Multiple Person Response Training Drills

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. If you're lucky enough to have access to reactive targets it's a much better way to train. Not only individually, but also in a multiple person engagement situation. For example, if you engage threats on the left side and you hear shots over to your right, but you get done, you then of course are going to want to assess the environment. When we say assess the environment, we don't say scan and just look or any of that.

We really wanna look and see what's going on. We wanna take information in from our surroundings and see if there are other threats. By using reactive targets, when you look over to an area that you weren't paying attention to and see a target still up that needs to be engaged, it doesn't matter if someone else shot at it, shot it, hit it, it got back up, it doesn't matter. That target represents a threat until the reaction has happened and that target is fallen down or slid down or changed in whatever way, indicates that it's been significantly affected to the point where it no longer presents a threat. Using multiple targets, using reactive targets more importantly, is a great way to take your training to the next level.

Especially when you're working on the three Cs in a live shooting environment with more than one person. Now that we've talked about two-man team tactics, we're gonna actually go over some of the training drills that we do for two-man team tactics. Obviously now that we've added the extra person, we have to increase the safety things. So one of the things that we're gonna talk about with regards to safety, is how far we move the muzzle of our own gun during our assessments or reassessments. If we look at Jeremiah here, as he extends his gun out, we wanna make sure that we're three feet off of the gun here.

If he's in the high compress ready and we come to three feet off of the gun here, if he needs to re-extend and take a shot, you can see how this can be a problem. One of the other safety parameters we need to talk about, our eyes and ears. Again whenever you're training with firearms, it would be good to have eye and ear protection. Another thing that we'd like to discuss is familiarity with the person that you're gonna be training with. Now, you're gonna be training with this person, which is great.

But as we discussed earlier, you may not have the opportunity to be training with the person that you get into the critical incident with. Remember it's the target that dictates that situation. Not so much you. So being familiar is going lead to a more rapid response, a more organized and coordinated response. But just be advised that you may not be in that situation with your training partner, as I train with Jeremiah here.

The next drill we're gonna do is the figure eight drill which we've been introduced to before earlier in the series. But now we're gonna talk about it in terms of having multiple shooters. So before we start the drill, let's go ahead and look at how we set it up. As you can see it's a standard figure eight drill. We're looking, we have the barrels, which, keep in mind, the barrels are not cover.

They're just here to delineate the course that the people are going to be walking. All right? This, what this does is this takes a 120 degree range and turns it into a 360 degree range. We look at the targets up on the walls. We can see that we have several numbers, including a couple duplicates of certain numbers.

This is to simulate multiple shooters, dealing with multiple targets. Let's go ahead and get started on the drill. Now for the purposes of this drill, we're gonna have someone calling out the numbers for us. A training partner, whatever you need to actually make this drill a little bit more realistic. And help us, Jeremiah and I, respond appropriately after recognition of the threat.

Recognition will take place as soon as our training partner calls out the number. Ready? Let's do it. Figure eight. [Training Partner] Four!

Clear right! Clear left! [Training Partner] Two! Clear right! Clear left!

Good to go. [Training Partner] One! Clear! Clear. [Training Partner] Six!

So you can see with multiple shooters there's a lot of added extra facets to this drill. We still have the 360 degree presentation from the holster like we did with the other figure eight drills in the series. Now we have two shooters. We have to be aware of where each other are. We also have to be aware of some way of communicating with each other, both where the threats are, and then once the threats are clear or our area's clear that it's okay to go ahead and re-holster and figure out what we need to do next.

Whether it's deal with our family members, deal with other people that may be wounded, call 911, whatever the case may be. So now let's look at a more dynamic, a more realistic figure eight drill. Before we had the paper targets, the numbers painted on them. There was no reaction to combat accurate hits. So the targets were always there.

Whether there was good hits by John or me, the other person could still engage in it. Now we're gonna move to reactive targets. So after good combat, after your hits, the targets will not be up. So we'll have to assess.