Larry’s field notes definitely needs to be preserved. You know- for science! -Jack

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Let me clue you guys in.

A common tactic used by dishonest bully assholes is to pretend that the internet is a real place, which functions on the same rules of civility as in real life conversations.

When they see someone saying something they don’t like, they weaponize the unstated rules of discourse by swooping in and “only asking questions”.

Because in normal face to face human interaction when someone asks you a question, you usually answer it. That’s the default path.

So you answer. The dishonest trash ignores that and asks another. Repeat. Again. Repeat. Again. And they aren’t just simple questions. They are homework assignments.

Deep down on an instinctual level dishonest pricks understand the Brandollini Principle. So they throw out some little bullshit, knowing it will take you an order of magnitude more effort to refute that bullshit than to create it.

Even worse, this type of asshole travels in packs. So no matter how many times you do one homework assignment for a stranger, there’s a dozen others in the comments doing the same thing. All of them willfully ignoring the answers you already provided to the others.

Now, because these are profoundly dishonest people and there is no actual honest engagement at play, they will bury you in bullshit until the polite victim finally says enough and gets snappy OR they will ask a question which is too complex to explain, doesn’t have a real answer, or is just so pointless no one will bother.

At that point the dishonest fake civility people will pounce. Because by failing or refusing to answer them, they declare that you have broken the rules of civility. They win. You lose. You suck.

Of course these rules of civility are a one way street. At no point do they honestly answer the people asking them questions. They might spend 30 seconds on Google and paste the first headline they think agrees with them (and they never read the article) but you have to write them a thesis with annotated bibliography or else. Which they will ignore anyway, and then demand you write another.

In real life if some fucking bum comes up to you asking bullshit questions because he wants to take advantage of you “nice” people get trapped, and now you’re in a conversation you never wanted about how he needs to borrow $20 for gas money because his baby mamma got a job interview and blah blah blah until he robs you.

These fuckers are that, only online.

So just like the in real life bullshit panhandler addict loser, you can either play their game or be assertive and tell them to fuck off. Both versions get super upset when you refuse to play by the fake rules of civility.

How can you tell a lying, time sucking bum, from an honest person who is seeking good faith discussion. Oh there’s many tells. The liars stink.

So they know they’re full of shit. We know they’re full of shit. They know that we know. We know that they know that we know. So why should we waste time pretending?

When you get one of these time sucking assholes, just skip to where you know you’re gonna end up anyway. If you feel like answering questions ONLY do it for the audience. Anything else is a waste.
EDIT: for Internet Zoology purposes this type of creature will be called a Time Sucking Cockwomble.

You know, all the recent TL/DR complaints got me to thinking… as a novelist I’m really not serving the impatient, entitled, short attention span, functionally illiterate, community nearly as well as I should. So I’m going to produce TL/DR versions of all my novels. Here are the first books of each series-

Monster Hunter International – An accountant shoots monsters, then shoots more monsters, and then shoots different kinds of monsters.

Son of the Black Sword – An Indian guy who might be autistic forgets a bunch of stuff then remembers it. Also there is stabbing.

Academy of Outcasts – Like this kid wants to be a wizard or something, but there’s a shark, and the shark might be autistic.

Servants of War – This kid who is not autistic but needs glasses gets to drive a giant robot with magic. Also lots of rats eating people.

Gun Runner – A different kid drives a different giant robot, only it isn’t magic. And the space ship captain is based on Nick Searcy.

Dead Six – Its like a buddy cop show only they aren’t buddies or cops and there’s a lot of shoot outs in two different deserts.

Lost Planet Homicide – Now this one has buddies who are cops but the shoot outs are in a big cave. It’s like Space Bosch, but not Space Justified, because the character based on Nick Searcy is in a different one.

The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent – honestly, the title should be enough for you. Also there is a manatee.

Into The Storm – I don’t know. This was someone else’s universe, but I got to write about the Dirty Dozen only with mad science lightning swords.

American Paladin – Have Gun Will Travel but for the guy who shoots Aztecs from another dimension, like if the Punisher was a cowboy.

There you go. If you functional illiterates made it this far you owe me 80 cents for each of those summaries. I take Venmo.

Larry’s battle with bad shooting advice continues unabated…
(sigh) —Jack

Over the last week I had a few shooting posts go viral, so I got dozens of that one type of comment that we’ve all seen before: Variations of the MINDSET thing, where whatever you are doing is useless, because unless you are a hardened warrior bad ass like them who has been tested in combat, when the time comes you regular people will freeze, choke, and fail, because you are unable to take a life.

