Combative Context: ALIVE! Gunfighting®: Accessing While Under Attack BERTRAM April 18, 2015

ALIVE! Gunfighting®: Accessing While Under Attack BERTRAM April 18, 2015

By Steve Miles

This past weekend I was fortunate to be able to present our flagship gunfighting course twice in one day at a great private range. There are two main goals for the class:

1. Immerse students in the context of various likely gunfight situations. Most students know they need personal defense training but haven't really thought about what kind of training is best for their particular situations. It seems obvious that one should have a good idea of what the problem is before one goes seeking a solution, but the status quo in the firearms and personal defense industry is to instead insist on "mastering the (so called) basics" before attempting any sort of force-on-force training. This is a gross error in teaching methodology. Without any idea of what the required skill endstate should look like, students (and instructors) squander training time and resources developing skills that may only correlate to a very small percentage of likely gunfight predicaments.

2. Build students' critical thinking skills vis a vis their training choices. Context is everything, and to ensure they are getting the most out of their training students must constantly compare the context of any training they perform to the context of the gunfight situations they expect to be in. If contexts are not similar, students must ensure they are not developing "training scars" by embedding responses that are suboptimal for their likely gunfight situations.

At the beginning of both classes I asked students to complete the sentence "I carry a gun because I'm concerned about..." Both classes gave the same four responses:

1. Street Criminal Assault
2. Witness to Armed Robbery
3. Home Invasion
4. Carjacking

Notice that the contexts that civilians want to learn how to prevail in didn't include "SEAL Team Raid", "SWAT Entry", nor "Felony Traffic Stop". Yet these significantly different contexts are where much of the firearms training industry focuses their instruction, even for civilians.

A large number of students in the first class were members of the "Austin Sure Shots" pistol league. The Sure Shots showed up with both skills and open minds and really progressed a lot during the class. By the end of the day everyone was running and gunning as if their lives really depended on it. Here's the pics: