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The Big Tex Ordnance Podcast
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The Big Tex Ordnance Podcast
Choosing When to Press the Trigger: Eric Weiss on Law Enforcement Decisions | Cornerstone Perfromance
So we get the call. There's a kid with a gun, like on the football field. He's going into the elementary school. You can imagine, like all the cops, who's coming.
Speaker 2:Everyone yeah how crazy.
Speaker 3:Everybody.
Speaker 1:Everybody's coming to shoot this kid To burn it down. Yeah, like everybody is coming to shoot this kid. One time I met a guy that had a possum living in his hair.
Speaker 4:In his hair. Yeah, when I think of cop stories.
Speaker 1:Everybody's been in a police chase, but the thing that I have that nobody else has so far I've never met anybody else. The lady calls, she goes hey, there's a panhandler in the street. I'm like okay, whatever, we don't care. And he has a baby possler in the street. I'm like okay, whatever, we don't care. Andy has a baby possum in his hair. I'm like I am on my way. I changed to baby possum here.
Speaker 1:Now it's a cute story. I am on my way. I get there and the guy runs over. He goes you can't get me, I'm not in the road. I'm like, listen, I don't care about being on the road. I'm kind of like I look around and he has got a baby possum. It's like this big In his hair. He's got nasty hobo hair and this possum is hanging on like it would to its little possum mom. It's hanging in his hair. I said somebody said you had a possum in your hair. And he goes yeah, and he reached his arm and said I'm not lying, he bets it. He goes this is Benjamin. And at that moment I was like, well, this is my career, I'm never going to top this. And I said, ok, well, everything's fine, you're not in trouble, but I was just wondering would it be OK if I took a picture of Benjamin and he goes? I guess so, and I ran so fast to get my phone.
Speaker 1:I started taking pictures of this possum, and I'm not lying. I will sacrifice a little bit of the truth for the sake of a good story, but everything I'm about to tell you is true. This possum it hides and then it goes like this and peeks out of his hair and he's reaching up and petting it. It was at the same time so disgusting and so fascinating, all colliding. He had a baby possum. He goes yeah, his mom was living in my camp and then his mom died. I'm taking care of him.
Speaker 1:Benjamin. There, he named it Benjamin. I'm pretty sure he ate. Mom is what happened. Like mom died I'm like okay, but yeah, possum in his hair. That's the cop story that I have, that I don't think anybody else has.
Speaker 3:Yeah, top that.
Speaker 1:All cops have done all the cop things, but so far I'm the only one that has possum in the hair. That's a good one, that's a really good one oh man.
Speaker 3:Well, that has possum in the hair, that's a good one, that's a really good one, oh man. Well, there's the podcast. We can just stop right now yeah. Oh man, that's wild.
Speaker 1:Well, I'll say this, based off of what I observed that day the possum was not like potty trained, oh man. I'm just saying, yeah, it's all fun and games until the possum's got to go and then it's in your hair. What else is in your hair for, really?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, on that note, welcome to the Big Tech's Ordnance Podcast. I'm Ike. We have Brendan today with us going in front of the camera. Today, he's usually the one behind it and behind the scenes, making everything look good and making me sound smart.
Speaker 4:He doesn't do a very good job of that. It's better than it would be wrong. I can only do so much behind the editor, yeah.
Speaker 3:Technology has only advanced so far.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I'm not a miracle worker, I just edit videos.
Speaker 3:We also have Beto today making another appearance, and then our guest Eric Weiss from Cornerstone Performance. Thanks for coming down and chatting with us for a bit If you want to give us a quick little story on who Eric is and how you got to where you are right now and fill us in on the backstory.
Speaker 1:Eric Wise, I've been copying for just over 20 years, coming up on 21 here pretty quick. I work for a large department here in Texas. I teach full-time at the range. I've been doing that for the last nine years or so. I'm currently in charge of the pistol program for the department. We do firearms and tactics, so active shooter response and building search, low light techniques, all that stuff. I assist with all that. My responsibility is the pistol program. Then I help with a lot of the other stuff. It's the typical cop story. I did the cop stuff and I teach at the range now.
Speaker 1:I started Cornerstone Performance several years ago. Last year I decided we're going to see if classes will fill up. Let's actually do some stuff and see what happens with it. I had formed Cornerstone just for the tax write-off. I'm doing all this stuff. I need to do something with the money. It had been sitting in the background for a while. Last year Y'all came out for a class last year. This year things have gotten real busy. I am booked through about the middle of June. Yeah, booked, booked. I don't know if I could fit another class in if I wanted to. Then we've got some stuff in August and September already on the books and scheduling some more stuff for September and October this week yeah, it's gotten real big Cornerstone. I went to a class with a guy.
