PDN LIVE! May 2018

All right. Hello, I am live and on my own tonight. So we are not doing the normal thing that we do with moderators, we are all alone tonight on the Personal Defense Network Live, and I am adding that to my timeline over here. So I'm actually monitoring some of the opportunities for you guys to ask questions in the comments over here. Normally we go through the Google Hangouts and I have my moderator, Shannon or Sam, someone taking care of fielding the questions.

So tonight we're just gonna go direct; Now I do have some questions that are already submitted from the comments that I'm gonna be answering. And I also know that I'm gonna go ahead and talk about some things that came up today in class, we actually had two days of training in intuitive defensive shooting skills up here in Michigan. I was with Steve Washington, Who's one of the US CCA training counselors, who is gonna be one of the leaders in our new collaborative project. Personal Events Network, and US CCA have been working together for a number of years. They've been a sponsor of our training tour off and on over the last five or six years.

And we have some other collaborative marketing projects and training projects, and curriculum development stuff in the works. ICE Training Company, that's my company, my training company announced last year that we were gonna be doing a couple of big things with them, teaming up. And some of you may have seen this book, "Defensive Shooting Fundamentals Level One", that was released at the US CCA Expo a few weeks ago. Hello, from Pennsylvania there, Scott Graham. I was just in Pennsylvania, actually on the Personal Events Network training tour.

Here's level two, this is obviously a proof, this is gonna be out in a few weeks. Rich, Nebraska, I don't know. I've been thinking about getting in Nebraska for awhile, it's been years since I trained there. And I think we're trying to maybe sneak a course in on this tour, 'cause I have a few days between my Iowa class and being in Colorado, and if you know your geography that is kind of on the way. Hi, Annette.

Thanks, Annette. I'm gonna be in Illinois with Annette Chapman, coming up soon, we've got several classes coming up on the tour. So the way we normally start this out, is someone will say, "Hey, Rob, what have you been up to?" So I'll tell you what I've been up to. I've been doing a lot of intuitive defensive shooting skill development on the ranges the last several weeks. Since the last PDN live, I think we had the US CCA expo.

I'm not sure that it happened when we did the last one, we certainly had the NRA annual meeting since then. The NRA annual meeting was done in Dallas and it was a great event, lots of good people, lots obviously going on in the politics. We don't really get too much into politics in Personal Defense Network, but it was great to catch up with a lot of our collaborators, our tour sponsors, a lot of the other instructors that are teaching on the tour. I have been... Hey.

Thanks, Donovan. So I have been just super crazy busy. This tour was supposed to be one that had some big gaps in it. We were supposed to maybe have three or four weeks for me on the road, then a week or 10 days off. And those week or 10 days off, 10 day offs, have been filled with things like the NRA annual meeting, things like the US CCA expo that was in Kentucky, and some video work that we're doing to support the instructor development for the level one and level two New Live Fire programs that are going to be offered as a collaboration through the US CCA, from ICE Training Company.

And ICE Training Company, of course has been running the combat focus shooting program, or the intuitive shooting program that we've run now since 2003, all over the country. And we've been certifying instructors since 2005. And I've said for a long time that it was actually a evolution. You know, we had to kind of come up with our own curriculum to run at Valhalla Training Center, and in the early 2000s that was really the culmination of my experience as a student, my observations as a student, my time as a law enforcement officer, reserve and full time, as well as the influences of so many other instructors and peers in the community. Whether they were people that I trained with, taught with, just talked to, being in the industry, working for SWAT Magazine, getting a lot of opportunities to go out and train, become an adjunct instructor at several schools.

And this book, which I wanted to talk about tonight, as a part of the getting into our question and answer period, really is the culmination, the evolution, of what I would consider my life's work, my career in helping people to try to develop intuitive defensive shooting skills efficiently. One of the things that gets said a lot about CFS or IDS program by guys who've taken it, my peers in the industry, is, you know, if someone's only going to take one course CFS might be the perfect setup, right? If somebody is gonna take a course every couple of years and they're gonna work on higher levels of marksmanship and things like that, there's a lot to be gained outside of the CFS world in terms of marksmanship and in terms of potential for dealing with outliers, you know, anomalies in the defensive shooting world. But if you look at kind of what we most expect to happen if you have to use your defensive gun, based on empirical evidence, based on just context, the way people live, the environments people carry guns in, or stage guns in their home or their workplace, CFS has always tried to be the all encompassing sort of fundamental default response, right? If you realize you have to shoot in an emergency, especially if you're caught off guard, we try to keep all those fundamentals intact through the one day course, expanding and refining them in the two day course, and then sort of dramatically covering all the things you normally see in a defensive shooting course, that's three, four, or five days.

By the time you get through our two day advanced pistol handling course, we cover all of the stuff down on the ground, we go to extreme distances all the way out to 80, 100 yards, if the range that we're on allows it. Certainly getting back to 40 or 50 yards, kind of beyond reasonable distance, we say, doing extreme precision, you know, down to one hole group stuff, shooting, you know, through the O in the word of, on the balance of speed and precision target, things like that. We also deal with all the one-handed reloads, all the malfunction stuff, all the weak handed reloads, weak handed shooting, shooting from the ground, shooting while seated, shooting from vehicles, shooting around cover, shooting while moving, when we're moving away from an immediate close quarters threat. And the only thing we really don't cover extensively in those fundamental courses is contact shooting, and shooting from retention, when contact is imminent and you can't create distance, you can't do the shooting while moving that we teach in our programs. And that we reserve for a separate one or two day course, called "Extreme Close Quarters Tactics", and that really was the course that sort of put Valhalla Training Center on the map, back in the early 2000s.

And that was a program that I started running around 2000, 2001, after trying to find good ways to integrate grappling close quarters striking and contact shooting. For mainly in the law enforcement community, where we tended to separate those things in the past, training defensive tactics, the unarmed stuff, and then over here training our shooting skills, our marksmanship skills, like for the qual course type thing on the range, and in the shoot house with SWAT teams and things like that it was almost always building up to a shooting, leading up to shooting a role-player, or shooting a target in a live fire shoot house. Whereas most of the actual raids that special teams in the law enforcement in the US go on, result in wrestling and capturing somebody and things like that, you know, with all the gear on, sort of more of the defensive tactics side. So that's really where that course came from. So all of this builds up to a series of programs, level one and level two.

I've already been committed to you through the US CCA, and it's really caused me to revisit the entire curriculum, really, and look at it where if we were gonna start over, if we were gonna do it all today from scratch; How would we do it? How would we put the program together? What things would I take out of advanced pistol handling and put into maybe more of an earlier period in the fundamentals course? What things in the fundamentals course need to switch around? For years our program has been based on a two day course, but I run a lot of one day courses as do a lot of our other certified instructors.

Because for some people it's a matter of money, time commitment, they can only afford one day, they can only get to one day of training and get away from their family and their other things in life and their work of course. Other times, it's my schedule. Where I don't have a schedule to be able to do, you know, two days here, and two days here, and two days here, and I wanna hit as many places as I can during the year, so I'll do a lot of one day courses. Sometimes I'll do a one day course and hopefully I'm teeing up a regional instructor or somebody who's local to the area to do the follow on training with people. So with that in mind, if I do so many one day courses, how much is being left out potentially, from a program that was designed as a two day course?

