’d studied, laws were generally either consistent across most of the US or could be bucketed into two or three variations. While there is a federal law that covers traveling between states, the details of staying legal once you’ve stopped somewhere can be drastically different from place to place.
And then I decided that if I knew how to point a gun and make a bullet hole appear where I wanted it to, I would feel kind of silly not being able to apply that skill in self-defense. And if I thought I was prepared to shoot someone in self-defense, then I would definitely feel silly if I didn’t actually have a gun with me if the need arose. Learning the technical part of carrying a gun, drawing from concealment, and all that was one thing….but learning all of the laws and all of their nuances? That definitely put the “Esquire” after my name to work because I sure didn’t want to become a criminal defendant.
Somewhere between trying to understand how a magazine in the same bag as a pistol made the gun loaded by law and why that really cute and easily handled short-barrel rifle I admired was classified as a restricted weapon, I began to appreciate the Second Amendment movement. It was a surprise to me, since I had never before considered myself political in any way, but the more I learned, the more I realized that a lot of the current laws, let alone at-the-time old ones like the federal Assault Weapons Ban really did more to trip up people who wanted to stay legal than anyone else.
I mean, if I found it difficult to untangle firearms regulations with a law degree, what was it like for everyone else?
Every girl should learn how to shoot. It will teach her that doing the right and legal thing isn’t always as easy as it looks, and that “common sense and common morality” aren’t always so obvious or correct.
As shooting became a more serious hobby, I became increasingly aware of the legal and political implications of my new weekend activity.
Although I was having so much fun shooting, I had to be discreet about gun ownership at work and among friends. Guns were, are, polarizing and have only become increasingly so in this post-Sandy Hook, post-Virginia Tech, post-Aurora, post-Orlando world. They are viewed by many as instruments of death and destruction, as weapons for murderers and terrorists.
Remember how I said I didn’t grow up with guns? Well, I did grow up in a community where guns were simply unremarkable. We knew enough hunters that venison wasn’t unusual, and there were definitely kids out of school on the first day of deer season. I’m sure we had friends or neighbors that owned guns, but nobody talked about them not out of shame, but because guns just weren’t really a topic of conversation in my semi-rural western New York world.
Then when I did start shooting, I was fresh out of the bubble that was studying for the bar exam, days in which I interacted with video lectures, workbooks, brownie sundaes, and sometimes even my husband. I was a little rusty at remembering what normal people were like, people who weren’t immersed in memorizing arcane facts and applying merciless logic all day. It just never occurred to me in the beginning that guns might be difficult or controversial.
I learned quickly.
See, I live near a state border and while the range we shot at was in the same state I lived in, the fast route was to go through another state and the convenient route for a little dinner or shopping after shooting was also through that state. If you’re familiar at all with traveling with guns, you can already spot the potential problems.
In my home state, I can only travel directly between home and range unless I have a license to carry firearms. That definitely means no dinner stops or errand-running after shooting a few boxes of ammo, but fortunately, the license is relatively easy to get. It does take some processing time and they called my references, but Pennsylvania is a “shall-issue” state, so if you can buy a gun you’re almost certainly going to be able to get the license too. That solved the “dinner and a lane rental” problem if I stayed on my side of the state line, but not the “shooting after shopping” problem if I wanted to head next door.
We don’t exactly have border crossings between PA and Delaware and my home and the range I shot at back then were both close to the line, so it’s easy to accidentally an interstate trip if you make a wrong turn, even if it wasn’t faster for me to go through Delaware and back to PA. I could legally do that if I locked up guns in the trunk and didn’t stop but hello? Shopping? I still liked it back then.
With my Pennsylvania permit, I could leave guns in the car all I liked as long as I stayed in PA, and only had to worry about my own comfort level with how well secured they were. Delaware, however, doesn’t recognize Pennsylvania licenses, and is a “may-issue” state and you might not be approved for a license even after publishing your name in newspaper notices. [Note: As of this posting, Delaware no longer allows any non-resident to receive a permit in any case.] The only other option was to find yet another state’s non-resident permit that would be accepted by Delaware.
That was the moment I realized how hard it could get to be a law-abiding gun owner.
And I hadn’t even gotten into thinking about using a gun for self-defense yet. I just wanted to be able to toss my .22 in the trunk and stop at the range after a trip to Home Depot. Law school hadn’t prepared me for the complexities of non-reciprocal licensing since in most every other area I’d studied, laws were generally either consistent across most of the US or could be bucketed into two or three variations. While there is a federal law that covers traveling between states, the details of staying legal once you’ve stopped somewhere can be drastically different from place to place.
And then I decided that if I knew how to point a gun and make a bullet hole appear where I wanted it to, I would feel kind of silly not being able to apply that skill in self-defense. And if I thought I was prepared to shoot someone in self-defense, then I would definitely feel silly if I didn’t actually have a gun with me if the need arose. Learning the technical part of carrying a gun, drawing from concealment, and all that was one thing….but learning all of the laws and all of their nuances? That definitely put the “Esquire” after my name to work because I sure didn’t want to become a criminal defendant.
Somewhere between trying to understand how a magazine in the same bag as a pistol made the gun loaded by law and why that really cute and easily handled short-barrel rifle I admired was classified as a restricted weapon, I began to appreciate the Second Amendment movement. It was a surprise to me, since I had never before considered myself political in any way, but the more I learned, the more I realized that a lot of the current laws, let alone at-the-time old ones like the federal Assault Weapons Ban really did more to trip up people who wanted to stay legal than anyone else.
I mean, if I found it difficult to untangle firearms regulations with a law degree, what was it like for everyone else?
Every girl should learn how to shoot. It will teach her that doing the right and legal thing isn’t always as easy as it looks, and that “common sense and common morality” aren’t always so obvious or correct.
Every Girl Should Learn How to Shoot - Part 1 of 4
In July, I was honored as the keynote speaker at the Women's Concealed Carry Fashion Show in Columbia County, NY. I went through my history as a shooter in order to figure out what I wanted to share with the audience, then realized that my journey was the story. And this is how my journey started:
Every girl should learn how to shoot.
That’s where I started my firearms journey almost ten years ago.
Guns weren’t forbidden by my parents when I was growing up, but they just weren’t a thing and I never prioritized opportunities to learn about them.
Still, I felt that shooting was the sort of life skill I needed, just like being able to change a flat on my car. Being a prime customer for road hazard insurance, I had to pick up on how to change a tire…though I’m definitely not ashamed to accept help and generally be useless on the side of the road as I was for both flat tires I’ve had this year.
That’s not where I ended up with guns.
When my husband, Mark, went to a local gun range with his coworkers as part of teambuilding activity, I remembered how much I’d wanted to learn how to shoot as a little girl, and a few weeks later, I shot a real gun for the first time, at an indoor range attached to a popular local gun store.
The gun store attached to the range seemed big and filled with all sorts of mysterious things. You could just walk up to the counter, hand over your ID and cash, pick a gun out of the rental case to shoot, and go right out onto the range. The range was loud and smoky and a little scary, and there were no instructors. I don’t remember much, except that I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing. After getting the gun loaded, pointing it downrange, and pulling the trigger the first time though?
I fell in love.
Tonight, I’d like to tell you the story of my firearms journey and share with you some of the lessons I’ve learned since I fired those first shots.
In the beginning, shooting was a way to spend time with my husband. We were newlyweds and since I wasn’t long out of school, we hadn’t yet settled into a mutual hobby…something fun we could do together.
Going to the range and shooting a box or two of ammo, followed by a meal or a little shopping, ended up being a perfect low-key date for the two of us, especially back when ammo was a lot cheaper!
We were self-taught back then, but once we started taking classes, we discovered how much there was to learn. And learn I did: basic pistol, defensive shooting, hunter safety, skeet shooting, tactical rifle, competitive shooting. You name it, I was game for it.
I discovered something about myself in those days. Even though I wasn’t very good at shooting, or very good at anything mechanical at all, I could learn. It didn’t come quickly or naturally to me, but I learned to clean my own guns, then maintain them, and now do my own armorer-level work. I do still send the complicated stuff to my gunsmith though!
And while I didn’t have too much trouble hitting paper at the range as a new shooter, I wasn’t quite so successful at anything more complicated.
That was from the beginning of my first full season of USPSA. I had already been shooting IDPA matches for years, and was about five years into gun ownership. I’m not kidding when I say I struggled.
It took a lot of training and a lot of practice, but that’s changed. Even though I used to come in last place all the time at my first competitive shooting matches, that’s no longer the case.
Since I started competing about six years ago, I’ve become a top competitor in my region. At local matches, it’s becoming normal for me to come in the top five or ten in my division and I’ve even won a time or two. In the last year, I’ve had four top-ten stage finishes in major matches. It’s not just my finishes, though: objective measures of my performance are going up. I’m faster and more accurate with a gun than I’ve ever been, and my numbers show it. While I’m not sure I could have found my gun in its holster in one second in the early days, I can now draw and fire an accurate round on target in less than that.
I don't tell you this to brag on my accomplishments, though I am pretty proud of them. I tell you because I was the worst shooter ever when I started and I got here by taking classes, practicing hard, and not losing faith that I could improve. You can get here too.
My improvement and increased confidence in competitive shooting isn’t all, though. I’m also far more confident with guns in all situations now, whether it’s carrying a gun wherever legally allowed, being the only girl in a class or a gun store, or shooting something I never have before.
For that matter, I’m more confident now period. Knowing that I could do all these things with a new and overwhelming tool like a gun helped make me more fearless in trying and mastering other new and overwhelming things.
After all, if I could learn how to operate and shoot guns, how could any home improvement puzzle be beyond me?
If I could travel solo to a new range and compete against people I’d never met before, how could any presentation at the office be scary?
If I could calmly handle an angry and unsafe shooter while acting as a range officer, what vendor or contractor could unsettle me?
Every girl should learn how to shoot. It’s one of the biggest confidence builders in the world, on the range and off.
Every girl should learn how to shoot.
That’s where I started my firearms journey almost ten years ago.
Guns weren’t forbidden by my parents when I was growing up, but they just weren’t a thing and I never prioritized opportunities to learn about them.
Still, I felt that shooting was the sort of life skill I needed, just like being able to change a flat on my car. Being a prime customer for road hazard insurance, I had to pick up on how to change a tire…though I’m definitely not ashamed to accept help and generally be useless on the side of the road as I was for both flat tires I’ve had this year.
That’s not where I ended up with guns.
When my husband, Mark, went to a local gun range with his coworkers as part of teambuilding activity, I remembered how much I’d wanted to learn how to shoot as a little girl, and a few weeks later, I shot a real gun for the first time, at an indoor range attached to a popular local gun store.
The gun store attached to the range seemed big and filled with all sorts of mysterious things. You could just walk up to the counter, hand over your ID and cash, pick a gun out of the rental case to shoot, and go right out onto the range. The range was loud and smoky and a little scary, and there were no instructors. I don’t remember much, except that I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing. After getting the gun loaded, pointing it downrange, and pulling the trigger the first time though?
I fell in love.
Tonight, I’d like to tell you the story of my firearms journey and share with you some of the lessons I’ve learned since I fired those first shots.
In the beginning, shooting was a way to spend time with my husband. We were newlyweds and since I wasn’t long out of school, we hadn’t yet settled into a mutual hobby…something fun we could do together.
Going to the range and shooting a box or two of ammo, followed by a meal or a little shopping, ended up being a perfect low-key date for the two of us, especially back when ammo was a lot cheaper!
We were self-taught back then, but once we started taking classes, we discovered how much there was to learn. And learn I did: basic pistol, defensive shooting, hunter safety, skeet shooting, tactical rifle, competitive shooting. You name it, I was game for it.
I discovered something about myself in those days. Even though I wasn’t very good at shooting, or very good at anything mechanical at all, I could learn. It didn’t come quickly or naturally to me, but I learned to clean my own guns, then maintain them, and now do my own armorer-level work. I do still send the complicated stuff to my gunsmith though!
And while I didn’t have too much trouble hitting paper at the range as a new shooter, I wasn’t quite so successful at anything more complicated.
That was from the beginning of my first full season of USPSA. I had already been shooting IDPA matches for years, and was about five years into gun ownership. I’m not kidding when I say I struggled.
It took a lot of training and a lot of practice, but that’s changed. Even though I used to come in last place all the time at my first competitive shooting matches, that’s no longer the case.
Since I started competing about six years ago, I’ve become a top competitor in my region. At local matches, it’s becoming normal for me to come in the top five or ten in my division and I’ve even won a time or two. In the last year, I’ve had four top-ten stage finishes in major matches. It’s not just my finishes, though: objective measures of my performance are going up. I’m faster and more accurate with a gun than I’ve ever been, and my numbers show it. While I’m not sure I could have found my gun in its holster in one second in the early days, I can now draw and fire an accurate round on target in less than that.
