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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