So that got me curious. This gets said a lot. So surely, with millions of regular Americans carrying guns, and thousands of defensive gun uses every year, this must happen all the time right?

And I’ll go ahead and put a TL/DR summary now for the semi-literate whine babies with no attention spans who need their food digested for them like baby birds- No. Regular people who carry guns do not freeze up, unable to drop the hammer on other human beings. Statistically, that almost never happens. That platitude is a myth, usually barfed up by dudes with self-esteem issues trying to feel special.  

Now for the rest of you who can read good, here’s the details, some nuance, and some possible explanations.

So after the 20th variation of this dumb ass platitude showing up on my page I decided to see how many cases I could find of regular people who carry guns getting into a violent encounter, and not being able to pull the trigger on the bad guy out of some moral/courage/feelings failure.

Luckily for me, I’ve been a huge gun nerd and training dork for decades so I know a lot of really smart people who do this stuff professionally. And I started asking a bunch of them if they knew of any cases where a regular person went all Upham from Saving Pvt. Ryan in real life, in America, in modern times?

I asked professional face shooters, guys who train cops, guys who train regular citizens, guys who study the psychology of applied violence and human performance, and people who collect and analyze information on gun fights for a living. I asked in private groups made up of professional instructors and training junkies, and then messaged a dozen other people.  (and apologies to any of you guys who feel left out because I missed you, this was a rush job) I’m not tagging them here because FB stomps on posts with name tags, but many of you will know exactly who I’m talking about and I’ll talk about them in the comments. (just heading off the dumb ass detractors who are going to claim I made all these people up)

Specifically, I wanted cases with regular people who had decided to carry guns who’d gotten into a violent encounter. Not police officers in duty related events. And not military combat. Those situations tend to be way different, and I’ll talk more about that in the findings.

So, having bugged people with a combined couple thousand years of experience on this topic, you know how many shootings they came up with where that thing we get screamed at happens all the time is confirmed to have happened?

One. Between all of them we came up with ONE confirmed incident. In 2005.

I asked the man who has the world’s largest collection of videos of shootings, and analyzed like 50,000 of them how often he has seen this. He hasn’t. He couldn’t think of any videos showing that. In fact, the big problem was the opposite with people being too eager to shoot when they probably shouldn’t.  

So no video and almost no cases anyone could recall. Now, to specify. There were other cases where that *might* have happened, but we don’t know, because we couldn’t ask the armed citizen what was going through his mind at the time unless we held a séance.

However, even if we toss in every event where the good guy died and the cause might have been because he choked and just couldn’t pull the trigger, we’re really having to scrape the barrel because that just doesn’t happen very often. And keep in mind, this is out of thousands of defensive gun uses every year.

If we take every single case where a regular person got disarmed by the bad guy and shot with his own gun, and assumed the reason why was that they just couldn’t shoot the bad guy, and assume moral choking is the reason-which speaking as a guy who has done force on force wrestling with sim guns that is a really bad assumption to make-that’s still a tiny percentage, because that hardly ever happens with CCW. Weapon retention is a lot bigger deal for cops than regular people, because their guns are visible and their job requires them to go hands on with bad people. Regular folks don’t usually do that.

Could there be more cases this group just wasn’t aware of? Yes, very possibly. But could it be a statistically significant number? Absolutely not.

Are there cases where people hesitate to shoot for reasons other than a moral/courage one? Absolutely yes. Especially in regular citizen self-defense, where the goal isn’t “destroy the enemy” or “arrest the perp”, the goal is “survive”.  In the majority of regular DGU’s no shots are fired. Bad Guy does something that makes Good Guy think he needs to shoot, gun comes out, Bad Guy decides to stop doing whatever bad thing it was, so he no longer needs to get shot. Yay. Problem solved.

In talking to all these smart people, they all had examples of hesitation, many of them personal, and it had nothing to do with they COULDN’T but rather if they SHOULDN’T. I had guys tell me about going to shoot someone and then stopping because they realized there were innocent bystanders in the backstop. I had guys tell me about going to shoot someone, but then stopping and holding fire because the bad guy suddenly broke off, surrendered, or turned and ran away.