Speaker 3:So you mainly just see him in Texas or do you book anything outside the state it's kind of a hey, we're already doing this, but we need the instructor cert.
Speaker 1:So we went to the class and when we left he told me he goes. Okay, we've got to really do this for real. If this is the product that's being put out to cops. We can put out a better product than this, and the cops deserve it. Everybody complains that cop training is so bad. Well then go do something about it. Let me talk to them and try to get you across the border and we'll do one for Georgia too.
Speaker 4:You mentioned the law enforcement training because it being lacking and things like that, or a lot of people say that it is. What kind of issues do you think are the biggest issues when it comes to firearms training and law enforcement today?
Speaker 1:do you think are the biggest issues when it comes to firearms training and law enforcement today? There's two. Somebody asked me this last year. You have to answer the question what's wrong with firearms training? I think it's two things. One of those is cops don't realize how bad they are. It's an insulated group. I say that Cops are better shooters than what people give them credit for, at least the ones that I see.
Speaker 3:I say that because, I trained them right.
Speaker 1:A lot of cops are better than what you give them credit for. We're just measuring them by the wrong standard.
Speaker 1:If you're going to measure them by USPSA standards, they're all real bad. I've done this. I've taken cop shooters and I'm like, let's shoot this USPSA classifier. They all classify as C-class. None of them are good shooters. But if you remove the USPSA scoring part of it I've got two M cards in USPSA and I've got several GM cards in Steel Challenge. I've done that thing. I'm speaking from some experience there. When you remove the USPSA scoring and movement part out of it and you say, hey, shoot that.
Speaker 1:The cops that I know can hit the thing Just pressing the trigger, they can do that. But if you measure them by USPSA now, do this movement In USPSA classifiers the movement matters? You have to be very careful about entries and exits and transitions and having the gun in a certain place at a certain time. All those are useful and they're useful for cops, but that's a very USPSA-specific thing. So if you measure them by that standard, no, they're not good shooters. The cops I know. If you're like, hey, shoot that, they can all hit it. They can press the trigger. At least the ones that I'm around can press the trigger and hit the thing One. They haven't been exposed to anything outside of that. They need exposure to what really good shooting looks like when you combine it with all those other aspects that we talked about. A lot of the shooting that they do is just stand here and press the trigger when that's all you're ever exposed to. You get really good at that because you don't see anything else. One part of it is they're just not exposed to what really exceptional shooting looks like. The other part would be the risk in training is not high enough, in my opinion. My ideal law enforcement qual would be a points-based system with realistic vital areas. Then also, if any of your shots are misses and by misses, I would say let's call it the D zone. On a USPSA target, the D is a miss. Either you're going through a coat or you're hitting them in the edges. It's ineffective and you're likely to get pass-throughs. My ideal qual would be D is a miss. If you miss, you're done. That is a failure. Shoot it again.
Speaker 1:I worked for an agency before I got to where I'm at now. That was similar to that. All the shots had to be on the target. It wasn't C-zone, d-zone, but if any of the shots landed off the person, it was a failure. I think it's an excellent way to assess people. At a minimum you have to be able to always hit the person Makes sense Right. To me that seems very reasonable. Now, I'm not in charge of running an organization of 1,500 people. If I were the administrator of that organization, I would probably not make things harder to be a part of that organization either.
Speaker 1:Nationwide we've got a shortage of cops. I'm not going to try to start kicking people out. If I'm the administrator. The risk associated with failure isn't high enough for a lot of what cops are exposed to. You just have to get the 70 or the 80 or whatever your minimum is. It's too easy to get that minimum and then there's no risk associated with missing. I think that's the other part of it. So yeah, those are the things I think are lacking In my opinion.
Speaker 1:Here's what I've seen. I deal with a lot of cops Already. This year I've only done two classes this year and in those two classes I've seen cops from nine different agencies. What I've seen is that law enforcement does not have a training problem. Law enforcement nationwide. They don't have a training problem. They don't have a shooting problem. They have a negligent hiring and retention problem that manifests in police training and in police shooting. A lot of these shootings because you only see the outliers on YouTube.
Speaker 1:On YouTube you're like whoa, yeah, look at this crazy guy. He shot 17 times. He didn't hit anything. Well, yeah, that guy shouldn't have been a cop. That's not a training thing. There are some people that I can't train to be a cop because they should never be cops. I'm not trying to be a gatekeeper or exclusive or anything like that, but I couldn't be a brain surgeon. There is no amount of training that would make me qualified to send rockets into the air. There's nothing I could do to make that happen and you could never teach me to do that. And some people just aren't cut out to be cops. That guy that missed 17 times on YouTube just shouldn't have been a cop.
