Anti-Competitive?
Yeah, it's kind of like that...
I have been asked to clarify my seemingly “anti-competitive” statements on the home page of my website. It appears that some people have taken the truth of the statement as some attempt at slandering the competitive shooters. Some are beginning to say that O2DA Training is “competitive hostile.” That’s simply not true, I am not degrading the competitive sports, I am simply pointing out some facts.
As I point out on the our home page, I do admire those shooters who have mastered their sport. Furthermore; as long as the shooter is using his “carry” equipment and utilizing proper techniques, the competitive arena can help to enhance ones balance of speed and accuracy.
Having said that, I want to once again stress that I truly believe that being a great competitive shooter will not enhance your survivability in a real life fight for life where someone is actively trying to kill you.
O2DA Training stresses what we call combative techniques[1], because we do not teach our clients how to win a non-lethal force competition. Instead, what we teach our clients over two, three, and four-day courses is how to not only survive a lethal force encounter, but how to thrive in a violent, chaotic, and rapidly changing environment in order to decisively win the encounter.
We want our clients to become the chaos their adversary’s plans for them and their loved ones, so that they can be the decisive winner, not just a survivor of a lethal force encounter. This means not only decisively winning the fight, but winning on the moral, ethical, legal, physical, physiological and emotional level as well. Think of it as a holistic approach to winning a lethal force encounter.
For instance: We teach our clients a technique of releasing their slide that is not the fastest way to release a slide to get back into the fight. The reason we will not teach our clients the fastest way to release the slide for fighting with a gun, is because the fastest way to release the slide requires three things; (i) fine motor skills (ii) a fully functional hand and (iii) a slide devoid of excessive blood, perspiration, or other “lubricants”.
All of these prerequisites can, have, and do regularly break down or occur during high stress conditions, especially during a fight for life. Therefore, learning the competitive/fastest way to allow your slide go forward (pinching it between the thumb and forefinger), will mean you will have to adapt and improvise under the debilitating stress of a fight for life if something as minor as a broken thumb occurs.
Please don’t read into the above example. We never “make” our clients conform to our techniques, our instructors are not pontificating cyborg drill instructors, as a matter of fact, you will be amazed how low key, helpful, and truly interested in your survival and progress our instructors are.
Our methodology is simple, we appeal to your intellect and reasoning skills.
We will first explain in detail why we are teaching you the technique you are learning, how they will enhance your survival in a lethal force encounter. We then demonstrate for you the correct techniques, and then we give you ample opportunity to practice the technique.
In a nutshell, we give you all the information required for you to make your own adult and fully informed decision.
All of our instructors happily abide by your right to shoot the way you want to. After all, it’s your life and we can’t tell you how to live it, we can only advise you and appeal to your intellect; and we do that better than anyone else in the industry. The bottom line is that we won’t force you to conform to a method you don’t believe in.
By keeping the reality of life and violence in mind, we select all of our training techniques by the prerequisite of what will be necessary in order to decisively win in a lethal force encounter in a real life fight for life, not against someone else in a competitive arena. By doing this, we set the criteria of what type of training one needs in a fight for life rather than those needed to win in a non-lethal competitive arena.
To get a better understanding of what we mean by this, let’s take a look at some of the parameters involved in a competitive system.
1. These competitive systems have rules
- These rules are enforced by referees who make sure all participants are operating within the rules
2. Your target is a paper, plastic or steel target
- More often than not, these targets are static or at best moving or perhaps bobbing
3. Most of your shooting is done “on line” or through a prescribed course shooting boxes etc.
4. While competitive shooting can be stressful for a shooter, there is little surprise to the routine, and the stress placed on the shooter is usually self-induced
5. Everyone has an opportunity to walk away from the competitive event a little more experienced; even the worst shooter can go home to improve his game
- The best in these events even receive accolades and awards.
Unbelievably enough, even today, most of the firearms schools (yes, even the popular and fashionable ones), police, and military academies still train within these parameters as their standards.