But in each of those THE ABILITY TO DROP THE HAMMER ON THE BAD GUY DID NOT ENTER INTO THE MENTAL EQUATION AT THE TIME.

In talking to one very analytical person who writes books about how the human brain processes this stuff he pointed out that when a surprise bad thing happens all humans have some mental freeze while they process that information. It’s just that the more training people have the faster that process is completed, and if they’re well trained enough it seems like there is no process at all.

He said that it is possible that some people do hesitate over moral grounds while going through that process, and just don’t recall it afterwards, but there’s zero way to really tell. He talked about one infamous mass shooter event where there were a few armed people nearby, but one of them reacted a lot faster than the other two. Could their hesitation have been from this alleged choke freeze or something else? Maybe? But it’s also possible the first guy was just better trained and more tuned up, so he reacted faster.

Also, I’m not saying that everybody reacted WELL. Or that they made the best decision possible. Oh no, people screw up all the time. But cases where they didn’t react or froze and didn’t make any decisions at all are virtually non-existent.

Now, my guess on the reason we’re not seeing large numbers of this legendary choke freeze that self-righteous cockwombles on the internet assume happens all the time to everybody but them, is that people who have made the conscious decision to go through the effort of carrying a firearm have self selected out of the group of people who would be morally hesitant to shoot someone.

Are there people who actually carry a gun, who haven’t thought about ever using it on someone? And they’ve just got it like some magic talisman to ward off evil? Very possibly. Is this common? Apparently not.

Back when I was teaching CCW a zillion years ago I was a young father, so the cheesy analogy I used in class was that it was like teaching our kids about drugs. You don’t wait until somebody offers you some cocaine at a party to decide if you’re going to do drugs or not. You make the decision beforehand. Then in the moment of testing that decision is already done. There’s no big moral temptation. You put on a gun, same thing. Moment of testing comes you already know your decision.  

Next up, you can’t compare wildly different things. Having been in the military is commendable. I thank you for your service. However, that’s apples and oranges compared to regular self-defense in America in the year 2025.

Keep in mind that the encounters the military get into are extremely different than the encounters cops get into and those are profoundly different than the encounters regular citizens wind up in. That’s why when dumb asses do the Respect My Authority because twenty years ago I Qualified Expert, that means jack shit if the topic is regular American self-defense shooting.

One difference on the psychology of taking someone’s life is that regular CCW people aren’t usually the aggressor. They’re the responder. The bad guy is who usually initiates the encounter. So it’s the bad guy who has made the moral decision that somebody is getting shot today. The good guy is just like oh man, I don’t wanna die, BANG.

That’s a lot different psychologically than taking the fight to the enemy, and sometimes initiating it from ambush even and blowing away unsuspecting dudes because it’s your job to seek out and kill the enemy. Then you’ve got people like Grossman making assumptions about how hard to impossible it is for people to shoot other people, because he was studying drafted 18 year olds who didn’t want to go to a foreign country at all, who weren’t able to shoot a drafted 16 year old once they got there… and thinking that’s the same mental hang up as some regular woman who just wanted to be left alone who pulls a gun on a psycho who is attacking her right now and he’s not wearing any pants. That lady is like naw, fuck this, BANG.

In asking one of the guys who has been teaching regular people for decades, and has had a bunch of students shoot bad guys, he said he didn’t know anybody who went full Upham, but he could name some kindly grandma ladies who didn’t hesitate to unload on people.

Law enforcement also gets into a bunch of different situations that don’t apply to regular people. We aren’t kicking in doors, serving warrants, intervening in domestic violence, or doing traffic stops, or any of those other high risk things. With the police trainers I asked they had cases where officers hesitated a lot longer than they should have, but those were because of worrying about legalities or they were trying to avoid starting another riot.

There have been super noteworthy cases of moral/courage failings among cops, but in situations which don’t really apply to regular people. There’s a big difference between standing around outside a mass shooting you’re supposed to be responding to and not doing your job, versus being a citizen who ends up in a mass shooting and your job is to keep the bad guy from killing you so you say fuck that guy BANG. Eli Dicken is a better man than the entire Uvalde PD.  

