Damn Big Hole

SWAT teams were first formed about the time that a lot of people entering law enforcement had combat experience in Vietnam.  They had special training and experience and things were getting pretty violent in some parts of America.  It made sense to exploit the training.  But being a cop is not the same as being a soldier and there was about twenty years or more of adapting the military tools to the civilian environment.

CERTs (Corrections Emergency Response Teams) were relatively new when we started ours and you could see the same process.  Just as SWAT tried to adapt military tactics and technology, we were trying to adapt SWAT tactics and technology.  The environments are vastly different.  We actually sped our evolution up massively by using a few simple tools.  One was to really look at the problem: what were our goals, our environment, our likely,unlikely and possible scenarios?  Under what kind of conditions would we execute our missions?

Lawrence Kane and I are working on a book, an introduction to the force continuum as it applies to self-defense.  More principles-based than technique based.  Non-prescriptive.  The kind of stuff I like.

Deadly force has to cover weapons.  There are unarmed deadly force techniques but, realistically, there are damn few that work when they can be justified.  Long and short of it, in order to justify deadly force you have to be losing and overwhelmed.  So when you boil down the stuff that works to the stuff that might work when you are surprised, off balance, your structure is compromised and you might be concussed, the unarmed list gets considerably smaller.

Lawrence has been to a number of civilian shooting schools that teach self defense with a handgun, judicious deadly force, stuff like that.  I was trained as a tactical shooter for an entry team.  That's a pretty broad range of training, right?

No.  It's the same problem as converting military to SWAT to CERT.  The situations simply are not the same.  Range training, tactical ops, surviving a gunfight are all important pieces, but they are skipping the one piece that civilians most need for self-defense: How to turn it into a gunfight.

Who practices and has techniques for drawing when you are being battered, slammed into walls or lifted and tossed into a van?  Who has practiced shooting someone who is lying on top of you, punching or choking or stabbing without the bad guy recognizing the action?  And without shooting yourself?  Remember penetration, bone fragments, concussion wave and burns from your own muzzle blast...

Is this a damn big hole in current training?  Or is someone teaching this that has managed to stay off my radar?

Do I really have time to design yet another course?