Recently discovered a new gun store in South Austin: “Guns and More LLC“.
I haven’t had the opportunity to stop by yet, but from the website it seems like a humble “mom & pop” startup, small, but eager.
They are lacking operating hours on their website, but I emailed them and found out they’re open M-F 9-6 and 9-4 on Saturday’s.
I’ll stop by sooner or later, when schedule permits. Meantime, I felt a little publicity wouldn’t be a bad thing. 🙂
How does the saying go? “Speed is fine, but accuracy is final.”
It matters in many places in life. For example, I love to allude back to the Pentium Pro floating point bug. At the time, it was the fastest microprocessor out there, but who cares, because it gave wrong answers. This even held up in the classroom… that student that raised their hand first only mattered if they were the first one with the right answer; the teacher always kept going around until they got the right answer, not the first one. If you can be both fast and accurate, great. But it matters more to be accurate than fast.
So when it comes to shooting, we tend to tell people to go fast. Why? Because you don’t have time to waste. SuburbanDad just returned from Rangemaster with some data:
Speaking of timing, one fun fact – the FBI reports (again, according to Rangemaster staff) that for citizens using a gun in self defense, 92% of those gun fights occur between six to ten feet. The fights usually involve the citizen firing just over three shots, and the entire fight is over in 3.5 seconds. As Tom Givens, the boss man at Rangemaster often says, “you will run out of time before you run out of ammo.”
This is where that “3 shots at 3 yards in 3 seconds” being the statistical average of a gunfight came from, and formed the basis for KR Training’s “3 Seconds or Less Drill“.
So you don’t have time, but to just say “go fast” really isn’t the whole story.
First yes, you must go faster. I can see students in class that move at the speed of “mosey”. You cannot do this. You must move faster. But how fast should you move? It’s tough to quantify, but it should be the maximum speed at which you can move and still get acceptable hits. It may not be as fast as Todd Jarrett and that’s fine, but I’m sure you can move faster than you are. Basically, keep moving faster in small increments until you get to a point where your accuracy is no longer acceptable. There you go. You just have to push yourself to find your limit, then back off within that limit.
Second, you must realize that faster isn’t a singular thing for the whole operation. You must move at different speeds for different tasks. Drawing the gun and getting it on target should be a very fast movement and should always be fast no matter how you’re shooting. But then how fast you get the sights and press the trigger? That will vary depending on what you’re shooting: a large, close-up target can have a coarser sight picture than a small, far-away target. But the only way to ensure you have enough time for those slower things is to make sure you are using your time correctly on other tasks.
Third, use your time efficiently. Most people shoot by pressing the gun out, then pressing the trigger in. For the sake of simplifying the math, let’s say it takes you 1 second to press the gun out and 1 second to press the trigger in. If you perform this as a serial task (press out then press in), that takes you 2 seconds to complete the whole task. What if you performed the two tasks simultaneously? Thus as you press the gun out you also press the trigger in? You have done nothing to speed up the work as it still takes you 1 second to press the gun out and 1 second to press the trigger in. However, by performing the 2 actions simultaneously, you’ve now taken only 1 second to complete the whole task. There was no speed change, no rushing, no hurrying, just more efficient use of the time available. In fact, you could even move a little slower (e.g. 1.5 seconds to press out, and press trigger) yet still take less time than doing the two actions sequentially!
So it’s not really as simple as “go faster”, tho that’s certainly the first step many need to take. In the end, it’s about using what time you have in the most effective manner.
This past Saturday was one of the tougher days at KR Training. A couple of times a year, AT-1A Low Light Shooting is offered. It can only happen a couple of times a year because we need the sun to seat early (e.g. 6-7 PM). And since we offer two other classes prior to the low-light class, in this case Defensive Pistol Skills 2 started the day and the afternoon was AT-2: Force-on-Force Scenarios, which is a bit more physically involved for the instructors and well… I’m still recovering from the weekend. 🙂
While long — and many of the students came for all 3 classes — I think days such as this offer some of the most important training blocks. Not only are you getting some higher-level skills, but you’re starting to really move beyond the mechanical skills of self-defense to the more mental and mindset skills — which I’d argue are more important.
OK, so you just shot someone in self-defense. Now what do you do? Now what will you deal with?
Or how about we back up to 5 minutes before the shooting. Could you have avoided the need to shoot in the first place? Did you make the right choices leading up to and going through the situation?
