Close Quarter Core Skills

At the Police Officers Safety Association, an organization of which I'm the training director, we teach a course called Close Quarter Handgun Core Skills. It is a course focused on just what the title suggests: fundamental skills and drills for close quarter lethal force encounters. I always like to start this course by lining up the participants at seven yards, facing an IPSC or IDPA target. I ask them to perform two reasonably standard handgun drills. Drill number one is to fire a magazine into the A zone as fast as they can make the shots. Drill two is to put two into the A zone and one into the head, on command, repeating until the magazine is depleted. Then I ask the class, "What relationship to real-life street encounters did either of these two drills have?"

A surprising number of the attendees have the correct answer on the tips of their tongues: "Almost nothing." That's right. They were all standing in a row, facing a designated direction. They fired on command. They were at least four times the distance that they were likely to have to fight at with a handgun for real. They were using sighted fire. They didn't move. They were placing their shots carefully. The targets weren't moving. The targets were all facing them head-on. Most important: the targets weren't shooting back.

So why is so much of our current so-called "training" so much like these two drills?

Theory of Operation

The answer to that question is "because this kind of training is challenging for students and safe for the instructor to teach." But that begs the critical question. That is starting from an answer, not from a question; from a conclusion, not an analysis.

Before we can design an effective training curricula, we have to answer the question: "What is the problem we are trying to solve?" The answer to that is that we are trying to keep people alive in close quarter, spontaneous violent assaults that our adversaries usually initiate. Our training drills therefore need to instill skills that contribute to that objective - not achieving some artificial "range standard." Which means, of course, that we need to use drills that mimic close quarter, spontaneous violent assaults that our adversaries initiate. That's curricula design criteria number one.

The other thing that we need to understand to design an effective training regimen is what resources we have to work with, or in this case, what the capabilities of ourselves and our equipment are. Our own capabilities under severe, close-quarter stress, are well known: target focus, loss of fine motor skill, etc. Curricula design criteria number two is therefore to accommodate target focus and gross motor skills in our training.

Our handgun's capabilities are also well known, but often ignored. Essentially, there are really only three ways that bullets stop someone:

1. central nervous system hits that prevent the brain from directing the body
2. loss of blood pressure, or
3. such overwhelming pain and shock that the body shuts down.

Further, all handgun bullets are all extremely ineffective. None of them (even .357s and .45s) are reliable one-shot stoppers. Now, the "shot placement" school of handgunning advocates central nervous system (CNS) shots or center-mass shots to accomplish either 1) or 2) above. Brain stem or head shots are all but impossible to realize in the violent chaos of a real-life encounter, while hydraulic pressure loss occurs too slowly to be of reliable use, even with major blood vessels hit. That leaves 3) above - inflicting massive shock or pain. Accomplishing this is done with many shots placed on the adversary as fast as possible. They don't all have to be center-mass or CNS shots - just lots of hits quickly. So this is our theory of handgun "stopping power": Put a lot of hurt onto your enemy quickly. Caliber is not very important - any significant caliber will do. Just hit 'em often and fast. So curricula design criteria number three is to train in multiple shots delivered quickly.