We always say that we probably cover about 75% or 80% of the topics from the two day course in a one day course, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're getting as thorough in exploration in those areas nor of course does it mean that you're getting as much practice, as much repetition. And that's usually what's lacking in the one day course. So knowing that with US CCA, we're gonna break everything down and make it a specific one day, and then another specific day, it was a good time to revisit the curriculum. So this spring in the training tour, you know, I've probably taught, I dunno, I'm sure 20 something, probably 30 courses already in the tour. And I've been experimenting with some of my thoughts on how this is gonna look, you know, when the new level one and level two programs are launched and running, and how it's going to affect the people who've been certified, teaching our program for a decade now or more, some of the people that are active.

And of course like, like any change, anytime when I announced the branding change from CFS to IDS, that was for some people like, "Oh, I don't want to change." Well, I don't care, you don't have to change but guess what? The certificate is gonna say IDS, and the t-shirts are gonna say IDS, and the coins at the challenge, you know, the challenge coins at the conference and all that, this is what we're doing. And everybody in business, if you spent 15 years building a brand and it's well established, and it's been successful, certainly a business venture, and a successful educational venture in terms of effecting people and affecting the community, then it doesn't make a lot of sense to kill that brand. But I thought it was important for a whole bunch of reasons to finally do that 'cause we had been toying with the name for years and doing different things with it. So along with changing the brand, there's also this issue of potentially changing how the courses flow, you know, and evolving the drills, and that's always happening, evolving the terminology, evolving the explanations.

So when it came down to sit down and do this ginormous project, that was the perfect opportunity to do it. And this spring, so far, those experiments if you will, shifting around what gets taught in a one day class today, finishing up a two day class, I really feel strongly like the new program is better than ever. And that's really gonna be the best way, especially for new instructors, people coming out of the US CCA, non live fire program, their concealed carry home defense fundamentals lecture class that a lot of people have been tying to maybe an NRA basic fiscal class, or their state mandated CPL, CCW, LTC type class, it's gonna be really easy for them to come out of that and into this. You know, so much in that original book by Michael Martin was collaborative, or at least, you know, some of my intellectual property that he contacted me over a decade ago and said, "Hey, can I use some of this stuff from the original "Combat Focus Shooting" book?" And I was like, of course, you know, let's get the word out there. And you can see ICE Training Company mentioned in that book, mentioned in that curriculum quite often, and combat focus shooting, as well as you can see our DNA in a lot of the stuff there.

So I'm excited about that, I'm excited about the move to integrate the live fire program, and it's been going great. So if you, you know, take a look and you start going through this book, you're gonna see that if you're familiar with my previous works, this one's kind of exciting 'cause it has pictures and diagrams and it's kind of exciting the way it reads, as opposed to just like words and ideas. But some of the, both the graphic work and the photo work here really illustrates a lot of what we've been talking about for years, but in a much better way. The content development team at the US CCA at Delta Defense is just awesome, they've been making great books. I always said that CC HDF book, it definitely is the prettiest version of any of the information I've put out, where we have some of the overlapping information there.

And this book now is definitely the evolution, even just the artistic, you know, sort of deciding how to put the chapters together, right? Really, it was fun. It was fun working with their team, and it's obviously a great way to present some of the information. We revisited some of, like what is end user information versus what is instructor information? When I wrote the "Counter Ambush" book in 2012 which is part of the first curriculum I worked with on US CCA for the distance education course, that was a lot of information that five years before was instructor development information, and we made it end user information.

People were catching up, right? Like the industry was starting to talk more about the same types of drills, and the same types of training methodology we did. So it was easy... So explaining that, being ready to answer the why questions for the end user became important. In evolution, we talked about this for years in our instructor development classes, the evolution from this kind of a target shooting, why did I miss in a certain space?

To a much more defensive shooting appropriate, you know, when did you miss, is as important as why you missed to figuring out... Sorry, where you missed to figuring out why. So if you only go by where you can only get so much out of it, 'cause it takes a lot for granted. If you also know when first shot, followup shot, things like that, it's much easier to diagnose what's going on. So deciding this was also important for people who are just gonna be reading the book, or doing like a distance learning kind of approach, giving them more of the tools, that's come out of this book.

So super excited about that. Like I said, book two, you know, more of the same, malfunction, nondiagnostic malfunction stuff presented, as well, as it's ever been presented. Talking about fighting being an athletic endeavor, you know, that's really important. We talk about fitness versus athletics. Everybody's got a different level of fitness, but the amount of athleticism that you put into your development of skills and your preparation to apply skills becomes really important.

You know, there's even just some of the cool graphic tricks, just the idea of visualization, right? You shouldn't just be thinking about shooting a piece of paper, a piece of steel, you should be visualizing that threat, right? And sort of justifying what you're doing, you know, why are you shooting? Well, I visualize this guy pulling a gun out of his waistband in the convenience store and starting to shoot people. Okay, well, that's good.

Why did you stop shooting? I visualized that guy dropping the gun, or the guy falling to the ground and not continuing to attack, or the guy runs away, so I stopped shooting. Those things are all really important. So I'm looking forward to kind of continuing now to go through the curriculum and work on the next revision to level three, level four, with each of them being a one day class. And certainly there's no reason instructor couldn't say, "Okay, we're running levels one through three, we're gonna do a three-day class." Great.

But I think the tools that we're gonna be providing people in the organization and the administration, of course that US CCA brings to the table is great. And of course all that backed up by a lot of the stuff we do at Personal Defense Network. So Personal Defense Network has always been about distance education in a somewhat casual way, right? First DVDs, then articles online, and video clips specifically designed for online digestion, whether it's a long format stuff, some of the lectures and things, or it's the short clips, some of the stuff that's about gears, about go into the rain and here's a drill, here's a quick thing. A lot of conceptual stuff.

Of course, we have a lot of people that contribute to PDN over the years, and I've tried to really stick to the concepts that underlie the formation of a curriculum, and the formation of an approach to defensive shooting, and gear selection, and tactics, active shooter, home security, all the topics we cover. And it's been fun to build that at Personal Defense Network. A few years ago, we launched PDN Academy. That was our first foray into distance education, and we've got some great courses there. And I think that's where all of these things start to work together really well.

So you wanna take a class from Rob, okay, great. You wanna understand some of the ideas, go to Personal Defense Network, watch some of the free videos, Personal Defense Network training tour comes up, you learn about it through US CCA, or you notice that US CCA has some fundamental level instructors teaching the same intellectual property, the same methodology that Rob and his team have been using, cool, take that class. The tour comes through your town and you take an advanced class, when you come to an advanced class you find out that I really highly recommend that everybody get medical training as well, 'cause just firearms training isn't really as important or as necessary in a lot of ways as some good medical training. So you go back to PDN Academy and you take our online medical course, our emergency medical course online that was developed by Lone Star Medics and Caleb Causey, one of our PDN contributors, as well as one of our Personal Defense Network training tour instructors. So all of these things work together, lots of great collaboration, lots of great people involved, Jamie Onion, Barrack Kendrick, and Derek Pool, have been incredibly important as far as the leadership from the ICE Training Company side, working with a lot of the people over at the US CCA in their leadership, Mike Brickner and Steve Fisher, especially.

They have built a great team in their non live fire program, and now it's sort of figuring out who on that team needs to be the leaders in the live fire program along with the senior instructors from ICE Training Company. So that's what's going on there. On the topic of defensive shooting skill development, I had a couple of questions, like I said, here. Let me call some of those up since I'm self moderating, while I'm doing this, if you wanna go sign up for the free newsletter at personaldefensenetwork.com, that's probably a good idea. You'll get notifications whenever we put out new videos or you get great information when we post some information about new training articles, stuff like that, from our contributors.

So you get notified exactly what's going on. Let me... I'm gonna come back to that question, Scott Graham, I like that. "If you don't change with the times," correct, Rich. Let me see one of the questions here; Okay.