If you’ve never actually role-played out some serious situations, I guarantee you will make mistakes — perhaps critical mistakes. Why? Because we’re human. The way humans work, we don’t “just know” how to do things: we have to be taught. Pick any sort of pressure situation that can exist in life, be it playing the big game, being on a game show, the big presentation at work, whatever. Did you just drop cold into that situation? Or did you prepare? Did your coach run you and the team through plays and drills and exercises to prepare you? Did you rewrite your presentation and rehearse it in front of the mirror a few times before the meeting? We set up and prepare ourselves before “the big moment” so when the moment arrives we can do it “just like we rehearsed” and it goes off without a hitch and a problem. If we drop in cold with no prep well… maybe we’ll make it through unscathed, maybe not. Is your life worth “winging it”?
The trouble is, we don’t know what we don’t know. Most people don’t realize the advantage of this sort of training — I know I didn’t. But I can still clearly remember how I felt after my first FoF scenario… and how horrible I felt. How sobering it was. How I didn’t know what to do, how I picked the wrong thing. Because all too often, we think that because we have a gun, we can and perhaps should use it… that we’ve got the hammer, and we’re looking for that nail. But you find out that most of the time the problems can and should be solved by some other means.
I was so happy to see students going through the AT-2 class and having their awakenings. There was one student in particular that I know got a good dose. During one of the restaurant scenarios, he was the CHL holder. He found himself wanting to just slip out of the situation, but as he got to the door he found himself turning around and struggling with an internal dilemma to get involved or not. We asked him why he did what he did, and it was just that internal struggle. We know we can do something, can we live with ourselves if we could have stopped it but didn’t? but should we get involved because I could get hurt and then who is going to pay my medical bills, my lawyer bills, take care of my family if I die, etc.? It’s a HUGE issue, and if you have not thought about such things before, you’re going to have trouble when the flag flies. We must draw our lines now, beforehand. We must sort out our feelings, beforehand.
Force-on-force sounds so scary, so intimidating. And yes, some levels can be (a SouthNarc ECQC may not be the best way to ease into the notion of FoF training). But KR Training AT-2 is a great way to start. It’s not physical — no contact, no wrestling, no striking. At most you might just be moving around, but I think the only reason people broke a sweat was from wearing long sleeve clothing and some extra gear out in the near-90 degree heat. 🙂 Your heart will get pumping tho, especially if everyone plays their roles well. You will get a mental and a bit of an emotional workout. But this is the place to get that workout. This is the place to make your inevitable mistakes. This is the place to start to figure out how to actually apply those hard skills of sight alignment and trigger control — and that you may be able to avoid applying those skills entirely.
If you’ve never done FoF, please do. It’s one of the more useful educational experiences you can have.
In other news about the day….
It was great to see some women taking these higher-level courses. In fact, Mrs. Groundhog was there for AT-2 and AT-1A, which was awesome. Great to see her and Mr. Groundhog too, who by the way is looking great (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just go catch up on their blog). For a reason that still alludes me (tho I have some guesses), women tend to not take higher-level training. It makes me happy to see this, because need for these skills aren’t gender-based — everyone needs them.
Skill take home: slow down.
Monster Magnet lyrics are a perfect thing to recite when you need to play the part of a mentally unstable person thinking the aliens are coming. Hey… I had to play off the weekend’s meteor shower. 🙂
My ankle is most unhappy with me again… too much time on it.
It’s always fun shooting at night. Muzzle blast is so fun to watch. It just doesn’t get old with me. And yes, I really need to bump finding a new EDC flashlight up my priority ladder (more on that some other day).
And I’ll end with a little love for the guys I work with: Karl, John (TXGunGeek, with his weekend writeup), and Tom. I’ve had the privilege of learning and working with these guys for a number of years now. I am thankful for their encouragement, the opportunity they give me to teach, and the ways they still teach and educate me. Thank you, guys. It’s always a pleasure, and I consider myself fortunate to be able to hang, run, and work with you.
Strictly speaking, violent crime is up. It jumped 18% last year — the first rise in nearly 20 years. Property crime rose for the first time in 10 years.
But should we stop there in examining this data?
The U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics reported Wednesday that the increase in the number of violent crimes was the result of an upward swing in simple assaults, which rose 22 percent, from 4 million in 2010 to 5 million last year. The incidence of rape, sexual assault and robbery remained largely unchanged, as did serious violent crime involving weapons or injury.
Property crimes were up 11 percent in 2011, from 15.4 million in 2010 to 17 million, according to the bureau’s annual national crime victimization survey. Household burglaries rose 14 percent, from 3.2 million to 3.6 million. The number of thefts jumped by 10 percent, from 11.6 million to 12.8 million.
The statistics bureau said the percentage increases last year were so large primarily because the 2011 crime totals were compared to historically low levels of crime in 2010. Violent crime has fallen by 65 percent since 1993, from 16.8 million to 5.8 million last year.
“2011 may be worse than 2010, but it was also the second-best in recent history,” said Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox.
