The 2a is Conditional?

Classically the gun rights movement, the prepper and patriot milieu, and the folks involved in the liberty mission have maintained a natural rights perspective on the Second Amendment.

“Rights don’t require permission.” “ The 2a is my carry permit.” Rights come from our Creator and the 2a merely says the State can’t infringe on them. So they say.

Until the wrong type of person has possession of a gun.

In this case, the Supreme’s have ruled that a person in the jurisdiction of the United States government has a right to possess a firearm if they didn’t enter into said jurisdiction they way they are “supposed” to.

The Lumpen-Patriot-Commentariat has entered into an apoplectic rage.

They suddenly believe in conditions and limitations to gun rights and the restrictions on the State the 2a places on it.

It makes me wonder. Where exactly did the memorialized Patriots of the militias in the American Revolution obtain permission to bear arms? Undoubtedly like my ancestors, many crossed the Proclamation line of 1763. They settled “illegally.” They were considered to legally be the same class as the one on question today whether they have any rights.

The nationalist impulse of Americans and Americans only possessing the right to bear arms is an interesting one. Those same felons in possession of arms, who crossed said imaginary line of 1763, didn’t obtain their 2a rights from the Fedgov. It didn’t exist.

By conditionalizing your 2a stance, and denying the right to bear arms of certain classes of people, you inherently argue that the right is not God given, but is a gift from the State.

Illegal aliens and guns, well, that’s one thing.

What’s more troubling to me is the commentariat on social media. The “gun people” who now argue not only can’t people who are not legal subjects of the Fedgov be forbidden from bearing arms, so can their “enemies.” Who exactly do they define as their enemies? People who disagree with their stance on illegals with guns. Democrats. Liberals. “Legal foreigners” on the grounds of the US.

Yes. “Democrats.” “Liberals.” Vagueness such as this.

This is a classic example of the slippery slope.

”Oh but felons shouldn’t have guns! You support child fiddlers being armed!! Mentally ill? Ha! Democrats and illegals are the same.”

Ah. The appeal to emotionalism.

“Felons” the argument goes shouldn’t possess guns. Great. Let’s look at what a felon is. Someone who possesses a short lobster is a felon. Someone who carries a gun on a sidewalk with a ccw, within 1000 ft of a school is a felon. Someone who has a bump stock that was legal one day, then Trump made it illegal the next. Yup. Felon.

Ah violent felons you say. What about this? If a person is actually so violent and brutal that they can’t be trusted with arms, why are they even free in the first place let alone living?

Many are putting forth the idea that x, y, x people shouldn’t have guns out of a public safety argument. In essence they are scared of certain people with guns. Much like the Left being scared of guns.

Liberty is scary. Life is tough. Get a helmet.

If you buy into Constitutionalism, no where does the BoR state that God given rights are only to be free from infringement as long as you are a citizen.

What even is a citizen? One that is “legally” subject to the jurisdiction of the US gov? The right of the gov to tax and lord over you?

Are these rights unalienable and God given or privileges?

The Right is just as totalitarian as the Left. Don’t believe it? Listen to some of these folks dream up the craziest mental gymnastics they can in order to justify their support of a conditional and privileged based right to bear arms.

Foreboding of the Revolution

Social media is ablaze about 4 US marshals killed while serving a warrant in NC. 4 other local agents were killed as well.

I know of no other details other than they were serving a warrant for possession of a firearm by a felon.

Given the 76,000 pages of federal register, and the multitudes of untold local laws, a felon can range from someone in possession of a short lobster to a serial killer and everything in between.

The 2a community speaks of armed Revolution if pushed, and the intent of the 2a to defend their rights through violence.

The spark they always talk about is gun confiscation. It happened April 19 1775 when the crown attempted to seize arms of felons.

Much like how the Right has a meltdown when a football player kneels for the national anthem, they post thin blue line batches and memorials for slain federal marshals. The same crowd that was after one of their heroes Randy weaver.

The cognitive dissonance is actually worse than ever for these people.

I recently saw a thin blue line license plate and a 3% sticker on a car.

This is further proof that a majority of the 2a crowd does not actually understand their own definitions of intent.

