An Interview with Michael Bane
Interview by Gila Hayes
What are you going to do to improve your firearms skills this summer? Perishable skills require practice, challenges, and evaluation to maintain or improve. Marksmanship and safe gun handling are no exception, and to our great good fortune, there are a variety of ways to improve, including formal training, individual practice – both live fire and dryfire, and enjoying shooting sports. Competitive shooting in particular builds interest and motivation to fulfill our responsibility to remain skilled and safe.
I enjoyed an interesting conversation about competitive shooting with journalist, firearms expert, and television producer Michael Bane who has shot competitively since the late 1970s. A longer, chattier video version of our conversation is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jQNSIlPKVI if you prefer video.
eJournal: Welcome back to the Network studio, Michael, and thank you for another contribution to our monthly member education journal. A few weeks ago, your podcast (https://www.michaelbane.tv/category/podcast/) discussed competitive shooting. I realized that not only are your opinions informed by decades of participation in a wide variety of matches, but you are one of my generation that still regularly shows up at matches. What got you started shooting competitively and what keeps you going back?
Bane: When I was a kid, I read Colonel Jeff Cooper’s Guns and Ammo column, so by the mid ‘70s, when they founded IPSC (International Practical Shooting Confederation), I was familiar with the concept of practical shooting. I was living in New York in the late ‘70s, but as soon as I moved back to Florida, I bought my first 1911, a Commander length steel-framed 1911. I had about $300 worth of modifications done, which took all the money I had in the world. It had a big upswept beaver tail and a Smith and Wesson revolver sight just like the Colonel’s.
I began shooting matches. I had published one article in American Handgunner, so when I went to the first Florida invitational combat match, I was placed on the squad with Tommy Campbell, then at Smith & Wesson, Walt Rausch, Jim Cirillo, Jake Jatras and Dave Arnold. Afterwards, Jake came up to me and said, “Are you busy? You want to start a new shooting sport?” We wrote out what became the United States Practical Shooting Association (USPSA) on yellow pads. I shot those matches and was very active.
Later, I was lucky enough to work as a crash test dummy while we put together the concept of the National Range Officer Institute. Then Bill Wilson asked if I would work with him to help get IDPA (International Defensive Pistol Association) up and going. I taught some of the very first safety classes for IDPA in the West; Ken Hackathorn taught them in the East. I was involved in those shooting sports from the ground up. I love the idea of practical shooting. I just love it.
eJournal: That’s not all, though. You’ve shot rifle, shotgun, and some of the .22 sports, too.
Bane: I have a huge amount of time in a practical pistol. I spent like 10 years shooting cowboy action, which is just fun. I’ve shot combat shotgun, sporting clays, and a lot of three gun. I shot a little precision rifle, too, but that’s too much like a religion – you have to sell your car just to pay for the tripod. I’ve shot NRL .22 (National Rimfire League), and some specialized matches.
I just love to compete. Even now that I’m old and decrepit, I shuffle through the matches. Last year, I did ICORE (International Congress of Revolver Enthusiasts). I may go back and do that again. I love shooting revolvers and it was a real hoot, even though I’m down so low on the stats, I hoped somebody would keel over dead so I wouldn’t be in last place.
Competition was really booming until the end of 2019, then it tanked. They still ran some matches, but I stopped going because you had to wear a mask and they banned picking up expended cases for fear of COVID cooties. I’m pretty sure the chamber gets really hot, but they were like, “No, no exceptions.” It hurt competition, but it drove people to training because the training operations continued.
Our gun culture rests on three legs. It’s a tripod. One leg is concealed carry, which is a very big leg. The second leg is training, which has been driven by concealed carry. The third is competition. Over time, those three legs change balance. Training is so much bigger than it was five or ten years ago, but I think competition is making a comeback. The training community, I think you’ll agree, is very ambivalent about competition.
eJournal: What is the history of the tension between competitive shooters and “pure tacticians?”
Bane: I’m going to say this harshly. In the early days, the pure tacticians couldn’t hit the ground. Back then we didn’t have huge numbers of vets coming back from war who had been trained by the military and had serious battle experience. A lot of the instructors would say, “We don’t believe in competition; we do pure training.” I’d ask, “Pure? Based on what?” If nothing else, competition is an experimental medium. What if I spent $45 on a new widget, and I DQ’ed (disqualified for a safety violation) because it got in the way?