So here's a question. Somebody wants to understand how the position of the holster really relates to speed. Is there an advantage to... The question is more along the lines of, is there an advantage to one or the other, but the underlying premise here, you know, those of you who have trained with me or watched these things before, I like to make sure you understand the underlying principle not just answer the question. So the question is related to whether carrying in the appendix position or carrying behind the hip is faster.

And I hear a lot of different things about why people think that there's a right answer to this. Some people will tell you that appendix is faster because the gun's already in front of your body, like the gun's closer to where it's gonna be when you shoot. Other people will tell you that behind the hip, or at the hip, is faster because your hand is going to be at your side, you know, they're envisioning the hand instead of having them move to the front of your body, the hand can just come up alongside your body and pull the gun out and go out to the shooting position. So I think one of the things you have to understand, of course, is what are the most likely scenarios that you're going to have to draw your gun and immediately go to the shooting position. So right away you take out anything where, you know, you're choosing to act, like a law enforcement officer who decides to interject themselves, or, you know, of course is responding to a call and moves forward.

I think that's important to understand, is that there's a difference between on the buzzer, go, and I'm now going to pull my gun out and get ready to shoot. And the thing that's most likely happen in a personal defense situation if you actually have to go straight from the holster to shooting someone, is that you got caught off guard. And if you're caught off guard your hands are almost certainly going to come to the front of your body, relative to your eye-line as you orient towards the threat, right? So you have that stimulus that happens, like, say over here to my left. if I had someone burst through that door my hands are much more likely to be here, moving to a position between me and that stimulus, that sound, before I realize and recognize, Oh, I need my gun, and I have to come back to my gun.

So in this case, now I happen to be seated, but if I were standing obviously then my orientation would come along with my hips moving this way. We train for movement laterally, not towards a threat or away from the threat. So once I'm oriented towards a threat, if I come over here, yes, my hands are more likely to be in front of me. So a gun that's carried closer to the center line, in front of the hips, is going to be faster to reach. But having said that, the idea that that's the reason you should carry appendix really doesn't make a lot of sense, right?

Appendix carry has to fit everything not just your fastest potential presentation in the most likely counter ambush moment. So someone said here that, Gabe says, "I feel what works for each individual is the best spot for your carry." The bottom line is that, but that can't ever be the first response, right? That's the first response I always say online, and I'm not coming at you, Gabe, I think you're trying to help and help me reach the bottom line, absolutely. But the first response can never be, ah, it really doesn't matter, pick whatever you like. That is the hobbyist response.

And unfortunately there's a lot of ego investment by people who take this casually, or seriously as students in gun world. If you think about it, like we're all people who are trying to predict our ability, or prepare our ability to control chaos when someone attacks us. And we wanna be prepared to take control back from the aggressor, or from the ambusher and win that fight, protect people we love, we're control type people. So when a hobbyist or someone on the internet that isn't super invested or even well vested in the arguments to defend their position comes up against expert advice, they will quite often, if they don't like it initially, respond with sort of a flippant like, well, it all comes down to what people like. And quite often, even if it's not someone who's antagonistic to information that's coming out, they'll jump in and say, "Well, it just really comes down to personal preference." And sometimes I see that as a defense mechanism that's sort of preemptively put in place in case someone actually comes back to them and says, "Well, what do you do?" And they say, Oh, I do X, Y, and Z, and then there's a bunch of good reasons why X, Y and Z don't make a lot of sense.

They've sort of already planted the seed that, well, nobody can tell you what to do, it's all up to you. Well, if that were true we wouldn't have universities and we wouldn't have, you know, doctors or pharmacists, we would all just be on our own figuring out what to do. But we have experts and we have educational systems, and we have research and studies, and we can learn from the experiences of others. There's a whole bunch of really good objective information out there on just about any topic about why one thing is better than the other. That said, now having set that premise, that no, the bottom line isn't what you like, as an instructor, I have to look holistically at a person and look at, somebody mentioned lifestyle, how you dress, the situations you're likely to be in, all those things.

And of course as people are mentioning, integrate those natural reactions I was talking about. And then the physics of shooting, right? Like all the stuff that goes along with, okay, what kind of gun are you gonna carry? How big is the gun gonna be? What kind of holster are you gonna use?

There's a lot that goes into it. Having said all those things, when you look at all the factors, I can then turn to this person and say, you know what? I believe as an expert with, you know, I got my 10,000 hours in, I'm sure a long time ago, right? With all my hours and all my observations, and all the people I've watched and all the different holster configurations I've seen, I've seen people experiment with, and that's way more important by the way, than what I personally have done myself, right? I'm one body type, one experience trail.

When I see hundreds of students live fire on the range, you know, already this year, I'm sure some years it's over 1000 easily, watching them on the range. It is an educated opinion that leads me to say, for you, you should probably do this, but for you, you should probably do this other thing. And those two things both be based on the same principles and the same ideas that lead me to those logical conclusions As opposed to saying, okay, guess what internet? 235 carry is the best possible place for you to be, right? Right here over the hipbone, that's the best place for you to be, regardless of what kind of pants you wear, whether you're male, whether you're female, whether you're tall, short, whether you wear a suit or jeans or yoga pants, it doesn't make any sense.

And unfortunately, I see people try to oversimplify things just, in exactly that way, you know, this is what people should do. I don't think that's the case. One thing I've been talking about recently is range of motion in the shoulder, flexibility coming out of the pectoral muscle and sort of how well human beings move their shoulder, has a lot to do with where the best place for them to carry is. If you've ever seen somebody on the range who has a lot of trouble getting that gun in and out of the holster from behind their hip, right? And they sort of have to bend their torso or they have to kind of pop the gun out of the holster, and they have a lot of trouble getting it back in there, or they point the gun at themselves and sort of shimmy it back into the holster, all the things we hate to see.

A lot of that is caused by lack of range of motion in the shoulder, or lack of flexibility. So if you have a damaged shoulder that doesn't rotate back well, or if you have a lot of tightness in your shoulder generally, and you can't pull your shoulder and your arm back away from your pectoral muscle, your torso here. If that's all tight and it's very hard for you to get into that position, it doesn't really matter how big your belly is, or what kind of clothes you wear, the safety alone, forget about also the speed of trying to get back here and get that gun out efficiently and orient it towards the threat, bring it back in front of your body. That might indicate that appendix carry, or even a carry kind of in this area here, right? Which isn't like up and down, true appendix carry, but more out here, maybe next to a belly.

Maybe the better thing for you, because if you're reaching to the front of your body, where you have much less movement of the shoulder to get a gun from your waistline, and come up, and orient, and drive out, than you do if you have to come back behind your hip, right? So it might be your shoulder that dictates behind the hip being bad. I see a lot of people with like drop legs, and this is where this came up earlier in the tour. Somebody showed up with a drop leg and that was sort of their rationale. They said, "Well, I can't move my shoulder.

I can't get my gun out where I used to carry it." Well, "Have you considered up here?" "No, because I don't do that, because my physical shape doesn't work with that," right? See, like this person saying, oh, he's saying it, literally, this is it. If you're thin or have an athletic build, it can work great. But that's really not the limitation, right? Rob Latham and I have done a video on this, you know?

I've seen some guys that make Rob Latham sorta look skinny, like I look skinny next around Latham. I got other guys who are bigger than Latham around the middle and they carry in this area as well. Some of them carry right in front, and the gun sort of angled, and they have to push their hip way out to make sure that they're safe when they get the gun out. Other people carry it, that angle, and that crease, but it's because of shoulder issues as much as anything else. So I think that's really important to consider.

