Massad Ayoob - Gun Digests Learning Combat Shooting Concealed Carry Handgun Training eShort

Combat shooting: Learning how to shoot under pressure when your skill with a gun may be the only thing that stands between you and Death. Its a serious topic.

The fact is, its a life study. It encompasses kinesiology and physiology. It certainly encompasses psychology too. It encompasses knowing what youre fighting for. It encompasses preparedness to die for something more important than oneself. And it also requires a broad set of skills that ranges from threat recognition to unarmed combat ability, to skill with tools that are capable of overpowering forcible assault but unlikely to cause death, all the way up to Lethal Force: a degree of force, as defined by law, that is likely to cause death or great bodily harm, i.e., crippling injury.

One of the great myths of the discipline we call combat shooting is that the gunfight will begin with the first draw and end with the last shot. If you study it in depth, long before youve spent a lifetime in the pursuit of that knowledge youll realize that the gunfight begins long before the participants face each other, and its terrible and powerful echoes may not finally go silent until you are on your deathbed.

But you will be ALIVE in those last moments on your deathbed. You will have filled your allotted years. You will be surrounded by those you love, and those who love you. You will have spent as much time on this earth as you can, doing good things for good people.

WEARING PROTECTIVE GEAR and using Simunitions guns, a practitioner performs a building search in the famous Funhouse at Gunsite Training Center.

And that is reason enough to study this discipline, a discipline that can keep you alive when, in an instant, some vicious predator chooses you at random as his choice for the victim he will murder tonight.

If you are attacked by someone who wants to kill you, you will be glad that you were skilled in these disciplines, and had developed the mental and emotional wherewithal to employ those skills when you were attacked. These skills and this knowledge will have literally saved your life. You will read in these pages about many good people cops, military personnel, ordinary law-abiding armed citizens who survived to live out their lives because they were able to beat their homicidal attackers at their own game and stay upright when the other guy went down for the permanent count.

If you are never attacked by someone who wants to kill you, rape you, or otherwise horribly hurt you, and you die old and fat and happy without ever having had to draw your gun, thats a wonderfully positive outcome. Ill be happy for you. Everyone who knows and loves you will be happy for you.

If you are like me, you will wind up in the middle. It is the space where most police officers, and most armed citizens who do need to resort to their firearms, end up. Your ability to get the gun out in time to ward off the attack will, in the statistics of the matter, probably shortstop the action right there. It has always been so for this writerbut let me be the first to tell you, I have been one of the lucky ones.

Ive never been in a gunfight, which I would define as two or more people shooting at each other. (Get a whole bunch of people shooting at each other, and you have a firefight; Ive had the good fortune to never have been in one of those, either.) What I have experienced is multiple armed encounters, I and someone else armed or reasonably perceived to be armed facing each other across the weapons. In every one of those, the other person ceased hostilities and either dropped their weapon and surrendered, or turned and fled.

In some of those cases I was an armed citizen. In some of those cases I was a law enforcement officer acting in the performance of my duties. In the end, it didnt really matter.

SIMULATED GUNFIGHTING is among the most useful training, done here force on force with Simunitions guns that shoot painful paintball-like pellets.

There was the time when two muggers jumped me in a city, and one pulled a knife. I pulled a gun. They both fled. Problem solved.

There was the time when I was a police officer making a traffic stop on the proverbial dark and rainy night. The other guy pulled a rifle. I pulled a Colt .45 automatic. His advantage was that he got to start first. Mine was that I had apparently spent a helluva lot more time preparing for this moment than he had. Our movement paths crossed each other: he started first, but was slower and clumsier. I started second, but I was faster and surer. I knew in that terrible slow-motion instant that his rifle could shoot through my pistol-rated body armor it turned out to be a .30-30 Savage Model 340 rifle that he was trying to bolt a round into the chamber of as he pulled it out of the car but I had already determined in that wordless thought that I was going to put him on the ground and take him with me. The safety was off on my Colt and I was starting to apply trigger pressure when he dropped the rifle and raised his hands, and it was over. Im not sure if he ever understood how close he came to dying that nightbut I damn sure know how close I came to it. We were absolutely on the razors edge of life and death on that dark and rain-swept night.

Ive never had to shoot anybody, and Im damn glad to be able to say that. Its more than my father and my grandfather could say. They survived murder attempts because they had guns with which they could shoot back. Between the two of them, they left three men in the ground and went on to live long and good lives. My grandfather recovered from the pistol-whipping he received from the armed robber he had to shoot, and died in his 90s. He passed the fight-back-and-survive ethos on to my dad. My father had to shoot two men in self-defense when he was about the age I was when I was that young cop on the roadside that much-later night, pitting a .45 caliber pistol against a .30-30 rifle. In my fathers shooting, one assailant put a revolver to his head and pulled the trigger. My father turned away as he felt the cold, hard muzzle, and when the shot went off the bullet missed his head but the muzzle blast destroyed his left eardrum and left him totally deaf in that ear for life. He returned fire and dropped his would-be murderer and his accomplice. The assailant who pulled the trigger died that night. His accomplice lasted a year or so.

STRONG HAND ONLY shooting is often the fallback in real-world self-defense. You want it deeply ingrained.

My father passed that family history on to me, with suitable warnings about how to deal with life.

At the age of twelve, in the year 1960, I began working in the family jewelry store owned by my father. There were guns in there, and, of course, at home. My how to shoot education had begun at the age of four with a .22 rifle. My handgun work began at the age of nine. By twelve, I was working part time in a high-risk-of-armed-robbery retail enterprise carrying a cocked and locked Colt .45 auto behind my right hip. My fathers customers included judges, lawyers, and the chief of police. They were kind enough to sit down and talk with an inquisitive youngster whose job description included the possibility of shooting grown-ups to death. I learned a helluva lot from them.