“These simple assaults are so low-level in severity that they are not even included in the FBI counts of serious crime,” Fox said. FBI crime data only counts aggravated assaults.
The growth in violent crime experienced by whites, Hispanics, younger people and men accounted for the majority of the increase.
Now, one data point does not a trend make. To know if violent crime is actually taking an upward climb will require more data, and that just takes time.
But let us look at the crime data we do have.
Consider the general trend: crime has been decreasing. This is a great thing! There’s all sorts of things you could attribute this to, like the rise in gun sales, concealed carry permits, and individuals taking more direct responsibility for the safety and well-being of themselves. It could be that we’re improving our situation as a nation, because despite what the media and politicians say, we’re still quite well-off as a nation compared to much of the rest of world. But this is a complex matter and pinning the trend on a single cause isn’t going to happen. Let’s just be happy that crime is dropping.
But still… while the trend might be dropping, look at the hard numbers. 5 million simple assaults. That’s still a LOT of assaults… and that’s just simple assaults (doesn’t count rape, sexual assault, robbery). 3.6 million home break-ins… 12.8 million thefts. That’s still a LOT of crime going on! Even if crime is dropping, it’s still quite present. This trend doesn’t mean there isn’t crime… perhaps less chance of you encountering it, but still you have a chance of encountering it, and your chances remain higher than winning the lottery.
Accept that crime is out there. Accept that you can be a victim of crime. Do your best to avoid crime, to make yourself less of a target, decrease your chances of being a victim. Do your part to make the world a better place where people can be given options to choose crime or something better. And keep a realistic understanding of the world around you.
Old footage of Megadeth covering “These Boots are Made for Walkin'” by Nancy Sinatra
The devotion to tabloid is a symptom of our sick society. We don’t idolize heroes, we canonize failures, falls from grace, human weakness, Our priorities are warped and insensitive.
I know it seems contrary to my very nature… but running your mouth isn’t always the right thing to do. Say what must be said, and stop.
An article on the topic: YOU ARE YOUR OWN WORST, OR “BEST”, EVIDENCE
(h/t LowTechCombat)
A 12-year-old girl took matters into her own hands during a home invasion in southeast Oklahoma.
It happened on Wednesday when the girl was home alone. She told police a stranger rang the doorbell, then went around to the back door and kicked it in. She called her mom, Debra St. Clair, who told her to get the family gun, hide in a closet and call 911.
…
During that time, the intruder made his way through the house. St. Clair’s daughter told deputies the man came into the room where she was hiding and began to open up the closet door. That was when the 12 year old had to make a life-saving decision.
“And what we understand right now, he was turning the doorknob when she fired through the door,” said the Bryan County Undersheriff Ken Golden.
Full story, including some of the 911 call made by the little girl.
Good for her.
Good for Mom and her instructions.
This is a Right Thing to do. She didn’t confront, she hunkered down in as safe a place as she could to do her best to avoid the intruder. I personally might handle things differently, like using a command voice to tell them to get out. But for a 12-year-old, I consider what she did reasonable. And she got 911 on the phone and I’m sure kept the phone going… I’m guessing the gunshot is on the recording.
I wouldn’t recommend shooting through the door because you can’t be sure of your target. But I’ll give the girl the benefit of the doubt, because I don’t know all the details and obviously she hit the guy. You can hear her voice calm at first, but as he drew closer she was certainly scared to death. I can’t say I blame her at all for her actions.
It also brings up safe storage laws. The fact she was able to “get the family gun” means a readily dischargable gun was accessible to a minor. Granted, Oklahoma’s laws could be different in specifics, but I’m going to consider Texas’ law and the general notion of this legal concept. It may well be that this is a legal violation because the child was able to get the gun. But Thank God she was able to… because, as the print story doesn’t report but the video does, this same man was previously arrested for abducting a 17-year old girl. What if he found this girl and all she was doing was hiding in the closet with no means of defending herself? Would she still have been in the closet when Mom finally arrived home? Or would we have a tragic event on our hands?
We can also talk about general self-defense concepts. I mean, girl was on the phone with 911 and police were on their way… but they obviously didn’t get there in time. The police want to protect, they try to protect, but they cannot bend the laws of time and space and be everywhere and show up instantly on-demand. What can YOU do to keep yourself safe? What are you doing to take responsibility for yourself and the safety and well-being of your loved ones?
Teach your children. Teach them what to do in a case like this. Teach them how to use firearms in a safe and responsible manner. Help them understand. Help them care for themselves… because that’s what a parent does.
If you haven’t guessed, I like to write.
Some think I like to talk. No, not necessarily. But get me on the right topic, and I can go on.
Programmers are a funny bunch. They’ll write pages and pages of code, but they won’t say a whole lot. It tends to happen frequently with regards to comments.