Let's see, what else? Oh, somebody said something about... What did you say? I said, I was gonna come back to it. Oh, how do the new books integrate with my old books?

So these really are like the beginning, I think, of a refresh of all the information. So there's some information here, certainly the "Combat Focus Shooting Evolution" book that came out in 2010, that book is essentially replaced by level one and level two. So just like that 2010 book replaced the 2006 book, this is... Yeah, Spencer, Somebody is talking about Spencer Keepers, right? So Spencer is not a thin guy, I just was talking to him at NRA, we were talking about some double-action, single-action stuff with handguns.

He was looking at some of the grand power stuff, and we were talking, and no, he's not a thin guy by any stretch, right? And he certainly is well-known as the appendix guy, he makes some great holsters, and he's kind of turn that into some classes he teaches on the advantages of appendix carry and stuff like that, and that's great. So he's another example of someone who's an advocate and obviously a practitioner of appendix carry, who's not a slim, kind of, anorexic guy kind of a deal thing going, scrawny, I guess I'm scrawny. So the question was how does this book, how do these new books integrate with my other books? So this definitely replaces the 2010 book, just like the 2010 book replaced the 2006, and then the 2008 kind of a mini refresh of the CFS book.

There's a little bit of counter ambush in here, there's certainly more counter ambush book information in these than there was in the CFS book. There's also, a tiny bit, of my book on armed home defense, called "Defend Yourself". That book also, by the way, was just recently released with, who was that released with? Cobblesound Studios, yeah, with Macro. He helped me with an audio book.

So we just released an audio book, I know a lot of people, the last audio book I did was "Counter Ambush", that was like 2012 or 2013. So we now have "Defend Yourself, The Armed Home Defense" book, which is one of my favorite books that I've written. I think it's a great book for anybody, even if they're not like a diehard gun person, it's got a lot of good tips and tactics and stuff, that is now out on audio book. But there's a little bit of that in these books as well, and I'm starting to now write the advanced pistol handling curriculum, which we had never written before. I had never written that down, that was more of just a class.

We'd done some videos on it, but it's a class, you kind of learn it, but I never felt that graphically it was easy for me the way I do books to represent a lot of the APH information, because so much of it is what I always call like the black belt magazine style. It's like first position, second position, third position. And since I personally, when I've published my own books through ICE Publishing, have never done a big picture heavy book. It's not been something I really was ready to tackle. With with Delta Defense, with the help of US CCA, we're starting to integrate some of that information into the books and probably the nondiagnostic linear malfunction drill is the first example of that.

And I think if we do a level three and four you're gonna start to see some of the positional shooting, you know, presentation from the holster while seated, all those kind of step-by-step pictures and all of that. So, Gabe, yes. The new book level one is out already, you can get it at US CCA, if you go to... There it is, defensiveshootingfundamentals.com, you can learn more about the new program. There's a great video there where I talk a little bit about it.

And Tim Schmidt, of course, the founder of US CCA, he talks about it a little bit as well. Kind of his feelings on why he wanted to team up. So that is all available there to find out more about the new book and how to get the new book. The second book, level two, will be available just in a few weeks, in June. Let's see, "Is there a method to determine the best carry position?" Really, no, Robert.

I don't know what to tell you. There is a certain aspect of understanding that generally in front of the hips is probably gonna be more accessible to you more rapidly if your hands come up in a startup position. Plus, if you're grappling, if you're in a fight with someone, if you're entangled with someone having something center line, and there's a lot of videos, if you go to Personal Defense Network, me talking about center line carry, whether it's a knife or gun or whatever, any defensive tool, where you can reach it with either hand. It's maybe counterintuitively to some people if you understand the dynamics of grappling and what Craig Douglas so brilliantly coined the term, in fight weapons access. We talk about clearing, controlling, and countering.

We've been talking about that for a long time. And the idea is that we clear the threat from us, so if it's a knife, we clear the gun away from us so it can't hurt us, then we try to get control over the attacker and then you wanna do your counters. Once you have some control that's when you would access the gun. So in fight weapons access is what Craig Douglas, one of our PDN contributors, refers to that whole sequence as. Is how you get to the gun while you're in the middle of a fight, and that's way easier from upfront.

In the back, if the guy bear hugs you, of course he may be on the gun faster and then you have to take your hand, you can't kind of stay in front of yourself, but you now have to come back here and open yourself up, and that becomes harder. If you take all that stuff into account you'll see why I'm an advocate for people seriously considering center line carry as a primary option, but it's not always gonna be the best. Mark Graves asks, "Is there a downside to center line?" Other than the comfort issue, I really can't think of very many downsides. You could come up with a situation, I'm sure, you could say in this narrow window it would be better if your gun were behind your hip and you had to reach back there and, you know... For me it really has to be a narrow slice.

I don't see generally, for anybody who has the ability to carry the gun comfortably the way they dress. When I wear a suit, when I go to Shot Show or NRA Convention and all that, when I'm wearing suits all the time I generally do not carry appendix. I don't carry center line because it just doesn't look right with the suit, so I carry four o'clock. So even just coming back from Dallas after four days, three and a half days of carrying at four o'clock, you know, I don't carry back there three or four days in a row, except during conventions and stuff, and Shot Show you can't carry. So there aren't that many conventions I even go to where I'm wearing a suit all day long, several days in a row, and that is kind of a pain on my lower back and all that.

But, you know, it's the way to carry if you're wearing a suit. Sometimes I'll put it and tuck it, I'll use like the crossbreed appendix holster and tuck it in behind the shirt but it just doesn't look right. I'm too scrawny to pull that off. There are times when behind the hip's gonna be better even for me, even though I'm an advocate for, and enjoy the benefits of appendix carry most of the time. The center line carry, good.

Okay, Dwayne. Hi, Dwayne. Eric, so let me do one live question and then I'm gonna go back to another question I have over here. "Advice for people in countries that cannot legally open or conceal carry." Jeff, we've got a lot of information about carrying other defensive tools, in terms of how you can defend yourself. A lot of people, you know, I get it, I'm not sure where you are.

But a lot of people in the US do have this mentality, like I have to have my gun, or I feel unsafe. Years ago it used to be sort of standard operating procedure in the training community to remind people, that, hey, if you wouldn't go hang out with a certain person, if you wouldn't go to a certain place, if you wouldn't engage in a certain activity without a gun, then you would be foolish to engage in that activity just because you have a gun. And this comes up every once in a while and people get all fired up about it, and I don't really know why. Like I said, this used to be common sense. Let's say your kid's graduation, it's graduation time, right?

Your kid's graduation is a gun-free zone. If you feel that you aren't safe enough going to your kid's graduation without a gun on and violating the law and risking everything that comes with getting caught with that gun. That came up last year, I think it was a guy sitting in the stands had a gun in his sock, fired the gun off in the stands and reignited this whole conversation. Well, "He shouldn't have his gun rights taken away, gun-free zones," all that. I get it, I agree.

But if your kid's graduation is in a gun-free zone and you choose to violate the law, I don't think you're helping yourself or the gun rights cause, right? If you write a letter to the principal and say I'm not letting my son participate, and my son doesn't want to participate, and our family's not gonna participate because it's a gun-free zone, that's how things change, You don't change things by sneaking a gun in and violating the law, and honestly I think the risk benefit thing has to be brought up, right? If you really think it's too dangerous to go to your kid's graduation without a gun, don't go to your kid's graduation, right? If you need a gun to go there, in your mind, something should be seen as pretty bad, right? That used to be common sense.

