I shot it out with a SWAT team, and this is what I learned.

I make my living as a medic on a tactical team, and I make some spending money teaching tactical medicine. The culmination of the course is an active shooter exercise complete with sim rounds. This week, the class included a local three letter government agency SWAT team. The class also included several branches of the military along with local PD. Here are some of the lessons learned form the shooting side.The first and foremost is this: Gun fights are highly chaotic and happen incredibly quickly. Before I was a medic, I spent five and change in the US Army as an infantryman with extensive combat experience. This is the number one thing I teach people about gunfighting, and this weeks exercise reinforced it again, as it always does. Even with highly trained leadslingers shooting wax bullets, it is chaotic and nothing like you see on TV.Oh Sweet Baby Jesus, get some training. One of the evolutions had police cadets as the responders to the active shooter, whom I would assume are a pretty good analogy for the untrained gun owners. It would have been a bloodbath with the way they hung up in fatal funnels and their reluctance to engage the shooter until I actually pointed the gun at them. Most people don't need a $1,500 gun, they need a $500 gun and $1,000 in training.Tactics matter people, they really do. The evolution that ended the worst for the responding officers was because they lacked light discipline. One of them activated their weapon mounted light in a hallway that really didn't require it, and I was alerted to their approach by the light in the hallway. I could judge the distance by the brightness of the reflection, and used that to my advantage to pick the moment to attack. Had they been real bullets instead of sim rounds, there would have been several dead officers.So how does this all relate to CCW? Mostly that I implore you to get training, and hopefully take at least one class that offers force on force training with some sort of marking round. They are expensive, but worth it. via /r/CCW http://ift.tt/2jbNFeH