So in conclusion, those internet choades are full of shit, and we can stick a fork in that old platitude. They’re just compelled to shit all over anybody who puts in any effort at anything in a desperate and pathetic attempt to feel better about themselves because their father never loved them. Next time you run into one of these losers ask him to name off some examples, and then enjoy watching them cope and seethe. 😀

This is day… five? Six, maybe? of Larry arguing with people about shooting. The video he mentions is available on X or Facebook -Jack

Okay, in all seriousness I need to say something about that video rebuttal I did yesterday to stomp that one moron’s demonstration of his point shooting technique. Bear with me. I promise this will be the last post on the subject for a while, but I need to explain my vehemence on this topic.

I’m a writer now, but I was an instructor for a lot of years, and I take it real serious when people dispense objectively bad information that’s going to get someone gullible hurt.

I did a little testing this morning doing it his way… And no joking around, that shit is legit dangerous, and if this guy is actually teaching people like he claims, and anybody tries to do that in real life, innocent bystanders are going to get shot.  

So from what he claimed he was point shooting at 7 yards, pistol at full extension, two handed, and he hit a single target 15 times with a pattern (I won’t dignify it by calling it a group) that measuring on that same size target I have here would be about a foot from top to bottom shot, and about a foot from furthest side to side. He didn’t use a timer (of course) and you can hear him run the slide before he starts shooting so he didn’t go from the holster, and his splits sound like about .25 to .30 I’d guess.

Doing the same thing, no sights (which feels dumb and awkward) it took me like three tries to be able to beat his show off video. This isn’t bragging, because you shouldn’t brag about being able to do something stupid. I did it from the holster for practicality. With the gun at full extension it was actually more difficult to force myself to NOT use the sights that were right there. (I mean, the guns extended out there, why not?) Even with the dot off it was dumb, and eventually I had to put painters tape over the back of the glass to keep me from picking up the irons through it.

And as I explain this next part, I want you to understand that this dude presented the BEST point shooting skill video at that range I’ve seen in nearly thirty years of asking.

Basically he was doing a recoil control exercise. With a decent grip and body index you can ballistically masturbate and mostly hit a target at 7. Yay. I did this several times, and it’s kinda fun, but that’s it.

Now this is where it gets incredibly dangerous and stupid to think you can point shoot at that kind of range in an actual defensive scenario. I cut the strings down to 7 or 10 shots each because this was already a waste of ammo anyway and started adding complications.

Next up, I’d draw and take three steps to the side. Oh snap. All that practiced index went out the window and I’m sending what look like 50 yard buckshot patterns. Then I tried moving backwards while shooting. Even worse. Lots of deltas. Any movement introduced at all obliterates that whole bullshit “muscle memory” thing.

Draw and take a knee or squat like you’re shooting around low cover? Now the angle is super far off and I missed some shots entirely. My range is on a slope, but I already knew this was bull crap and didn’t waste any time moving the target stands, but you can guess what’ll happen if you change the elevation between you and the target from whatever your “muscle memory” was set at.

I threw up a second target three yards from the first one to do some transitions. Hits on 1 from the indexed position. Just swiveling to 2 had a massive drop off in accuracy and a couple complete misses.  Then I did some shooting on the move laterally trying to hit both from pointing. Oh, there were hits, but they weren’t anything to write home about. Keep in mind I’m doing this on my private range where I shoot while moving all the time. Most people don’t have access to a range that will let them practice that.

And keep in mind, NONE OF THIS WAS ANY FASTER THAN JUST AIMING. You get a dangerous degradation in accuracy for no gain in speed. At .3 splits doing all this stuff I should be like 90%+ A zone hits.

I pulled the tape off and messed around with coarse aiming, so dot off, just using the rear of the slide and shape of the gun as a rough aiming device, and that was way better than the pointing it like a finger thing, which makes me suspect some of these dudes spouting off about point shooting are actually doing coarse aiming and don’t know it. I know the Duke told you to just point it like a finger because a screen writer put that in a script 50 years ago, but humans don’t move our arm in line with the center of our torso and then use both hands to control the recoil of our finger.

For the people bringing up WW2 and Vietnam pistol shots from point shooting, go look at the sights on a GI 1911 and you’ll understand why that happened when they were in a hurry or the light was bad. The people saying you aren’t going to see the sights under stress are talking about hundred year old sights that are a tiny and nearly invisible compared to modern high visibility sights, and way less obvious than a glowing dot.