There was always that tension. In the early days, there was a split between the “gamesmen” and the “martial artists.” I have a black belt in Budokon and studied multiple other martial arts. When I went into practical shooting, I was very much on the side of the martial artists. Eventually you get up one morning and think, “Boy, I’m tired of being last! Can I get a compensator on a .38 Super, and just run it?”
There’s always been that tension, and now it’s exacerbated by the fact that there are zillions of instructors, some from the returning military, and some are great instructors: Kyle Lamb, Chris Costa, Travis Haley, Kyle DeVoe, who have done landmark work.
Is competition training? Yesterday I saw a headline on the internet by a really good instructor that said competition is not training. I thought, “Can we stop? We know it’s not training.”
eJournal: At least they aren’t still saying that competition will get you killed. I wonder, are good tactics and clear thinking under chaotic conditions at odds with or compatible to the procedures that we habituate at matches?
Bane: I once talked to an Israeli Special Forces guy I knew, an IPSC champion in Israel. He came to the United States and shot matches. I asked him, “As Israeli Special Forces you shoot people for a living, right? That’s your job description. Do you ever have any problem with match scars?”
He goes, “Do I look like an idiot to you? I can tell the difference between a buzzer in my ear and a bullet that goes past it. I have techniques that I use when bullets are going past my ear, and I have techniques I use when the buzzer goes off. In 20 years of doing this, I’ve never seen a problem with it.”
Jim Cirillo, New York City’s Stake Out Squad, your good friend, and Marty’s, was in many ways my mentor; I loved the guy. He was a vicious competitor. I asked him, “Do you ever have any trouble transitioning between real life and matches. Is there anything you might call match scars?” He goes, “I don’t think so.”
We filmed a program for Shooting Gallery (https://www.outdoorchannel.com/show/shooting-gallery/1630) that was an advanced concealed carry class. There were two groups of students. One group trained on their own every week, were very focused and were very good shooters, but they did not believe in competition. The others were C-class USPSA shooters.
We filmed them doing advanced, hard, tricksy drills. Both groups performed evenly. They could draw and shoot quickly, but one group stumbled over what you’d consider basic gun handling skills. When the group that didn’t compete had a jam, they had to flip an index card in their head and [mimes a tap-rack clearance] go like, “Okay, okay.” The C-class USPSA shooters never slowed down when their guns jammed. If you compete, you have to factor in jams, which happen in so many fascinating and different ways. The non-competitors thought the C-class USPSA shooters were so fast clearing jams and reloading. I’d add that competitors reload without ever thinking.
eJournal: If we can agree that competition builds “automaticity,” a term Karl Rehn taught me, and competitors excel at drawing, reloading and clearing malfunctions, then the question becomes what glaring gaps need to be addressed away from competitive shooting? Where do we fill in those gaps?
Bane: Tactics, tactics, tactics, tactics! I’m stealing from Jim Cirillo who said, “You know what the problem with competition is, Michael? Nobody’s shooting at you, and they tell you which targets to shoot: ‘Go shoot that one. Go shoot that one three times.’”
The problem with competition scars is when we take the gun out of the holster and point it at the target, we are going to shoot because the range officer said two shots on each of those targets, one shot on the plate. We don’t have to think whether we should shoot or not. At a match, I look at the course of fire and say, “Okay, I’m going to shoot that, and I’m go this direction.”
There’s a danger in that. In the real world, you may have to draw your gun, right? As a competitive shooter, you’re prepping the shot. [Mimes drawing and pointing] At the worst time of your life, you’re doing the same thing you do in competition. As the gun comes up, I am pulling the trigger, I’m moving the trigger back to the wall, right? At the wall, I’m going to break the shot. Well, you don’t want to do that in the real world unless you’re really sure it’s the one-percenter biker gang taking over your neighborhood.
That’s a dangerous thing that classes and matches have done a long time. Darryl Bolke has often said we should train more to draw to a low ready. They do this at Gunsite Academy now. Why do you draw to a low ready? Because then you’re not pointing the gun at anybody.
Karl Rehn says no more than one percent of shooters ever go beyond the basic concealed carry class. That’s a terrifying number. I have always suggested that people take classes from people who know what they’re doing: Gunsite, Thunder Ranch, Massad Ayoob. Those are people who wrote the books. People say, “I’m way beyond basic.” I say, “You’re not. I’ve taken the Gunsite 250 class something like nine times, because the basics never change.”
