Pistol Performance Revisited
All who partake in firearms training face limitations, the biggest two being money and time. I can think of no higher compliment for an instructor than to train with them repeatedly. There are some instructors that I have trained with several times and felt it time well spent every time. However, taking the same course more than once speaks highly of the material and the instructor. This also allows for some unique learning opportunities, as well as getting the chance to pick up things that might have been missed earlier.
With that in mind, I attended Gabe White’s Pistol Shooting Solutions for the third time. Gabe states upfront that this class is designed for the enthusiast and not for the novice shooter. He is well known for his standards and a substantial portion of the class is designed to work on performance and test the students on those standards. Gabe states that he arrived at his standards by looking at the shooting performance of the world’s best shooters. He then worked to match the champions performance using the carry gear that he wore everyday instead of race gear.
A large focus in defensive firearms training is focused on commonly encountered problems, such as “3 rounds from 3 yards in 3 seconds.” This makes sense for defensive training to focus most on common skills to deal with problems with the highest likelihood of being encountered. However, since this class is designed for the enthusiast shooter it can go more in depth than a basic class. This allows the shooters to think about more demanding, if less likely, problems that we can be encountered.
Something not appreciated or understood by many is the skill gap between what we can do on the range and what we can do under stress. A great many people think that their performance standing on a flat range is what they can expect to produce on demand. This is something I have seen many times over the years in competition and especially in force on force. If these types of stress can cause noticeable decrease in performance, the stress of a deadly force encounter most certainly will. The higher we drive our personal skill, the more skill we have on hand when needed, even with real world stress. This is something that the students got to experience first-hand though some of the head to head competitions throughout the class.
Gabe gives another reason to drive individual skills to as high a level as we can. There are certain performance windows that the human body is capable of, such as how quickly a person can shoot or present a gun without any regard for shot placement or collateral damage. This is what can be expected from our most likely assailants. What we are trying to accomplish by driving our skills ever higher is to be able to again reach this performance level only with the discipline and accountability for our shot placement that we as the good guys expected to hold ourselves to.
The blocks of instruction focusing on the performances standard skills are well laid out with time for practice and individual coaching from Gabe. Then each skill is run for score. This process is the same for all four of the drills that are run for score. This represents the pure performance aspects of the class. Also, as Gabe explains, while these four are classic competitive tests such as the Bill Drill, they can also be legitimate tactical solutions to defensive problems.
Interspersed between the testing blocks are blocks focusing more on contextual skills. These skills, such as shooting on the move and use of cover, are standard fare for a shooting class. However, each one had several variations, some of which may not have been encountered before. Something we can lose sight of is this, shooting on the move is still just shooting, we just incur more movement that must be dealt with. The speed that we move is going to be based on whether the priority is the movement or the shooting, and the circumstances are what the shooter will have to use to determine that priority.
Use of cover was covered in depth as well. I feel that Gabe offers the most comprehensive and thought-provoking instruction about the proper use of cover that I have ever encountered. I have been in law enforcement for over two decades and I think that this part of the class did a better job of condensing as many of the different aspects of use of cover than anything I have seen. While there is no way to cover all the variability that may be encountered, Gabe brings in many aspects that are often neglected.
I started out talking about some of the benefits of having taken a class more than once. One of the biggest ones is the chance to absorb lessons that were missed the first time around. Humans can only retain so much information at one time and this class is so packed full of information that it is virtually impossible to remember it all. Repeated exposures to the material allow opportunities to pick up things that were missed or forgotten the first time. With a class with a such clearly defined standards, you can also measure personal performance with compete objectivity. My personal performance is not where I want it to be, but I continue to see improvements and I learn what things I need to practice for the results I want to see.
Another benefit is the chance to watch the class evolve. Gabe already had a very well-polished presentation when I attended his class the first time. None the less, his instruction has become even better, and the class has changed in little ways that make the experience better and smoother for the student. Gabe is an excellent and passionate instructor who truly wants to see his students do well and I look forward to training with him again.
Chris Norville