I don’t have actual pictures from the night shoot, so I drew this up in MSPaint for the two Johns, aka TXgungeek and Hsoi. If you’ve never shot at night, sans a flashlight, it looks something like this:

(Shoothouse Barbie’s artistic impression of the night shooting class)

First, thanks go out to TXgungeek and Hsoi, who were both instructors at the classes. If you dig gun/2A/self-defense and common sense blogs and are not already reading them, you owe it to yourself to check them out! Thanks as well to the rest of the team at KRtraining.

In addition to shooting sans flashlight, we also did some flashlight work with paper targets and steel, but I’ll go into that later. I guess I should start at the beginning.

Boyfriend “bought” me the classes as a birthday/XMass present. It was possibly the most bitchin’ birthday give I’ve ever received. He really is teh win. We arrived at the training site with a big box of stuff that goes bang, and some lunch. Couldn’ve have asked for much better shooting weather: cool and cloudy.

We started with defensive pistol class. The instructors pulled up some stats from a shootout, and showed us some pretty gritty pictures. Not that I wanted to get shot ever before the class, but seeing actual pics of bullet wounds enforces that. Anyhoo, the baddy was taken down in a gun fight with several (I honestly don’t recall the details as to bullet count and how many victims, etc. Guys, correct me if mess this up, please) officers. Multiple calibers were fired on him by officers, including .40, 9mm and .223. The fight lasted several minutes, during which over 100 rounds were fired by the officers. The baddy sustained over 20 hits and was able to continue fighting and doing damage. Why? Because, as the coronor revealed in full color and on the x-rays, none of the bullets hit vital organs.

What matters most in a real life situation is not caliber, but shot placement and the availability of bullets. As was clear from the gunfight example, it can take over 20 shots to kill a baddy if you don’t hit vital organs. The instructors suggested keeping mag capacity highly in mind choosing defense guns. The lead instructor, we’ll call him Kevin* (since I haven’t asked him if he wants his name blogged), said he had switched from carrying a .45 to a 9mm for the sake of having more bullets at his disposal.

Speaking of defense arms and bullet counts, Kevin* graciously allowed me to use his carry gun since my baby, the Sig P239 (I still loooooooooove my Sig), has a 10 round mag capacity and is DA/SA. I ended up using Kevin*s XD9 for both classes. Having never really shot this gun before, I was kind of nervous, but it was a pretty nice gun, and after some grip adjustment it felt good in my hands.

Apart from the one IPSC match I’ve done, I haven’t spent much time drawing from holster and firing on a target. I also tend to neglect dry firing practice, though I’ve stepped up my efforts since the class. If you haven’t dry fired much at all, here’s what we did which I found useful. First, make sure your gun is clear: drop the mag and check the chamber to make sure there are no bullets in there. One of the girls had 3 negligent discharges because she would drop the mag and forget to clear the chamber. Scared the crap out of me and I thought about leaving because of that more than once. At least she had the gun pointed in a safe direction. So, with the gun pointed in a safe direction, rack the slide, acquire your sight picture, press the trigger, re-acquire sight picture. Without releasing the trigger, rack the slide and slowly release until you feel the trigger reset. Press again. Repeat.

It’s funny…all the things you feel your hands and arms doing when you do dry fire practice for the first few times. Little flinches and twitches and tugs and yanks that you didn’t expect to feel. After about 10 dry-fires, I could feel things starting to smooth out a little. For me, the slow release of the trigger to the point of reset was key. I’ve never been one to let my finger fly off the trigger, at least, according to my other instructors, Mark and White Mike. Still the slow practice of finding the reset point and then taking up the slack over and over again helps establish muscle memory. I started to feel like I was zen-ing in on the trigger press.

When the time to draw and fire came, we took it super slow. In fact, we did it in reverse – and dry. The first (reverse) step was to aim at the target, focussing on the sight picture. Stance was corrected here as needed. The next step was to retract the weapon, bringing it in close to the chest (pointed down range, of course), while still keeping eyes on the target. Then, extend the gun back onto target and dry fire. The key skill focussed on here was to take up the trigger while extending the gun towards the target so that this final step of the draw, extending the weapon and firing, is one smooth action and not two stages. It’s harder than it seems to not pause between putting the front sight on the target and pressing the trigger. Again, the exercise built up the muscle memory of acquiring your sight picture with your eyes and bringing the sights of the gun up to that, rather than looking down the sights in order to find the target. Out of all the firing drills, I think I got the most out of this one.

After working our way backwards, we began to learn how to index the gun and draw from the holster, and eventually put it all together. We also worked at drawing from concealment. How this is done depends somewhat on your cover garment. Kevin* had a nifty day-planner/gun concealer which he showed us in the classroom. For future classes, it might be fun to show interested students how to draw and present from some of these other forms of concealment, like a laptop bag.

Once everyone was able to draw, we practiced some drills involving shooting multiple targets. For these drills, we had to fire on our target 3 or 4 times, then check our surroundings. The instructors would stand behind us and hold up signs which read “body”, “head”, “left” or “right” and we would have to fire accordingly. This drill, I believe, helps the shooter transition from the mentality and habit of focussing and firing on the target straight in front of him, as one practices at the range, to the real-life scenario where there could be multiple baddies. I was in the second string and waited and watched as the first string performed this drill. It’s amazing how many shooters simply didn’t check the surroundings – and oh yeah, I should mention that the instructors moved all over the place with their signs – for several seconds after they had ceased firing, and would forget to check again and again.

