By John Gilstrap
A few weeks ago, I posted about my adventure with Jeffery Deaver in which we got private instruction on tactical shooting while at the SHOT Show in Las Vegas. Well, now there’s videos evidence: http://tinyurl.com/clxzbry. You can also find a link on the News Feed on my website.
If it looks like slow motion, that’s because it was. We were using live ammo in a car, assuming shooting positions that could easily have made our own legs the primary target while drawing. The “quick draw” contest at the end–also rather slow–was a one-shot, three round accuracy contest. The first to hit the gong won the round. While the video shows Jeff winning the first shot, the next two, which I won, somehow ended up on the cutting room floor. I’m just sayin’ . . .
This brings me to the stated purpose of this week’s post: my coolest new Internet discovery: Dropbox. Like everything else that dwells in cyberspace, I’m confident that I’m one of the last ones to the table here, but my goodness, is that cool!
You go to www.dropbox.com and download the program free of charge, and Bingo! you have cloud storage for your files that is accessible from any computer anywhere. You can even share files, which is how I was able to give my web mistress access to the 100MB video of our shooting adventure.
I still depend heavily on my thumb drive as primary storage, backed up to whatever machine I’m working on at any given time, but it’s great to have Dropbox, accessible from anywhere.
What are the other cool Internet toys that I’m behind the times on? Which ones are indispensable toyou?
Category Archives: SHOT Show
Lesson From Gun Camp
Last week, I wrote a teaser blog about some firearms training I was to receive while pulling duty as a VIP guest of 5.11 Tactical at the SHOT Show in Las Vegas. First a few words about the SHOT Show: Holy Cow! You have to see this thing to understand the size. It takes up the ENTIRE Sands Convention Center, occupying all three floors. Every conceivable manufacturer of any firearm is there, and while they cannot sell to individuals from the floor, you are perfectly welcome to handle any weapon you want, up to and including dry firing it. (The Las Vegas Police Department checked every single one of the thousands of firearms there to verify that the firing pins had been removed.) Never held an M4 or a Glock or a 1911? You can play with them. Ditto the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle, the M2 “Ma Deuce” .50 cal machine gun and a Dillon Gun. It’s the mother of all gun research opportunities, and EVERYONE I spoke to was more than willing to chat about their products. What I found most stunning was the number of firearms makers that I’d never heard of.
Last Thursday, I met Jeffery Deaver in the lobby of our hotel at 6:45 a.m. We were driven a half hour out into the desert to a shooting range that looked like it covered twenty or thirty acres. We were driven way to the back of the facility, where I realized for the first time that Jeff and I would be the only students for the entire day.
Our instructor was Steve Tarani. Look him up. Yeah, he’s qualified. And he’s very, very funny, in that zero-bullshit kind of way. After an extensive safety briefing, we were issued our .40 caliber Glocks, holsters and three mags of ammunition. (A million thanks to Barry, who made sure that we always had a 12-round mag ready to go so that our pouches were never dry.) Jeff drew a thigh rig holster, while my holster rode on my belt. As an aside, the 5.11 Tactical pants we wore were specifically designed with an extra belt loop that keeps a belt holster from moving around. I like that kind of attention to details.
For the next three hours, we shot hundreds of rounds of ammunition, first while standing still, but then while moving and turning. Finally, we were shooting from the driver’s and passenger’s seats of an SUV (a late model Acura that did not belong to either student). The day ended with a quick-draw contest and an NSR (non-standard response) drill that involves shooting everything in the mag at short range, as quickly as possible while still hitting center of mass on the target. As Steve made clear from the very beginning, this was a tactical shooting class, not a marksmanship class (although I did pretty well in that department, too.)
Lesson One: Tactical shooting is only a distant cousin of target shooting. Until this lesson, my range training had consisted of picking a weapon up from a table, taking my time and concentrating on placing shots in the center ring. I’d never drawn a pistol from a holster and just that much movement changes the game. Throw in multiple points of impact on the target (we’d be instructed, for example, to put two in the chest, one in the pelvis and one in the forehead–not the jaw, though) and now you’ve got more to think about and more to do. By the time you’re pivoting and turning and throwing open the car door while drawing your weapon without ever pointing it at your own leg or anywhere near your partner, it’s tough to get your rounds downrange to the target. And very, very fun.
Lesson Two: My grip was AFU. This one’s hard to describe without specific pictures, but my hands didn’t have enough contact with the gun. I was also using an out-of-date and out-of-favor shooting stance called the Weaver Stance, in which my support side leg (my left, since I’m right-handed) was slightly forward. I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that stance. In my new Isosceles Stance (or “Tony Chin” stance), I square off at the bad guy with my toes, knees and chin touching the same vertical plane–Toe-Knee-Chin. Tony Chin. Get it?
Lesson Three: It’s disconcerting how much of one’s own body can become a target when drawing a weapon. Think about your free hand, for example. Given that one of Steve’s Four Golden Rules is that the muzzle never cover anything that you don’t want to completely destroy, that free support hand needs to be anchored somewhere when the pistol is coming out of the holster. I learned to place it on my chest, where not only is it out of harm’s way, but it’s also ready to do its job in supporting the shooting hand.