I don't tell you this to brag on my accomplishments, though I am pretty proud of them. I tell you because I was the worst shooter ever when I started and I got here by taking classes, practicing hard, and not losing faith that I could improve. You can get here too.
My improvement and increased confidence in competitive shooting isn’t all, though. I’m also far more confident with guns in all situations now, whether it’s carrying a gun wherever legally allowed, being the only girl in a class or a gun store, or shooting something I never have before.
For that matter, I’m more confident now period. Knowing that I could do all these things with a new and overwhelming tool like a gun helped make me more fearless in trying and mastering other new and overwhelming things.
After all, if I could learn how to operate and shoot guns, how could any home improvement puzzle be beyond me?
If I could travel solo to a new range and compete against people I’d never met before, how could any presentation at the office be scary?
If I could calmly handle an angry and unsafe shooter while acting as a range officer, what vendor or contractor could unsettle me?
Every girl should learn how to shoot. It’s one of the biggest confidence builders in the world, on the range and off.
05 May 2016
Things I Learned in Gun School - Advanced Competition Pistol with Op Spec Training
One of the most transformative experiences in my shooting career was taking Practical Fundamentals with Operation Specific Training. I’ve been fortunate to have been part of some really excellent classes over the years, but the lightbulbs that clicked on for me in Practical Fundamentals changed the most basic ways in which I thought about the problem of shooting a pistol well: trigger management. Other classes taught me a lot about how to address the more macro problems in practical shooting and gave me a strong grounding in the sport, but Practical Fundamentals addressed some of the micro problems that were preventing me from advancing no matter how much work I put in.
Recently, I was able to follow Practical Fundamentals up with an Advanced Competition Pistol class taught by Bruce Gray, also through Op Spec Training. Bruce and the Op Spec crew are friends and sponsors of mine, but that wasn’t what led me to take these classes. In fact, it was the other way around. In my pursuit for excellence in marksmanship, I’ve been doing my best to hang around the best and have been fortunate to become friends with many of them.
Advanced classes are always a tricky topic: what makes them "advanced"? I consider being really good at shooting as essentially being able to perform the fundamentals more consistently under more pressure. This class was “advanced”, then, in that it assumed a grasp of fundamental trigger control and instead of spending the time solidifying what great trigger management looks like in isolation, it explored the application of time, distance, and other performance pressures both from a psychological standpoint and a practical perspective.
There is a great deal of sports literature that discusses how the conscious and subconscious mind influences performances. The classic work is With Winning in Mind by Lanny Bassham, an Olympic Gold Medalist in International Rifle. I’m partial to The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey, actually recommended to me by Bruce himself. Essentially, the theory is that after a certain amount of training, a person’s subconscious mind is able to perform to a high standard, but that the intrusion of conscious thought and concern gets in the way of that performance.
Many strategies have been put forth on how to train the conscious mind or otherwise encourage it to be less interested in attempting to control physical performance. Some of them are purely cerebral in the sense of beliefs to be internalized. Some are more practical in how they direct specific physical actions or conditions to focus on. We covered both types in Advanced Competition Pistol.
On the mental “brain” game side, we spent quite a bit of time discussing concepts like faith, attention to process, and the tension between being reactive and proactive.
When I’m behind a gun at a match or otherwise ‘when it matters’, I, like many shooters, start doubting my ability to be as good as I want to be. I start literally grabbing at every little thing I think might help me be faster or more accurate and try to make sure right away that I’ve done what I needed to so that I can fix it right then if not. The results are somewhat predictable: I’m slower and less accurate as I try harder and harder.
In class, this problem was identified as a lack of faith: faith that my sight picture and alignment is acceptable, faith that my ability to press a trigger and handle a gun is sufficient…probably about the only faith I don’t completely lack is faith that my gun will perform. Naming a problem is a good start to fixing it, fortunately, and for the particular areas that I doubt the most, rounds downrange is one of best ways to internalize that I am and have enough. I got plenty of both with this class.
While I don’t generally believe that extremely high round count practice is a very productive way to spend time and ammunition, it ended up being useful for me when paired specifically with the concept of solidifying my faith in my shooting skills and some of the physical techniques that can help maintain that faith, like the ones I’ll talk about a little later. After repetitively shooting difficult drills not just successfully, but in a state of mind where I was able to identify imperfections from behind the gun, I now know much more innately that I am enough, that I have enough skill to meet my goals.
My self-images are beginning to merge now, so that what I know about how others see me, with all of my flaws and my potential, the “me” I secretly and not-so-secretly aspire to, and the imperfect but improving individual I see in the mirror are starting to look more and more alike. That’s a direct result of beginning the process of getting more directly on the path of giving my conscious mind faith in the ability of my unconscious competence.
Part of creating that bridge of faith is focusing on process. Instead of trying to directly mash together who I am and who I want to be, keying on to doing the work and really staying on that bridge, rather than looking behind or ahead, is really important. Staying engaged in process is one of the most reliable ways to keep the conscious mind busy without interfering with the subconscious. Therefore, we spent quite a bit of time in class speaking to what the process of shooting really looks like and what fundamental elements to concentrate on.
Another part is to make the shift from shooting reactively to shooting proactively. In other words, instead of acting out of fear, anxiety, or worry (about missing, or otherwise screwing up), and allowing yourself to feel tense or rushed, you take a leap off the cliff of proactivity and attack the shooting problem. It’s a little terrifying in the same way that crowdsurfing or riding a rollercoaster can be, but it’s also exhilarating, fun, even joyful to let go and allow yourself to fly and trust that you will land safely. It’s really hard, especially for us overthinking, analytical, risk-averse types. But oh, it’s so beautiful when you do.
On the more practical, physical side, we worked on visual patience and were led to what Bruce considers the universal answer: prep harder. Range exercises including the bump drill, dot drills, Bill and Triple Bill drills, transition drills, and strings of steel targets.
In Bruce’s paradigm, there are two fundamentals of pistol shooting: trigger control and sight alignment, with trigger being paramount. Other elements of technique like grip and stance are adjuncts to making it possible to perform these fundamentals more consistently and perfectly.
Good trigger control is the ability to press the trigger to the rear without disturbing the sights. Seems simple when put that way, but there is a lot that can get in the way of being able to do so successfully. As I already said, the answer is to “prep harder”, but what does that mean?
The concept of prepping a trigger is to exert ever-increasing pressure on the trigger to the pressure wall, to and through the point it breaks and the shot fires. Ideally, no more pressure is used than the minimum necessary to move through the break, and as a function of recoil after following through completely, the finger releases past the trigger’s reset point then begins to exert that pressure again with the goal of being up against the wall by the time the sights have settled. The bump drill, where the shooter ‘bumps’ against the trigger with repeated presses on the trigger that increase in weight minutely each time until the gun fires, is an important tool to learn this skill.
Prepping harder means continuing to increase pressure on the trigger at the wall, an intensely process-oriented technique that is focused on the preparation to fire the gun rather than the end goal of actually firing. The physical feeling of prepping the trigger is part of what anchors the conscious mind and busies it from distracting from subconscious performance.
For me, continuing to prep and prep and prep is what I need to do in order to avoid the most common flaw in my trigger control, which is mashing at the trigger and trying to make the gun fire as soon as I see what I perceive as a good sight picture. That particular strategy doesn’t work very well because it almost inevitably results in a trigger press that paradoxically disturbs the sights enough to send the bullet away from its intended point of impact. Instead, if I just prep harder as I see what I need to see, and have faith in the process of prepping, then my shot lands where I wanted it to go.
The question then, is how I as the shooter can know that I’ve seen what I need to see and can trust that what I’ve seen is enough – that is, how can I develop visual patience?
The first step is to consider the boundaries of what must be seen and processed in order to successfully shoot the intended target zone. How steady does the sight picture need to be? How well do the sights need to be aligned with each other and with the target?
No human can hold a gun perfectly still. There is always some degree of wobble, but with a good grip and stance, that wobble is relatively small as compared to the size of most targets, even targets we might perceive as “far” or “hard”. Instead of looking for perfection, the shooter must accept the wobble and understand that the singular micro-moment of perfection is a misconception.
Trying to “catch” that moment is a major cause of degraded trigger control. Instead, the shooter needs to have faith (there’s that word again) in the wobble and in the fact that excellent trigger control through the wobble will result in the shot landing at the point of aim. Here again, the answer to the wobble is “prep harder”.
The need to trust the wobble and the ability of the prep to result in the desired shot was illustrated in class by shooting a dot drill with a number of tiny dots shot in sequence from just a few yards away. The dots were small enough that the sights felt like they were wandering on and off them all the time. But prepping harder resulted in holes punching through the dots time after time. The principle is applicable to larger targets further away that appear the same as those tiny dots behind the sights. I didn’t find it extremely difficult to shoot the tiny dots up close, and doing so not long before shooting 30+ yard plates that looked the same helped drive home the fact that if I can shoot small groups up close (and I can!), then I can shoot anything I can see.
The extension of the wobble is the idea of how much a shooter needs to let the sights settle after firing one shot or after moving into position, before firing the next shot. The temptation for me has always been to get another really solid, stable, perfect sight picture again. But if my sights have slowed down enough to be within what I would have considered part of the wobble zone normally, then that should be enough for me to continue prepping the trigger harder and allowing the shot to fire. I don’t need to wait. Shooting Bill drills and other drills that put a lot of shots on a target were used in class to illustrate that if the sights were observed with acceptable alignment and placement, then shots can be fired as fast as the shooter can continue prepping the trigger.
I’ve known from other classes and other drills that the ideal “equal height, equal light” sight alignment is not actually necessary for close-up, wide-open targets so long as there is some definable relationship between the front sight and the rear sight notch. I’ve even known intellectually that “close-up” and “wide-open” are elastic terms with meanings that change between shooters and under different circumstances. What I’ve been struggling with is how to expand my definitions so that I become less concerned with waiting for perfect sight alignment before I fire a shot.
Similarly, I know that my P320 is mechanically capable of shooting ridiculously small groups. Even if my aim is a bit off, the gun’s ability to maintain tight groups means I have quite a bit of forgiveness to still land a shot where I need to on most targets because I can rely on the gun to not throw the shot wild. Combined with the fact that Bruce reminded us of this weekend – that our trained subconscious knows how to put the sights where they need to go on the target – I should trust my body’s ability to know when my sights are in the right place.
This spot is where I need to sidetrack into another area I've been working on for the last few months with Yong Lee: the concept of target focus. Traditionally, marksmanship is taught with a hard visual focus on the front sight of a pistol, leaving the rear sight and the target itself a blur. The theory behind target focus is that the target should be the clearest to the eye while the front and rear sights are blurs to be referenced for alignment and to confirm that the gun is correctly aimed at the target. Among other benefits, I’ve found that target focus has allowed me to accept less perfection in my sights because I’m not trying to make my front sight look perfect.
Part of learning target focus for me has included significant dry fire time practicing getting my gun and sights up to a specific spot on the target. I do so with target focus, and since I have time in dry fire, can confirm by focusing on my front sight to make sure everything is lined up like I’m used to with front sight focus. Through this conscious process, I’ve been able to train my body to put my sights in exactly the right place every time.
By applying the target focus skills I’ve been working so hard in dry fire with the live fire exercises in Advanced Competition Pistol, I was able to make the transition to believing that my subconscious had learned what I was trying to teach it. In drills requiring reloads or transitions between targets, using target focus to observe my targets and my sight-blurs, and deciding to trust my subconscious to know when the blurs were lined up, I was able to shoot lots of Alphas and make lots of hits on steel. Live fire confirms dry fire, but it’s rarely been so dramatic for me.
I return full circle now to the concept of visual patience, the idea of waiting until the sights have given us acceptable feedback before we fire the next shot. The obvious prerequisite is that the shooter has to actually watch the sights. Along with giving attention to the feel of prepping the trigger, proactive engagement in observing the sights keeps the conscious mind from interfering with the subconscious mind that knows how to perform and allows the conscious mind to feed the necessary input into the subconscious mind so that it knows what to perform. It’s important not to try to direct what is seen but rather to simply see what the eyes pick up – a subtle, but vital, distinction that underlies visual patience.
When the subconscious is satisfied with what it observes both visually and by feel, then it will perform so long as there is no interference. Learning how to feed my subconscious and let it do its thing to solve the problem of marksmanship in the midst of increasingly complicated tasks, like 18-round, multiple target drills with reloads or ever-changing small steel stages (each with targets past 30 yards), and with the pressure of other students on the line at the same time or watching you…that’s what Advanced Competition Pistol brought me.