If you wouldn't do it without a gun don't do it with a gun. Now because of the politics, I think, and the open carry activism is part of it. But now, because of the politics over the last decade, I guess, that's been lost from the common discussion. And it's much more like, "Hey, they can't keep me from carrying a gun, what they don't know won't hurt them. If you're carrying it properly they'll never know," you know, all that kind of stuff.

And I think a lot of that's just ego, bravado stuff. So Jeff, my bottom line is, my advice for you is that you're not helpless just 'cause you don't have a gun. I travel around parts of the country, and certainly, you know, on airplanes, I travel around Europe, I can't carry a gun. I don't feel like I'm helpless, I don't walk around scared. There really isn't anything that I do that I wouldn't do if I were carrying a gun in the US.

You know, I'm on the record, I don't carry when I drink, right? So if I'm going out for an evening and I have some wine, or beer, or cider with friends, a couple cocktails, whatever, I don't carry. I don't feel like I'm helpless because I make that choice in life, right? And certainly there's times when I might rather have the gun and I choose not to drink. But as a lifestyle, Jeff, I think there's a lot of things you can do and there's a lot of things you can learn at Personal Defense Network about having a flashlight, having an impact device.

I had it. Where did I put it? There it is. So I've got this impact devise that was made for me by Walk-ins Defense a long time ago. A lot of you know his company and his stuff, this is number 167, and he put my name on it, I thought that was pretty cool.

But, you know, that's on my key chain, right? I've got a flashlight on my key chain, I've got useful things that... I've got my medical kit, you know, I've got knives you might be able carry, other impact devices, maybe a larger flashlight like the one I keep in my pocket that can use as an impact device also. These types of tools are way better than nothing. Certainly pepper spray might be an option, a taser might be an option, a baton might be an option, obviously unarmed skills and fitness, those are always gonna be important options as well.

So go ahead and research unarmed defense as well as the topics surrounding when you can't carry a gun or non permissive environments. I did a live update for Manhattan when I flew back to do Fox News one time. I flew back, I think from Alaska or something, obviously I was there for like 20 hours. I couldn't have a gun, wouldn't carry a gun around Manhattan anyway. So I just kinda showed everything else, the hard pen, the impact device, the medical kit, the flashlight, all the things that I could have on my body.

Let's see, what else do we got? Center line carry... "Are you opposed to the James Bond shoulder sling carry with jacket?" No, a shoulder holster certainly can be a way to carry, I generally don't like it. And as far as the trade shows go a lot of times I find myself, I'll take my jacket off, maybe when I'm sitting down in a booth or something like that and the gun's kind of behind my back, and I might sit down in a chair like this. And in that time when I'm sitting down the gun is, you know, behind my back and I'm not standing up or walking around open carry.

Obviously with a shoulder holster, that's gonna change some of that dynamic. Again, coming across your body is different from coming down to your center line in terms of that entanglement situation as well. And when you add the jacket into that situation of entanglement that shoulder holster may not be as convenient or accessible as you might think. Let me see here. There was another question I wanted to get to that was really good.

Okay. So this was about, is a laser detrimental to developing defensive shooting skills? And if I understand the question correctly, it has to do with whether or not a laser is... A laser aiming device on your gun, I think I have... Let me see what I got here.

I have pulled up no props, so let me pull out a prop if I can. Uh, that one, no. So if I have a laser aiming device, and let's prove that that gun is clear to everyone. It's clear. If I have a laser aiming device...

I am gonna just kinda slip that on there and cheat it. So if I have a laser on the gun, this is a new XL-5 third gen from Viridian, one of our tour sponsors, sitting on a XD forage, one of our loaner guns. So we had a couple of people use this as a loaner gun today and yesterday on the range. Obviously it's not completely attached but you get the point. If I a laser on the gun, and I train without learning kinesthetic alignment, you know, getting that gun out in front of my eyes, right?

And just knowing that the gun is pointed in the right direction. If I don't train to use my sights, driving out and closing one eye and focusing on that front sight, and maintaining my sight alignment and sight picture while I'm shooting. If I instead just kind of point the gun out here in front of my body and look for that laser dot on the target and I learn to shoot, "learn to shoot" like this, I'm obviously not learning good fundamentals. And that's where it can be dangerous, right? A laser on the gun as an aiming device, shouldn't be thought of as a crutch for developing your shooting skills.

It's one thing to have both eyes open and look through the gun, so to speak, focus on the target. And the gun's blurry in your field of vision, but I'm looking at the threat and seeing a whole chest, right? When I'm shooting at someone nine, 12, 15 feet away. It's something different if I drive out and I'm trying to see this... You know, you guys know what this dot looks like.

If I'm trying to see this little dot... The camera isn't focused there, it kind of blurs it out. But if I'm trying to see this small dot on the wall, or on the target, more importantly, that dot, to see it, I would have to look up over the gun. So if I'm looking over the gun when I'm driving out here instead of being in my line of sight where I can't see laser right now, but I'm instead here, looking over the gun where I can see the laser dot, that ruins my development of fundamentals. So we always say the laser should be thought of as a tertiary aiming device.

The third one, right? Primary is driving out kinesthetic alignment, right? And a secondary would be looking at the sites, a lot of people talk about that, right? I think that's what they're talking about, I guess they've read my book. Primary and secondary, primary being the kinesthetic alignment, secondary being, focusing on the sites, and then tertiary, right?

Tertiary is when you're using an alternative. Well, the alternative when you're contact shooting might be your body index, just knowing where the gun is, and knowing where the body that you're fighting against is, then that would be a tertiary way to aim. Hip shooting might've been considered a tertiary way to aim, you know, the old FBI, kind of hip shooting thing at three yards or whatever in the qualification courses, back in the 70s. Now I like this idea of using the laser. I could use a light, right?

There's certain lights that might work as a tertiary aiming device. Just if I have a really, you know, focused cone without a big wide beam, putting that light on someone helps me know that I am oriented towards the target, but the laser is really good for those non-standard shooting positions. When you can't get the full extension, someone's coming in at you, or you're injured, things like that. On a rifle it can be great. So I don't think a laser hurts your ability to develop your defensive shooting skill if you're using it properly in the proper context.

Do I prefer red or green? I've taken to the green. I don't feel like red is useless by any stretch, but the green really just... Especially when you train, I mean, most of the time we train we're training on the day, sorry, we're training during the day. And we're training in sunlight, hopefully, as much as we can, so that green really shows up.

And today the price difference is just, green is the way to go. And obviously Viridian has been a tour sponsor for a few years, and I've been working with them for a while now. Their green was one that really... They put green on the map, I think, as much as anybody else. A lot of the other companies were maybe a little bit late to green, in terms of the popular companies that do lasers.

And I think they've done a good job of keeping up, they actually have some red lasers as well, but I think the green is the way to go. Brazilian... Yeah, Oak, you're saying you have to take some Brazilian jujitsu. I always tell people, when it comes to unarmed defense, I get that a lot, what martial arts should I study or whatever. I tell people, go do three or four months muay thai, and do six months, a year of Brazilian jujitsu.

And in those time periods you're gonna learn or be exposed to the things that you should practice a lot, right? If you stay with any art for a long time you're probably gonna start learning little nuanced technique-qy things that may or may not ever be useful, but certainly are very specialized and highly skill oriented in a narrow box, right? Whether that box is an MMA fight or just a sparring competition, or just doing your kata really well and getting your belts or whatever. So if you learn the fundamental close quarters striking skills that come with an exposure over several months to muay thai, and if you learn the grappling skills that come with an exposure over several months to jujitsu, and then you practice them, and that's really the trick, right? If you have a great group, or training group, or gym, or school that you can go in and practice those fundamentals really hard, roll, strike, you know, with the pads on, with the bags, all that stuff, great.