More than anything else, I want those basics to be there for me. As a competitor, how many times have I drawn the pistol? A million times? That’s a fair guess. I see people come out of training with half a day of holster work. They can’t draw. Forget the standard of bringing the gun into play in a second and a half; they can’t do it in three minutes. There’s no way to get better at gun handling than by handling a gun over and over again.
eJournal: Over and over again, with someone correcting you when you point it at your hand.
Bane: The advantage of competition is that you are on a range with a safety officer attached to you who is going to make sure you do it right. For your first year in competition, you don’t really know what to do.
When I ran the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s media education program, I had 25 instructors that were best in the world: Todd Jarrett and Chris Edwards and other great, great people. I noticed really quickly that we’d give the safety briefings, but it took time on the range with somebody saying, “Stop! No, stop! Don’t do that,” before the participants were safe.
John Farnam says there’s no such a thing as a safe gun. I agree. They’re dangerous. We can handle them safely and we can handle them in such a way that we don’t put ourselves and other people at risk.
You have to practice for competition, so you’re getting a huge amount of time with the gun in your hand and all of it adds up. Gun handling is so important. You have to be able to manipulate it, load it safely, unload it safely and know what happens when it doesn’t work.
Out of my experience as a competitor, range officer, range master, or match director, one of scariest things I ever did was for an IPSC world match. They made me range master in charge of hopeless cases. They said, “You get the people from countries where they don’t have safety rules and you’re going to get them through the match without them shooting themselves.” They failed to give me one guy as a hopeless case. He had rigged a Star semi-auto – because he’s from Spain – so the safety couldn’t be engaged, “because it was faster.” It was fast enough to put a bullet down his leg. He said, “I can’t engage the safety.” [gesturing] Bam!
eJournal: The specific ways that the guns we carry work are often different than the way certain competition guns function. Unless I’m mistaken, you’re really big in rimfire competition. The obvious difference is less recoil, but often, the .22s work differently. I mean, a rimfire pistol generally has a bolt, not a slide, and that’s just the beginning. Does your mind actually make the separation your Israeli friend talked about? Why do you shoot .22 matches?
Bane: Yes, it does. My crazy friend Paul Erhardt, editor of the Outdoor Wire, and I have worked together for 30 years, maybe more. We are big fans of shooting multiple, different disciplines with different kinds of guns. I’m proud to say that Ken Jorgensen, the late Nelson Diamond, and I invented the Rimfire Challenge Shooting Association and we’ve managed to bring tens of thousands of new competitors in through that window.
I was at the Rimfire Challenge World Championships in October last year and I said to one of the kids I filmed, “So, did you beat your dad?” and he goes, “Every single time.” I’m like, “Cool, so how old are you?” He’s 11. “How long have you been shooting?” Three years. I watched girls sitting around bitching and talking like high school girls do, then step up to the line and run seven plates in under 1.2 seconds. I talked to KC Eusebio, a fine, fine competitor and he goes, “I don’t even know what they’re seeing.” Two competitors shot a six-plate string in under one second. I’ve shot a lot of plates and I never shot that well.
For 22 years, I produced the TV program Shooting Gallery, and I traveled around the world and shot guns. Invariably, in every country, somebody would come up to me and say, “I’m sure you’re familiar with this.” Sometimes, I couldn’t be totally sure that it was even a gun, but everything has a trigger and some way of cocking. Focus on the commonality of the guns and work outward from there.
I went to Bill Rogers’ Shooting School, easily the hardest shooting school in the country; it’s a nightmare. Bill Rogers and Andy Langley, who was working with him, said that everything has commonality. Back in the old days, I was taught to ride the trigger, reset, click, that’s how we did it. Bill said, “I will break you of that if it kills you. If I have to strangle you, you will walk out of this course and never ride a trigger again.”
I said, “Why?” and Bill goes, “Commonality of all firearms. There are some that don’t work to reset. If I hand you a Thompson submachine gun, it doesn’t work the same way as your pistol. If I hand you an MP5, it doesn’t work the same way as the Thompson or your pistol. What you need is the ability to shoot anything.”
The commonality for guns is that they have to be loaded, there’s a trigger that makes them fire, and there’s a way to cock them to set the mechanism. I saw the same commonality when I went through the Eastern Bloc weapon familiarization course at Gunsite. I want to recognize the commonality. It’s one of the reasons I drift back and forth between sports.
eJournal: Beyond the obvious fun, I want to explore motivation. Face it: one competitor is at the top of the scores and all the rest of us are below. What keeps us lesser mortals going back to matches?