Could I eventually get to where I could reliably get hits doing all this stuff at 7 yards pointing? Sure. But for the amount of effort expended I’d be far better off doing it the not stupid way. There’s no return on this investment, because you aren’t going to have “muscle memory” for every angle or body position that might happen. (plus muscles don’t have memory, just stop with that)

What’s going to happen to the poor sucker who listens to this idiot and thinks the mag dump at trash method is viable, is that he’s going to end up needing his gun, and then the bad guy is going to move somehow and not just stand there and you get the idea.

(On that note, the 3 yards, 3 seconds, 3 shots thing? That’s not actual data. That’s just something somebody made up and the internet ran with it. Turns out most shootings aren’t static, and those that start at 3 might stop at 15)

Plus we know how this point and blaze method works now. Look at the shooting stats for places like Chicago and Baltimore. Lots of rounds getting sent at each other with enthusiastic pointing, a ton of misses and a small percentage of hits for relatively few fatalities because most of those are extremity shots, and a whole bunch of little kids getting shot off of swing sets down the block.

I think we can do better than that.

Dead horse beaten! 😀

When I say Larry has been arguing shooting a lot, I wasn’t kidding. So you get a twofer today- enjoy 🙂
-Jack

A note on how to get good firearms instruction-

You may have noticed over the last week I’ve gotten into a bunch of gun related arguments with a horde of ridiculous Dunning-Krugerands with self-esteem issues. But one major serious issue popped up a few times during this that I need to talk about. Some of these dudes who were dispensing objectively awful information claimed “I teach this shit for a living” or claimed that they were instructors. One bragged about how he was an “NRA certified instructor” and got butt hurt when that didn’t impress anyone with a clue.

The problem is that anybody can call themselves a “firearms instructor”. There’s no barrier to entry. Any doofus can make a website and charge suckers good money to teach them mag dump at trash level stuff. My last post was sharing a video of some instruction that looked downright idiotic and probably dangerous.

So how do people who are starting out, who don’t know what they don’t know, get good instruction rather than some dumb ass who thinks point shooting at 7 yards makes a lick of sense in the year 2025.

There’s different levels of professional instruction. There’s local guys who teach basic stuff all the way up to people who are really well known at the national level who travel around the country putting on classes. You can get instruction in pretty much every type of shooting you’re interested in. I’m primarily a pistol guy, so that’s what I’ll focus on. But I’ve also taken shotgun, precision rifle, carbine, and some oddball specialty stuff, which I’ll get into a bit, but mostly this is aimed at new shooters trying to get better with basic self defense pistol type stuff.

For getting started, I’m talking basic familiarity-this is how guns work and how to shoot them a little-and safety-how not to shoot yourself or others-level stuff. As long as you don’t pick a complete dumb ass most regular basic classes are fine. And yes, despite what people who’ve only gotten to that level claim, state mandated CCW classes and NRA classes are super basic.

How do you find a basic class? Check your local ranges. Check your local gun stores. Just ask the people who are there and there’s almost always going to be one scheduled somewhere by somebody.

HOWEVER… don’t just accept the word of the first person who says “Oh, Jim Bob’s class is great!” It’s okay to do a search on Jim Bob and see what other students have said about him. If he’s teaching basic stuff it’s probably gonna be fine. But if you get to the reviews where they tell you most of the class is Jim Bob’s “war stories” and then they did Death Blossom or some shit, run. Basic classes should be safe handling and fundamentals of marksmanship type stuff.

If you see them talking about shit like “CQB” or “room clearing” in the description of a one day class for newbs, open to the public, with no pre requisites to get in, RUN AWAY. I don’t care who you are, you aren’t shoving that kind of stuff into a one day class for GenPop. That’s a big red flag.

For basic level stuff you can also learn on your own, but starting out that’s one of those things where you don’t know what you don’t know, and you might be teaching yourself wrong and ingraining bad habits. I started out self taught and thought I was really bad ass because I was better than all my friends… until I went to my very first ever pistol match and realized I had no flipping clue what I was doing. That’s the part where humility is important, and if you want to get better you shut up, and learn from the people who are better.

On that note, it isn’t official instruction, but getting involved with your local shooting sports will help you immensely. If you want to learn to shoot a pistol good, and you have got at least some basic proficiency, safety, and are humble enough to listen to directions and not be a dick about it, you can learn a ton by going to your local IDPA or USPSA matches. The first thing I ever went to was a Steel Challenge match. I got lucky and those guys were super friendly and happy to help a newb. A good match director will squad newbs up with patient shooters who will offer coaching as you go. This of course will be hit or miss depending on the nature of your local clubs. Some people are just dicks. Sorry. That’s how it is.