If you find that your training environments that you go to kind of wanna keep getting more and more specialized over time, and don't let you just practice the fundamentals in a wider context of application, that's probably not what you need. So you probably need to find that group that'll help you do that. Let's see, there was a question early on here, like, how do I recommend somebody get started? You know, obviously, I think one of the things about developing defensive shooting fundamentals that we've gotten wrong historically, is starting people out at this really high mechanical level, sort of teaching them the way to shoot the same exact techniques you would use for a one hole group at 25 yards, being how we get new shooters started, right? The, 'the fundamentals', you know, sight alignment, sight picture, trigger press, breath control, you know, push, pull, isometric tension, those kinds of things that we've traditionally taught as fundamentals of shooting, aren't necessarily appropriate to defensive shooting.

Like kids, if you get a five-year old and you wanna teach them how to play baseball, they wanna go out for the baseball team, and, you know, America's pastime, you don't take them out and put them in the batter's box and talk to them about all the techniques of hitting a fast ball, and then put a pitcher out there that's gonna throw a ball at 90 miles an hour past him and just tell him to keep trying, and make sure they get the timing right and all that stuff. You put the ball on top of a tee, and you give him a bat and you hope that they don't swing around and hit themselves in the face, right? You know, just make contact with the ball, not the stick, and don't throw the bat, and don't spin around and hit yourself in the face, that's it. If you can hit the bat against the ball and it goes off the tee, and it goes flying, and dribbling and it just moves, everybody claps. Yay, you did it.

But with shooting, we start people out with the same level of mechanics, the same exact pieces that we would want to shoot that really tight one hole group or hit the bullseye, you know, like that target I showed you earlier, the little two inch circle, with the big areas telling you why you missed. It makes more sense to me to start people out with a fundamentally easier thing, right? Like a gross motor skill thing, put up a chest size target, a pie plate or something like that, put somebody a reasonable distance away from it, you know, nine to 15 feet, where most defensive shootings happen. Learn to drive the gun out, keep both eyes open, focused on the target and press the trigger relatively smoothly, the shot's gonna go into that box, or really close. And if the elbow is bent, well then straighten the elbow out.

If the head's up over the target, or up over the gun, you know, get the head inside of that triangle. If the trigger is being smashed in a way that makes the gun move, right? Learn how to press the trigger in a way that doesn't let the gun move. And if we just refine those simple things, extending the gun fully, feeling the trigger and then pressing through, we call it extended touch press drill, you got it. You can shoot chests at eight, nine, 10, 12 feet, across the bedroom, around your car, inside the convenience store, inside your office, that kind of thing.

So if we teach that fundamental skill at the beginning, I think then you can add on to that, right? We can add on, the gun is in the right place, we can add on-sight fires, so close an eye, focus on the front sight, and teach what sight alignment is, and sight picture, teach about the idea of maintaining sight picture. But remember that that target we're shooting at, that head of the person that has a knife to our friend's throat, walking them out of the building, as they're moving and walking out, and saying, "No, I'm taking them, I'm taking them, I'm taking them," their head's moving, right? So we don't want isometric tension, perfectly still guns that shoot one hole groups into pieces of still paper or hit steel targets far distances that don't move. We need to be able to move with that head throughout the smooth trigger press and maintain that sight picture on the head, so that when the shot breaks it goes where we want it to go.

So developing skills that are contextually appropriate, and developing grocer, motor skill, kind of more fundamental, basic level marksmanship, basic level control of the gun, then advancing into obviously higher levels of precision, that's kind of how we teach every other physical athletic skill to human beings, and shooting really shouldn't be any different. "Talk about fundamentals. How much does grip of the gun..." Grip's huge, right? Rich, talking about grip. So let's take a look here.

One of the most important things with grip is that the gun fits well, right? One of the biggest things with gun fit that I look for is can someone set the gun up so that their knuckle of their strong hand thumb is completely on the weak side of the gun? So that movement there isn't really impinged at all. So they can, you know, lock the gun open, they can reach down and hit the magazine release, all that kind of stuff. But also, so that thumb can get right up next to the gun, so there's plenty of room for your weak hand to come in there, and you can get good coverage, as much of a good 360 degree grip as you can.

So that to me is the biggest piece of gun fit that I really look for, is where is that knuckle? And when the knuckle is in the right place, can someone reach the trigger and get a good trigger press? If your knuckle is under the back of the gun, right? If your knuckle is this... Let me show you up here .

If your knuckle is kind of under the back of the gun, you can see how my thumb gets flared out, it's hard for me to manipulate, either the slide stop or the magazine release, if not impossible here. When you see that red mark after, you know, 50 rounds, and you start to see after 100 or 200 rounds, there's no skin left there, it's because you've got... If you're familiar with sniper shooting or any kind of even improvised hunting positions, the idea of not putting your rifle down on the hood of a car or the rifle down on a, you know, a cinderblock, jersey barrier, or something like that, you put hard on soft, right? Put your jacket, put your backpack or something there, hard on soft, you know, or soft on hard if you have anything you can put your rifle, the rubber feet of a bi-pod for example. Put the rubber feet on the hard rock, or on the hood of the car.

So soft on hard, or hard on soft. Well, it's kind of the same thing, if I have the hard knuckle on the hard beaver tail of a gun, I'm gonna get rub, I'm gonna get more bounce, I'm gonna get pain, I'm gonna get less control over the gun. Plus my thumb is impinged in terms of movement over here, to be able to do what it needs to do. So that is incredibly important to fundamentals. I guess it's not important to what the fundamentals are, but it's really important to being a good shooter and being able to shoot especially intuitively.

So that's one of the first things I look for. And that means that the more contoured and ergonomic this area of the gun is, that's why I think this mod two and requisite make fun of the grip zone. But this mod two evolution of the XD is really important. The MNP too, other than the texture, a lot of people complaining about the texture, I haven't shot it that much. I've felt it, I understand it's kind of gritty, but I also was the guy, I was like one of the four people that liked the RTF finish on the Glocks back in the day, that was also really sticky.

The new CZP-10, I've been seeing that, it's kind of stippled with the dots, with little spikes, kind of like the RTF was. But the XD, this mod two, only has high levels of friction on the front and on the back. Well, that's kind of where we want, we want good friction on the front and the back, and it's not incredibly abusive, kind of on the softer parts of the palm of the hand, when you come in here, or the inside of the hand, right? The base of the palm and up here by the fingers, that come around the front, right? That's definitely gonna get more contact, more friction, that's where we want it.

But the contours that come in here, that really helps get your hand on the gun. The contours on the MNP 2.0, help get on the gun. The MNP was more contoured than the Glock was originally, which is kind of blocky. So this kind of a gun is gonna fit more hands than the Glock will. This kind of a gun, the MMP, is gonna fit more kind of hands than the Glock will, so that's really important.

Dry firing. Dry firing... Dry fire itself really doesn't bring a whole bunch of value, if you have a sirt pistol, and I like to recommend people who use the sirt pistol, we were using one on the range today, to help break that habit of staging, right? You can set it up so there's a good, hard break, and then when you shoot make sure that you get through that break when you're pressing through without these fingers contracting, without, you know, that kind of a sympathetic contraction, without breaking the gun, moving it off of its axis, where you've aligned it. Just pushing through that break is really important.

So you can do that kind of a thing much better with a sirt pistol, with the two lasers, and you can just dry fire. One of the problems with dry fire is that you're not really getting any feedback, right? You're not getting recoil, you don't know where the bullet went, so you may be doing everything wrong, right? If I were to, again, take this gun and it's clear, nothing in it, right? Drive out and let's say I'm like all here crazy, right?