Recently, I was able to follow Practical Fundamentals up with an Advanced Competition Pistol class taught by Bruce Gray, also through Op Spec Training. Bruce and the Op Spec crew are friends and sponsors of mine, but that wasn’t what led me to take these classes. In fact, it was the other way around. In my pursuit for excellence in marksmanship, I’ve been doing my best to hang around the best and have been fortunate to become friends with many of them.
Advanced classes are always a tricky topic: what makes them "advanced"? I consider being really good at shooting as essentially being able to perform the fundamentals more consistently under more pressure. This class was “advanced”, then, in that it assumed a grasp of fundamental trigger control and instead of spending the time solidifying what great trigger management looks like in isolation, it explored the application of time, distance, and other performance pressures both from a psychological standpoint and a practical perspective.
There is a great deal of sports literature that discusses how the conscious and subconscious mind influences performances. The classic work is With Winning in Mind by Lanny Bassham, an Olympic Gold Medalist in International Rifle. I’m partial to The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey, actually recommended to me by Bruce himself. Essentially, the theory is that after a certain amount of training, a person’s subconscious mind is able to perform to a high standard, but that the intrusion of conscious thought and concern gets in the way of that performance.
Many strategies have been put forth on how to train the conscious mind or otherwise encourage it to be less interested in attempting to control physical performance. Some of them are purely cerebral in the sense of beliefs to be internalized. Some are more practical in how they direct specific physical actions or conditions to focus on. We covered both types in Advanced Competition Pistol.
On the mental “brain” game side, we spent quite a bit of time discussing concepts like faith, attention to process, and the tension between being reactive and proactive.
When I’m behind a gun at a match or otherwise ‘when it matters’, I, like many shooters, start doubting my ability to be as good as I want to be. I start literally grabbing at every little thing I think might help me be faster or more accurate and try to make sure right away that I’ve done what I needed to so that I can fix it right then if not. The results are somewhat predictable: I’m slower and less accurate as I try harder and harder.
In class, this problem was identified as a lack of faith: faith that my sight picture and alignment is acceptable, faith that my ability to press a trigger and handle a gun is sufficient…probably about the only faith I don’t completely lack is faith that my gun will perform. Naming a problem is a good start to fixing it, fortunately, and for the particular areas that I doubt the most, rounds downrange is one of best ways to internalize that I am and have enough. I got plenty of both with this class.
While I don’t generally believe that extremely high round count practice is a very productive way to spend time and ammunition, it ended up being useful for me when paired specifically with the concept of solidifying my faith in my shooting skills and some of the physical techniques that can help maintain that faith, like the ones I’ll talk about a little later. After repetitively shooting difficult drills not just successfully, but in a state of mind where I was able to identify imperfections from behind the gun, I now know much more innately that I am enough, that I have enough skill to meet my goals.
My self-images are beginning to merge now, so that what I know about how others see me, with all of my flaws and my potential, the “me” I secretly and not-so-secretly aspire to, and the imperfect but improving individual I see in the mirror are starting to look more and more alike. That’s a direct result of beginning the process of getting more directly on the path of giving my conscious mind faith in the ability of my unconscious competence.
Part of creating that bridge of faith is focusing on process. Instead of trying to directly mash together who I am and who I want to be, keying on to doing the work and really staying on that bridge, rather than looking behind or ahead, is really important. Staying engaged in process is one of the most reliable ways to keep the conscious mind busy without interfering with the subconscious. Therefore, we spent quite a bit of time in class speaking to what the process of shooting really looks like and what fundamental elements to concentrate on.
Another part is to make the shift from shooting reactively to shooting proactively. In other words, instead of acting out of fear, anxiety, or worry (about missing, or otherwise screwing up), and allowing yourself to feel tense or rushed, you take a leap off the cliff of proactivity and attack the shooting problem. It’s a little terrifying in the same way that crowdsurfing or riding a rollercoaster can be, but it’s also exhilarating, fun, even joyful to let go and allow yourself to fly and trust that you will land safely. It’s really hard, especially for us overthinking, analytical, risk-averse types. But oh, it’s so beautiful when you do.
On the more practical, physical side, we worked on visual patience and were led to what Bruce considers the universal answer: prep harder. Range exercises including the bump drill, dot drills, Bill and Triple Bill drills, transition drills, and strings of steel targets.
In Bruce’s paradigm, there are two fundamentals of pistol shooting: trigger control and sight alignment, with trigger being paramount. Other elements of technique like grip and stance are adjuncts to making it possible to perform these fundamentals more consistently and perfectly.
Good trigger control is the ability to press the trigger to the rear without disturbing the sights. Seems simple when put that way, but there is a lot that can get in the way of being able to do so successfully. As I already said, the answer is to “prep harder”, but what does that mean?
The concept of prepping a trigger is to exert ever-increasing pressure on the trigger to the pressure wall, to and through the point it breaks and the shot fires. Ideally, no more pressure is used than the minimum necessary to move through the break, and as a function of recoil after following through completely, the finger releases past the trigger’s reset point then begins to exert that pressure again with the goal of being up against the wall by the time the sights have settled. The bump drill, where the shooter ‘bumps’ against the trigger with repeated presses on the trigger that increase in weight minutely each time until the gun fires, is an important tool to learn this skill.
Prepping harder means continuing to increase pressure on the trigger at the wall, an intensely process-oriented technique that is focused on the preparation to fire the gun rather than the end goal of actually firing. The physical feeling of prepping the trigger is part of what anchors the conscious mind and busies it from distracting from subconscious performance.
For me, continuing to prep and prep and prep is what I need to do in order to avoid the most common flaw in my trigger control, which is mashing at the trigger and trying to make the gun fire as soon as I see what I perceive as a good sight picture. That particular strategy doesn’t work very well because it almost inevitably results in a trigger press that paradoxically disturbs the sights enough to send the bullet away from its intended point of impact. Instead, if I just prep harder as I see what I need to see, and have faith in the process of prepping, then my shot lands where I wanted it to go.
The question then, is how I as the shooter can know that I’ve seen what I need to see and can trust that what I’ve seen is enough – that is, how can I develop visual patience?
The first step is to consider the boundaries of what must be seen and processed in order to successfully shoot the intended target zone. How steady does the sight picture need to be? How well do the sights need to be aligned with each other and with the target?
No human can hold a gun perfectly still. There is always some degree of wobble, but with a good grip and stance, that wobble is relatively small as compared to the size of most targets, even targets we might perceive as “far” or “hard”. Instead of looking for perfection, the shooter must accept the wobble and understand that the singular micro-moment of perfection is a misconception.
Trying to “catch” that moment is a major cause of degraded trigger control. Instead, the shooter needs to have faith (there’s that word again) in the wobble and in the fact that excellent trigger control through the wobble will result in the shot landing at the point of aim. Here again, the answer to the wobble is “prep harder”.
The need to trust the wobble and the ability of the prep to result in the desired shot was illustrated in class by shooting a dot drill with a number of tiny dots shot in sequence from just a few yards away. The dots were small enough that the sights felt like they were wandering on and off them all the time. But prepping harder resulted in holes punching through the dots time after time. The principle is applicable to larger targets further away that appear the same as those tiny dots behind the sights. I didn’t find it extremely difficult to shoot the tiny dots up close, and doing so not long before shooting 30+ yard plates that looked the same helped drive home the fact that if I can shoot small groups up close (and I can!), then I can shoot anything I can see.
The extension of the wobble is the idea of how much a shooter needs to let the sights settle after firing one shot or after moving into position, before firing the next shot. The temptation for me has always been to get another really solid, stable, perfect sight picture again. But if my sights have slowed down enough to be within what I would have considered part of the wobble zone normally, then that should be enough for me to continue prepping the trigger harder and allowing the shot to fire. I don’t need to wait. Shooting Bill drills and other drills that put a lot of shots on a target were used in class to illustrate that if the sights were observed with acceptable alignment and placement, then shots can be fired as fast as the shooter can continue prepping the trigger.
I’ve known from other classes and other drills that the ideal “equal height, equal light” sight alignment is not actually necessary for close-up, wide-open targets so long as there is some definable relationship between the front sight and the rear sight notch. I’ve even known intellectually that “close-up” and “wide-open” are elastic terms with meanings that change between shooters and under different circumstances. What I’ve been struggling with is how to expand my definitions so that I become less concerned with waiting for perfect sight alignment before I fire a shot.
Similarly, I know that my P320 is mechanically capable of shooting ridiculously small groups. Even if my aim is a bit off, the gun’s ability to maintain tight groups means I have quite a bit of forgiveness to still land a shot where I need to on most targets because I can rely on the gun to not throw the shot wild. Combined with the fact that Bruce reminded us of this weekend – that our trained subconscious knows how to put the sights where they need to go on the target – I should trust my body’s ability to know when my sights are in the right place.
This spot is where I need to sidetrack into another area I've been working on for the last few months with Yong Lee: the concept of target focus. Traditionally, marksmanship is taught with a hard visual focus on the front sight of a pistol, leaving the rear sight and the target itself a blur. The theory behind target focus is that the target should be the clearest to the eye while the front and rear sights are blurs to be referenced for alignment and to confirm that the gun is correctly aimed at the target. Among other benefits, I’ve found that target focus has allowed me to accept less perfection in my sights because I’m not trying to make my front sight look perfect.
Part of learning target focus for me has included significant dry fire time practicing getting my gun and sights up to a specific spot on the target. I do so with target focus, and since I have time in dry fire, can confirm by focusing on my front sight to make sure everything is lined up like I’m used to with front sight focus. Through this conscious process, I’ve been able to train my body to put my sights in exactly the right place every time.
By applying the target focus skills I’ve been working so hard in dry fire with the live fire exercises in Advanced Competition Pistol, I was able to make the transition to believing that my subconscious had learned what I was trying to teach it. In drills requiring reloads or transitions between targets, using target focus to observe my targets and my sight-blurs, and deciding to trust my subconscious to know when the blurs were lined up, I was able to shoot lots of Alphas and make lots of hits on steel. Live fire confirms dry fire, but it’s rarely been so dramatic for me.
I return full circle now to the concept of visual patience, the idea of waiting until the sights have given us acceptable feedback before we fire the next shot. The obvious prerequisite is that the shooter has to actually watch the sights. Along with giving attention to the feel of prepping the trigger, proactive engagement in observing the sights keeps the conscious mind from interfering with the subconscious mind that knows how to perform and allows the conscious mind to feed the necessary input into the subconscious mind so that it knows what to perform. It’s important not to try to direct what is seen but rather to simply see what the eyes pick up – a subtle, but vital, distinction that underlies visual patience.
When the subconscious is satisfied with what it observes both visually and by feel, then it will perform so long as there is no interference. Learning how to feed my subconscious and let it do its thing to solve the problem of marksmanship in the midst of increasingly complicated tasks, like 18-round, multiple target drills with reloads or ever-changing small steel stages (each with targets past 30 yards), and with the pressure of other students on the line at the same time or watching you…that’s what Advanced Competition Pistol brought me.
19 March 2016
Why Women Shoot Slow - A Response
Over at Women Carry yesterday, my friend Tammy posted some theories about why women shoot slow...or at least slower than men. Women and their relative ability behind a gun is a topic I've been thinking about quite a bit as I work through my own journey to understand the craft of shooting. Many of the points Tammy brings up are correct in my experience, but I want to discuss them a bit from my perspective, which is as a competitive shooter in action shooting sports, namely USPSA.
Body mass and strength, particularly upper body strength, are undeniably an issue for most women. The ability to muscle down on recoil saves a lot of male shooters from terrible technique, such as yanking the trigger twice on a single sight picture. Generally speaking, smaller and weaker shooters (and sorry gals, as a genericized whole, we are) will pull that second shot right off even a close target but larger and stronger shooters will usually find that second shot somewhere on paper. With correct sight management technique and trigger control, taking two aimed shots is no slower and can even be faster while resulting in two hits in the A-zone or down-zero circle, but certainly much more finesse is required and the temptation to aim too hard is difficult to overcome. A two-fold problem for women getting faster then: the inability to muscle through bad technique and a greater need for a good technique that can lead to the temptation of slowing down.
As my mentor Bruce Gray reminds us, though, accuracy is not a necessary victim of speed. And I know from my own experience in learning how to more efficiently use the strength I do have and to trust in the development of superior technical skills, I can shoot very well from an accuracy perspective at splits that most any man would be happy with - down even into the sub-.20 range. As I've opened myself to truly observing as I shoot rather than trying to muscle or control my way through, I've been able to watch my sights staying within an A-zone through the entire recoil cycle from seven yards. And along with starting as an excruciatingly slow and not even all that accurate shooter, I'm still far (for now) from a top woman shooter. So it's possible for a not naturally talented, not large woman to learn how to shoot quickly and accurately with excellent recoil management. But it can take more thought and effort to get there.