I wonder if the Rebels after the Boston Massacre memorialized the British troops?

It’s all a fantasy. Spooks of their minds. The first “patriot” taken down by the feds will be met with the “community” standing with the State.

Why even pay lip service to it?

“Battle Rifle’s” and Context

The never ending debate. I’ve heard it ever since I got into all this.

Starting in the early 2000’s, I’ve read and heard all the debates about “battle rifles.” Bostons Gun Bible, Fred from Fred’s m14 stocks, and James Rawles carried on the old school vision of the 308 Battle rifle.

The funny thing is it was all theory based. At this point it’s antiquated but the debate still continues in slightly different forms. Since the early 2000’s the AR15 has solidified itself as America’s rifle. They are reliable. Proven. All the things. And even more, they are practical and fun.

More recently over the last year, the debate has shifted to the role precision rifle plays in the context of preparedness, practical use as well as the popular larp’ing Red Dawn/Ukraine situation manifesting itself in the US.

The thing that gets me with these debates the sense of mutual exclusivity. If one has a certain rifle, that they can and must only own that one. No other options can be had.

Tool boxes exist to house tools. Tools serve different purposes. A 1/2” breaker bar does a completely different job than a 1/4” stubby ratchet. And I’m here to tell you both serve a role and you can own both.

Context is everything. What is the mission? What are you doing, who are you with and where are you at? If a more military type role, it’s METT-TC, right?

These questions just about objectively begin to answer themselves.

Lucas over at T Rex Arms most recently started this discussion when he took on the CQB bro’s and said that from a 2a / tyrannical gov perspective, precision rifle had historically played a greater role than head to head cqb fights. He’s not wrong, in that context. And that if that was the goal of the 2a originalist, they should be looking at that.

Some push back came with that.

It’s nothing new.

When I first got involved in some shooting circles, the focus for most was a shtf context where some type of rogue bandits were roaming the country side and community defense had arose to combat it. In Southern Appalachia the idea was green side fights in the woods. A long shot might be 75y. Red dots were the deal, maybe with some lpvo’s in the squad.

If it turned urban, the red dot still fit.

The problem then instantly becomes, when you actually live, work, hunt, and exist in southern Appalachia you also realize the SHTF fantasy role isn’t all we have to consider.

Unless you solely live in a Laurel thicket, magnification on a rifle in the armory is handy. The LPVO or rifle scope comes in extremely handy when game pops up at 250 yards at the wood line when it’s still “legal” shoot time but the sun is starting to drop low.

The 400 yard shots on deer are a thing here. If you hunt the high grassy balds all over here, 800 yard shots are not uncommon. This is the highest peaks on the east coast and probably arguably the steepest few counties that exist east of the Mississippi.

Where we hunt there are opportunities for several hundred yard shots on bear. Usually, they get treed, and it’s a close range affair. 30-30 lever guns with iron sights. Gets the job done, until it doesn’t. Till you have to stop one in the open at 200 yards at a run, before it gets somewhere it’s not supposed to, or where it’s impossible to retrieve if treed.

It happened a couple years ago and the iron sighted guns at 250 yards couldn’t do it. But if a 308 was on site with a magnified optic it would have.

Which brings us full circle. If a hunter could keep a magnified rifle in his truck, and a close range gun, why can’t SHTF Jack do the same? Why does he only have to own one? If it’s a team sport, why can’t overwatch have SPR’a or DMR’s? It’s no different than a 240 gunner.

There’s also an unintentional semantics debate in all this. Distance and precision rifle go hand and hand. It’s mostly considered the same job. Hence the LE use of snipers but their average shot is under 80 yards. It’s not just purely distance in this debate but precise shots, at ranges where a red dot can’t do the job. This ain’t a 24” blaze target in the woods.

Magnification is good to have in lower light, and for the ability to ID blended targets.

An apocalypse-only mentality is not only mostly fantasy, it can be detrimental.

The reality is this is all theoretical bullshit.

How about, instead of arguing about the best rifle for X made up situation, you work on the most likely problem first? If the goal is self defense, why are we talking about the best rifle set up for “SHTF,” when we aren’t proficient with an EDC pistol? You are 100,000 times more likely to need to use that on the way home from the prepper meeting than the perfect rifle set up in SHTF anyway.

