Drills

This post is really for those of you who are not yet shooters or are relatively new.

If you have not shot a gun before then you may not be aware that guns can "malfunction". I will leave all the technically aspects of this to the experts, but basically, when you pull the trigger and there is no bang, you have a problem.

If you are in a bad situation and it calls for you to draw your gun and shoot, you want it to go bang and more likely, you will want it to go bang, bang, bang. If for some reason, your gun doesn't do that, then it is imperative that you know how to deal with that problem, quickly.

There are several reason why the gun might not go bang and there are several ways to deal with the problem.  I will not get into all of those ways because I don't want to bog you down with to much information.  For the purpose of simplicity, I will just say, dealing with malfunctions is an important part of your training.

If you missed my post yesterday, I talked about having some bad dreams and all of them focused on my gun not working and me not being able to fix it.  Lots of people posted that these kinds of dreams are very normal and all have had them.. Huge relief.  Many of the suggestions to dealing with said dreams was to a accept them as nothing more than the mind doing its thing and to practice.

I receieved lots of very helpful comments, but I thought I would share part of one from Weer'd...

"I used to have the crazy malfunction dreams, and I still have REALLY weird ones, like one when my wife and I were in a hotel room and some creep tries to force their way in. I grab the travel box I had taken the gun in (obviously we must have flown or driven through an unfriendly state) and open it up and there is my 1911...perfectly field stripped and laid out.

So now I'm putting a 1911 together as fast as I can while the door is breaking down.

Just weird.

Still the most common nightmares everything works as I practice, my draw is smooth, I keep the gun in a position where it can't be grabbed and I shoot and hit my target....and nothing changes, the attacker keeps coming, and eventually my gun breaks or falls apart, or jams just because my mind is out of bad ideas.

I suspect the reason for this is I've never actually SHOT a person. I know what its like to draw and fire, and I know how to fix a gun that's stopped working...but I have no idea (in practice) how to stop an attacker because I've never had to do it.

I know my biology, I know my ballistics, and I've read a ton of books about such things...but I've never seen it happen, and so my mind has nothing to draw on".


 I think that makes perfect sense.  Our minds do in fact draw from what we tell it or what it has experienced.  I actually, know this to be true from my education in Deaf studies and linguistics.  That is why practicing anything you want to do well, is so important.  You have to develop those neural pathways.

Anyway you slice it, I needed to get to the range. So, yesterday my husband and I met John at the range to work on malfunction drills.

The first drill was a target placed at a relatively close spot to me, maybe 5, maybe 7 yards. John, placed some live ammo mixed with dummy rounds then I shot the magazine and dealt with the issues that came up.

A dummy round is a "fake" bullet. It isn't supposed to go bang. They are also called snap caps. There might be other names, but those are the two I am familiar with. Mine are red. You can read more about them here

So, let's say I pull the trigger and the gun makes a click sound, but nothing else happens. Then I have a problem. What I practiced was tapping the bottom of the magazine, racking the slide and then pulling the trigger. It is actual called...tap, rack, bang. I have practiced this before, but it has been a while. The other part of the drill was to move while tap, rack, bang was taking place. If your gun is not working, you don't want to stand there like a sitting duck while trying to fix the problem. It is important to move and to make yourself a difficult target. Now, when I say I moved, understand at the indoor range there isn't much room to actually move.

Again, if you have never shot at an indoor range let me explain that basically you are put in a little cubicle.

I had just enough room to take 2 steps to the left or to the right, but it got my mind thinking about moving and any practice is good. Well, as long as what you are practicing is based on good solid training.

I practiced dropping the magazine and reloading and John showed me how to tap, rack, bang with one hand. The range we were at would not actually allow us to practice this, but I got the idea and I can certainly practice that at home during my dry fire practice time.  For more on dry fire practice see the Cornered Cat's article on the subject.

I did pretty darn good if I do say so myself. What I found interesting is that when the target was a man, I did much better then when I was shooting at little circles. When I was shooting a "person", I hit every shot in center mass with a fist sized group, but when I was shooting at little circles, I was still hitting the target, but not exactly where I was aiming. Not sure why.

All in all it was a very good day at the range and I felt much better about being able to handle a malfunction. I will, of course, keep practicing, but I am feeling good and last night very peacefully.