What then? Are we women not pushers, not competitive enough? If so, why?
I have to admit, I find it difficult to identify the idea of not pushing and not being competitive, and most of my women friends inside and outside of shooting are the same. As a child, I went through stints of a string of sports including gymnastics, and was a classical musician for over ten years. Even when I drifted through more solitary athletic pursuits, I always chased better form, more difficult exercises. And in school, let's just say it wasn't just parental pressure that drove my course selections and grades. I was as guilty as anyone of choosing the occasional "Easy A" classes, but the A alone was never enough. Perhaps like attracts like, but I'm part of a large community of similarly high-performing women whether or not they are shooters.
In fact, I posit that some women are too competitive to enter the competition arena. Much like men who are unwilling to go to a match until they're "good enough" to not "embarrass themselves" (whatever that means to them), women also fall victim to the same fallacy. They just seem to find it harder to take the leap. When they do, I posit that they are then met with a confluence of factors that make it difficult for them to excel as shooters as opposed to as women shooters.
Women are welcomed with open arms into the competitive shooting community, which is no bad thing except when it becomes smothering. Kathy Jackson has written about The Parade of the Dancing Bears, and women can so easily become part of that parade at many ranges, as the welcoming committee is so impressed by a GIRL! Shooting a GUN! that any level of performance is praised as a job well done. I believe strongly that we rise to the level of our expectations, and if our expectations are influenced to accepting bare minimums…well, then, perhaps we as a shooting community, men and women, have created a class of shooters who believe that they’re good enough as they are. And perhaps that’s true, that how far they get is good enough and perhaps, even likely, is already better than many average gun owners. But if we’re talking about why women shoot slow, why they aren’t ‘as good as’ men, then we’ve done ourselves a disservice by not setting a higher level of expectation. Instead of “great job!” maybe the better approach is “great start!”
There’s another problem with overly warm welcomes and dancing bears: too much attention. When the entire squad and half of the one next door stops what they’re doing to watch the GIRL! Shooting a GUN! Guys, you know how you’re nervous sometimes shooting on the clock, let alone in front of an audience? Yeah, don’t make it worse by making the audience bigger and more obvious. That really doesn’t help a shooter’s development. And if they are overly accuracy-focused or overly concerned about ‘not making dumb mistakes’, a very natural result is to slow down enough to guarantee perfect hits and no missteps. That can be very slow indeed.
Too much attention manifests itself in other ways, including piles of helpful advice. Some of it is indeed important and even necessary to improvement, but some of it, forgive me, is utter crap. Even the best advice can be unclearly conveyed or poorly timed, whether because it’s during a match or because it’s not the right moment in that shooter’s development to add that particular factor to their journey. It’s also very confusing to receive hints and tips on too many issues at once, leaving a shooter trying to integrate sometimes conflicting ideas and juggle changes in multiple parts of her technique at once. Doing that while shooting also means the shooter has too much to think about, which will also slow her down while her brain runs through all of these things instead of just allowing her subconscious to drive the gun.
Another important factor that limits women shooters today is that there are few role models for new shooters to follow. Related to the expectations problem I described earlier, seeing someone who “looks like you” in a certain setting is a big part of understanding that you, yourself can belong in that setting too. While some of us are wired to be pioneers, trailblazers play an undeniable role in showing those that follow just how far they can go. We’ve seen it as a positive driver of increasing the number of women going into and staying in STEM fields and it’s one that will be key in the shooting community too. We need women making it to the higher classes, finishing higher in matches, and yes, shooting faster. The numbers of women who are doing that are growing daily and once we make a critical mass so that all women stepping onto the range are aware of those women at the top, I think we’ll see change.
There are more, but I suspect these are some of the major drivers. Some of them can't really be fixed from the outside, but I do think that there are two areas where immediate strides can be made. First, we must treat all women shooters on the range like all other shooters on the range. That goes both ways: coddling, head-patting, and giving excessive attention should be reduced, but we should also ensure that we extend kindness and courtesy to all shooters. It's okay to nicely tell a shooter, "hey, that was kinda stinky. What happened there?", but it's also okay to follow that up with "I was really impressed with how you recovered and finished the stage though...and your reloads were rockin'!"
The actual fixing part is really up to the individual shooter to best navigate their own training journey. There is some value to genderized training communities, but they should not be pursued to the exclusion of other training communities and opportunities particular when, as now, the women’s-only and women’s-led training structure simply does not yet have the capacity to produce top shooters consistently. For now, women wanting to get to the top must seek training opportunities that may leave them as the only woman in a class. As women shooters drive to the top, that will change and we’ll take over “advanced” classes on our own. And we’re getting there – we’re now beginning to see a breakthrough in top women shooters breaking through into the ranks of top shooters overall. Solving for the problem of women role models, top women who new shooters can see and think “I can be like her!” is a big step in the right direction to solve for the problem of why there aren’t more good and fast women shooters both purely as shooters and as instructors. It's not that women can't, it's that we're still working our way there as a larger group.
Body mass and strength, particularly upper body strength, are undeniably an issue for most women. The ability to muscle down on recoil saves a lot of male shooters from terrible technique, such as yanking the trigger twice on a single sight picture. Generally speaking, smaller and weaker shooters (and sorry gals, as a genericized whole, we are) will pull that second shot right off even a close target but larger and stronger shooters will usually find that second shot somewhere on paper. With correct sight management technique and trigger control, taking two aimed shots is no slower and can even be faster while resulting in two hits in the A-zone or down-zero circle, but certainly much more finesse is required and the temptation to aim too hard is difficult to overcome. A two-fold problem for women getting faster then: the inability to muscle through bad technique and a greater need for a good technique that can lead to the temptation of slowing down.
As my mentor Bruce Gray reminds us, though, accuracy is not a necessary victim of speed. And I know from my own experience in learning how to more efficiently use the strength I do have and to trust in the development of superior technical skills, I can shoot very well from an accuracy perspective at splits that most any man would be happy with - down even into the sub-.20 range. As I've opened myself to truly observing as I shoot rather than trying to muscle or control my way through, I've been able to watch my sights staying within an A-zone through the entire recoil cycle from seven yards. And along with starting as an excruciatingly slow and not even all that accurate shooter, I'm still far (for now) from a top woman shooter. So it's possible for a not naturally talented, not large woman to learn how to shoot quickly and accurately with excellent recoil management. But it can take more thought and effort to get there.
What then? Are we women not pushers, not competitive enough? If so, why?
I have to admit, I find it difficult to identify the idea of not pushing and not being competitive, and most of my women friends inside and outside of shooting are the same. As a child, I went through stints of a string of sports including gymnastics, and was a classical musician for over ten years. Even when I drifted through more solitary athletic pursuits, I always chased better form, more difficult exercises. And in school, let's just say it wasn't just parental pressure that drove my course selections and grades. I was as guilty as anyone of choosing the occasional "Easy A" classes, but the A alone was never enough. Perhaps like attracts like, but I'm part of a large community of similarly high-performing women whether or not they are shooters.
In fact, I posit that some women are too competitive to enter the competition arena. Much like men who are unwilling to go to a match until they're "good enough" to not "embarrass themselves" (whatever that means to them), women also fall victim to the same fallacy. They just seem to find it harder to take the leap. When they do, I posit that they are then met with a confluence of factors that make it difficult for them to excel as shooters as opposed to as women shooters.
Women are welcomed with open arms into the competitive shooting community, which is no bad thing except when it becomes smothering. Kathy Jackson has written about The Parade of the Dancing Bears, and women can so easily become part of that parade at many ranges, as the welcoming committee is so impressed by a GIRL! Shooting a GUN! that any level of performance is praised as a job well done. I believe strongly that we rise to the level of our expectations, and if our expectations are influenced to accepting bare minimums…well, then, perhaps we as a shooting community, men and women, have created a class of shooters who believe that they’re good enough as they are. And perhaps that’s true, that how far they get is good enough and perhaps, even likely, is already better than many average gun owners. But if we’re talking about why women shoot slow, why they aren’t ‘as good as’ men, then we’ve done ourselves a disservice by not setting a higher level of expectation. Instead of “great job!” maybe the better approach is “great start!”
There’s another problem with overly warm welcomes and dancing bears: too much attention. When the entire squad and half of the one next door stops what they’re doing to watch the GIRL! Shooting a GUN! Guys, you know how you’re nervous sometimes shooting on the clock, let alone in front of an audience? Yeah, don’t make it worse by making the audience bigger and more obvious. That really doesn’t help a shooter’s development. And if they are overly accuracy-focused or overly concerned about ‘not making dumb mistakes’, a very natural result is to slow down enough to guarantee perfect hits and no missteps. That can be very slow indeed.
Too much attention manifests itself in other ways, including piles of helpful advice. Some of it is indeed important and even necessary to improvement, but some of it, forgive me, is utter crap. Even the best advice can be unclearly conveyed or poorly timed, whether because it’s during a match or because it’s not the right moment in that shooter’s development to add that particular factor to their journey. It’s also very confusing to receive hints and tips on too many issues at once, leaving a shooter trying to integrate sometimes conflicting ideas and juggle changes in multiple parts of her technique at once. Doing that while shooting also means the shooter has too much to think about, which will also slow her down while her brain runs through all of these things instead of just allowing her subconscious to drive the gun.
Another important factor that limits women shooters today is that there are few role models for new shooters to follow. Related to the expectations problem I described earlier, seeing someone who “looks like you” in a certain setting is a big part of understanding that you, yourself can belong in that setting too. While some of us are wired to be pioneers, trailblazers play an undeniable role in showing those that follow just how far they can go. We’ve seen it as a positive driver of increasing the number of women going into and staying in STEM fields and it’s one that will be key in the shooting community too. We need women making it to the higher classes, finishing higher in matches, and yes, shooting faster. The numbers of women who are doing that are growing daily and once we make a critical mass so that all women stepping onto the range are aware of those women at the top, I think we’ll see change.
There are more, but I suspect these are some of the major drivers. Some of them can't really be fixed from the outside, but I do think that there are two areas where immediate strides can be made. First, we must treat all women shooters on the range like all other shooters on the range. That goes both ways: coddling, head-patting, and giving excessive attention should be reduced, but we should also ensure that we extend kindness and courtesy to all shooters. It's okay to nicely tell a shooter, "hey, that was kinda stinky. What happened there?", but it's also okay to follow that up with "I was really impressed with how you recovered and finished the stage though...and your reloads were rockin'!"
The actual fixing part is really up to the individual shooter to best navigate their own training journey. There is some value to genderized training communities, but they should not be pursued to the exclusion of other training communities and opportunities particular when, as now, the women’s-only and women’s-led training structure simply does not yet have the capacity to produce top shooters consistently. For now, women wanting to get to the top must seek training opportunities that may leave them as the only woman in a class. As women shooters drive to the top, that will change and we’ll take over “advanced” classes on our own. And we’re getting there – we’re now beginning to see a breakthrough in top women shooters breaking through into the ranks of top shooters overall. Solving for the problem of women role models, top women who new shooters can see and think “I can be like her!” is a big step in the right direction to solve for the problem of why there aren’t more good and fast women shooters both purely as shooters and as instructors. It's not that women can't, it's that we're still working our way there as a larger group.
14 September 2015
Happiness and Satisfaction
I have been thinking some recently on how we frame our wins and losses on the range, match or otherwise. Very often, we are dismissive of or disappointed in our results, but in a way I'm not sure is productive either for ourselves or for others.
"I had a terrible match; I only [won by a little, came in top 3/5/10]."
"I was all over the place today, couldn't do better than a [some size] group at [some distance]."
"I only came in behind [someone] because I was having gun trouble."
"I [won, came in top 3/5/10] only because I got lucky."
Most all of us have been guilty of saying something along these lines, myself included. But the more I hear them, regardless of who is speaking, the more they bother me. Here's a few reasons why:
- They do not reflect ownership of your results. We are not only our best performances, but our worst. We are responsible for our bad days, our lack of equipment maintenance, our unpolished skills. And yet, we are also responsible for our blistering-fast draws, our perfect doubles, our "hero" runs. It wasn't luck or circumstance, good or bad; it was you.
- They do not respect your own improvement. Do you remember the first time you tried something on the range? In your first months or years, what was your worst match finish, biggest group size, slowest draw? What was your best? And today, how did you do? Probably better in some way or another. A little faster, a little tighter, a little more comfortable. I may not be happy in the middle of the pack now, but making it there used to be my fondest dream. By focusing on the failures, we forget how much we've won. And it wrecks our self-image.