Speaker 3:Like the acorn guy, right, like he hears a noise and then just starts blasting through a neighborhood. Oh, I forgot about that one. Yeah, I forgot about that one.
Speaker 2:That was a crazy one.
Speaker 1:So tell me, am I quick? Everybody's like, yeah, police training sucks. I'm like, well, you tell me what training course, what training block could I have given that guy to say, hey, when you hear a loud noise, don't blast through a neighborhood. You know, like I, I have never thought to put that in a class, right, like that's not a training issue, that's a negligent hiring and retention issue. Um, and whenever I see crazy things where I work, like the, really the outliers, when I see those, I'm like, oh, that tracks. I'm not surprised that this person did this crazy thing. Whether it's shooting or not, just in life, just crazy things that happen. You're like, yeah, that guy's crazy. Of course he did a crazy thing. That's the biggest issue in my opinion. There's some things that can be fixed within the police training culture, but it needs to be fixed at an administrative level. A cultural change needs to be staffed at 1,000 people. Give me 400 people that are hyper-qualified, rather than just 400 OK people and then 400 just dudes Should not be there.
Speaker 1:Yeah they can work at Discount Tire, they can work at Jack in the Box or they can be a cop, Just whatever.
Speaker 4:I don't want that guy because he's bringing all of the high performers down. Yeah, I can definitely see that issue. It's not simple. I don't think to solve that with today's politics and everything with problems with hiring with some of these agencies.
Speaker 1:And you can do. There's things being done when we have classes. If I put a class on the calendar tomorrow, it will be full tomorrow. What I see is cops hungry for training. I've been doing A lot of the classes that I'm doing are through the George Pastore Foundation. George Pastore, are you familiar with it? Through you? Okay, yeah, you talked about it last class. Yeah, the Pastor Foundation is.
Speaker 1:George was a cop in Texas that died in a hostage rescue. I don't mean to diminish anybody's service, but cops can die. If I get run over directing traffic next week, that's tragic and I'm sorry that that happened. But that's different than what George did, where he's like there's a man with a gun in there, I'm going to go get him. He's going to kill those people if I don't go in right now and there's a high likelihood that I'm going to get shot doing this. And he decided at that moment it wasn't like a reflex, it was a conscious decision now we're going to go through that door to save those people. And George died. That's real-deal cop work. And so George died.
Speaker 1:His wife, kim, has set up the George Pastore Foundation, so she established a nonprofit. Part of what the nonprofit does is fund police training. She gets corporate donors large-scale corporate donors to donate money to the foundation. Part of what she does with that is fund police training. I'm a small part of that. For instance, sunday, in a couple of days, I'm going to be doing a low-light class out at Staccato Ranch. It's open to civilians so anybody can sign up on my website. Anybody can come take it. But all the cops that sign up are funded through scholarships from the Pastor Foundation. That's awesome, okay, so the cops come for free, like we've got people coming driving to a staccato ranch from the DFW area, driving from Houston, from San Marcos, you know, like way down, like all over the state.
Speaker 1:People are so hungry for training that they're driving in for this stuff. They just need access to it. And so when you're like, what's, what's the problem with police training? Well, there's not enough good stuff out there because the cops want it. And when the cops show up, they are locked in as long as they're there. They are hungry for good training.
Speaker 1:And so you can fix it outside of the administration, the politics and that's part of what Kim has been big on she's like yeah, I don't care what they're doing over there, departments are broken, the government's broken. Okay, well then, ignore the government. I'm not trying to fix that, I'm just going to do it myself. I see a problem, I'm going to fix a problem. And so she's gone out and gotten donors and she's found people like me and some other people she's like here, go train these people. Go find them and go train them. Big picture our goal is to take the show on the road. I'll load up my trailer. I've got a cousin that's a deputy in East Texas. His county training budget for the sheriff's office is $3,000 a year.
Speaker 4:That's not very much. Yeah, that's the sheriff's office.
Speaker 1:That's deputies, that is the jailers, that's the dispatchers. Dispatcher needs CPR training. It's coming out of that $3,000. So everybody gets five bucks. Yeah, the jailer needs to learn how to use pepper spray. That's coming out of the $3,000. You can't buy ammo for a department for $3,000. There's a lack of training in those areas. So trying to get stuff to people like that is part of the big picture. Long-term, what the Foundation's going to try to do.
Speaker 4:I like that. We need more of that People solving problems on their own without looking for somebody else like government in the situation to solve it for them. We need communities to come together and do things like that.
Speaker 3:It's a lot easier on the micro scale instead of having some centralized big bureaucracy trying to coordinate it all. That's where a lot of that kind of breaks down. If you're doing it, a small organization can be a lot more effective in this regard, I believe.