Bane: Sometimes I bitch piteously because I finish badly. I tell my girlfriend, “I’m done. I am so friggin’ done,” and then it turns out I’m not done because I remember something about competition that is critical. I spent a number of years in high-risk sports, where if I made the wrong decision, I didn’t get to come home. The major learning experience for me is that stress has to be dealt with. The only way that I’ve ever understood how to deal with stress is to be inoculated against it the same way you might be inoculated against smallpox. You’re given a vaccine of cowpox, which is a muted down smallpox. The next exposure you’re like, “Oh, I kind of know how this works.” That’s critical.
I talked about being involved with high-risk sports in my book Over The Edge (https://www.amazon.com/Over-Edge-Regular-Odyssey-Extreme/dp/0575400854). A lot of the mental techniques I was taught in shooting turned out to be critically important because sometimes you really need to be able to do a specific activity very, very specifically. If somebody is trying to kill you, I would say that would be one time when everything has to work at that exact moment. How do you do that?
Anything I can do to inoculate me against stress gives me a baseline. It’s like rock climbing. You start climbing rocks so low level that your dog could scramble up the rock face, but then it gets harder and harder and harder. Part of that is increased skills, which is what training gives you, but the second part is your mind saying, “Well, okay, I haven’t fallen yet.” That’s stress inoculation.
A timer in competition will blank your brain. You get a new shooter, and you say, “Ready?” They say, “I’ve studied this; I’ve got this. I do a five-step draw, take the trigger slack out...” But then, “Beep!” and they’re like, “Where am I? Where’s the gun? Wait, I need to go to the bathroom.”
Stress inoculation is critical, so your brain doesn’t shut off. We shot a lot of blind stages in IDPA. On a blind stage at a match, you’re not going to see the stage until you walk to the box. By the time I walk 10 steps from hearing, “Michael Bane, you’re up,” when I step into the box and they say, “Load and make ready,” I have a plan because I’ve seen X number of stages, I’ve built X number of stages, I’ve run X number of stages. I know, “I need to do this, I need to do this, I need to step here, here’s cover, I need to do these things.”
Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Blink, says it takes about one hundredth of a second for a human to make a snap decision. An example he uses is speed dating from the 1980s and ‘90s. You sat down and spent 60 seconds with somebody. Gladwell found that by the time the person sat down, they had already decided about the person sitting across from them. He also spent time with art authenticators. High-end authenticators walk into the room, see a painting, and go, “It’s a forgery.” They can’t tell you how, but they immediately know, and then they move forward, and prove it.
We have this ability to analyze situations really very quickly. It’s why we’re at the top of the food chain. We’re not here because we have big claws or run fast. We’re here because we are stone-cold analyzing engines.
eJournal: Match experiences help us trust that internal computer that is apparently so capable if we don’t get in the way of it.
Bane: You have to trust it because in a really bad moment, you’re not going to have time to engage your frontal lobe. There was interesting research years and years ago, when two big jumbo jets in the Canary Islands crashed and caught on fire. A lot of people died. The question was, if you’re on the ground, and the fire isn’t burning rapidly out of control, why are you dead?
The answer was that you need to have a reaction programmed in your head. If you don’t, you’re going sit there going, should I stand up, should I stay here? Should I go up front? Should I go to the back? Now they tell you, “In the event of a loss of oxygen, put this mask on. Exit lights will come on and you will move to those,” and you’re thinking, “Any idiot knows that.” No, as a matter of fact, if you don’t have it in your head, you can’t perform it.
You learn that in competition. You plan everything and then the buzzer sounds and it’s like “Where am I? I need to go to the bathroom. I think I left my car unlocked. Can I leave? I mean, take the gun, really, I don’t care, you finish the stage.” At matches, you learn that things screw up and you have to assume that in real life things will screw up, too.
Because I’m not a cop, one of the rare times that I have ever put a gun in somebody’s face was on my way home from the National Tactical Invitational match. In the course of three days of filming, I ran something like 25 or 30 convenience store robberies. I played the crook, the clerk, or the innocent bystander over and over and over. On the way home, I ran into the grocery store for some milk. I stepped in, the door closed behind me, and a biker guy with two girls stands up, grins, and drops his hand into his jacket. I think, “This is like stage number eight. Good grief.”