Now, as I said before, an accomplished shooter from any of above competitive systems can shoot well with a good balance of speed and accuracy.
Unfortunately, most of the parameters involved in the competitive world do not apply to real life. That is; in the real world of lethal conflict, the reality of violence is very different than the sport applications make it out to be, these are not subtle differences either, these are substantial and significant enough differences that will get you killed in a real life lethal force encounter if you attempt to handle a real life problem with a competitive mindset, techniques, and tactics[2].
To compound the problem, the way most people perceive reality and violence is absolutely incorrect and leads to false assumptions about reality, and that leads to their untimely demise due to inappropriate decisions and actions based on those false assumptions.
Competition meets Reality -
1. These competitive systems have rules, real life lethal force encounters have only one rule; “Decisively win in the fight.” You can only achieve the goal of decisively winning the fight by ruthlessly inflicting debilitating injuries on your adversary in the fastest manner possible in order to force him to submit to your will either by death, surrender or by causing him to pass out. The faster you solve your first problem, the faster you can move on to other opponents, solving the problems that are coming up, and the more effectively you do that, the more decisively you win.
- In the competitive system; rules are enforced by referees who make sure all participants are operating within the established and agreed upon rules and regulations. In a real life scenario, there are no referees; you do what you have to in order to ensure you decisively win the fight. That means you use every “unfair” advantage to your advantage.
2. Your target is a paper, plastic, or steel in the competitive circles, in real life you have real live, dynamic and unpredictable humans to contend with.
- In the competitive arena, more often than not, your targets are static or at best moving or bobbing. In real life, your adversary will not only be moving, he may be climbing/descending stairs to get to you, he may be running, he may be shouting, he will probably be shooting if he has a firearm, real life targets are dynamic, seldom static, and therefore instant ambiguity and chaos ensue.
3. In the competitive system most of your shooting is done “on line” or through a prescribed course shooting boxes, lanes, etc. In real life, the only thing that limits your area of movement are the laws of physics and your decision of where you want to go in order to inflict the greatest injury into your target as quickly as you can while avoiding injuring the innocent, while minimizing your exposure.
4. While competitive shooting can be stressful for a shooter, there is little surprise to the routine, and the stress placed on the shooter is usually self-induced. In real life the stress is placed upon you by a target that is attempting to either do you serious bodily harm or kill you… Presto, instant externally induced adrenalin rush via activation of the Sympathetic Nervous System or “SNS”.
5. In the competitive arena everyone has an opportunity to walk away from the event a little more experienced; even the worst shooter can go home to improve his game. In a real life lethal force encounter, only those that are willing to fight and do so ruthlessly will live to have the opportunity go home, and that’s considering that you survive the “legal landmines” that ensue a lethal force encounter.
- The best shooters in the competitive events even receive accolades and awards. The best you will receive as the winner of a lethal force encounter is your personal satisfaction in knowing you are alive to see another day, hopefully your loved ones appreciation of the same, and if you are lucky, a quick investigation with no legal repercussions criminally or civilly.
Therefore the more you train in the rules of sport, the less prepared you will be for the chaos of a real life lethal force encounter which has no rules. And as I am sure all of the readers of this column have already heard before, the old axiom “Train the way you fight, because you will fight the way you train” is certainly more true than most are willing to admit to themselves. This type of training leads to what we call the dreaded “range mentality” and even worse, training scars.
As an example of the above; my eldest son and I were at the range the other day, and some shooting sport group had a video loop playing over the sales counter. The video showed a shooting match scenario where the competitor started out sitting at his desk. At the “go” signal, the guy opens his briefcase, pulls out an unloaded handgun, places magazines in his magazine pouch, loads his handgun and then after presumably running outside and down the street a little bit, he starts shooting through windows/doors/openings, while never paying attention to proper distance from surfaces/cover/concealment, and then he runs across the street and engaging in more of the same.
That is exactly the type of competition and competition training that leaves “training scars” and is a huge liability to a fighter with a gun.