- They do not respect the hard work of others. Our disappointment in what is likely an objectively good result is part of what makes it difficult for others to appreciate their own work and results. Someone may have shot the best match of their life - and ended up last place 'but not by that much!', and by saying that you've never shot so horribly in your entire life, and only came in second. What hope does that leave for someone trying to work their way up the ladder, and how does that celebrate what they've accomplished? (And why should you care? Because we're human. And because we contribute to our own ability to respect ourselves by building a culture where all wins are respected.)
There is value, of course, in reflecting on and even dissecting performance that does not meet your goals. We can't improve if we think we're already 'good enough'. And most of us are competitive by nature, so the fun is in the win or in a good-natured beat-down of our friends. So I'm certainly not saying we shouldn't talk about the negative, but we can consider how we frame what we've accomplished in a way that is more productive for ourselves and for those around us. You don't have to be satisfied to be happy with what you've done.
21 May 2015
A Very Quiet Bang
My friend, Tracy Hughes, issued a dry fire challenge this month to the members of the League City A Girl & A Gun Club chapter, where she is the facilitator (among the many hats she wears!). The challenge is simple: one full month of dry fire, six days a week. She's even provided a helpful graphic with each day's prescribed exercise.
I'm really excited by Tracy's challenge because I know how well dry fire worked for me. Almost exactly two years ago, I celebrated breaking 50% on a USPSA classifier, meaning I shot it about half as well as the best person who's ever shot it. Earlier this month, I shot a classifier that's predicted to be within hundredths of a percentage point from 80%. How did I get here? I'm not a naturally talented shooter. I don't get to the range a whole lot to practice. But I do dry fire.
Almost all of my significant gains can be directly traced to the dry fire routine that I started nearly 18 months ago with only one significant break this past winter when I actually didn't dry fire or shoot any guns at all. I've taken classes in the past, tried dry firing on and off, but this time was different. I'd just taken a class with Ben Stoeger who, true to form, told and showed me in great detail where precisely I was lacking as a shooter. The deconstruction came with a plan: dry fire, with a really honest focus on gun-handling technique and sight picture. Less than a year later, I took the class again and was pronounced improved (a little ;) ). I still have a long way to go towards my goals, but here's a few things that have helped me get to where I am now:
I dry fire or shoot (live fire practice or match) 5-7 days a week. That includes days we go out with friends or run errands after work, days when I'm stuck in the office late, days when I want nothing more than to crawl into bed right after dinner...I take a night off if I'm sick, if dry firing means I can't get my minimum amount of sleep to function, if I'm traveling, or occasionally if I'm busy packing for a match. And with that last one, I'll probably sneak in a few minutes of trigger control work anyway.
I've settled on 30 minutes for my dry fire sessions. A half-hour straight through is a bit longer than is often recommended, but it's a chunk of time that works for me. Occasionally, I'll add an extra 15 minutes if I want to make sure I get in some time on a second gun, but 30 minutes is about as long as I can stay on task and not overwork my body. But even 5-10 minutes would do. To keep myself focused, I set a timer and use a dedicated space. My laptop and cell phone stay out - it's just me, my gun, my session timer, and my shot timer.
I've built a plan that I follow if I don't have something specific I want to practice. That way, I never wonder what I'll do in dry fire on a specific day. My plan includes specific exercises, including par times and other goals. I want to leave my thinking for the actual work I'm doing in my dry fire studio, not for figuring out what that work will be. The plan also forces me to do things I'm bad at or haven't thought of before, not just blow through some feel-good drills.
I track and journal my dry fire, so that I can look back and tell you what I worked on last week or last month, and what challenges I had or details I noticed that helped me hit on a new or better way to do something. My trackers and journals also create accountability because they don't lie on how much I have or haven't done, and can be used when checking in with my training buddies. Plus flipping back to old entries can be really motivating when I see how far I've come.
I participate in the occasional dry fire "throw down", where one of my training buddies will post a video of a dry fire drill performed under par time, and challenge the rest of us to match it...on video, of course. The drills can often focus on more obscure skills or push heavily into the limits of what's physically possible. It's fun and I learn a lot about the skills in the drill, since participating often includes lengthy discussion of the specific techniques that make it possible to perform the drill as described or refine performance even further.
I push my dry fire practice until I fail, then I figure out what went wrong and fix it. While perfect practice is important, so is going hard until the wheels fall off. Dry fire, in a safe environment, is where you can find out how fast you can go, whether or not an odd technique will work for you, or if your bright idea about how to do something really is so bright. And having that safe space means I can make a skill mine even if it didn't seem so hot the first thirty times. Three hundred. Whatever. It doesn't cost me anything but time to figure it out.
One of my mentors and coaches describes dry fire as shooting with everything but the bang. Or rather, shooting live ammo is just dry fire with a little more noise and recoil. While you can't replace every bit of the shooting experience in dry fire, you can do most of what matters. All that work you do in dry fire? That's what's behind making your shooting beautiful.
26 March 2015
Hi There - A Few Personal Updates, and Some Thoughts On Range Safety
I'm sorry for the radio silence here. While I've been able to post shorter tidbits fairly regularly over on my Facebook page (where you really should go for more timely news and posts anyway) and even my new (relatively) Instagram, the longer and more thoughtful stuff that goes here has taken a backseat to some developments in my professional life both at my day job and as a shooter.
My day job career and my shooting career have paralleled each other in many ways, having started at roughly the same time. Major shifts in the way I've approached my relationship with guns can be almost directly tied to jumps I've made between jobs and roles. In 2015, my life in both worlds has become both more visible and more demanding. I won't bore you with the details of what I do in my office, but on the range, I'm happy and proud to a member of Team SIG SAUER and Team Lucas Oil. I'll also be proudly representing, in no particular order but alphabetical, Brilliant Backstraps, Full Bore Firearms, Grayguns, King Shooters Supply (Better Bullets), and PHLster...a list that is continuing to grow with my team affiliations. I'm really fortunate to be supported by these fine people and companies, and I'm looking forward to doing my sponsors proud. Each one of them puts out products that I'm personally impressed with and would choose to use regardless of sponsorship status.
Enough about me.
Most shooters who haven't been living under a rock recently have seen this video, showing a gross safety violation at a USPSA match.
Clearly, I believe that since the video showed up on the internet at all in the first place, we are better off as a community not trying to delete all traces of it. Social media just doesn't work like that, and we have an excellent opportunity for education here on many fronts. Since we're all just playing experts here on the Internet, I'll need to go back to mememe for a moment and remind you of my qualifications. In addition to being an avid competitor, I'm also a match director, an IDPA Safety Officer, and a USPSA Range Officer.
Having this video out in the wild doesn't just show a huge safety violation. It also shows that we are safety conscious. Witness the almost universal reaction of competitive shooters; I think we're more outraged at what went wrong than anybody in or out of the shooting community. Do you know what would be worse than this video? Not having this video posted because nobody thought it showed anything noteworthy. The reason it's gone viral is because it is so out of the norm, and so far away from what we consider acceptable on the range.
Range safety is an overlapping system so that if one element fails, the others continue to protect you and those around you. That's why we talk about safe direction AND finger off the trigger: if you put your booger finger on the bang switch when you shouldn't, but you're pointed downrange, all you'll do is give a good scare. Here, there was a failure of many best practices. There isn't one person at fault, and not everybody bears a greater or lesser degree of fault. So what should have been done?
- Stage designers and match directors should carefully consider design and construction to maximize safety. I'm not raising a call to go to mesh walls, but you might think twice about that shoot house stage, or build your walls to start a few feet off the ground so that you an RO/SO can do an extra safety check by looking underneath them.
- Range/Safety Officers must remain diligent about visually clearing the entire range before starting a new competitor. The common, and smart, recommendation is to designate the RO/SO as the "last (wo)man off", who will conduct a visual sweep of all areas as they move to the start position. If a stage is very complex, there should be a plan to clear people off the range: who will walk from where, along what path? Who will keep watch to make sure nobody else goes uprange as the range is being cleared? What areas can be double-checked and how, before the next shooter makes ready?
- Range/Safety Officers must remain aware of the entire range as much as possible while a competitor is shooting. Focusing on the gun/muzzle does not mean locking on with tunnel vision that does not take into account what is beyond/behind the muzzle. The scorekeeper can take on some of this responsibility, and you can designate a squad member if there is a shortage on staff. It's not just for shooters downrange, but anything else that might affect range equipment or safety: a prop that has blown over or activated early because of wind, an animal wandering onto the range (you laugh, but it's happened on ours!), an errant brass-picker.
- Other squad members should stay on the ball when taping and resetting a stage, and drag their fellow squad-mates off the range with them. We've all been squadded with "That Guy" who can't resist lagging behind a few minutes for a few extra pieces of brass as long as they're downrange. We all should be reminding him to stop holding up the match and be keeping an eye out to make sure he isn't still downrange when the rest of us are done taping.
- If we're watching or video recording a shooter, we need to remember that we are all responsible for safety and for keeping an eye out for the same things the folks holding the timers and score sheets are. You're watching for your buddy's foot faults anyway so you can razz him after the match, so watch for what's on the range too.
- Some shooters like to visually clear the range as they head towards the start position. You might consider doing that too, at least in bays with compromised sight lines. Or you can ask the RO/SO running the timer if they've checked. And you should remember that while most all of us love that win, we should be paying enough attention that if we see or hear something odd, we can and should stop ourselves. Just like a suspected squib.
And let's remember this: nobody got hurt. It was awful close - far closer than it ever should have been - but this incident didn't result in extra holes in anything outside of a cardboard target. Instead, we've been fortunate enough that it's just a community reset, a wake-up call that our best practices exist for a reason. Not a bad thing to have in our heads as we get into the full swing of competition season. Are you ready to get started? I am!
08 October 2014
Still Alive and Kicking!
To my five readers:
I continue to dry fire religiously, and shoot tons of matches. 3-Gun and USPSA have taken over my schedule this summer and fall. Please check out my Facebook page, where I post my less rambly thoughts, and my YouTube channel, where I post match videos. Very soon, I hope to be announcing some very exciting news, and it will break first on Facebook.
See you on the range!
I continue to dry fire religiously, and shoot tons of matches. 3-Gun and USPSA have taken over my schedule this summer and fall. Please check out my Facebook page, where I post my less rambly thoughts, and my YouTube channel, where I post match videos. Very soon, I hope to be announcing some very exciting news, and it will break first on Facebook.
See you on the range!
18 June 2014
Integrity
If you're a competitive shooter who hasn't been living under a social media rock, you've probably heard at least rumor of a USPSA Range Officer who is being called out for allegedly adding to and subtracting from stage times shown on shot timers at major matches. If you're following the various Facebook discussions, you'll likely know that I've contributed my two cents. Given the many electrons that have given part of their life to the debate, I don't have any more to add on that particular scandal (at least not here), but it has made me think about integrity on the range generally.
As with any sport, there are a lot of ways to gain an unfair advantage if you're shooting for score, whether from the competitor side or the range/safety officer side. The shot timer can be manipulated by tapping it after the last shot or allowing it to pick up the slide dropping during the Unload and Show Clear, or by protecting its microphone from picking up the last shot or two. Improbable perfect doubles can be argued and granted. An inaccurate score can be written down or entered, or modified after the fact. The fact that ammunition is under the power factor floor can be hidden. In most cases, these types of advantages result from unintentional - or at least unmalicious - mistakes.
We attempt to build safeguards against unfair advantages into our rules and best practices. Having the range/safety officer running the shooter show the timer to the scoring official helps, as does checking the shot count on the timer or the split between the last two shots. IPSC/USPSA and some of the more precision-oriented sports use scoring overlays to determine whether a shot is a double or if it touches/breaks the scoring line and thus receives the next higher point value. We often keep backup carbon copies of scores at major matches, or ask the shooter to approve what is entered into an electronic scoring system (and perhaps go so far as to audit for later changes). Chronographs are used to test competitor ammunition at major matches.
The safeguards we've built don't always work. Ultimately, they do best in preventing the unintentional slips but they aren't very effective against concerted efforts to break the rules. That's where all of us, as match officials and competitors, need to step up. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here when I say, "don't be a cheater". I think we're all pretty clear on the sorts of things that are absolutely over the line, like changing scores or using "special" rounds at the chrono stage. On gray areas like whether or not a very close shot touched/broke a scoring line, we should be fair when we apply principles like making doubtful calls to the benefit of the shooter - if you would do it for your buddies, you should do it for a stranger, and vice versa. Similarly, if we think we've found a better way inside the rules, we should stay within the realm of good sportsmanship. More, we need to speak out if we see bad calls and shady behavior. I don't just mean posting (anonymously or not) on the Internet, though that's certainly been effective in the current scandal both for bringing this particular issue to light and for raising awareness of simple ways to safeguard against it, but also in raising the issue to the range master or match director, and if necessary, further up the chain to section/area coordinators and so on to hopefully nip the problem in the bud. As one of my friends describes it, failing to give a procedural to one shooter who rightfully should have received one has the net result of giving a procedural to every other shooter who followed stage procedure. Don't do that to your fellow shooters.