On the self taught thing, I’ve been doing this a long time. We didn’t have YouTube back then. There’s a bunch of firearms instruction videos online. Believe it or not some of them are actually really good. Some are utter dogshit. Buyer beware and none of them replace hands on use or personal coaching. You get what you pay for. The more you learn the more you will be able to weed out the bullshit. But a lot of the good, higher level instructors I’ll talk about below also post some of their content online.

Now that you’ve got some basic training, and you’re at least semi-competent, and most importantly understand the safe handling of firearms, you can probably stop there and be content. (just don’t do like these morons who’ve been yelling at me all week and go all Dunning-Krugerand. Remain humble about knowing what your actual level of relative performance is)

This is a great time to continue in the shooting sports. It’ll help immensely. You can learn a ton in class, but a class is only so many hours. Classes are to get information. Practice and competition are how you take those lessons and hone them and actually figure out how to put them into use. You can learn a technique in a class, but you aren’t going to master anything while you’re there. You’re going to master it in the weeks and months after the class while you screw around with the stuff you were taught during the hours you were paying someone money.

There are some stupendously good shooters who never got any formal training at all. However, those guys are usually the fixated, driven, highly competitive sorts. And I’m not talking just competitive against others, but competitive against themselves.

There are also people who are freaks of nature, either through pure talent or abnormal extraordinary amounts of personal effort. If you are a normal person it is foolish to compare yourself to these people, and if you don’t test yourself, don’t dare assume you can do what they do. There’s a reason they are special. Yes, guys like Jerry Miculek and Jelly Bryce exist. You aren’t them. Because a thing can be accomplished by the far outliers doesn’t mean that thing is viable to most of the bell curve.

So now you want to get some more advanced training. Awesome. This stuff is expensive and time consuming, so choose wisely. Vet who you are going to learn from. There’s a lot of assholes out there who “teach” as in they charge you money while they tell you shit and then you shoot stuff. We’ve seen a few of them here this last week.

I watched a guy talking shit about a Master class USPSA shooter, and when other accomplished shooters pushed back, that guy’s appeal to authority was that he was an NRA certified instructor. Which made everybody knowledgeable snort laugh, because all that proves is that you were able to stay awake (mostly) during a 2 day class that has a shooting qual at the end that’s so easy it makes the FBI qual look like the old MGM Ironman. I was an NRA certified instructor at one point (it was a pre req to teach CCW in my state) and the biggest challenge of that class was avoiding narcolepsy. And that’s not an insult to my teacher, because he was a good guy, it’s just the mandated subject matter for that is super low level. Getting that cert by itself is essentially a nothing burger.

The best way to find a good instructor is to ask around among other accomplished shooters. Ask the guys who you know are good. The world of quality gun instructors is actually pretty small and everybody knows everybody else, or at least knows their rep.

There are some guys who have steller reps for a reason. There’s some names that you see repeated over and over again, and it’s almost always with praise from people who actually know how to shoot really good. There’s different teachers who are known for being good at different areas. In gun instruction there’s basically jocks and nerds, both are good, and it just depends on how you like to learn. Some classes are practical-tactical, others are sports psychology. There’s all sorts of cool stuff out there depending on what you’re into.

There’s also some big name teachers who are pricks but they have good marketing. Their stuff isn’t that good and they teach to stroke their ego rather than help their students get better, but asking around among your knowledgeable friends you’ll get the straight scoop on anyone you’re interested in.  

There are also some amazing teachers out there who are dicks in their personal lives. Martial skill and character have nothing to do with each other (Jon Jones is one of the greatest MMA fighters of all time but you wouldn’t let him babysit your kids). That’s up to you if you want to give these people your money or not. I’m not naming any names because I don’t want to get screamed at by their nut huggers for the rest of my life.

So there’s a class you’re interested in. Look up the instructor. See what good shooters have to say about him. Check his bio. A good instructor is going to be honest about who he is. If it’s a bunch of vague “tactical” buzzword jargon to make them sound like mysterious and tough bad asses, it’s very likely bullshit. TIP OF THE SPEAR IN THE GLOBAL WAR ON TERROR guy probably didn’t do much, while somebody honest will say I did this, this, and this, and I worked for this group, and then I worked for these guys and taught this class at this place. There’s a difference between an actual resume and marketing buzz word bullshit designed to sell a vibe.

