by Marty Hayes, J.D.
I was having breakfast this morning with Belle McCormack, the owner and director of The Firearms Academy of Seattle which is the training company I used to own, before the Network took over my life. I hired her to run the academy about five years ago, when I could not do justice to both the academy and the Network at the same time, and then sold it to her about three years ago.
Belle had just completed an Advanced Tactical Handgun course, a course of instruction I designed over two decades ago to allow students the opportunity to experience the type of training that police officers receive in the standard state-run police academy, which consists of not only handgun skills range training, but also training in decision making, hostile threat mitigation, weak-handed training, low light training and a number of other experiential training exercises. You see, it was and still is my belief, the armed citizen should have the opportunity to seek out the very same type of training that law enforcement officers receive before going out into society and facing the criminal element.
The reason for this belief is that the armed citizen faces the very same criminal element that law enforcement faces, except the armed citizen typically has no body armor and no back-up officers either on-scene or on their way. The only real difference is the police are called to interact with the criminal element or paid to go out hunting for them, and hence police are more likely to have to use deadly force than the typical armed citizen. Still, make no mistake, the type of criminals and the threat is the same.
Anyway, back to my breakfast conversation with Belle – she was relating the different things that happened over the weekend, and it reminded me that I really should write about the topic in our members’ journal. It is my intention that our members should take a solid assessment of their training experiences and the skill level they possess. Have you been trained to shoot at moving targets or in the dark? Can you operate your carry gun weak-handed, including reloading it and clearing malfunctions with only your weak hand? Do you train to face multiple threats, and do you practice long distance shooting?
In addition to the above, the other type of training I am convinced that the armed citizen should experience is a good dose of “force-on-force” training, what we called back in the day “mock scenes.” In police training, mock scenes typically involved traffic stops (including felony stops), building searches, and handling domestic violence situations – all part of a police officer’s normal work. A good full day of training in the FAS Advanced Tactical Handgun course includes these types of scenarios, including bank robbery scenarios, convenience store scenarios, home defense scenarios and more.
You see, the philosophy behind putting the student in these simulated encounters is that by giving them realistic experiences in training, if they find themselves caught up in a similar situation for real, it will not be the first time they have faced such a problem. I know that if it were not for the training I received in my police training, I would not have been nearly as confident as I was when I had to make my first felony arrest. All I had to do was to do it how I had been trained, and all worked out fine.
To my knowledge the only other training schools that I can recommend to expose you to this type of training is Gunsite Academy in Arizona or KR Training in Texas. I am not as familiar with Network Advisory Board member Karl Rehn’s KR Training curriculum as I would like to be, but I have been a student in at least one Gunsite class yearly for the past decade.
As of this writing, we have about 22,000 members of the Network, and while we do what I think is a very good job teaching and educating members about the legal aspects of use of force in self defense, what we cannot do in our current structure is teach the hands-on aspects of deadly force training. I am open to suggestions on how to expand our training and education into these areas. Just to clarify, I am not talking about starting a shooting school or certifying instructors. To do so would take our attention away from the work the Network currently does. Is there, instead, some way to replicate the hands-on force on force training by using current, modern technology on a wide scale basis? If anyone has any ideas, please reach out to me.