If someone can’t atleast be proficient with a pistol, have a basic grasp of clinch range fights, have a basic understanding how to defend a house and be able to put rounds where you want them, in a hurry, on demand, no one is going to take you serious in the discussion about the best shtf rifle set up or caliber.

The hard facts are the average rural dwelling southern mountain boy who lives the life, will kill coyotes at 450 before they’ll get in a fire fight with ____. They’ll need a pistol and hand to hand skills for self defense. They’ll drop a deer at 300-400 in lowish light. They’ll have to head shoot ground hogs at 200-300. They’ll have to drop a hog that’s been rooting their fields in the head because that’s all that’s exposed at extended range. In addition to all the normal 100 yard and in shots.

For a lot of folks, keeping a magnified optic gun on hand makes a lot of sense. It’s not a one size fits all thing.

It’s pretty simple. Identify what you’ll need the gun for about 80% plus of the time. Set it up for that use case, and perhaps address a likely contingency or two. If you need a set up with a different capability, set another one up. It’s like having a set of logging boots and a set of running shoes.

We can endlessly discuss these things till the cows come home about this set up vs that set up, but can you even use the set up to its full capability in the first place? Can you handle the daily situations that happen frequently, in the current day, before getting lost in the fantasies?

For the folks who endlessly partake in these discussions how about this. You post video of you executing some basic benchmark standards. Let’s match ability level to your opinion.

I think we’d see the entire conversation would shift instantly.

The answer is always in the work.

Accountability

An unintentional experiment has been going on in my world. I’m convinced it’s working.

After some discussion with a buddy on accountability and hitting the daily hard skills everyone should be doing if they are interested in either being harder to kill and more useful in general, or simply looking for physical fitness and performance, he related he was going to start a group chat with some of his local buddies to do check ins on what work they have been doing.

I have no idea how it’s going for his local crew, but unintentionally we started checking in daily ourselves on what we have been doing. It’s been working great for accountability on all fronts. It’s making us do what we say we are about.

Today for instance. I sent what work I had done in the gym. He hit back with his and then his dryfire routine. Besides myself, he’s the only one in our friend group who I know for a fact that has flipped the script and started to make dryfire a daily priority. Im not just talking draws and throwing the gun around. But actual useful stuff that will make you shoot better. Self diagnosing errors abd correcting them. Checking it live, recreating problems dry, fixing them, confirming live again. Rinse, repeat.

I digress.

After reading his routine, I hit back with, I hadn’t done my dry fire because I was tearing apart an exhaust leak on one of my rigs. I thought the priority of fixing the truck was justifying my lack of dryfire. But what did the accountability text do?

After I got cleaned up and even though it was past my bed time, I hit 5 minutes of dryfire. Yes, it was partly a place holder session. But the mere fact I had to tell my buddy I didn’t do my dry fire shamed me into being accountable and to just go get after it.

This is nothing new. Diet types have done thus forever. It’s the basis of weight watchers.

Give it a try. Hopefully you’ll find some people who actually want to do the work. It might be tough, but they exist.

Get after it.

Equipment and Performance, Again

The dead horse continues to be beaten.

We know 90% of the time equipment isn’t the limiting factor.

Mosby and myself had a multipart discussion on the cost / benefit of equipment selection, opportunity costs and whether higher performing / higher quality equipment can increase performance.

Ben Stoeger got a Staccatto XC. Essentially their race gun. In his circle, staccato’s have generally been mocked to atleast some extent due to their finnicky nature.

The 4000$ pistol choked at 500 rounds. And continued until a higher power recoil spring and proper lube was used.

Open guns have generally been known as race cars in the sense that you are constantly tweaking them to eek out that last ragged edge of performance, usually sacrificing reliability.

If equipment didn’t matter at all, all other things being equal such as skill, different divisions in competition wouldn’t exist.

Racy equipment being finicky is not really of interest to me, but performance is.

Stoeger commented that he was running standards drills as fast as he ever has and showed something like a 3.7 El Prez.

Take it as you will.