That was because of pattern recognition. Once I recognized the pattern of his hand dropping into his jacket. I had to move, there was no choice. I dropped my hand into my jacket and loudest sound ever was when the safety came off my little bitty 1911. Click! The guy looks at me and goes, “What should I do?” It wasn’t the first time he’d seen a gun pointing at him. I had him get down on the ground.
How many times have we drawn the gun? How many times have we drawn the gun from concealment? We know the patterns. Where did we learn those patterns? When I see somebody do things I know from pattern recognition, I have to move.
The only way to get a fluid draw is to practice drawing. I’ve done it a million times. I’ve done it from appendix, from three o’clock, from cross draw, from a shoulder holster. Not only do I have those motions, but I also understand the patterns. A lot of what we get from training that we do not get from competition shooting is pattern recognition for threats.
John Hearn’s class Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why is really great. What are the factors that make it more likely that you’ll come out of a situation? One of them is how quickly you recognize a threat. In other words, minimize lag time. I wish competition had multiple, different starts: a timer, saying, “up, shoot, hey,” even a blinking light like John Murphy has used. One reason Rob Pincus’ Intuitive Defensive Shooting is hard is because he forces you to think before you shoot. You cannot shoot faster than you think. You are limited because you must recognize the threat then complete the actions you do to minimize it.
My good friend Mickey Schuch has been writing recently that the purpose of a civilian defender is to break contact. When I had the biker on the ground, I went to the police, and they said, “Did you check him for guns?”
I said, “Do I look like a cop to you? I didn’t do anything. I got him on the ground. I got my girlfriend away, because that’s my job.”
“What about the people in the grocery store?”
“Are any of them married to me? Are they relatives? No.” They can all have a gun just like me, but the key thing I want to do is break contact.
As John Shaw said years ago in our first book, more than anything else, training buys you time. You may see an opportunity with that time. Andrew Branca’s early book, his very first, red-covered book, discussed a chain of events, a tree structure in which every decision leads to a branch. Do you have a branch for “run” or “break contact” or “go home?” You should.
You want to go home. What maximizes that? Think back to Darrell Bolke teaching to draw to the low ready. That maximizes your chances of exiting the situation, because literally from low ready to bang is what? A 10th of a second, less than a 10th of second, it’s inconsequential.
eJournal: It’s all about using lag time or processing time, getting the most out of that microsecond. Don’t dither, do something. Don’t stand there, don’t freeze, do something.
Bane: You need to get that programmed into a lot of things you do. When I took my girlfriend to New York to run the New York Marathon, I wanted to take her to my favorite Chinese restaurant in Chinatown. We got there about midnight.
The cab stops and I opened the door, and Chinatown’s quiet. I said, “Denise, get back in the cab now. Cabbie, let’s go, go, go, go!” We left and she asks, “Why? Why?” I said, “Chinatown’s never quiet. Somebody’s getting hit.” It turned out that happened. I don’t want to be in the crowd when somebody gets hit. If things don’t seem normal, you can’t say, maybe it’ll clear up in a minute.
eJournal: That’s right, you better move. Take action.
Bane: Colonel Jeff Cooper of Gunsite believed if you want to be a fully, well-rounded defensive shooter, you need to hunt. In hunting, something dies. There’s a consequence of pulling the trigger. There’s a sound when the bullet hits flesh and then eventually you cut it up and there’s blood everywhere and there’s blood on you. You should be aware of all that happening.
The other thing that hunting teaches you is that there is no time. Animals have minds of their own and they move. How long does it take for an animal to run? Luckily, I’ve never lost an animal. I’ve been to Africa four times, been to Texas and New Zealand, and I’ve never lost an animal. One was close and the other was a 16-hour stalk in the Kalahari Desert to follow a blood track. It was a learning process. That was my first African hunt.
You can’t dawdle. You’re on the sticks and thinking, “I got an OK sight picture, but if I work on it just a little, if I can get a little bit better...” No! It needs to be, “Bang.” You have to act. Every shot, every situation, whether hunting or a violent situation is a chaos system. That means you can’t know how it’s going to go because there are so many factors acting on the system. Got an OK sight picture? Bang.
