TL:DR; Take some lessons. It'll help identify and eliminate bad habits.Quick background on me so you know where I'm coming from:I shot .22's very occasionally as a kid, but didn't grow up with guns in the house or shooting regularly.Shot my friend's handguns a few times in grad school. (In Texas of course.)I didn't take up shooting again until 2016.Received my Ohio CHL (aka CCW) in January 2017.I've taken 4 small group defensive pistol classes with a couple different instructors since then.I'm a civilian and I conceal carry in public when and where I can. It's a felony to carry at my place of employment, which sucks. But there's no way I'm jeopardizing my main source of income, no matter how much I think the law prohibiting campus carry is wrong.A couple months ago I decided that I was probably in a rut with my regular range drills. So I reached out to an instructor I had taken group classes with last summer to ask if he ran 1-on-1 sessions.I met up with him on a weekday morning a few weeks ago at his private range. Basically his back 20, set up with berms and target stands and cover areas.We started with fundamentals: grip, stance, drawing from concealment, etc. He pretty quickly identified some issues, such as:I carry appendix. For some reason, while I was pulling up my garment, my support hand was flying off into space instead of trapping my shirt and getting ready to form my grip.The elbow of my strong hand was winging out during my draw.I was also occasionally flagging my support hand while forming up my grip prior to driving the gun out.After that it was on to live fire. Working from ~ 15 feet, he had me draw, drive out, fire a round, go back to ready, then reholster. He used a shot timer and I was firing at a standard IDPA silhouette. What did we discover then?I was wavering the pistol up and down slightly while driving the gun out, which was making it difficult for me to pick up the front sight and slowing my shot on target speed.I have a tendency to leave the gun hanging out at full extension after firing. This would not be smart when you're engaged in a DGU.So we worked on correcting those bad habits. I definitely improved, but like any skill it's going to require practice to maintain the improvements.It's been a few weeks since that session so I'm definitely not remembering every detail, but here are some more highlights:I am actually pretty efficient at dropping and swapping magazines - I practice that a lot - but that's probably not so important given the average number of shots fired in a typical DGU. It's a great skill to have when fighting off the zombie hordes. But it's probably not going to be a deciding factor if I'm forced to draw and fire in a real encounter.Stress will mess with your overlearned behaviors, so imagine what it does to your rarely-practiced actions. Lesson learned: practice all aspects of defensive gun use. Make sure you know how different garments will react to being yanked up. Find potential failure scenarios for your belt and holster, and train to overcome them. Be prepared to react instinctively if your gun doesn't go bang when it should. Embed "tap-and-rack" deeply in your brain and muscles. It might even be a good idea to put some range time in with with your least-reliable semi-auto, so you can practice recovering from malfunctions.The rest of the training session was devoted to more advanced drills. I did OK, but as expected when my instructor put me under any pressure or changed things up, I tended to revert to earlier bad habits. This is known as reversion under stress (I'm a psychologist). The only thing that alleviates it is more practice and training.All in all, I'm very glad I took the 3 hours to train 1-on-1 with a good instructor. It helped me identify and work on eliminating accumulated bad habits, and it gave me more confidence in my ability to handle a firearm in a defensive situation.EDIT: For those who are interested, here's my equipment list:CZ P07 Gen 2Vedder LigthTuck appendix holster with claw. (Highly recommended.)Some random POS mag carrier I got off of eBay.Uncle Mike's 1.5" belt.Skinz quick-release thong swimsuit and Nokono sequined medium toe calf skin boots. (Nah. I'm just seeing if y'all are still reading.) via /r/CCW https://ift.tt/2IZrKCu
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