Volume of Fire Drills

Here's another important video from the Personal Defense Network. I could stand here all day and fire shots slowly but accurately at that target and it's never going to go down. I've set it up that way on purpose, and maybe that's the point of my day's training is I want to do slow, precise fire. Maybe the target, because of the distance, the type of target, the size of the target, the conditions under which I'm shooting, a new firearm, a new holster configuration that I'm drawing from, concealment, weather, fatigue, whatever the reason is, maybe that's what I'm working on today, is precision fire. I want the steel target to stay up. But what I've also done to this is set it up so that eventually, it will go down with this firearm. If I fire more rapid shots and knock that target back, it's going to go down just like a threat that was trying to hurt me that required multiple shots. Now, I don't know exactly how many shots it's going to take. It might take two It might take three. It might take five. With this nine millimeter firearm, it may take more shots than it would with a 45 caliber, 40 caliber or a 10 millimeter auto. But that's an important part of deciding what type of firearm to carry. Any pistol is a compromise, as we know, and you also compromise with capacity, recoil management, things like this that also result in the size of the gun, or the energy going down range. A drill like the Volume of Fire Drill can help us to experiment with different firearms, see how fast we can keep rounds on target. Being combat accurate, but also getting hits as fast as we can. If it takes me three seconds to knock down a threat instead of four or five, or better yet, one and a half or two seconds instead of five or six, I'm safer, faster. And so is everyone else around me. The Volume of Fire Drill is designed to teach you to keep combat accurate strings of fire consistently until the threat stops. If you're used to shooting at paper, you might get into a pattern of shooting two shots now, three shots another time, two shots in one place, one shot in another. All of those patterns presume that the bullets are going to do what you expect. And that's a dangerous presumption. What you want to make sure you're doing is shooting consistently as fast as you can in a combat accurate way until the threat goes down, using your balance of speed and precision principles. That may mean sighted fire. It may mean unsighted. It may be two hands, one hand, moving, not moving, grabbing your daughter, holding your daughter behind you, needing two hands to shoot, focusing on the front side, all of those different variables come into play as usual with any shooting, when we're trying to balance speed and precision and be combat accurate. What's important here is to understand that that Volume of Fire concept means continuing your string of fire until the threat has gone down. Let's take a look. What happens if I shoot faster, but continue to be combat accurate. By maintaining a consistent string of fire and recognizing when the threat has stopped, I'm much better off than I was when I was doing slow, precise fire. Imagine someone with body armor or someone who's getting hit, but is still determined to hurt you. And those hits are not stopping him in a physically disabling way. He's going to continue to carry on until an overwhelming amount of force stops him from being a threat. The faster you accumulate that amount of force into his body, that amount of damage into that threat, the better off you are. The Volume of Fire Drill will help you to figure out how to recognize when your threat is stopped, and how to shoot consistently and combat accurately as fast as you can, under a variety of different circumstances. Check out more videos just like this one at the Personal Defense Network.