I went nilgai hunting in Texas. We did 10 or 15 stalks that didn’t pay off and at the end of shooting light, we did a stalk and there standing in the field was a nilgai bull looking at another nilgai bull. His attention was distracted. He’s not looking for me; he’s looking for that other guy who wants his girls. Chaos system. There was an old falling down fence. I found a fence post, bang, shot the bull and they all told me, you’re going to have to track it because even with clean heart shot, nilgai can run several hundred yards into the mesquite brush. You’ll have a really sucky evening. Through the scope, I saw his legs bunch, and I thought he’s going to run. As soon as he pushed off, I shot him right behind the ear because I didn’t want to track and lose him.
All those decisions had to be made in a very short time. The question was, can I make that shot? Yeah, it’s a sporting clay shot, not a rifle shot. It’s a small round moving target. What do I have to do? Swing through the moving target, exactly the same as sporting clays. I have to swing the gun past the animal and keep moving because the bullet is going to be in the barrel. Skills from competition translate into the real world. Several of my PHs have made a point, “You shoot quick.”
eJournal: That decisiveness grows out of knowing what to look for and acting on it. That can be a real hard-won lesson and not all of us have learned it. How do you cure indecisiveness?
Bane: You know how to cure that? Competition will cure it because you’ve got a structured situation. When you miss the 50-yard popper, typically what you’ll see in a competition shoot is two shots close together – bang bang. Why’s that? Because the shooter very, very quickly picked up the fact that the 50-yard popper didn’t move. If you watch an IPSC match or a Steel Challenge match, you’ll see pick-up shots so fast that you can’t understand how they knew. Part of it is they know what a good shot felt like. You have to shoot lot until you get to a point where you call your shots.
eJournal: There are many paths to that internal knowledge, but I think that you make a good pitch that competition is the most accessible and frankly attractive path. If a Network member was ready to try competition, what do we recommend? Common questions are where do I find matches? What should I avoid? What should I seek out? What about my budget?
Bane: Well, a couple of things. First, just tell yourself that regardless of the competition, whatever match you go to first, you’re going to think, “I can’t do this!” The great American Aikido master George Leonard wrote a book called Mastery about how people learn. It is an absolutely brilliant book about human learning theory. He was adamant that to learn, you have to be willing to play the fool. Be willing to step up and have people look at you; once you do it a few times, it’s not too bad.
What I would say is, okay, what’s closest? Go to the websites for the various sports, USPSA, IDPA, maybe even Cowboy Action. Then go and watch a match. When you’re watching an 80-year-old grandmother moving through sequencing with cowboy guns and she’s as smooth as water, you go like, “Huh, it turns out ability is not necessarily tied to age.”
You can look at people shooting the match and think, “I can do that,” and if you want to start on something like Rimfire Challenge, it’s really simple. It’s .22 rifle and pistol, and you get to shoot some plates. The plates are never in another county; I think the farthest plate is like 18 yards for rifle. Go to a .22 match and don’t look at the 11-year-old who smoked his father 25 times in a row. Instead, you think, “Hmm, can I do this?” With the rimfire match, you don’t have a holster, so it’s all from low ready. You say, “I have a white belt; I’m starting out here. I’m an idiot. I’m going to get through this.”
Don’t choose three gun for your first sport because it’s three guns and that means that you have to practice thrice as hard. Three-gun matches are hard because there are so many things you have to think about. You’re transitioning between guns, and you’re doing this and that, and then the rifle targets are in Cleveland, and it’s like a 10-inch plate. Since you’re the last shooter of the day on that stage, the 10-inch plate has been hit 200 times, and it looks exactly like the dirt around it and you’re thinking, why didn’t I have a bigger scope?
eJournal: Good scopes are expensive. For beginners, the budget question is important. Maybe we should start with maybe a local IDPA or ASI match.
Bane: If you start at IDPA, remember you can shoot the gun you carry, but I would suggest a couple of things. First, you have to understand the rules and you’ll probably need to do some kind of local safety class because they also want you to know the rules. Pop for an outside the waistband Kydex® holster and one of the vests that they use in IDPA games. Start small and say, I’m going to shoot this concealed carry match, so I got one of these cheesy vests. The reason? You’re learning how to sweep the cover garment, get a firing grip on the gun, and safely bring that gun into play. Later, you can use your carry gear. But first learn A, and then you can go to B, and then you can go to C. Same with USPSA.
