Todd Green on teaching 'non-dedicated' CCW users...

[ikor]

Teaching to Your Audience

19-Mar-14 – 05:57 by ToddG

If you teach basic CCW, do you teach those first time students about sight alignment and trigger control and breathing and the other fundamentals of marksmanship?

If you answered yes, are you properly addressing your audience? Odds are, probably not.

This might come as a shock to anyone who’s been reading this website for a while and certainly for anyone who has attended one of my classes like Aim Fast, Hit Fast or Aim Fast, Hit Small because I am all about sighted fire and visual control of the handgun. Students hear me talk all the time about how it’s eyes focused on sights, not grip or stance or cadence, that determines how fast you can shoot and how accurately you can shoot fast. I don’t teach, advocate, or like “point shooting” or “target focused shooting” or whatever folks are calling it this year.

Unless I’m teaching to the 99% instead of the 1%. Which I don’t do often, thankfully. But a few times a year I get asked to do a private class for a friend-of-a-friend who turns out to be some VIP (Congressman, business exec, etc.). The first thing I ask these folks is whether they intend to practice regularly or even come back to the range once a year. The ones who are honest say no. They’re not going to become shooters. They’re gun owners. And there is a huge difference between the two.

Look at the photo below. That’s what people see when they’re first learning to use their sights: doubled targets and visual confusion. Who is going to excel under those circumstances? And let’s face it, until sighted fire becomes so ingrained that it’s habitual — which takes a lot of practice — people simply aren’t going to do it to anyway. So again, if we know that the typical CCW guy isn’t going to use his sights when he needs them, why do we spend so much time teaching him sighted fire and marksmanship fundamentals?

The answer is that we don’t adjust to our audience. Serious shooters like us use their sights so we train people to be like us. But most of those CCW students aren’t like us. And teaching them about front sight, trigger press! is like teaching a McDonald’s cashier about global economic theory or the agronomy of potatoes before she can ask, “Would you like fries with that?”

When one of these non-shooters, whether he’s a MLB star or Joe Sixpack, comes to class and clearly demonstrates no desire to train regularly I don’t bother talking about sights or how to press a trigger. We talk about safety… a lot. Then we hit the range for some simple drills to get used to the gun making loud unpleasant noises. I want the student to get comfortable with a gun going off in the hand, and then build his confidence in an ability to point the gun toward a humanoid target and hit it in the chest (or thereabouts) with some degree of rapidity.

Then, if there’s a little extra time and a little extra ammo, maybe we’ll talk briefly about sighted fire for greater accuracy. Because maybe, just maybe, the student will catch the shooting bug and want to get better. But most basic CCW students are always going to be gun owners, not shooters. And as instructors we owe it to them to teach them things they can actually use instead of things we want them to learn.
The next time you teach a class, ask yourself a simple question: are you teaching to the audience you want, or the audience you really have?

[PesVis]

I've thought about this topic a lot recently. I am in the process of getting a few friends convinced to carry a gun, and they are seeing the light. But I also know that most of them will probably will never enjoy shooting and guns as much as I do, so they won't take the trouble to go practice regularly.

But a must admit, promoting unsighted shooting is a bit tough for me to swalllow. But he definitely has a point.

[marshy]

Thanks, Ikor! I found that an interesting read, and quite on point!

[francois.viljoen]

Good article ikor.

I'll keep it in mind.

[Ds J]

Great read. It took me a looooong time to start using my sights correctly.

[Herne]

Of course the flip-side is, if you teach point shooting first, maybe it'll make them less likely to learn sighted shooting later

[Pirate]

Ikor, I'd be interested to hear your opinion on the article... it did cause a few waves in the comments iirc :-)

@Henre: as I understand it, it's less about teaching point shooting "first" and sighted shooting later, than teaching someone who will not spend much/any time at a range and in practice again, to point a gun at a BG and manage to hit said BG when said gun is fired.

As much as it goed against "our dogma", we should acknowledge that there are many people out there that own (or realise that they SHOULD own) a gun for SD purposes but that have no intention of spending hours and days at a range.

:- P

[ikor]

Pirate;

My comments are: first, I don't think Todd is actually promoting 'unsighted fire' in any form or fashion. I think rather that he is mainly teaching these shooters to key off the front sight / muzzle area, as in the old 'flash sight picture' days. Or at least that is what I have done many, many times when dealing with folks such as this, and had good success.

Right after the 'Chi Omega' murders perpetrated by Ted Bundy in 1978 in my city, we had an almost general panic of people buying guns...many of them women. (Remember, no one knew in the southeast then who Theodore Bundy was, or what other horrible crimes he had committed...people were scared and rightfully so) I no longer recall the numbers, but I know we inspected at least 500 handguns in the several weekends after the murders, so we almost certainly ran about the same number of people through the brief 'Firearms Safety and Familiarization' classes we did. This is the kind of shooting I think Todd is speaking about...using the muzzle as a rough index point and shooting to live. I am also happy to say we never had any inadvertent discharges (that we knew of, at least).

I absolutely do NOT believe in denying self protection to any decent and honest citizen, and IMO the registration system in SA is far too strict, and...worse...far too unequally applied...for my liking. Still, SA is one of the very few countries in the world where one is actually able to get and CCW a handgun, and for that I credit some amount of common sense plus a large dose of behind-the-scenes work by lots of people whose names many will never know. May their numbers increase and prosper!

In any case, I also believe that my GF would fall into this general grouping...there is simply no freaking way she is ever gonna take to hard core shooting...won't ever happen. She would, however, be an excellent candidate for the type of training Todd is discussing.