Again, don’t get me wrong: Yes I realize it’s a sport, yes I realize the fun factor, yes I realize it’s a way to blow off steam, and yes I realize it takes real competitive determination and talent to win those matches.
Unfortunately, every day, somewhere in the world we see the tragic results of the range mentality played out when those with training scars that they don’t know that they have, come into contact with real life consequences when the fantasy world of training collides with the harsh reality of kinetic energy and chaos of real world violence.
Even worse… how many innocent people get shot by poorly trained and over reacting police, military, or private citizens who are training scarred and don’t even know it?
How many news stories have you heard where an untrained and amateur thug gets lucky or gets the “jump” on a trained police officer? How many times have good soldiers shot by a bruit with a worn out unsighted weapon system? How many trained and skilled martial arts instructors get beaten or shot to death because the thug they were “teaching a lesson to” wasn’t playing his game?
Why is it that these untrained amateurs are able to overcome the “trained professionals”? Think about it. These people aren’t good weapons handlers, they don’t invest hundreds of dollars at firearms schools or personal protection classes, they don’t spend hours at the range training, or on the mats with a training partner, they don’t have great form, or even a “proper stance.” How is it that they can be so unskilled and “untrained” yet so effective?
The answer is simple; they are aggressive and dedicated when they need to be; therefore they are pretty effective in using the tool of violence to gain the upper hand just long enough to be successful in the fight.
So no matter how well you shoot in competition or qualification, no matter how much you know about all of the techniques available to you (competitive or combative), someone with a Crescent wrench and the intent to do you harm, can use the tool of violence to ambush you and end your life. And there is nothing you can do about it if you don’t see it coming or can’t act fast enough to prevent it. All that training, money, ammunition and time you invested in competition or range training becomes useless because it was the wrong type of training.
Giving our clients the right kind of training is what O2DA excels at. Setting you up for success by setting you up for reality right away is what makes our training program truly unique and so devastatingly effective.
So don’t do yourself the disservice of confusing the sports application of firearms training with the reality of what it will take to save your life during a real life lethal force encounter. Because the decisions you need to make against a real live target that is intent on doing you serious bodily harm or attempting to kill you are not the same decisions you need to make while shooting against a clock and at inert targets.
So while we can admire the competitive shooters for the dedication and skill it takes to become competitive in his sport, it is of little value in the real world if they don’t understand the reality of violence and understand what the tool of violence is all about.
Why? Because without the fundamental understanding of what violence really is, and what it’s role in real life lethal force encounters will have on them, they are unconsciously incompetent (they don’t know what they don’t know), and have been training with techniques that are for competition only, not taking into account the reality of what a high stress events can and will do to them in real life, and therefore they are setting themselves up for a rude awakening at the wrong time.
That’s the reality of it folks. I know it stings a little, but if I lied to you and told you it was as easy as buying a gun, purchasing some ammo, joining a team, pressing a trigger a few thousand times, and launching rounds at paper, plastic, and steel targets, I would be doing you a huge disservice.
- Silent Bob
[1] At O2DA we teach that a technique is a thing you could do by formula. This would include things like loading, malfunction clearances, reloads, how to present, aim and fire a weapons system, gouging eyes, punching someone in the throat, using concealment and cover, “slicing the pie,” movement techniques, talking on the radio, and so on. A technique is not a series of movements or some type of formula intended to defend against something or a series of actions on your assailants part.
[2] Tactics can be thought of as the art and science of winning confrontations (verbal, physical, and lethal,) by the use of power (mental and physical) and maneuver; the integration of different weapons (verbal skills, hand to hand, contact weapons and firearms,); and the immediate exploitation of success to defeat your adversary. We cannot simply add judgment and creativity (art), to techniques and procedures (science) in an arbitrary and illogical manner and arrive at a sum called tactics. Rather, we use each to increase the value of the other exponentially when combined in a logical and well-reasoned manner for a unique threat, at a unique time and in a unique situation.
Tags: ATA, Fighting, Handgun, IDPA, IPSC, personal protection, Rifle, SASS, self protection, shooting, survival