Lesson Four: I was a “booger flipper,” Steve’s term for one who lets one’s finger off the trigger after every shot. If you watch what that looks like, booger flipping really does come to mind. I learned in the early part of the class to hold the trigger all the way to the back of the trigger guard after the first shot, and then let it up only to the reset click to prepare for the next shot. It takes far less pull, and increases accuracy by a lot. After a few hundred rounds, it was second nature.
Lesson Five: It’s stressful as hell to run out of ammo in the middle of a drill. Running out when the target is shooting back must be really unnerving. Steve taught us to drop the spent mag and slap in the new one while never taking our eyes off the target. Truth be told, this was my hardest lesson to learn. My thumbs are too short to reach the mag release without shifting my grip. I sorta got the hang of it in the end, but it’s really hard not to look. After a couple dozen tactical reloads in which we let the spent mags just drop to the ground, we even changed it up to replace a partially-spent mag with a full one, in which case we needed to put the old mag back into the pouch after reloading while still staying on the target.
Lesson Six: If you own a gun, you really need to practice this stuff. In just three hours–and about 200 bucks in ammo (Thank you again, 5.11 Tactical!)–so many of the tiny details became second nature. Even the simple act of reholstering has its complex parts. In Steve’s class, after the threat is cleared, you sweep left, sweep right, then return to low-ready before you put that support hand back on your chest to get it out of the way, and then slide the weapon back into the holster. We did that every single time we reholstered, even if we hadn’t fired a shot, and by the end of the training, doing things otherwise would have just felt wrong.
As I write this, I realize how long the post is, and how few of the lessons learned I can actually document here. My big take away was this: As a guy who’s always liked guns and has played with them a lot over the years, I in fact knew nothing. Now, after this experience, I’m fully aware of the fact that I still know way too little, and that much of what I did learn will disappear from my muscle memory in just a day or two. I need to find a range that will let me move and shoot.
The world is full of five-day classes on this stuff, and I’m seriously thinking about taking one. How about a Killzone field trip for a week at Sleep-Away Gun Camp? That could be fun.
Lesson From Gun Camp
Last week, I wrote a teaser blog about some firearms training I was to receive while pulling duty as a VIP guest of 5.11 Tactical at the SHOT Show in Las Vegas. First a few words about the SHOT Show: Holy Cow! You have to see this thing to understand the size. It takes up the ENTIRE Sands Convention Center, occupying all three floors. Every conceivable manufacturer of any firearm is there, and while they cannot sell to individuals from the floor, you are perfectly welcome to handle any weapon you want, up to and including dry firing it. (The Las Vegas Police Department checked every single one of the thousands of firearms there to verify that the firing pins had been removed.) Never held an M4 or a Glock or a 1911? You can play with them. Ditto the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle, the M2 “Ma Deuce” .50 cal machine gun and a Dillon Gun. It’s the mother of all gun research opportunities, and EVERYONE I spoke to was more than willing to chat about their products. What I found most stunning was the number of firearms makers that I’d never heard of.
Last Thursday, I met Jeffery Deaver in the lobby of our hotel at 6:45 a.m. We were driven a half hour out into the desert to a shooting range that looked like it covered twenty or thirty acres. We were driven way to the back of the facility, where I realized for the first time that Jeff and I would be the only students for the entire day.
Our instructor was Steve Tarani. Look him up. Yeah, he’s qualified. And he’s very, very funny, in that zero-bullshit kind of way. After an extensive safety briefing, we were issued our .40 caliber Glocks, holsters and three mags of ammunition. (A million thanks to Barry, who made sure that we always had a 12-round mag ready to go so that our pouches were never dry.) Jeff drew a thigh rig holster, while my holster rode on my belt. As an aside, the 5.11 Tactical pants we wore were specifically designed with an extra belt loop that keeps a belt holster from moving around. I like that kind of attention to details.
For the next three hours, we shot hundreds of rounds of ammunition, first while standing still, but then while moving and turning. Finally, we were shooting from the driver’s and passenger’s seats of an SUV (a late model Acura that did not belong to either student). The day ended with a quick-draw contest and an NSR (non-standard response) drill that involves shooting everything in the mag at short range, as quickly as possible while still hitting center of mass on the target. As Steve made clear from the very beginning, this was a tactical shooting class, not a marksmanship class (although I did pretty well in that department, too.)
Lesson One: Tactical shooting is only a distant cousin of target shooting. Until this lesson, my range training had consisted of picking a weapon up from a table, taking my time and concentrating on placing shots in the center ring. I’d never drawn a pistol from a holster and just that much movement changes the game. Throw in multiple points of impact on the target (we’d be instructed, for example, to put two in the chest, one in the pelvis and one in the forehead–not the jaw, though) and now you’ve got more to think about and more to do. By the time you’re pivoting and turning and throwing open the car door while drawing your weapon without ever pointing it at your own leg or anywhere near your partner, it’s tough to get your rounds downrange to the target. And very, very fun.
Lesson Two: My grip was AFU. This one’s hard to describe without specific pictures, but my hands didn’t have enough contact with the gun. I was also using an out-of-date and out-of-favor shooting stance called the Weaver Stance, in which my support side leg (my left, since I’m right-handed) was slightly forward. I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that stance. In my new Isosceles Stance (or “Tony Chin” stance), I square off at the bad guy with my toes, knees and chin touching the same vertical plane–Toe-Knee-Chin. Tony Chin. Get it?
Lesson Three: It’s disconcerting how much of one’s own body can become a target when drawing a weapon. Think about your free hand, for example. Given that one of Steve’s Four Golden Rules is that the muzzle never cover anything that you don’t want to completely destroy, that free support hand needs to be anchored somewhere when the pistol is coming out of the holster. I learned to place it on my chest, where not only is it out of harm’s way, but it’s also ready to do its job in supporting the shooting hand.
Lesson Four: I was a “booger flipper,” Steve’s term for one who lets one’s finger off the trigger after every shot. If you watch what that looks like, booger flipping really does come to mind. I learned in the early part of the class to hold the trigger all the way to the back of the trigger guard after the first shot, and then let it up only to the reset click to prepare for the next shot. It takes far less pull, and increases accuracy by a lot. After a few hundred rounds, it was second nature.
Lesson Five: It’s stressful as hell to run out of ammo in the middle of a drill. Running out when the target is shooting back must be really unnerving. Steve taught us to drop the spent mag and slap in the new one while never taking our eyes off the target. Truth be told, this was my hardest lesson to learn. My thumbs are too short to reach the mag release without shifting my grip. I sorta got the hang of it in the end, but it’s really hard not to look. After a couple dozen tactical reloads in which we let the spent mags just drop to the ground, we even changed it up to replace a partially-spent mag with a full one, in which case we needed to put the old mag back into the pouch after reloading while still staying on the target.
Lesson Six: If you own a gun, you really need to practice this stuff. In just three hours–and about 200 bucks in ammo (Thank you again, 5.11 Tactical!)–so many of the tiny details became second nature. Even the simple act of reholstering has its complex parts. In Steve’s class, after the threat is cleared, you sweep left, sweep right, then return to low-ready before you put that support hand back on your chest to get it out of the way, and then slide the weapon back into the holster. We did that every single time we reholstered, even if we hadn’t fired a shot, and by the end of the training, doing things otherwise would have just felt wrong.
As I write this, I realize how long the post is, and how few of the lessons learned I can actually document here. My big take away was this: As a guy who’s always liked guns and has played with them a lot over the years, I in fact knew nothing. Now, after this experience, I’m fully aware of the fact that I still know way too little, and that much of what I did learn will disappear from my muscle memory in just a day or two. I need to find a range that will let me move and shoot.
The world is full of five-day classes on this stuff, and I’m seriously thinking about taking one. How about a Killzone field trip for a week at Sleep-Away Gun Camp? That could be fun.
Pure Coolness
By John Gilstrap
I’m writing this blog post on Sunday, January 15 knowing that when you read it, I will be in the middle of a very, very cool day. Actually, a warm day, I hope. In Las Vegas, where I’ll be signing books this morning at the 2012 SHOT Show. According to the show’s website, www.shotshow.org, “The Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade Show (SHOT Show) and Conference is the largest and most comprehensive trade show for all professionals involved with the shooting sports, hunting and law enforcement industries. It is the world’s premier exposition of combined firearms, ammunition, law enforcement, cutlery, outdoor apparel, optics and related products and services.” Last year, over 50,000 people attended.
I was invited to the show months ago by the nice people at 5.11 Tactical, a well-respected manufacturer of tactical apparel–the very kind of geat that Jonathan Grave wears as he charges through my imagination. In fact, in preparation for the show, 5.11 tactical sent me a carton of gear, including shirt, pants, jacket and the best pair of boots I’ve ever worn. I’ll be wearing the attire for the book signings and the press conference.
I’ve never enjoyed this kind of VIP treatment before, so I confess to being a little giddy. Take a look at my official itinerary from yesterday:
6:30am — Firearms instructor will pick you up at the hotel
7:00am — arrive at range, setup/meet with range staff, gear check, etc.
7:00am-7:30am — Orientation, area familiarization, safety briefing, etc.
8:00am-11:00am — Firearms training
11:00am-12:00pm — Knife training
12:00 — depart back to hotel for lunch and classroom training
12:30-1:30 — Prefense Technologies — lecture, PowerPoint presentation, student interactive, etc.
1:30-2:15 — Prep for author panel
2:30-3:30 — Author Panel Press Conference, Venetian Murano Room 3306.
Really, how cool is that? As I write this, I’m hoping that the knife training comes complete with either thick padding or fake knives. You’ll know the answer, I suppose, if you see a post here next week.
Tally ho!