My grip's horrible, my grip's really low, my fingers are on the trigger though, and I can close my eye, look at the sites, and I pull the trigger. And while I'm pulling the trigger I don't see any movement whatsoever of the gun, right? Pulling the trigger and don't see any movement whatsoever with the gun. Well, when I'm doing that, I'm telling myself I'm doing something great, right? If I come in and I'm shooting and, again, really crappy grip, you know, really low, just big gap here, there's all kinds of craziness, my thumbs screwed up, my fingers are interlocked, all of this, right?

And I pull the trigger. Oh, it was perfect. Well, what am I really learning, right? I'm learning how to do this badly, because I don't get the feedback of recoil, and I don't get the feedback of the coach or an observer, and I'm sitting in my basement, in this case, I'm in my dad's basement in Michigan. Sitting in my dad's basement telling myself I'm good at something that I'm really not getting good at.

So you gotta be careful with dry fire. One of the things I really like dry environments for though, I'll give you this example, let me adjust the camera here a little bit. I think it'll get... Maybe not, I'm near the edge of the table. This is the part where, Shannon, if she were moderating, or Sam, would say, "Okay, so we've used up our hour," and I usually try to move on anyway.

So I've got this gun, again, always double, triple check it, right? No live ammo around here. And if I were gonna put this gun into my appendix carry position, now what I can do is I can imagine, oh, I just got startled over here, reach back, spread my feet, make sure my knees are wide so I'm not covering myself when the gun comes out of the holster, my gun's already in front of my body. And I can practice coming up here and being parallel over my legs when I move, so that I'm not coming up and covering myself. So I can, you know, of course go from concealment as well, cover it up, get the concealment garment out of the way, and get the gun up, turn, orient, extend, touch, press.

And then I can watch a video of that and see, well, did I cheat? Did I come up here and just kind of cover my knee? Did I point it directly at myself? Did I get this handout here in front of my gun? What was wrong with this presentation?

Well, if nothing's wrong with it, great, right? Now I'm getting good dry practice of presentation while seated, which isn't necessarily something that you can do very well on the live fire range. Scott Graham. No, Scott, we still don't know, not until it's ready yet. We're hearing all kinds of things, one of the new popular guns, I'm seeing pictures all over the internet of firing pins being broken, stuff like that.

So, you know, we've seen problems with guns that were released before they were ready, so we're not gonna do that. Let's see, grip. We talked about that. Kansas city. You know what?

Kansas city, I have not been in Kansas city for a while. In fact, we taped the original distance education for counter ambush in Kansas City, and that might have been the last time I was out there. So get with a host, Robert Novotny. We really don't solicit like, "Hey, can we come to your range?" It's usually people calling us. That way it sort of makes the conversation a lot easier, obviously it can't get much busier in any given year, 60 to 70 classes a year, I'm traveling about 300 days a year.

So it's all about who's asking us, and what kind of course do they wanna host, and are they likely to bring in a lot of students? Sometimes we purposely go to a new range, like the range I was at this week in Michigan, up in Rockford, hosted by Protection Tactics out of... They aren't in Grand Rapids, where are they? They're in Kent city, I think. And we went up there, Steve Washington, like I said, Us CCA training counselor.

We went up there and he requested to host a course, I've never trained with him before, I've trained in a lot of different areas, Gun Lakes, Skip Correale has had us there, Al Beyond, we've been down there. I was just in Saline with Ken Ross, Tri-County Sportsmen's League, I think they're called, we were down there. So sometimes I go to a new place like I was this week, just to kind of try it out, right? To help them build their training community, establish a relationship, and it was great. We had a full class and it was a very diverse class, from very, very beginners that had really low confidence levels going in, all the way up to some very experienced people, some of whom had what I would consider overconfidence about their ability, and then other people who had trained with me before and really kind of knew what they were getting into, and wanted a refresher.

So going to a new range, sometimes I end up out there like in a field with a dirt pile that was pushed up last week with a bulldozer and three guys, you know, wondering if I'm gonna just cancel the class and go back to the hotel. Sometimes I end up, like this week, on a great range with some great RSOs and great assistant instructor, and a great bunch of students, and usually it's that. And even if sometimes when it's the three guys with the dirt berm that was pushed up last week, two years later, we have a real range and we have a bunch of really good people there, and a bunch of developed instructors within a few years. So it's worth it to me to just ask, you know, "Hey, who wants to host the course? Show up." So as far as minimum range size, we actually did a PDN live recently on hosting a course, and what's involved.

So Scott, I'd encourage you to go back a couple of months ago, probably right around the beginning of the tour, and look at hosting or attending a course for the first time and sort of what some of that Q and A was all about. And then other than that, email training@icetraining.us, 'cause we're pretty flexible. As long as there's a safe backstop and a target stand for every shooter, that's all we really need, we'll figure the rest out. If there's a classroom all the better, if it's a covered area, all the better, the more room the better as far as that goes. So let me do one more question here.

And that question is gonna be from this page, as soon as I get there, 'cause I know there were a couple on this page. All right, you know what? This is good. "Is it better to learn to shoot with a gun that's hard shoot?" And that's the kind of question that comes up a lot. I understand the premise, right?

The premise is if I can shoot a double action revolver, then boy, I'll be really good with a Glock or a Springfield XDS or something. And really, while there is a certain logic to that from a shooter's perspective, somebody who really knows guns might say, yeah, if you can shoot that, well, boy, you'll be great with this one. But if you're someone new, if you're someone really buying your first gun, or someone who's just getting into defensive shooting as opposed to shooting in general, the idea that you're going to spend a bunch of time or honestly waste a bunch of time learning how to shoot a less efficient gun, or a less ergonomic gun, really doesn't make a lot of sense. So I'm not an advocate for people learning how to shoot all types of guns, I don't think people... You know, you're not lacking in your gunliness if you don't know how to shoot a revolver.

It's 2018, there's plenty of people that have never shot a revolver and never will shoot a revolver, and if they do, it's just for fun. Sometimes, you know, their grandfather came out to the range with their revolvers so they shot it. You know, I've got plenty of revolvers, I've got some revolvers in the tour truck, I like shooting revolvers, but I don't subscribe the idea that you should all know how to use a revolver in case ISIS shows up and drops a revolver after you choke a guy out, and you pick up his revolver, and then you take out another ISIS and you take his AK 47. I don't get it, like you're not battlefield pickup situations where you're needing to learn how to use an AK 47 and a revolver. If you have an AR and a XD, then learn how to shoot the XD really well, and learn how to your AR really well.

And, you know, for fun, if you wanna go shoot an AK, have at it. But you have no responsibility to learn how to shoot every type of gun out there. Now for instructors, it's different, right? For instructors, you do have to know how to shoot all those guns. If you're gonna go out on the range, and say, "Hey, bring your defensive firearm," and somebody shows up with a revolver, you can't point and laugh and just say, "Oh, that's silly." You know, "Here, use this," right?

They may, by the end of the day realize that the revolver is not the best choice for them, but you certainly have a responsibility to teach them how to use a single action, how to use a double action, single action, how to use the revolver. A lot of times people are kind of amazed kind of how far I let something go. This happened earlier this week, I had a student that showed up with a gun that just clearly was a horrible fit for them, the Beretta storm, the PX4, their thumb shape size, their hand size, it was just a horrible idea, you know, probably for almost anybody to have that double action, single action. I remember I had a class with the Portuguese Border Patrol, I think it was, I was issued them one time and it was a long week. But I know that I know that going in, right?