I'm not saying we go on witch hunts or accuse anyone who gains an advantage of "gaming" or "cheating", but turning a blind eye to bad behavior perpetuates the flat out cheating we don't want on the range. It's important to keep the game, whichever one(s) you shoot, fair so that we can compete on as level of a playing field as possible wherever and with whoever we shoot, all within the boundaries of the rules we go by. Classifications and wins derive much of their value from knowing that everyone went up against the same problem and you solved it better, whether that means you shot it faster or you saw a way to exploit a stage design. If we all truly do our best to ensure that everyone the same experience coming in, we'll all have a more enjoyable match...and we really will know who was the better shooter (or at least better at coming up with brilliant stage breakdowns or at reading the stage brief closely!).
By the way - those of you who don't compete or who don't care about your scores? You don't get a free pass either. When's the last time you spoke up about unsafe practices you've witnessed on the range? Told someone your measured opinion about an ineffective or unsafe piece of gear? Gave an honest assessment of a person's skills? Gently warned a friend that a training opportunity they're excited about might not be a good idea? Fair isn't just for the competition range; it's also for training for competency or self-defense.
We play with dangerous toys and that requires a high level of personal responsibility so that it remains safe, fun, and fair. Be a person that you would trust, and support integrity in those who surround you. That's beautiful.
23 May 2014
Mille Viae
I recently spent several days with Kathy Jackson while she was in town to teach a few classes. While Kathy is a defensive shooting instructor and scholar and I have been focusing my time and mental energy on almost purely competitive shooting, we still find plenty of common ground. My heart is in shooting on a timer, but keeping my hand in with other shooting disciplines exposes me to broader thinking about what works and doesn't work behind the trigger. That's why I'll occasionally spend time on the line with concealed carry classes, show up at CMP-style matches and Project Appleseed, and even pick up a bow and arrow.
As an instructor, I've always known that it's helpful to be able to articulate and demonstrate different methods of accomplishing the same end even if I had a preference on which way was "best". If nothing else, knowing all of the other methods and their rationales help me to be able to tell someone why my way was a good way, without falling prey to one of a multitude of logical fallacies. As a student, it's as or more important to understand the many paths to the same goal of making accurate hits on target at speed. But I don't just blindly toss tools into my toolbox by indiscriminately adopting every new technique to cross my path, I don't rely on self-experimentation with all of those different techniques presented to me over time to try to puzzle out which one works "best", and I don't simply latch on to one or two techniques because some guy told me it was a good idea.
Instead, I insist on learning the "why" of each technique so that I can reject completely unsuitable techniques out of hand because they don't have reasonable underlying logic and theory, as well as evaluate the more plausible techniques more objectively and completely. This strategy lets me fill my toolbox with new, usable tools with uses I can specifically articulate and contextualize into the exact shooting problem I am trying to solve. In other words, I don't try to figure out the "best" way of doing anything, or try to arrive at the "best" overall technique for me. I find my favorite hammer that does 80% of what I need, then I keep some screwdrivers and wrenches my back pocket for the edge cases, and I'm able to pick the right tool quickly because I've already thought through when and why each one would make the most sense.
For instance, one of the major differences between what Kathy teaches and what I do and teach revolves around grip. Kathy defaults to a "thumbs locked down" grip; I'm very much a "thumbs forward" kind of woman. Unsurprisingly, it's been a topic of much discussion when we've gotten together. While I still strongly believe in "thumbs forward" for my own shooting, I've softened my views towards "thumbs locked down" now that I see its uses for shooting revolvers, for fitting hands to too-small guns (and occasionally too-large guns), for firearms retention, and other reasons. In fact, my husband's been shooting "thumbs locked down" for the last year or so, as he's been rocking a Chiappa Rhino, which can cause injuries with "thumbs forward" grips. Avoiding burns seems like a good reason to pick a new tool out of the toolbox! And while I still have a lot of trouble getting into a "thumbs locked down" grip because of the immense time I've put into "thumbs forward", you can now find me occasionally using a curled thumb for strong hand shooting with otherwise more difficult-to-control pistols. Plus it was the perfect grip to show one of my students with teeny hands who was having trouble hanging on to any handgun we tried. Is it the best overall tool for me? Nope. Not at all. But it is handy to have around? Yup. Absolutely.
Mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam. A thousand roads lead men forever to Rome. One way might be better for you today, but having a map for many ways means it will be a lot harder for you to get lost. And a full toolbox is a lot more beautiful than a lonely hammer rattling around a big, empty box...as long as you keep the manuals around so that you know how to best use every tool you have available.
As an instructor, I've always known that it's helpful to be able to articulate and demonstrate different methods of accomplishing the same end even if I had a preference on which way was "best". If nothing else, knowing all of the other methods and their rationales help me to be able to tell someone why my way was a good way, without falling prey to one of a multitude of logical fallacies. As a student, it's as or more important to understand the many paths to the same goal of making accurate hits on target at speed. But I don't just blindly toss tools into my toolbox by indiscriminately adopting every new technique to cross my path, I don't rely on self-experimentation with all of those different techniques presented to me over time to try to puzzle out which one works "best", and I don't simply latch on to one or two techniques because some guy told me it was a good idea.
Instead, I insist on learning the "why" of each technique so that I can reject completely unsuitable techniques out of hand because they don't have reasonable underlying logic and theory, as well as evaluate the more plausible techniques more objectively and completely. This strategy lets me fill my toolbox with new, usable tools with uses I can specifically articulate and contextualize into the exact shooting problem I am trying to solve. In other words, I don't try to figure out the "best" way of doing anything, or try to arrive at the "best" overall technique for me. I find my favorite hammer that does 80% of what I need, then I keep some screwdrivers and wrenches my back pocket for the edge cases, and I'm able to pick the right tool quickly because I've already thought through when and why each one would make the most sense.
For instance, one of the major differences between what Kathy teaches and what I do and teach revolves around grip. Kathy defaults to a "thumbs locked down" grip; I'm very much a "thumbs forward" kind of woman. Unsurprisingly, it's been a topic of much discussion when we've gotten together. While I still strongly believe in "thumbs forward" for my own shooting, I've softened my views towards "thumbs locked down" now that I see its uses for shooting revolvers, for fitting hands to too-small guns (and occasionally too-large guns), for firearms retention, and other reasons. In fact, my husband's been shooting "thumbs locked down" for the last year or so, as he's been rocking a Chiappa Rhino, which can cause injuries with "thumbs forward" grips. Avoiding burns seems like a good reason to pick a new tool out of the toolbox! And while I still have a lot of trouble getting into a "thumbs locked down" grip because of the immense time I've put into "thumbs forward", you can now find me occasionally using a curled thumb for strong hand shooting with otherwise more difficult-to-control pistols. Plus it was the perfect grip to show one of my students with teeny hands who was having trouble hanging on to any handgun we tried. Is it the best overall tool for me? Nope. Not at all. But it is handy to have around? Yup. Absolutely.
Mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam. A thousand roads lead men forever to Rome. One way might be better for you today, but having a map for many ways means it will be a lot harder for you to get lost. And a full toolbox is a lot more beautiful than a lonely hammer rattling around a big, empty box...as long as you keep the manuals around so that you know how to best use every tool you have available.
28 March 2014
You've Decided To Shoot A Match - Now What?
Last weekend, I had the honor and pleasure of being part of the instructor staff for A Girl and A Gun Women's Shooting League's Second Annual Training Conference. While I spend a good deal of my time at the Conference on the range, one of the classes I was most excited about teaching didn't directly involve shooting at all. It's about an important topic, and one that got a lot of interest both from new and experienced competitive shooters, so I wanted to share it with all of you who couldn't come or who didn't take all of the notes you wanted to. What was it? Match etiquette. What to expect and how to behave once you've rolled up as a new shooter in a big crowd of people who all seem to know where to go and what to do. This is going to be a monster post, but I think you'll find it valuable. Before we dive in, I'd like to thank the many people across a variety of shooting disciplines who read my early class notes and outlines and contributed their own two cents, which I've tried to distill into what I hope is a complete guide to the "social scripts" of competitive shooting.
Good match citizenship isn't just a matter of politeness to smooth the way, though that's a big part of it; it's a safety issue too. Both aspects will make everyone's day more enjoyable and rest assured - your efforts will be noticed! In most cases, memories of your scores will disappear long before memories of your attitude. If you leave a positive impression as a thoughtful and considerate shooter, you’ll find a friendlier and more helpful community waiting for you when you go back.
Before the Match
As I've said before, safety is one of the core concepts of what we do on the range. You must know and be able to apply gun safety rules before you shoot a match, where your ability to maintain muzzle and finger discipline in particular will be tested in a more dynamic and stressful environment than many shooters have experienced elsewhere. Even those of us who have been to a lot of matches can find new safety challenges at a new club, major event, or different sport where a safe direction might be different than our home range, there might be more/different guns in play, and just more pressure than a local club match among friends. An exercise I give many shooters interested in going to their first match is to simply pick a safe spot or direction in their house, have them point a finger gun at it, then practice moving around while keeping their finger pointed there. It's a great way to safely figure out how to turn up-range and other moves you can't do at most ranges.
Another safety note: almost all competitive shooting events are held on cold ranges. Generally, you will not be permitted to have a loaded firearm except under direct supervision of match staff (see below on how to handle your carry gun). Chamber empty and magazine out should be your default state, with guns in a holster or bag, safely stored on a rack or table, and possibly with a chamber flag in place. How will you know what will be required? Now, before the match, is the time to find out.
You don't need to be an expert before you show up, but it's a good idea to spend a bit of time before your first match in any sport getting familiar with the basic rules and equipment requirements. You will almost certainly be given a brief introduction at the match to the rules that will matter for your first time out and many match directors will allow a new shooter to use slightly non-conforming equipment, but you probably don't want your first match to be the first time you're exposed to these concepts. At this point, the details are relatively unimportant as long as you know things like what kind of holster is acceptable, how many magazines/speed loaders/moon clips you need, and a general idea of what your targets will look like. Check your club's website! Ours includes much of this information. Failing that, try contacting the match director, although I'd recommend not waiting until the very last minute both to give him or her time to respond and for you to pick up any gear you might need.
You might also contact the match director in advance or when you arrive at the range if you have a physical limitation or health issue that might affect you during the day. When we design and review stages before a match we run, we will take into account known disabilities when possible by, for instance, eliminating a kneeling position and replacing it with a chair or at least have a plan for an alternate way to approach a stage (though they may come with a minor scoring penalty). You should also notify the match director, your range/safety officer, or a trusted friend who will be with you if you have a medical condition like a bee allergy or diabetes, so you can be treated appropriately if necessary.
Arrive early! It will give you time to get situated by meeting a few people, locating important areas like the bathrooms, andwalking through stages and getting some personalized introductions helping with set up. Set up only requires willing hands. I find it very helpful to have someone assist with even the simplest things like stapling targets I'm holding up or carrying some light-weight props and equipment to where they need to be...and I always remember to give a few extra hints to new shooters who pitch in to make sure they'll have a match to shoot. My more experienced shooters who show up early will often take a newbie under their wing for the match, especially if they see the newbie at set up.
If you normally carry a defensive firearm, you'll need to deal with it appropriately when you have arrived. Appropriate does not mean trying to surreptitiously unholster and unload your carry gun in the parking lot. It means finding the match director or a range/safety officer immediately and asking them what the procedure is at their range. Most will take you to a handy berm and ask you to unload and show clear under supervision, then stow your carry gun appropriately (even if it's just in your holster if you plan to shoot the match with it). In some cases, I suggest that you may find it easier not to carry to your first match so you don't need to worry about it. As with all carry-related decisions, you need to decide what's right for you.