Do your own cost/benefit. But on the flip side, realize a 4000$ 2011 isn’t going to Fox your 12” low left push a 7 yards.

Low Level Decision Making 2: Group Standards

Avoiding low level decision making can be an important tool as discussed in part 1.

Turning training and practice of the hard skills into the same category as brushing your teeth can be really beneficial. It’s a daily hygiene. A journey not a destination.

Years back, when involved in what folks would call “preparedness group” events, and attempting to organize practice days, I learned alot about human dynamics. There was a pool of hundreds to invite. Less than 20 showed any real interest. Half that would show up on any given day, after months of heads up. After one or two, 5-6 might even show interest.

Within a preparedness type context, where the grid might of went down or things had gotten hinky, my thought process was those guys on the various teams should be regularly practicing the skills they had learned in the couple classes they had taken. This obviously applies to everyone.

I quickly learned while it was a feat to get people to even come to a class, it was 10x more to get them to come practice. They almost exclusively wasted 80%+ of their time even taking the class because they never became proficient with the material they learned.

The ulterior motive of the experiment was ultimately to see what guys commitment level was. I can see, 8-10 years later, there are about enough guys still standing from that clique that I can count them on one hand.

If guys cannot commit to coming to work on the hard skills or collective skills 4 times a year, let alone 1x per month, when things are relatively nice, do you think they are going to show up on your door at 2am when the ballon goes up? Hop in your truck when it’s time to do hood rat shit? Hell, they never practiced anything, so what are they even capable of?

It might be hard to grok, but this stud’s relevance to the “group” (in the tactical/defensive/offensive sense) is probably zero. That doesn’t mean they might not be “a good dude,” there head just isn’t in the game you are supposedly training for.

This is intended to be rhetorical.

When is it time to call a spade a spade?

I know this is tough. But the fantasy the prepper porn crowd trains for is gonna be beyond tough.

When does the time come to enforce a standard on the group? Show up or get cut? Show up or quit wasting our time?

Some groups may have a training pipe line. A stacking model that progressively stacks more things on top of each other each meeting. If no one is showing up every single time and moving forward, you are falling behind. The guy who skipped 3 months has no idea what the other guys are doing because he’s behind.

When does lack of lack of performance enter the equation?

I was relistening to an old podcast recently. It detailed a recently retired crew of tier 1 operators who started training law enforcement and doing cqb contracts.

One SWAT team essentially sent them packing and they left, when they decided to get black paster tape out to paste targets between runs to show them they are not putting rounds where they need to go. They didn’t want accountability. They wanted enterTRAINment.

Folks either understand the need to over develop skills and techniques, practice, hit the PT, and get after it, or they don’t.

When does the “team” hold folks accountable? Why don’t you have a standard in place? Even if it’s that you get 100 misses on CQB runs per week, document it and track it. Why are guys who have been training for 10 years not getting any better?
Mostly because they don’t do the work. Or aren’t doing the right work, in the correct manner.

Why aren’t guys supposedly training for these bad ass prepper missions not holding themselves accountable to their peers? Because no one wants to be accountable. Why are folks not religiously doing the work to be better for their team? Why are they working on writing operations orders when they are low left Charlie? All the tactics in the world merely deliver you to a shooting problem. You have to deliver on demand. You owe it to your “team.” Shouldn’t your team also hold you accountable to the standard?

If this truly is about the situations they dream up, why isn’t the training being taken more seriously? This isn’t everyone gets a participation trophy type stuff. When will a standard be enforced?

If the team isn’t holding its self to a standard, what’s the point? If it’s just man camp, that’s fine. EnterTRAINment is popular. Call it what it is. If it’s for real, you better show up. You better be consistent.

A mentor once said consistency is the art of showing up when there isn’t a cheering section. If your “why” is doomsday-ism tactical team preparedness, you’ll probably have to be serious. Be hard. Get serious with the skills. Get to high levels of proficiency with fundamentals be layering on multitudes of bs that merely cloud the goal.