But just telling a guy who shows up to the class, you know, at 9:02 in the morning or 8:55 in the morning, like, "Hey, that's not gonna work. Use this other thing." That doesn't always work. You know, if the person's invested in the gun and I don't know them, I don't know what their budget issues might be, I don't know all that stuff. So it's like, hey, you know what? Let's see, maybe he'll surprise me, maybe he's awesome at it.

Maybe he's the best Beretta, Px4 shooter ever, right? Cool. Let's see how it works out. Well, it worked out kind of as predicted, within half an hour or so he was just really fighting it and having issues, and the consistency with the de-cocking and all that. It's like you're kind of throwing away the first shot, like a lot of guys wanna do.

And it's like, you know what? Try this maybe after about an hour. Well, that hour of time he spent with the wrong gun made him realize, and I think it was this same four inch, made him realize how much a difference it makes. And through the day we had him shoot a whole bunch of different types of guns so that he could get some experience with them. But, you know, he kind of kept coming back to the XD, that's our default loaner gun this year.

Obviously Springfield's a sponsor of the tour, and I know these guns fit a lot of people's hands really well. And he realized that regardless of what he ends up with, that large kind of something that works much better for a large hand double action gun, isn't it. Today I had a student, he came up to me and said, "Well, I had this one type of gun, a CZ, I think, And you said, that's not good for me but that other gun you let me shoot, that was great. Should I keep that gun because someday I'll be ready for it?" And it's like, you're missing the point. It's not that someday you'll be ready for it, like, ready for what?

Ready to make your life more complicated, right? It's kinda like driving a manual transmission in 2018, nobody's driving a manual transmission in 2018 because it's better. Nobody's driving a manual transmission in 2018 because it's a faster shift, that's for sure, right? Like if you want high performance driving you're not driving a manual transmission. It's more fun, I get it.

There's a rite of passage to learning how to drive a manual transmission well, there's some ego investment in that, it's a versatile skill. If you're gonna spend a lot of time in a third world country and you might wanna jump into a vehicle and use it, or, you know, even just a couple of few years ago, renting a car in Europe, you'd better know how to drive a manual transmission. But as far as everyday life, it's a hobbyist choice, right? As far as the high-performance car goes, certainly as far as trucks go, right? It is what it is, but it's not better, right?

So knowing how to do it and being ready to do it as if I'll graduate to shooting in 1911 someday, it's just crazy talk. Somebody asked a good question. I'm gonna make this the last question. Where was it? Somebody was asking about this; Do I worry about people across me?

Nope. So that sounds weird, Tom. But no, I'm not worried about other people. In the training environment, my number one priority is I can't cover anybody else, right? I don't wanna over other people in that training environment.

So when we train these things, we have to sort of set the chairs up, and set the angles up so that people don't cover one another. But as far as in the fight mode, right? Again, I'll kind of set that there, appendix style. In the fight moment, let's say I knew someone was sitting right there, but as I recognize the threat and they recognize the threat, and then they move somewhere in one way or the other. And if I were doing something to try to avoid them, and get to the threat, but then they moved, what it comes down to is this; My trigger finger stays off the trigger until I'm in a position to shoot.

I'm not gonna drive out to shoot until I have a clear shot. If someone interferes with that clear shot I'm gonna take my finger off the trigger and come back to the ready position and continue to maneuver. But I can't be accountable for all the places that someone might move to, might popup from behind a counter when I'm assessing the environment, right? And they pop up from behind that counter over there. Well, my finger's off the trigger, I'm not in a shooting position, I'm not searching out here, right?

I'm searching and assessing here, I'm moving the gun close to my body, and might I cover someone? Yes. Is that okay in the sense of, big boy rules? No. Is it bravado, ego?

No. It's that I don't know... I'm focused on the threat, I'm not tracking everybody else's movement. You know, as far as the whole, like, point the gun up in the air and move it over here kind of thing, you know, I'm still... Not only am I potentially covering somebody on the way to that, if someone is sitting across from me and I go to this side of my head, I've still covered them on the way up, right?

I see it in cars. What about in a car, if you have to do that? Okay. Well, what about the person right outside the windshield that's standing on the street corner, or the person in the traffic, in the car in front of you? You still covered them, right?

Now as I move and I come back down, now I'm doing something different. What I need to do is stop that threat, right? So I'm focused on the threat, I'm not worried about exactly where everybody around me is, the gun comes up, I don't cover myself. If something's gonna happen I don't want it to happen to me, if I'm gonna protect that person, if my worry is I'm trying to protect that person and I take myself out of the fight, I'm not helping them, right? So I don't cover myself 'cause I know where my body parts are, and then I think the threat out, and that's what's gonna save that person, right?

Not some convoluted, pretend, I'm gonna avoid covering anyone ever in the real world. So we know where we are, we understand trigger finger discipline, we know not to extend the gun until we're ready to shoot. And that's what we count on keeping us from having some kind of a negligent tragedy. In the training environment we don't just line up a bunch of chairs and say, screw it, you're getting covered. The laser rule in the training environment is way sacred.

In the real world, people are gonna pop up and move and all kinds of things are happening, and we rely on keeping the gun in close to our body, and not extending it out until we're ready to shoot, to keep us from having a situation where we cover someone with our finger on the trigger. So Tom, glad to answer that. Ian, good. Marketing, yeah, there's a lot of... Ian says, "It's stupid how much marketing to first-time shooters, particularly women, is for revolvers." Yes, Ian.

We agree. So that's it, that's all I got for you guys tonight. I talked a lot about the books, I talked a lot about a few topics on defensive shooting, skill development, and tried to answer some questions. I appreciate the people that tuned in live. It's kind of cool getting to watch the live people coming up and see what's going on.

Normally, I have a moderator sort of between me and the audience, so I'm sure we'll be back to that next week. With the tour schedule and everybody's crazy schedule, it's kind of do or die this month. We were gonna miss out on a PDN live if I didn't do it this way. So I hope that everybody liked it. You can let us know, let us know in the comments afterwards if you absolutely hate it when I do it myself, or if you loved it and maybe you wanna do more of these.

Some of our PDN gold members, we have a private group for our PDN gold members and we've been talking about doing some more direct Q and A's like this, a little more casual for that group. But check out Personal Defense Network, personaldefensenetwork.com, for hundreds of free videos and articles. Go to pdntrainingtour.com to learn more about the classes that are being offered, as well as see the whole team, right? Mike Sikh Lander, Caleb Causey, we've got Derek Pool, we've got Barrack Hendrick, who else is out there? Grant Cunningham is doing classes, Omari Grishard and Erin Israel, I think, just did a team up class together.

Cecil Birch, doing the unarmed combatives, the Brazilian jujitsu stuff, really good, fundamental grappling and striking stuff that he does. William April's with us this year doing a lot of the behavioral, the mindset stuff, letting people understand, kind of, when to get ready to flip that switch. We had a great live discussion with him around the beginning of the tour, I think it was in February. So just learn what these guys are doing, learn who's on the tour, learn what they're teaching. Don Edward's another one, Greenline Tactical he's with us, Ken Scott from Provectus Group, he just joined the SWAT magazine.

For those of you who have checked out swatmag.com over the last six months, you know that they're now a sister site with PDN, and Ken Scott just joined. And we just got a couple of his video tips out. He's one of our tour instructors this year. So thanks a lot, I appreciate it. Send me out the...

Tom, thank you. I appreciate it. Send me out to your questions, your thoughts, as always I try to follow up in the comments underneath the lives, as well as all of the stuff that goes on in Personal Defense Network, or any of the Facebook pages. My Rob Pincus pro page has all the training info as well, and Instagram @PincusRob, or @PDNetwork. Thanks.