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Old June 2, 2012, 07:11 PM   #10
DepOne
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Join Date: August 27, 2011
Posts: 35
Sarge said: "That which improves your shooting skills to the point they become subconscious, conditioned responses is good." And someone else talked about "conditioned responses." And there is the problem.

I spent over 25 years as a police firearms instructor and I sure don't have all the answers. But I do know that when things go south and you're on the wrong end of a gun, you will automatically revert to whatever you trained/practiced to do. One example of this as a problem is an officer I once had on my range who was a very accomplished competition shooter. We had constructed a tactical range and when this particular officer took out the bad guy he cleared his semiauto and held it over his head with the empty magazine in the other hand so that the instructor could see it was clear as he approached the fallen assailant. Obviously one would not do that in a real shootout but that was a required safety measure on his competition range.

We worked very hard to train only those habits that would keep you alive in a shooting situation. For instance, no one was allowed to police brass or pick up empty magazines until there session was completed. Cops have been found after a shootout with empty brass and magazines in their pockets which they had picked up as the shooting was in progress. Why? Because they were trained to police their empty brass and pick up their magazines before they moved to the next stage. There was a shootout where the bad guys used whistles to distract the police. Once we heard about that we never again used a whistle as a range signal.

Range safety considerations can get a professional seriously dead, and it's an instructors responsibility to make that unlikely to happen due to his or her actions.
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