Maintain the standard, even if you end up by yourself in pursuit of the goal. The reality is, the context a lot of guys get lost in, is very unlikely. But even after all the logical discourse, if it still is the focus, and if you aren’t prepared to deliver the goods when called upon it won’t go well for you. If folks can’t commit to the practice of even the hard skills on their own, without the social aspect or cheering section, how do you expect folks to rise to the occasion of some complex scenario when it’s game time? If you can’t commit to the lifestyle of constant improvement and dedication to the craft, this shit probably isn’t for you.

“Never convert, only recruit”. – Matt Pranka

Low Level Decision Making and Proactive Apathy

“If you want look good in front of thousands, you have to outwork thousands in front of nobody.”

Mosby over at Mountain Guerrilla recently made a post about the discipline to show up train when you don’t want to. 

This essentially is avoiding low level decision making. It’s powerful. It’s often a large part of success. 

Getting up early to go to work, day in and out, regardless of how you feel or how tired you are. Going to the gym after work is the same. Hitting 10 min of dry fire before bed. These disciplines also have a theme of avoiding low level decision making. You’ve made the decision to do these things so just do them no matter what. You don’t have to think about it. It’s just who you are. 

In Mosby’s patreon post, he talked about place holder work outs. I do this somewhat often. Especially as I’m getting older and my body is more beat up, I might find myself doing less squat work than I normally woukd due to injury or extreme fatigue. But I’m still showing up and doing work.

There’s a lot to say about showing up. But the work has to be done correctly and in the right areas otherwise it’s time wasted. 

I’ve written extensively over at Zerogov.com about doer’s vs. talkers. I’ve been at odds with lots of friends and acquaintances because I’ve seen through their bullshit fairly quick that they just want to talk about doing instead of doing. 

Which brings us to something that I have been seeing lately in the prepper space. An acceptance you can really only do so much, and you just have to live your life. I think most folks with a brain come to this conclusion. 

Which brings us to the next point. Leisure. Or “living your life.” What exactly is “living your life?”

For me, I don’t go on extravagant vacations, ride a Harley or go to the lake. I shoot, I train, I hike and backpack, and I live a rural lifestyle. “Training” is just what I do.

We often see prepper groups and range buddy’s spending lots of time on the conraderie part of the equation. You know, come over, bring the family, have some food, watch us drink beer, etc. If you look at the end of the year, and you are being honest, you’ll probably see the amount of hours spent talking, hanging out, drinking, etc are a greater percentage than your training. 

I’ve spent years on that. Years of wasted time. Mostly because no one wanted to commit to train even remotely close to my training pace. It was all social.

A lot of range trips and “training days” often turn into 75% talking about training and 25% training. 

The talking is usually billed as “community building.” I think it’s the opposite. Community building is done by doing hard shit with hard people. Why not “build community” while running range drills? 

Over the last 10 years, I’ve held to something I call proactive apathy. I’m aware of what’s going on in the system, but it’s not my focus. I control what I can control. I’ve heard all the problems for 20+ years. It’s still all happening like a broken record. The answer is always in the work and yourself.

Back to this leisure stuff.

I was chatting with a buddy recently and he put forth the notion that every Alpha type has an opinion or agenda about what training is the most important. And that’s a fact. 

The thing is much of this can be definitive or objective. The problem mainly comes with folks not lining out their actual use case/mission or application.

The experienced “tactical” guy might say “we need to be looking at EDC pistol work!” And the Doomsdayer is gonna only be talking about Red Dawn. And everyone just talks past one another.

Define the actual mission/application and those with common sense, experience, relevance and currency, can easily come to a consensus about what to train. It’s almost objective.

Which is honestly why guys make such good jokes about the LARPer’s. (On the flip, all training is LARPing, till it ain’t…)

I’m of the opinion lately, that most of this “preparedness” stuff is a hobby first and foremost. It might be driven originally by a fear of the unknown or a sense to prepare to be more self reliant, but in end there is preference involved. 

Bushcrafters gonna bushcraft. Shooters gonna shoot. Commo guys gonna commo. Of course there’s overlap, but let’s not forget the focus often time reflects our interests. Especially with a lack of understanding of basic mission planning.

The PrepperPorn crowd illustrates this pretty well, if they can even define their actual mission context in the first place. We often hear abstract aptitudes like “I’m doing this to defend my family” or “self defense.”

