Larry Vickers Recreates Collateral Shooting Techniques

As a profession, law enforcement sometimes fails to teach practical shooting drills in favor of square range target practice.  Yes, I know, Collateral was a just movie.  But the essence of the action here is a Controlled Pair from the holster on suspect one, followed by a Failure Drill, a.k.a. the Mozambique Drill, to suspect two.  If you have not depressed a trigger on either of these techniques thus far in 2015, you are not keeping your shooting skills honed.

I was with a small group of sergeants who had rifle qualifications a few weeks ago.  Our instructor for the evolution is a reserve Tier One soldier with combat tours overseas.  He is also one of our administrative supervisors.  I enjoy his sessions because he is serious about providing excellent training that can save your life.  He has seen the elephant.

In addition to the actual AR-15 qual, we practiced Controlled Pairs and Failure Drills with our rifles and in transitions with our handguns.  We made many trips “on-the-hop” from the line back to the ammo table to re-up our mags.  A little stress can be introduced by keeping the tempo brisk while demanding accuracy and safe weapons handling.  It is a good thing.

In checking the blue B-21-E targets of my peers, I was pleased that we were all shooting well.  While some of us had much experience, a few had just a little, but by hammering away at the basics, the instructor made it a worthwhile day at the range for all.

At the conclusion of the training, we had a debriefing and then the instructor had us load up our magazines with fresh duty ammunition and put in new batteries for our weapon-mounted lights.

While I was not a big fan of the movie and I am so-so on LAV’s delivery, I do feel that he gave a good walk-through of the scene that has some illustrative value.  I have griped that, by and large, police agencies fail to train their officers as “gunfighters,” but the time to acquire these technical skills is not during a critical incident out on the street.

Randall

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