On that note, and this is going to hurt some feelings and piss some people off, but oh well, it’s true whether you like it or not. Being in the military doesn’t automatically make you a gun expert or a good instructor. Especially if we are talking about regular American civilian defensive pistol use. Outside of a few very niche jobs very few people in the military get any pistol training at all. Going into battle using rifles and crew served weapons along with two hundred of your closest friends against the Taliban is commendable, and thank you for your service, but it isn’t what most of us are talking about here.

Now if you’re looking at a class in door kicking, room clearing, and face shooting with a carbine, by all means, the instructor having that background experience now becomes VERY important and on topic.

But honestly most of the time when this gets shoved into this discussion its just pointless ego stroking by somebody who needs validation.

Now, military vets (and this applies to cops too) who are actually good at shooting (and who themselves are good teachers) understand this, because they also needed to check their ego at the door and recognize how learning works because they wanted to improve their skills too.

Mindset and technical skills are two very different things. If the discussion is on improving technical skills and someone barges in going RAR MINDSET! CAN U DO THAT IF THE TARGETS SHOOT BACK they’re just telling on themselves. Yes, sir, I’m sure you are a bad ass killer of men who never hesitates… Now can we go back to discussing this technical topic that’s got fuck all to do with your need for validation, random internet stranger?

This is also why you will see dudes from elite units going to gun school taught by guys who aren’t bad ass killers. It’s because that particular teacher is good at TEACHING. The professional bad asses don’t need help with their mindset and they’ve already got their own war stories. They’re there to get BETTER AT SHOOTING. So you will see professional face shooters in classes taught by competition guys all the time. I’ve been to gun school where there have been certified bad asses in the class and the instructor was a nerdy looking guy wearing a leopard print shirt who makes EDM music, and the bad asses are listening and learning because the EDM guy is that good. 😀 (I’m talking about Gabe White BTW, who is a fantastic teacher)

And on the “mindset” thing there is specific instruction you can seek out in that kind of thing too, about the psychology of shooting people. There are classes on decision making, shoot and don’t shoot, role playing violent encounters, managing unknown contacts, all sorts of stuff.

I’ll point out Chris Cypert who does an amazing class about criminal behavior, and most of his work is based on stuff he learned from the late Dr. William April. Chris is also a combat vet with a crazy resume, but he’s a humble man who is primarily interested in learning and helping regular people defend themselves.

There’s a ton of really good instructors out there. There’s guys who I would like to train with but I haven’t had the opportunity yet. I’m not going to make a list out of risk of insulting someone by leaving them out. But I enjoy this stuff and always try to do a couple new things a year.

But focusing on the positive experiences I’ve had with some national level instructors, I can say I enjoyed my time and learned a lot in the following classes. (and again, I’m probably forgetting somebody, sorry). The aforementioned Gabe White, great shooting class. Recently I went to Simon Golob’s pistol class and carbine right afterwards, great experience. Learned a lot. I’ve hosted a bunch of Citizen’s Defense Research classes at my home range. Melody Lauer is the probably the best diagnostic shooting coach I’ve ever worked with. Kirk Alex Clark’s performance shooting class is great. John Johnston’s Tests and Standards, wonderful class. For shotguns, Symtac Consulting, the Haughts are phenomenal teachers. Brian Whalen puts on a great precision rifle class. If you want force on force, wrestling with guns and shooting people with simunitions, go take ECQC from Craig Douglas. I am probably forgetting good people and I feel bad about that.

One thing that all good instructors have in common is they keep learning. They don’t get stagnant. There’s some instructors who were great at one point, but they froze there, and what they knew in 1996 is now state of the art for them forever. That’s silly. Why do that to yourself?

Another thing that they all have in common is that good instructors will absolutely demonstrate their techniques live. If there’s an instructor who won’t demonstrate their technique in front of the class, that’s a big warning sign right there. They don’t need to be super champion speedsters or anything but they need to be able to show that they’re proficient and they practice what they preach.

If somebody talks a lot about what they can do but they won’t show you what they can actually do, how do you know that what they’re telling you is actually viable? They don’t need to be amazing but what they’re teaching needs to be replicable at some level for the big part of the bell curve.

Sadly there is no big clearing house of information about how quality any of the thousands of self-proclaimed firearms instructors actually are. But if you do a little research and ask around a bit before spending your money, you’ll be a whole lot better off.