If you don’t know how to do something, how do you learn? YOUTUBE! If you want the very best in Navy SEAL training? YouTube! Brain surgery? YouTube! If you want to know anything, YouTube it! Ok, ENOUGH already!

The internet has made almost everything easily accessible. There are so many people touting firearms training on the internet you can’t count them. Oh, Yes you can! Google registers 72,600,000 in just .57 seconds. I’m not trying to sell you on our training either. There are plenty of good trainers out there, but there are plenty of not so good trainers too. It’s important to consider the following.

What are you training for? In the world of a Gatekeeper who is “Protecting God’s People” you are ultimately training to prevail in a worst-case scenario of a “Gunfight” with a, or several bad guys. Yes, I said “Gun Fight”.

Here’s my point. They may have a fancy fly-in logo with hard rock music intro, but that doesn’t make for a good instructor or good “Gunfighting” technique. They may have been a policeperson on a SWAT team for 20 years or a Grand Master at IDPA, but that doesn’t mean they have great gun-fighting skills. I’ve seen an active SEAL team member nose pinch/sling shot the back of their handgun slide while loading their handgun and barely get it out of the holster in less than 2 seconds.

Learning and practicing the basics will give you a firm foundation. Most likely all those basics will just be a foundation when you really get thrown into the fire. I don’t profess to be an experienced “Gunfighter” either.

A guy once told me a story of his brother who, while in the police academy, accidentally shot himself in the foot. He then became a School Resource Officer. The students would ask him; Have you ever been shot? Have you ever shot somebody? He would truthfully answer them, “Yes”.

The author of “On Killing” and “On Combat” which is touted as a great book on both subjects admits he has never actually been in combat or actually killed anybody. But he has studied it a lot.

The same goes for me. I have never been in a gunfight. I have had bullets whiz by my ears a few times and I have studies the mechanics of Gunfighting a lot. I believe all the things they say about the sympathetic nervous system and the “fight or flight” response and have experienced it a few times.

Look up how to run the slide on a semiauto pistol and you see multiple ways to do it. Lookup how to grip a handgun and you will get the same thing. There’s a lever on the left side of your handgun called the slide “LOCK” lever, not the slide “RELEASE” lever. Is it easier to just hit the slide “LOCK” lever to “Release” the slide? Yes, but that is a fine motor operation/skill. Fine motor skills have a tendency to go away under stress. Your body will suck all your blood out of your appendages under the “Fight or Flight” response. This is just one effect that stress has on the body.

All that practice at standing tall in the perfect stance and punching out your handgun in the perfect grip with the perfect trigger press might all go away when you get onto a gun fight.

I tell our students that you will most likely be running the opposite direction from the fight (getting off the X as Gabe would put it) using the “One Handed Half-Homie ™” pulling the trigger as fast and hard as you can. Funny how that trigger “Reset” thingy goes WAY away. Whoever practices that the most gets to be the winner!

In our first edition of the new e-magazine we will be writing about the “One Handed Half-Homie™” technique. Hope to see you there.