With all the insanity that has been going on especially in the last week and the exponentially growing amount of gun owners, I've been feeling like I really should be doing more. After the first night of riots I decided I wanted to try and give people a road map to become better shooters based on my experiences. I kept this as brief as possible so much is left out, but this information alone would have saved me years of development if I had it the first day I picked up a gun and I simply don't see these things talked about enough. Feel free to ask questions.

So you bought a gun, now what?

You've decided to take ultimate responsibility for the safety of yourself and those around you. That is fantastic. Firearms are the most effective force multiplier available to the general population and most people are unaware of just formidable a trained firearm user can be. Unfortunately, people also tend to grossly over estimate their shooting ability. I believe that if you're going to own a gun you owe it to yourself and others to be well trained in it's use. Hands on instruction from a keen and knowledgeable observer can be incredibly valuable in reducing the learning curve. Since that isn't always an option for people, it is my intention to help to provide resources and guidance for how anyone can improve their shooting skills in their own home. The first thing you must do is re-familiarize yourself with the 4 rules of gun safety. The gun is always loaded. Never point the gun at something you are not willing to destroy. Always be sure of your target and what is behind it. Keep your finger off the trigger when you aren't shooting. If you follow ALL of these rules like a religion your chances of accidentally adding a hole to someone or something go down to effectively zero. Take it seriously as your life depends on it.

Who am I? I've been a USPSA grandmaster in multiple divisions for 15 years and over the course of 20 years I have worked with thousands of people from all walks of life to improve their shooting. I have no combat experience and will make no attempt at teaching tactics. What I know how to do is teach people to accurately and quickly manipulate a firearm. I teach the handgun primarily, which is the most pitiful of all firearms you would ever want to use in a fight. The reason I do this is the handgun is also the hardest firearm discipline to learn and master. A good shotgun or rifle shooter is not necessarily a good pistol shooter, but a good pistol shooter is very likely to be pretty good with a rifle or shotgun even with very little training. The pistol is also the platform most likely to be used in self defense by everyday people.

This is a surprisingly deep subject, so today I just want to do a short overview on what I think are the two most critical things to improving your shooting ability. Those two things are dryfire and shot calling. First, I would contend that dryfire is far and away the most important thing to do for development of skill. It allows unlimited repetition and refinement of technique for free. If you ask the 100 best shooters on the planet, a high majority of them would name dryfire as something that was instrumental to their development. The alternative of firing an obscene amount of rounds is of course an option for some, but not for most.

So what is dryfire? As you can probably guess, it is the execution of fundamental shooting techniques with no ammunition (not just none in the gun, none in the room. Don't set yourself up to do something stupid). Common drill components are draws, reloads, splits (repeat shots on the same target), transitions (moving from target to target), movement, and any imaginable combination of those and more. Usually you use the same rig (holster, belt, pouches) that you are going to be using whether that is a competition belt or your carry gear. Most drills are began condition 1 (empty of course) and executed by dropping the hammer on the first shot and manipulating the dead trigger for the rest of the drill. The goal is to call every shot of each drill under decreasing time constraints ideally by utilizing a par time feature on a shot timer like these. You want to execute these drills with the same body position as you would if you were shooting live ammunition, so the amount of dryfire you can do in a day will likely be limited by your ability to squeeze and maintain an effective grip/stance, which itself is a gigantic topic deserving of it's own post. As little as 15 minutes of good solid work everyday will make the overwhelming majority of people a gun slinger compared to the average gun owner in as little as a few months.