Comments are blubs of text within code that don’t have much to do directly with the code, but tell us something about the code.
Comments help us understand.
Comments are also the subject of religious wars.
Some believe comments are evil and shouldn’t exist. I’ve seen a lot of course code that is devoid of comments. I generally assume the programmer is lazy or in a hurry when this happens. They might come back to say code should be self-documenting, but then I see the quality of their code is such that it doesn’t document much of anything.
To me, the trouble with self-documenting code is… what if the code is wrong? Comments (and perhaps design or API documentation written prior to the writing of code) provide a level of redundancy, because they provide the general overview, the abstract notion, the description of the promise of what is to happen. If the code jives, great. If it doesn’t, then we know there’s a problem. Can comments be wrong? Sure. But we tend to grok wrong comments better than wrong code, because it might be possible the code is right even if it looks wrong to us. What helps us determine that? You guessed it, comments.
See, comments are about the “why” of the code. We cannot tell WHY the code from the code; we cannot derive the reasons for the way the code is from the code itself. Once you write code, it will forever have to be maintained, so you need to think of the future maintainers — likely yourself 6 months from now, and yes you will have forgotten more than you expected. Do yourself a favor and comment your code.
I worked on a large software project many years ago. It was a huge beast of a mess of code. One day I went digging around after a memory problem and found a complete mess. See, every bit of memory you allocate, every resource you create, it must have a distinct owner. We have to know who made this mess so it can be cleaned up when we’re done. As I dug through the code, it became evident whomever wrote the original code played fast and loose with the ownership and numerous people assumed ownership over the memory but never rightly transferred that ownership. It created a massive mess, and in the end I determined there was no real safe way to properly clean things up. It was horrible.
Consequently, I wrote a lengthy diatribe in the code (comments) explaining the mess. It was pages long, because it was that ugly of a mess. I figured after all the crazy I went through, future folks ought to know about it so they could beware. Well… I left the company some months later, and then later on the product was sold to another company. I was at Apple’s WWDC (back in the old days) and came across a representative of the new company. When he saw my name his eyes got really wide and he said “YOU!!”. He started laughing. Seems they had come across my epic comment block and had a great laugh reading it, calling over everyone in the office to see it. He said I was a legend in their office for having written it. It was most amusing. 🙂
What spurred this walk down memory lane?
Over at AltDev is an article The Elements of Comment Style. It talks about the value of comments and the different types of comments. I never gave much thought to the types of comments — it’s just comments, there to explain what code itself cannot explain. But the article provides good reason for comments, and links to writings of others, like Knuth and Raskin, as to why comments are good (and wouldn’t those guys know).
In all my years of programming I’ve gone back and forth and refined my approach to comments. Do I think we need to have copious levels of documentation? Well, sure that’d be nice and ideal, but it’s tough to do that because comments and documentation also have to be maintained. There isn’t always time. And that, depends upon the scope of the project. I’m sure if I was writing some system for the .gov I’d be documenting everything to the Nth degree. But working in the mobile app space, sometimes you have to move faster than is healthy and there isn’t always time for formal comments. Maybe the best I can do is a couple lines at the start of a function to give the basics of what it does then “self-document” what are legal parameters by having a lot of asserts of the parameters at the start of the function, which do provide documentation and also a level of code robustness. But that approach only works when we have full access to the code; writing an opaque library/SDK would require a different approach. So there’s always trade-offs and balances to be found, depending upon context.
I haven’t written a multi-page comment since that one.
And if nothing else?
A little humor buried in code can always brighten your day. 🙂
I might be getting weaker, but I’m finding this time to improve technique.
“Week 2”
I also worked on chin-ups: 1 rep immediately after each bench press working set and assistance set (8×1). Totally still, dead hang, all the way up, chin clears the bar, then SLOW negative back down. And so, I just can’t do what I did in the DB rows before. But whatever… weight is relative.
The big thing is, I know I’m losing strength… which sucks but I’m finding it a good time to really work on form. I really noticed that my bar path on bench press is sucking. So I just slowed down, really controlled myself. Made things tougher, but of course a lot better… and my shoulders thank me. But I did notice that with my better body placement I didn’t quite have the foot placement. Basically I put my feet where I normally do, but with the better arch and placement there, I just didn’t get the hip drive I needed. That’s OK. Refinement is a process.
And really… while I can be bummed about the loss of absolute weight/strength, I will focus on form improvements and of course the fat loss. That’s plateaued a bit so I’m revisiting my eating. I know one thing that has hurt as well is the loss of some additional exercise. Things like an injured ankle really don’t help. 😦 So, squat more and faster, I guess. 😉
Stuff From Hsoi 