They then proceed to ignore all the current, likely and probable threats, and proceed to work on skills they’ll use in their prepper fiction dream that has a .0000001% chance of happening. 

Be honest. If one is training current TTP’s they learned off Garand Thumb from the war in the Ukraine, and they live in CONUS, that’s great. But just be honest and say it’s tactical fantasy band camp. It has nothing to do with the daily interpersonal violence that happens daily in America. Just amend your mission statement. No use pretending it’s something it’s not.

I have a real interest in tactics. How high level folks solve problems and what tactics are employed in certain missions. It’s an interest. Like history. I don’t really fantasize that I’m gonna be running raids with the goons next week.

Stepping further away, you can see if one does indeed train for things like “Ukraine,” but they can’t deliver the basic hard skills or possess the skills to defend themselves from daily threats, the priorities are wrong. In fact they might actually be full of shit.

Some can easily point out it’s unlikely I’ll ever need a sub 2.0 Bill or need to make a 675 yd head shot. But, I’m unsure where training relevant skills to CCW/EDC or hunting, and over developing those skills is a negative. If I can hit a 6” plate at 675y, a 8” vital zone if an animal at 300y is gravy. Has anyone in a fight ever said “damn I wish I didn’t spend all that time training!” Or “man, I woulda done so much better at this match if I just wouldn’t have dry fired so much.”

I train shooting because I like it first and foremost. It’s who I am. Originally motivated by the EDC / Sheep Dog mantra’s, I’ve come to realize it’s way more than that. I’m not pretending I’m in the Ukraine sniping Russians at 700 when I shoot SPR’s. To me it’s about performance. About getting better at something I like. Being harder to kill and more useful in general is a side benefit.

For most of the punisher skull crowd, it’s about standing around talking about being a bad ass instead of being a bad ass.

I’ve hosted classes locally for years and still do to some extent. Nationally known instructors and lesser know for atleast the past 7-8 years. I had some interest in my friend group early on. It soon dwindled to virtually zero after a couple years. I over grossly over estimated the interest level in a fairly large and broad group of preparedness minded folks locally.

I started hosting classes so I didn’t have to drive 6 hours for a class. It took away a large portion of travel time, allowing me to train more often.

If anything within 2 hours of me happened in the shooting world, I was there. Very rarely were the guys from the preparedness circles.

Around 10 years ago, there was an unofficial study out that roughly said there about 5000 serious shooting students across the country who take multiple classes a year. It’s prob many more than that, but the comparison is still useful. Say 10k serious shooting students out of 10’s of millions of gun owners.

Of the very small percentage that shows up to train, probably 10% or less of them actually do the work outside of the class.

For many this is purely a social thing. A collectivist activity. “Training.” In reality, most of the people doing the real work are suffering in silence. They show up every day. You have to be relentless. Nobody cares about your problems. If you’re training for self defense, your opponent sure doesn’t care. The same is true of competition. You don’t really need to talk about it, but the results need to speak for themselves. Do the work and everyone will know without you saying a words.

I’d urge folks to stop focusing on this outlandishness and talking. Avoid low level decision making. Show up for the work and don’t give yourself an excuse.

To be continued…

Range Rants or “You Can’t Trust a Patriot”

Kurt Saxon has been deemed the father of the Survival Movement. You know, the Poor Man’s James Bond guy.

One of his more interesting essays is called “You Can’t Trust a Patriot.” It details the silliness of much of the movement.

As I was re-reading it the other day, it got me to thinking about some of the “patriots” you see at the range.

The movement these days is more like the tight T shirt punisher skull crowd or the “only trains tactics but can’t hit the target crowd.” Instead of the Mark Koernke conspiracy crowd selling scratchy vhs conspiracy tapes about the UN take over and black helicopters.

Some of these guys are very entitled. For laying claim to American Individualism they sure are needy.

Several car loads pulled up one day and stood in disgust at the end of the bay I was shooting in. After pacing around quite a bit between bays, and mumbling about target stands, I finally heard the obvious leader say, “ha well I guess we can’t shoot, everyone’s got all the stands.”

They left.

The funny part? The 5 stands I was using were my own.

Another day, a retired disabled Bro Vet stood at the end of my bay. “Hey man you got any extra targets and a staple gun?”

“Sorry man, I just got this blown out target right there. I don’t have a staple gun.”

I should start using a line from a guy I used to work with. Any time someone would ask him to borrow a tool, he’d say “they sell em at Lowe’s!” Or “the Snap On guy sells em…”

These people show up to the range, to “train” without anything to train with. Most barely have any concept in even how train in the first place.

The Patriot welfare queen class. Needing hand outs. Entitled to everything while denouncing the Left for the same thing. Man up, dudes. Take responsibility for yourself. The punisher skulls won’t help you. Maybe Saxon was onto something.

Skills vs. Drills

I’m guilty.

A long time ago heard the late Ron Avery say that he thought it was sort of silly that guys swap drills like kids swap baseball cards. It kind of got logged in the Rolodex, while I still found myself collecting every shooting drill I could find.

I kept running .doc files of every drill I could find. My main motivation on this was not nefarious. It was always about getting better. Secondarily it was about having something to do on the range particularly with a group of people.

I found on these group range days, (I’m generally more of a loner) I got two outcomes without a plan. It either degraded to school kids yucking it up shooting tv’s or standing around saying “well what are we gonna shoot?!” For an hour.

So I vowed to always have a plan.

After training regularly for a number of years at this point, I’ve come to the conclusion that the actual drills themselves aren’t necessarily as important as what you are focusing on skill wise.

It took a while to grok, but many years ago and having trained with him a half dozen times since, Frank Proctor always talked about shooting exercises not drills. Drills tend to be more along the lines of being outcome focused. Exercises are more like going to the gym and working on the bench. Using sets and reps that support the goal. Identifying weaknessses and turning them into strength’s. Process driven.

When starting practice sessions, determine the skill or technique you want to focus on. Set up exercises to get reps on that. Most time is spent on the repetition phase of training. And in your exercises, there are limitless concepts to focus on. Working transitions? Regardless of set up, you can focus on moving the gun to those small spots on the target. If shooting a compound exercise, you can focus on the movement part, like rolling out of position or having the gun up on entry ready to shoot as soon as the sight flashes onto that spot in the target. Any exercise, you can focus on target focus. Things like this.

Running certain outcome focused drills is great, but the drill itself matters less than the skills you are focusing on.

Pistol RDS

Last weekend I did a lot of shooting. A buddy came up and we shot pistol one day.

I wasn’t shooting as good as I would have liked. I noticed about halfway through the day, I was not getting hits. Rounds were all of a sudden going to the 10 -11 o’ clock on nearly everything I was doing. I was watching my dot the entire time and it was staying where it was aimed. I wasn’t pushing into the gun or pressing the trigger with my whole hand.

After doing some reps at distance with my favorite trigger control exercise and with less than stellar results I noticed my RDS was loose again.

Well atleast it wasn’t me.

After wearing out an SRO after about 18,000-20,000 rounds, ever since I replaced the original steel mounting plate with an aluminum model when I warrantied the optic, about every 500-1000 rounds the screws would loosen. This time after about 1500 rounds with red loctite.

Shortly after my buddy’s RMR shit the bed. Ironically his screws were rusted in from carry with no loctite.

It’s been the nature of the beast.

Red dot sights on pistols, even the best models out, are relatively new technology. They just still haven’t figured out how to build them to handle the reciprocating mass of a handgun slide.

Type 1 RMR’s barely made it past 10,000 rounds. Newer models run on average from 15,000-40,000. Better but still not great. Cheaper models can die from installation to much lower round counts.

It was said with race type guns, you have to do more maintenance. More tinkering and tweaking. And it’s sort of true.

Running a more race type set up, I have yet to have any reliability issues. But you have to clean behind the extractor every 10-15,000. Springs wear out but I haven’t replace any yet.

There are batteries to replace on RDS’s. Mounting plates are less robust than direct milling but on certain guns there is no other option.

I’ve had issues with irons. Different height sights to get the gun zeroed. I’ve seen the sights fly off at classes.

At the end of the day, I still think the performance I get from a dot gun by far outweighs the other issues.