How much live fire should you do? There's really no right answer here. Doing many high volume practice sessions tends to get prohibitively expensive for most people pretty quickly. In my opinion, until you have fairly well developed fundamentals one solid live fire session per week or per two weeks is great to give you a feel for recoil and have a chance to execute what you've been working on throughout the week in dryfire. If live fire is particularly difficult to get in, don't let it deter you. I know many extremely skilled shooters who haven't shot a round in practice for extended periods even up to a year or more who focus on dry fire and are still quite sharp. In most cases my opinion is that a novice shooter should be 95% dryfire 5% livefire and the extremely refined shooter should try to do as much live fire as possible. Dryfire is the sharpening of the knife and extended live fire is the 5000 grit sandpaper finish. The best competition shooters are accustomed to operating in a world where without exaggeration, wasted hundredths of a second are not only noticeable but are seemingly eternal pauses to the shooter as they happen. Skilled shooters tend to get more from live fire than novice shooters as they are more aware of what is going on and getting action with recoil is critical for timing and being as sharp as possible with shot calling. Most novice shooters simply will gain more from regimented dryfire in a controlled environment than they will throwing a couple hundred rounds downrange especially if it is done haphazardly.

We can get into what a structured dry fire training session should look like, but that is getting deeper in the weeds that this post is meant for. Until then, I can highly recommend the books from Steve Anderson at andersonshooting.com and the books from Ben Stoeger at BenStoeger.com. Both men have compiled significant resources for the guidance of dry fire training and I suggest you read/use them all. I am in no way affiliated with them beyond having shot with them many times in the past.

So, now we get into calling the shot. If you once again ask the 100 best shooters on the planet what the most important skill is in shooting a pistol, it's very likely shot calling would carry the unanimous vote. Shot calling is the ability to see precisely where the sites were pointed the instant they lift in recoil. If you are able to do this correctly, you know precisely where the bullet will impact the instant it leaves the barrel before it reaches the target. Note this is has nothing to do with accuracy, that is a separate issue entirely. In the world of shooting the ability to call your shots consistently and accurately is simply equivalent to a superpower. It removes all hesitation from your shooting and replaces it with certainty. A hallmark of an immature shooter is when a person for example fires a round at a piece of steel, begins moving his gun off the target, misses the steel (usually noticed by the lack of the audible ding), and has to move his gun back to the target to re-engage. If the shooter in that example had called his missed shot, he would have been able to instantly fire an aimed makeup shot as a split rather than wasting all sorts of movement and time. Calling the shot is equal to action, listening for the ding is equal to reaction. Action always beat reaction. This has clear potential crossover to the real world where you don't have the benefit of a reactive target to let you know where your rounds hit. This skill can be developed to the level where shooters have been known to score their targets real time during long drawn out 32 round stages. I cannot overstate how critical this is. The amount of visual information you can process is integral to your ability to shoot with speed and precision. Nothing will supercharge your development more than being able to reliably call your shots.

Rule number one for shot calling: you cannot blink when the gun goes off. When you are aiming and you have the front and rear sites aligned you are looking for the precise point on the target that the front site lifts from in recoil. The reason you are looking at this location is because the gun doesn't actually begin to lift during recoil until the bullet leaves the barrel so this is the earliest point in time you can know where the bullet you just fired is going to impact. Here's a video of former AMU instructor and World IPSC Champ Travis Tomasie showing a solid live fire drill with a great visual explanation of what shot calling is. In dryfire the training methodology is exactly the same but it requires more vigilance as you don't have the harsh reality of the targets as a check to confirm the accuracy of your shot calling. When dryfiring you will tend to drop the hammer on the first shot and your goal is to know precisely where the sites were when the hammer hits the firing pin. For subsequent shots in dryfire drills you are still trying to get a snapshot of your site picture as your manipulate the dead trigger for the remainder of the drill. Apply enough pressure to the dead trigger that it would have broken a shot if it were cocked and note what the sites do at that instant. I want to stress that shot calling tends to be an extremely difficult skill to develop and must constantly be refined but it is well worth the effort.

This eventually extends into more advanced shot calling which can be done to a limited extent without even looking at the sites at all if the shooter has a well enough developed index and natural point of aim. Shooting closer targets from half extension and calling your shots reliably by aiming over the slide is also a valuable skill to eventually develop, but those are concepts I will go into further detail on another day. Meanwhile, training your ability to see what the sites are doing all throughout recoil will take you very far in the development of your ability.

I haven't decided what part 2 will entail yet, but the options I'm currently considering are grip, stance, technical description of the execution of common skills, or the benefits of competition. Feel free to chime in and talk about what you'd like to see discussed next Sunday.