Carry gear works fine in IDPA. If you want to play super games, you’re going to have to buy super gaming toys. There’s a reason golf clubs are expensive. Nobody ever carves their own clubs, but you don’t have to. I spent two years shooting nothing but a Glock 19. I shot it in IDPA. I shot it in USPSA. I shot it in training classes. And did I win? Absolutely not. I didn’t get the Cadillac; I didn’t even get a Yugo, but I learned to shoot a Glock 19 pretty well. That was the point. I wanted to get something from the matches to make me overall a better shooter.
Remember that ultimately you have to practice. You simply cannot shoot match after match after match and expect to be better. You can expect to be the same. When I shoot a match, what did I screw up? The 50-yard pepper popper or did I miss the three-yard target? Did I miss it because my eyes swept over it, and I pulled the trigger here and put two holes in the ground? I need to know what I need to fix.
Another critical skill you can learn in competition probably easier than any other way is something I learned from Mike Seeklander and Gabe Suarez. At what level can you hit a headshot every time? Bang! That’s really important to know, because if you have to shoot somebody in the head, you want to know that you can make that shot. That’s a critical thing to know. A long time ago, Brian Enos said that a target will define the sight picture you need.
In terms of budgeting for competition, don’t spend anything until you’ve gone to a couple of matches with what you have. One thing I found in every competition, regardless of what it was, the good shooters will help you.
It’s useful to watch other people on the stage. In the very first match you go to – a rimfire challenge, sporting clays, cowboy action, whatever – say to them, “This is my first or second match. Could you please put me down in the rotation? I need to see how this works.” Never be afraid to do that, because everybody at their first match had to ask, “What’s going on?”
The good shooters will help you if you say, this is only my second match, I just got my safety card. Don’t listen to everybody, though. My girlfriend said, “If you happen to be a girl and you go to a practical pistol match, everyone is your friend, everyone. And 75 percent of what they tell you is wrong. So be careful.” People do want to help you, especially in a sport like three gun where it’s just complicated as hell. Every competition I’ve been in, we’ve worked hard with and for new shooters because they’re our life’s blood.
eJournal: I hope we send some Network members to matches, because there is so much to be taken in, so many gifts, so much personal development, so many “I can’t believe I just did that” things to learn about yourself. The “light bulb” moments are endless.
Bane: They are. You got to put yourself out there and you have to make yourself receptive. You can’t go to a match and sit there and think, “I wish I could do better.” No. Instead, it’s like, “I wonder what I can steal from this guy. I’m pretty sure I can crib something from him. Why are they loading the way they’re loading? Why are the gun and ammo on their belt in a certain way? Why are the magazines for the rifle in a certain position?” Will it be the same for you? Not always, but at least you have a place to start.
eJournal: You know what? I always learn from you when we talk, and that’s what also keeps bringing me back to MBTV on the Radio podcast because every week there’s some interesting topics and some crazy music choices. Did I really say that?
Bane: Wait, when was the last time you heard Robert Mitchem sing Thunder Road? I mean, honestly, you can’t get that even on satellite radio.
eJournal: Your music choices are out of this world, but I always learn something from your podcast. What I’d really like to come out of our time today, in addition to prompting members to go find a match and try it, is I’d like people to start listening to you because I think you’re a greatly under-utilized resource. There’s years and years of experience there and fun. How do we learn more about your work, Michael? Where do we check?
Bane: It’s really easy. https://www.michaelbane.tv/ I do a weekly video that’s only like eight or nine minutes long. The podcast is 45 minutes a week, 50 weeks a year and I’ve been doing it for 21 years, which is enough BS to go from here to Mars.
eJournal: I would love to see members start learning from that because you know what? If it’s not fun, we don’t do it. When it’s fun, we keep coming back and if there’s one thing you bring to this, it’s you help us have fun.
Bane: Right, it should be fun. It should be. If it’s fun, you’re more likely to continue doing it. I mean, I certainly get the mentality that [delivered as a somber warning] “Right now someone is training to kill you, and if you’re not training at that same level ...” I get that. There’s been times in my life when I’ve been there, but mostly I just like guns.
Maybe competition that keeps me coming back. By the way, if you change competitions, that works, too. You’ve been shooting USPSA and you’re sick of it, shoot three gun then go shoot cowboy action for a while.
eJournal: Michael, it’s been fun. Thank you so much for sharing this with us.
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Take advantage of Michael Bane’s extensive online programming at the links above, and don’t miss his excellent books Trail Safe and Over the Edge which are available on Amazon or through used booksellers.