The last drill of the day was the shooting while moving drill, which I showed in my little teaser of a post last week. I’ll post it again for ease of viewing. By this point in the day, my trigger finger was a little sore; I think the trigger – I don’t know what kind of trigger but I’m sure it has a specific name/type – was pinching my finger a bit. I still can’t say too many bad things about this gun. Notice the recoil on the tape. It was a full sized frame (it was a little big for my hand), and I was shooting one handed, and yet managed to get 9 shots on target. I wish boyfriend had filmed for just a few seconds longer because one of the instructors made the comment, “remind me never to get in a gun fight with you.” I lit that target up! I wish you could see my shot placement, but the resolution of my camara on the video setting is crappy.

done

We took a dinner break and moved on with the night shooting class. We reviewed light intensities and types of flashlights. If you haven’t peered into these topics yet, you could probably look them up on the interwebs. It’s kind of interesting to learn what the different levels of lighting are and how our vision changes depending on light intensity: full color, depth perception, light/dark contrast, or whether all we can see is an outline.

We didn’t jump right into using the flashlights while shooting. The first thing we did was to flash the target briefly with the light, then, in the dark, fire on the target. The muzzle bast is bright enough to get a pretty good idea of where your rounds are hitting. I was amazed at how well I shot in the dark! I think I shot better in the dark than I did when I was lighting the target while firing. Shooting with a flashlight for the first time felt multitasking, and it was hard, I tell you. It’s not often that I do anything else besides fire my gun while shooting, so the simple task of working a flashlight while firing seemed quite complicated. Aim the flashlight on the sights and the target and aiming was tough. If you ever get the opportunity to take a night shooting class, I highly recommend it, it’s a lot of fun.

We also added some footwork to the mix: flash your target briefly. Step to the side, fire. Wheeeeeeee! We shot some steel in the dark as well.

Then there was the house scenario/drill. Check this shit out: you’re the owner of a bbq joint (how very Texan). You’ve just closed up and locked the door and are about to walk to your car when you hear a crash from inside. What do you do?

We did this drill one at a time while everyone else was shooting. So there I am standing outside, holding the redgun (we did the drill with a redgun and a flashlight) . I hear the crash, ready-GO. Now, I have a pretty killer flight impulse, when it comes to fight or flight. For some reason, I thought we had to go back into the house. I thought it was part of the drill that we would go in the house and they would do stuff. It didn’t occur to me that not going into the house was an option; I didn’t think I had a choice. So stupidly in I go. I’m happy to say that stupid stopped right there. Beyond the front door was a hallway, and I stood in the hallway with the front door to my back, and peered around the corner. John (was that you, TXgungeek?) asked me what I thought I should do. I stood there for about 4 minutes with no inclination whatsoever to leave the safety of the foyer. See, I f***ing hate it when things jump out at me. Oh my god, do I hate it. It makes me really angry and then I throw things (past projectiles have included pints of ice cream, my calculator, and my car keys). The hair on the back of my neck is standing up. No, it’s not just standing up, it’s pulling me towards the door. I stand there some more, and John (I think it was one of the Johns) says, “well?”

“Ya know, I don’t feel like I want to go any further than this wall. I think I want leave.”

“So, you’d just do nothing then?”

“No, I’d get in my car and call the police.”

“That’s the right thing to do. The right choice for the scenario: don’t even go into the house.”

And I’m thinkin’, oh man! I didn’t think that was even a choice! It makes me feel good to know that my instinct to avoid the threat when it was still possible to do so kicked in, but truth be told, in real life, “monkey brain” sometimes takes over, and we have to be practiced and prepared for this eventuality and know how to turn off monkey brain and learn to be aware of our situations.

What’s “monkey brain”, you say?

Monkey brain is our primitive impulse. Monkey brain is the old animal instinct that says “Something is over there, I don’t know what it is, but I’m gonna go hit it with a rock.”

To wrap things up, Snubnose a beautiful poem about guns

(via Hsoi)

I don’t carry a gun

… to kill people. I carry a gun to keep from being killed.

I don’t carry a gun to scare people. I carry a gun because sometimes this world can be a scary place.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m paranoid. I carry a gun because there are real threats in the world.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m evil. I carry a gun because I have lived long enough to see the evil in the world.

I don’t carry a gun because I hate the government. I carry a gun because I understand the limitations of government.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m angry. I carry a gun so that I don’t have to spend the rest of my life hating myself for failing to be prepared.

I don’t carry a gun because my sex organs are too small. I carry a gun because I want to continue to use those sex organs for the purpose for which they were intended for a good long time to come.

I don’t carry a gun because I want to shoot someone. I carry a gun because I want to die at a ripe old age in my bed, and not on a sidewalk somewhere tomorrow afternoon.

I don’t carry a gun because I’m a cowboy. I carry a gun because, when I die and go to heaven, I want to be a cowboy.

I don’t carry a gun to make me feel like a man. I carry a gun because men know how to take care of themselves and the ones they love.

I don’t carry a gun because I feel inadequate. I carry a gun because unarmed and facing three armed thugs, I am inadequate.

I don’t carry a gun because I love it. I carry a gun because I love life and the people who make it meaningful to me.

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Kellene has written a beautiful variation HERE. Gun chicks, be sure to check it out (also via Hsoi)!