With the rest of your gear, I recommend packing your gun in a separate case from everything else so that you can put on your belt, holster, ammo carrier pouches, etc and fill your magazines/speed loaders/moon clips whenever you are ready, because handling your gun will almost certainly not be permitted outside of the designated safe areas which are generally limited in size and won't allow you to handle ammunition and/or magazines. Safe areas or safe tables are almost always designated by an easy-to-find sign but if not, you can ask anyone who looks even just a little less lost that you are. They're places where you can handle your firearm without supervision to get it in or out of its bag, practice a few quick draws, or perform minor maintenance, all while keeping the muzzle pointed in a safe direction. To prevent mistakes, ammunition is never allowed at a safe table and magazines may not be allowed either. A good practice is just to bring your gun's case with you to the safe table. Since space is limited, be considerate of your fellow shooters and don't spread your gear out all over or spend lots of time here getting ready because you'll need to register.
If you haven't pre-registered for the match, just a few words of advice for registration: follow directions and write neatly. Match staff will also appreciate it if you bring exact change and let them know that you're a new shooter or if you have any squadding requests. Your squad is the group of people you'll spend all day with and while it's a great opportunity to meet new people, it's also nice not to be separated from the friend you brought for moral support or who is your ride home. Keep in mind, however, that squad requests are just that - requests. You may be shuffled around to a different squad for purposes of match balance and flow. Either way, once squads are called, pay attention to who you'll be with and where to go so that you can be in the right place once the match starts.
Shooting the Match
You've made it! This is the big event! Now what? Start by paying attention to the match and stage briefings, which will give you info specific to the club and to each course of fire. A quick bit of background vocabulary for very new competitive shooters: the entire event is a match, and each separate bit of shooting is a stage. Stage briefings in particular are a good time to ask your squad's range/safety officer questions for that particular stage that you might not have been clear on, such as whether you can make up shots by firing extra rounds at a target than the number of hits required for scoring purposes or when and where you can reload your firearm during the stage. The stage briefing is also normally when the squad's shooting order is called.
It's important to know shooting order because it's the key to moving a match along at a smooth pace so you can go home at a reasonable time. A squad will normally shoot in the same order for every stage of a match except that the first shooter on one stage rotates to the bottom of the stack for the next stage. As a new shooter, you should be able to ask to not be one of the first up at any point during the match. As an experienced shooter, I've been known to do the same...just with a bit less success than a new guy or gal (but it's always worth asking!). While you'll hear shooting order early in the match or stage, you should also hear it after each shooter is called to the line, using the "on deck/in the hole" system. It'll sound a little like this: "Annette is the shooter, Mark is on deck, and Rusty Jamz is in the hole!" That means that I better be at the start position and ready to go. Meanwhile, Mark should be confirming that his gear is in order and hanging out ready to step into the start position. Rusty should be making any last-minute adjustments to his gear and finishing up any mental preparation or review he wants to do before he shoots. As soon as I'm done shooting and the range/safety officer calls the range safe, Mark should go to the start position and get ready up to the point before his gun leaves his holster to load up for the stage, Rusty should get into the on deck position, and the next shooter in the hole should do his or her thing. While Mark gets ready and shoots the stage, I'll immediately prep for the next stage by topping off my magazines, going to the safe table if maintenance is necessary, and grabbing a drink of water or a snack. Then I'll join the rest of my squad to watch the shooters and help out with other parts of running the match.
While chatting with your squad can be one of the high points of the day, it's nice to keep the volume down a bit. Electronic/active hearing protection can pick up a lot of conversations that you might not intend to be overheard, especially by someone who is trying to focus on the stage they are shooting right then. That's one of the reasons I often just turn my electronic muffs off when I'm on deck. Chatting can also turn into a low point if you let well-meaning advice become a distraction. Competitive shooting is generally a pretty friendly sport and shooters often want to help out 'the new guy or gal' with a few tips given with the very best intentions. As the recipient of that advice, it can be both confusing and distressing to hear that you've been doing it all wrong, and you should be focusing on safely completing the match rather than changing up technique midstream. Being suckered into arguments about the "right" way is unproductive and can alienate people offering valuable guidance. Instead, I suggest responding by saying things like “Thanks”, “I’ll try that out at my next practice”, or “Let’s talk about that after the match; I’d like to concentrate on my shooting right now”. Then actually do think about what was offered to you - it might make a positive difference next time you're at the range! And when you find yourself in a position to offer a few tidbits yourself, don't forget what it's like to be that new shooter bombarded with hints and wait for the right moment to offer help without being pushy.
When you are the shooter on the line, the range/safety officer will tell you exactly what you need to do to "load and make ready". He or she will walk you through the steps of loading and holstering or positioning your firearm, with as little or as much detail as you need. Don't feel like you need to rush this process or anticipate the commands; you won't get any bonus points for being fast and you won't get any penalties for taking a reasonable amount of time. At this point, you'll be asked if you are ready. You can say no. You can ask any last-minute questions. Even though it's not required, I might use this opportunity to tell the range/safety officer if I'm planning on moving or turning a specific direction or shooting the stage in an unusual order, so that he or she can plan ahead on where to be while I'm shooting. You can say yes or just nod your head. I like to keep my hand on my pistol's grip while I finish my last quick mental rehearsal, then move my hands to their starting position once I'm ready. Then it's just waiting for the start beep and finally - shooting!
When it appears you have finished shooting a stage, the range/safety officer will ask if you are finished and if so, they will walk you through the steps of the "unload and show clear" (or other steps depending on stage and match flow). If you are standing, start by squaring yourself to the rear backstop, then follow the commands like you did when you went through the load and make ready. If you end the stage in some other position, you may be directed to unload and show clear before standing and holstering and/or to place your gun on the ground or a table before standing and completing the unload and show clear process. Unload and show clear isn't on the clock, so you can and should take your time, especially since you, as the shooter, are ultimately responsible for making sure that your firearm is completely unloaded before you step off the line. When unloading, you can let your magazine drop to the ground if you aren't comfortable catching it and hanging on to it or stowing it in a pocket while you continue. If you do so, leave it on the ground until after your gun is holstered. When ejecting the live round out of your gun's chamber, let it fall out naturally and, like a magazine, leave it on the ground to be picked up later. If you're watching someone else unload, it's nice to note where it fell so they can find it later! Don't try to "flip" the round out to catch it because this can lead to losing control over muzzle direction. Similarly, don't try to "roll" the round into your hand, risking the possibility of an out-of-battery detonation if the extractor hits the primer - rare, but potentially very damaging. Gravity is a neat thing; use it. Once you have emptied your gun, you will need to show the range/safety officer that your gun is clear. Locking the slide back is usually optional but if you don't, you'll need to be prepared to hold it open long enough for someone to easily see that your chamber is empty. Either way, you are solely responsible for confirming that you are completely unloaded.
During all of the time you aren't shooting, on deck, in the hole, or dealing with your gear after you have just shot, you should be helping with the small tasks necessary for a match to run. My mantra is that everybody works every match. Why? Because matches are volunteer efforts; your fees very likely do not go to the pockets of any individual as a result of their work managing or otherwise working at the match. As a new shooter, you can help with the simple but necessary tasks of taping/pasting and resetting a stage after each shooter is finished, the range has been called safe, and the targets have been scored. If you can't or don't know how to reset a piece of steel or a moving target, ask a squadmate or move on to something you can do so that somebody else can handle the heavier, more complicated things. Taping/pasting is only a matter of putting a sticker or piece of tape over the holes in a cardboard or paper target. I call it arts and crafts time, and it's about as difficult as any kindergarten art project. Work efficiently and don't linger downrange so that the squad can get back to shooting that much sooner. If it just so happens that you're shooting a sport that allows individual walk-throughs, this is a great time to squeeze one in so long as you get taping/pasting and reset done and don't interfere with getting the next person shooting.
Another task a newer shooter might be asked to help with is scoring. Don't be intimidated - it's often a straightforward chore and a great way to learn some of the nuances of your new sport. The person asking you to help out with scores can tell you where to write down times, points, and penalties, and the range/safety officer responsible for the squad or stage will tell you what to write down. Just enter it neatly into the proper spots and repeat back what you are entering so that the range/safety officer can be sure that you have the right numbers. Unless you are specifically directed or permitted to pick up brass, taping/pasting and reset time is not a good time to do so. Keep in mind that while most ranges have their own brass policies, you should plan on a match being a "lost brass" event until at least the match is completely over and everything put away, in which case you should plan on replacing your own brass and not taking someone else's clearly marked (or oddball caliber) brass.
Taking video or photos of a shooter isn't part of working a match, but you'll see it quite a bit if range rules allow it. If you'd like to get some movies or pictures of another shooter, ask before your whip out your phone or camera and don't forge ahead if they say they'd rather not be in your camera frame. If a shooter says yes, it would be appreciated if you shared your footage with him or her privately (great way to get contact info for your new friends!) and to share links if posting anything publicly, assuming he or she doesn't have a problem with you sharing with other people. Remember that many shooters aren't comfortable with non-gun-friendly friends, family or coworkers finding out about their hobbies or may be subject to job-related restrictions on publicity. Some shooters also prefer to edit and post their own footage to keep it all in one place. Either way, if you are taking videos or photos, make sure you don't interfere with match flow or safety by staying up range, not getting in the way of range/safety officers, and remembering to tape/paste and reset. And don't forget, if you want a few cool pictures or videos of yourself, feel free to ask your squad mates. They'll be happy to help out as long as they aren't getting ready to shoot, just as you should be if you are asked.
After the Match
Once everyone has finished shooting, the match isn't quite over yet. Because everyone works every match, everyone should be involved in tear down: putting away all of the equipment used in the match. Tear down tasks range from pulling targets off the sticks or backers they are mounted to, disassembling props, and neatly piling up target stands in the appropriate areas, to delivering or putting away score sheets and timers, taking shot-up targets to the trash, and collecting stakes and other accessories used to hold props together or make activated targets work. While some heavy lifting is always required, you don't need to be Superman or Wonder Woman because those lighter-weight things need to be done too. Either way, stash a pair of work gloves in your range bag and you'll look like a hero and be remembered for being prepared and eager to do more than participate in the entertainment portion of the day. And while you're tearing down, don't forget to say thank you to the match directors, staff, and your squadmates.
Finally, results. You probably will want to know how you did now that you've been through all of the work, stress, and fun of the match itself. Normally, scores are posted or emailed within a few days to a week after a match. Ask your squadmates when and where you can expect to find them. Remember that getting these up is also a volunteer job, so pestering the match director about when you'll get scores or issues you have with scores is generally not a good idea. Polite questions are always acceptable, though, so don't feel like you have to stay silent if scores seem to be taking a long time to become available or if you're confused by the results. It might be something as simple as your email address not being in the right list or a typo.
Here's a parting secret: you don't have to care about your scores, and chances are extremely good nobody else cares about them. What we, as match staff and more experienced shooters, care about much more is that you are safe, that you had fun, and that you participated in all of the match including the grunt work. When we see that, you're much more likely to get all of the help you want in getting your shooting to the level you're looking for, because you're who we especially want to see back on the range. Because beauty isn't just perfect doubles and blazing fast Bill Drills...it's also many hands making light work and a smoothly and efficiently run match that everyone can enjoy.
Good match citizenship isn't just a matter of politeness to smooth the way, though that's a big part of it; it's a safety issue too. Both aspects will make everyone's day more enjoyable and rest assured - your efforts will be noticed! In most cases, memories of your scores will disappear long before memories of your attitude. If you leave a positive impression as a thoughtful and considerate shooter, you’ll find a friendlier and more helpful community waiting for you when you go back.
Before the Match
As I've said before, safety is one of the core concepts of what we do on the range. You must know and be able to apply gun safety rules before you shoot a match, where your ability to maintain muzzle and finger discipline in particular will be tested in a more dynamic and stressful environment than many shooters have experienced elsewhere. Even those of us who have been to a lot of matches can find new safety challenges at a new club, major event, or different sport where a safe direction might be different than our home range, there might be more/different guns in play, and just more pressure than a local club match among friends. An exercise I give many shooters interested in going to their first match is to simply pick a safe spot or direction in their house, have them point a finger gun at it, then practice moving around while keeping their finger pointed there. It's a great way to safely figure out how to turn up-range and other moves you can't do at most ranges.
Another safety note: almost all competitive shooting events are held on cold ranges. Generally, you will not be permitted to have a loaded firearm except under direct supervision of match staff (see below on how to handle your carry gun). Chamber empty and magazine out should be your default state, with guns in a holster or bag, safely stored on a rack or table, and possibly with a chamber flag in place. How will you know what will be required? Now, before the match, is the time to find out.
You don't need to be an expert before you show up, but it's a good idea to spend a bit of time before your first match in any sport getting familiar with the basic rules and equipment requirements. You will almost certainly be given a brief introduction at the match to the rules that will matter for your first time out and many match directors will allow a new shooter to use slightly non-conforming equipment, but you probably don't want your first match to be the first time you're exposed to these concepts. At this point, the details are relatively unimportant as long as you know things like what kind of holster is acceptable, how many magazines/speed loaders/moon clips you need, and a general idea of what your targets will look like. Check your club's website! Ours includes much of this information. Failing that, try contacting the match director, although I'd recommend not waiting until the very last minute both to give him or her time to respond and for you to pick up any gear you might need.
You might also contact the match director in advance or when you arrive at the range if you have a physical limitation or health issue that might affect you during the day. When we design and review stages before a match we run, we will take into account known disabilities when possible by, for instance, eliminating a kneeling position and replacing it with a chair or at least have a plan for an alternate way to approach a stage (though they may come with a minor scoring penalty). You should also notify the match director, your range/safety officer, or a trusted friend who will be with you if you have a medical condition like a bee allergy or diabetes, so you can be treated appropriately if necessary.
Arrive early! It will give you time to get situated by meeting a few people, locating important areas like the bathrooms, and
If you normally carry a defensive firearm, you'll need to deal with it appropriately when you have arrived. Appropriate does not mean trying to surreptitiously unholster and unload your carry gun in the parking lot. It means finding the match director or a range/safety officer immediately and asking them what the procedure is at their range. Most will take you to a handy berm and ask you to unload and show clear under supervision, then stow your carry gun appropriately (even if it's just in your holster if you plan to shoot the match with it). In some cases, I suggest that you may find it easier not to carry to your first match so you don't need to worry about it. As with all carry-related decisions, you need to decide what's right for you.
With the rest of your gear, I recommend packing your gun in a separate case from everything else so that you can put on your belt, holster, ammo carrier pouches, etc and fill your magazines/speed loaders/moon clips whenever you are ready, because handling your gun will almost certainly not be permitted outside of the designated safe areas which are generally limited in size and won't allow you to handle ammunition and/or magazines. Safe areas or safe tables are almost always designated by an easy-to-find sign but if not, you can ask anyone who looks even just a little less lost that you are. They're places where you can handle your firearm without supervision to get it in or out of its bag, practice a few quick draws, or perform minor maintenance, all while keeping the muzzle pointed in a safe direction. To prevent mistakes, ammunition is never allowed at a safe table and magazines may not be allowed either. A good practice is just to bring your gun's case with you to the safe table. Since space is limited, be considerate of your fellow shooters and don't spread your gear out all over or spend lots of time here getting ready because you'll need to register.
If you haven't pre-registered for the match, just a few words of advice for registration: follow directions and write neatly. Match staff will also appreciate it if you bring exact change and let them know that you're a new shooter or if you have any squadding requests. Your squad is the group of people you'll spend all day with and while it's a great opportunity to meet new people, it's also nice not to be separated from the friend you brought for moral support or who is your ride home. Keep in mind, however, that squad requests are just that - requests. You may be shuffled around to a different squad for purposes of match balance and flow. Either way, once squads are called, pay attention to who you'll be with and where to go so that you can be in the right place once the match starts.
Shooting the Match
You've made it! This is the big event! Now what? Start by paying attention to the match and stage briefings, which will give you info specific to the club and to each course of fire. A quick bit of background vocabulary for very new competitive shooters: the entire event is a match, and each separate bit of shooting is a stage. Stage briefings in particular are a good time to ask your squad's range/safety officer questions for that particular stage that you might not have been clear on, such as whether you can make up shots by firing extra rounds at a target than the number of hits required for scoring purposes or when and where you can reload your firearm during the stage. The stage briefing is also normally when the squad's shooting order is called.
It's important to know shooting order because it's the key to moving a match along at a smooth pace so you can go home at a reasonable time. A squad will normally shoot in the same order for every stage of a match except that the first shooter on one stage rotates to the bottom of the stack for the next stage. As a new shooter, you should be able to ask to not be one of the first up at any point during the match. As an experienced shooter, I've been known to do the same...just with a bit less success than a new guy or gal (but it's always worth asking!). While you'll hear shooting order early in the match or stage, you should also hear it after each shooter is called to the line, using the "on deck/in the hole" system. It'll sound a little like this: "Annette is the shooter, Mark is on deck, and Rusty Jamz is in the hole!" That means that I better be at the start position and ready to go. Meanwhile, Mark should be confirming that his gear is in order and hanging out ready to step into the start position. Rusty should be making any last-minute adjustments to his gear and finishing up any mental preparation or review he wants to do before he shoots. As soon as I'm done shooting and the range/safety officer calls the range safe, Mark should go to the start position and get ready up to the point before his gun leaves his holster to load up for the stage, Rusty should get into the on deck position, and the next shooter in the hole should do his or her thing. While Mark gets ready and shoots the stage, I'll immediately prep for the next stage by topping off my magazines, going to the safe table if maintenance is necessary, and grabbing a drink of water or a snack. Then I'll join the rest of my squad to watch the shooters and help out with other parts of running the match.
While chatting with your squad can be one of the high points of the day, it's nice to keep the volume down a bit. Electronic/active hearing protection can pick up a lot of conversations that you might not intend to be overheard, especially by someone who is trying to focus on the stage they are shooting right then. That's one of the reasons I often just turn my electronic muffs off when I'm on deck. Chatting can also turn into a low point if you let well-meaning advice become a distraction. Competitive shooting is generally a pretty friendly sport and shooters often want to help out 'the new guy or gal' with a few tips given with the very best intentions. As the recipient of that advice, it can be both confusing and distressing to hear that you've been doing it all wrong, and you should be focusing on safely completing the match rather than changing up technique midstream. Being suckered into arguments about the "right" way is unproductive and can alienate people offering valuable guidance. Instead, I suggest responding by saying things like “Thanks”, “I’ll try that out at my next practice”, or “Let’s talk about that after the match; I’d like to concentrate on my shooting right now”. Then actually do think about what was offered to you - it might make a positive difference next time you're at the range! And when you find yourself in a position to offer a few tidbits yourself, don't forget what it's like to be that new shooter bombarded with hints and wait for the right moment to offer help without being pushy.
When you are the shooter on the line, the range/safety officer will tell you exactly what you need to do to "load and make ready". He or she will walk you through the steps of loading and holstering or positioning your firearm, with as little or as much detail as you need. Don't feel like you need to rush this process or anticipate the commands; you won't get any bonus points for being fast and you won't get any penalties for taking a reasonable amount of time. At this point, you'll be asked if you are ready. You can say no. You can ask any last-minute questions. Even though it's not required, I might use this opportunity to tell the range/safety officer if I'm planning on moving or turning a specific direction or shooting the stage in an unusual order, so that he or she can plan ahead on where to be while I'm shooting. You can say yes or just nod your head. I like to keep my hand on my pistol's grip while I finish my last quick mental rehearsal, then move my hands to their starting position once I'm ready. Then it's just waiting for the start beep and finally - shooting!
When it appears you have finished shooting a stage, the range/safety officer will ask if you are finished and if so, they will walk you through the steps of the "unload and show clear" (or other steps depending on stage and match flow). If you are standing, start by squaring yourself to the rear backstop, then follow the commands like you did when you went through the load and make ready. If you end the stage in some other position, you may be directed to unload and show clear before standing and holstering and/or to place your gun on the ground or a table before standing and completing the unload and show clear process. Unload and show clear isn't on the clock, so you can and should take your time, especially since you, as the shooter, are ultimately responsible for making sure that your firearm is completely unloaded before you step off the line. When unloading, you can let your magazine drop to the ground if you aren't comfortable catching it and hanging on to it or stowing it in a pocket while you continue. If you do so, leave it on the ground until after your gun is holstered. When ejecting the live round out of your gun's chamber, let it fall out naturally and, like a magazine, leave it on the ground to be picked up later. If you're watching someone else unload, it's nice to note where it fell so they can find it later! Don't try to "flip" the round out to catch it because this can lead to losing control over muzzle direction. Similarly, don't try to "roll" the round into your hand, risking the possibility of an out-of-battery detonation if the extractor hits the primer - rare, but potentially very damaging. Gravity is a neat thing; use it. Once you have emptied your gun, you will need to show the range/safety officer that your gun is clear. Locking the slide back is usually optional but if you don't, you'll need to be prepared to hold it open long enough for someone to easily see that your chamber is empty. Either way, you are solely responsible for confirming that you are completely unloaded.
During all of the time you aren't shooting, on deck, in the hole, or dealing with your gear after you have just shot, you should be helping with the small tasks necessary for a match to run. My mantra is that everybody works every match. Why? Because matches are volunteer efforts; your fees very likely do not go to the pockets of any individual as a result of their work managing or otherwise working at the match. As a new shooter, you can help with the simple but necessary tasks of taping/pasting and resetting a stage after each shooter is finished, the range has been called safe, and the targets have been scored. If you can't or don't know how to reset a piece of steel or a moving target, ask a squadmate or move on to something you can do so that somebody else can handle the heavier, more complicated things. Taping/pasting is only a matter of putting a sticker or piece of tape over the holes in a cardboard or paper target. I call it arts and crafts time, and it's about as difficult as any kindergarten art project. Work efficiently and don't linger downrange so that the squad can get back to shooting that much sooner. If it just so happens that you're shooting a sport that allows individual walk-throughs, this is a great time to squeeze one in so long as you get taping/pasting and reset done and don't interfere with getting the next person shooting.
Another task a newer shooter might be asked to help with is scoring. Don't be intimidated - it's often a straightforward chore and a great way to learn some of the nuances of your new sport. The person asking you to help out with scores can tell you where to write down times, points, and penalties, and the range/safety officer responsible for the squad or stage will tell you what to write down. Just enter it neatly into the proper spots and repeat back what you are entering so that the range/safety officer can be sure that you have the right numbers. Unless you are specifically directed or permitted to pick up brass, taping/pasting and reset time is not a good time to do so. Keep in mind that while most ranges have their own brass policies, you should plan on a match being a "lost brass" event until at least the match is completely over and everything put away, in which case you should plan on replacing your own brass and not taking someone else's clearly marked (or oddball caliber) brass.
Taking video or photos of a shooter isn't part of working a match, but you'll see it quite a bit if range rules allow it. If you'd like to get some movies or pictures of another shooter, ask before your whip out your phone or camera and don't forge ahead if they say they'd rather not be in your camera frame. If a shooter says yes, it would be appreciated if you shared your footage with him or her privately (great way to get contact info for your new friends!) and to share links if posting anything publicly, assuming he or she doesn't have a problem with you sharing with other people. Remember that many shooters aren't comfortable with non-gun-friendly friends, family or coworkers finding out about their hobbies or may be subject to job-related restrictions on publicity. Some shooters also prefer to edit and post their own footage to keep it all in one place. Either way, if you are taking videos or photos, make sure you don't interfere with match flow or safety by staying up range, not getting in the way of range/safety officers, and remembering to tape/paste and reset. And don't forget, if you want a few cool pictures or videos of yourself, feel free to ask your squad mates. They'll be happy to help out as long as they aren't getting ready to shoot, just as you should be if you are asked.
After the Match
Once everyone has finished shooting, the match isn't quite over yet. Because everyone works every match, everyone should be involved in tear down: putting away all of the equipment used in the match. Tear down tasks range from pulling targets off the sticks or backers they are mounted to, disassembling props, and neatly piling up target stands in the appropriate areas, to delivering or putting away score sheets and timers, taking shot-up targets to the trash, and collecting stakes and other accessories used to hold props together or make activated targets work. While some heavy lifting is always required, you don't need to be Superman or Wonder Woman because those lighter-weight things need to be done too. Either way, stash a pair of work gloves in your range bag and you'll look like a hero and be remembered for being prepared and eager to do more than participate in the entertainment portion of the day. And while you're tearing down, don't forget to say thank you to the match directors, staff, and your squadmates.
Finally, results. You probably will want to know how you did now that you've been through all of the work, stress, and fun of the match itself. Normally, scores are posted or emailed within a few days to a week after a match. Ask your squadmates when and where you can expect to find them. Remember that getting these up is also a volunteer job, so pestering the match director about when you'll get scores or issues you have with scores is generally not a good idea. Polite questions are always acceptable, though, so don't feel like you have to stay silent if scores seem to be taking a long time to become available or if you're confused by the results. It might be something as simple as your email address not being in the right list or a typo.
Here's a parting secret: you don't have to care about your scores, and chances are extremely good nobody else cares about them. What we, as match staff and more experienced shooters, care about much more is that you are safe, that you had fun, and that you participated in all of the match including the grunt work. When we see that, you're much more likely to get all of the help you want in getting your shooting to the level you're looking for, because you're who we especially want to see back on the range. Because beauty isn't just perfect doubles and blazing fast Bill Drills...it's also many hands making light work and a smoothly and efficiently run match that everyone can enjoy.
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