Speaker 1:So if Elon's watching, Jay Pastore. Foundation. Yeah, just go and give them a bunch of money and you want cops trained? We'll train them.
Speaker 2:You said you do offer civilian training with all of your classes too. Are there some just military LE, or are they all open to civilians?
Speaker 1:The only stuff that I do that is LE only is due to range restrictions. If the facility says this is an LE only because of insurance or whatever, I can't do anything about that. But yeah, all the other classes. Matter of fact, I'm doing a 40-hour instructor school next month at a police facility that civilians are coming to.
Speaker 1:My civilians are coming to get the 40-hour TECOL instructor training. The CERT doesn't do anything for them. They're just hungry for the training and so I don't want to make a distinction. In the foundation it said we're not going to make a distinction between cops and civilians. It's good guys and bad guys. That's awesome. And we're going to get all the good guys trained up. That's awesome. That's the other part of the mission of the foundation community outreach. You want to link cops and civilians. Put them on the range together, let them go shoot together. The class I came to and I've had people comment. They just showed up to the class and I'm taking a class with the guy on the SWAT team in the city where I live. That's outreach, that's building relationships with people.
Speaker 2:I asked that because I just wondered, in creating the curriculum and drill structure and stuff like that for your classes, I just wondered if that would change at all if it was just law enforcement and civilians, or just how those certain things would transfer with what people are coming to the classes for and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all the curriculum is the same. I build it all to be offensive-defensive in nature. The distinction I make, defensive being reactionary, I can't get away. Ike's trying to get me. I can't get away. I don't have an option. Offensive being well, he's over there and I don't have to do anything. I could just get in my car and drive away, but I decide to go get him. If I'm at the mall I hear gunshots at the mall, I could just leave. But if you decide to go solve the problem, that's offensive. I'm going to do it.
Speaker 1:Every drill is offensive-defensive in nature. Now the application can kind of change some. That's some of the stuff we talk about in the patrol marksman class. We talk about angle shooting and stuff. Either you are on top of a parking garage doing Overwatch for this parade or this event like downtown at your town, or this is post-apocalypse. You're on the roof of Costco that you took over, you've got the parking lot barricaded in and here come some people. Now we've got to do some target identification ID. The people target discrimination of these good guys, bad guys. Is this a mom and her kids and they need some canned soup, or is that guy coming to get my penicillin? I need to know, and so the drill looks exactly the same. The application for the two different people is a little bit different, but I try to talk about that and it's fun because people like to think about defending their penicillin.
Speaker 2:That's so cool, though I know there's some other training courses and they'll be like oh, that's just law enforcement. Only that can't really translate into a civilian class, but that's so cool how you explain how that can be. It into a civilian class, but that's so cool how you explain how that can be. It's the same drill, but you can apply it to however you'd like. It's really really cool that you offer that.
Speaker 1:We talked about, because it's patrol marksman is the name of the LPVO class. We talked about running a patrol marksman and then a marauder marksman.
Speaker 3:It's the exact same class, but one.
Speaker 1:the context is just you're defending yourself against the marauders. Post the fall, the marauders are coming to get you Deegan's there. What?
Speaker 2:are you going?
Speaker 3:to do about it.
Speaker 1:But yeah, the exact same class. You would just change the title.
Speaker 3:Marketing 101 with Eric.
Speaker 2:That's awesome man, that's very cool.
Speaker 3:Actually, on that note, one of the drills that you do in class. It's pinned on our Instagram right now. There's a pretty intensive drill. It doesn't sound like a lot, but when you actually start doing it the heart rate gets up pretty high. Can you walk us through that drill and what it is and why you incorporate that in the class?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I haven't come up with a good name for it. If anybody's got a good name, let me know. It's not burpees. When I say burpees, everybody panics. It's not like a true burpee. But what we do first, the first thing we do is get a 30-round composite. We do this morning of day two Rifles should be zeroed. But then we do three 10-round groups. If we need to make adjustments, we make any adjustments. Two more 10-round groups on top of that to overlay a 30-round composite. 30-round composites are important. Can I pimp Hornady's?
Speaker 3:podcast on here.
Speaker 1:On Hornady's podcast. It's episode no 50,. Your Groups Are Too Small. They go through the math of three-round groups vs five 10, what kind of data are you getting? A 30-round group gives you 97% of the rounds that'll ever come out of your gun. We can talk some more about why I'm fully in the camp of 30-round groups.
Speaker 3:Let's explore this rabbit hole right now. That was my next question. This is perfect. We'll go ahead and just do it 30-round composites.
Speaker 1:It represents 97% of the rounds that your gun's ever going to fire.
Speaker 1:We call that the cone of fire. Why that's important? We use 30 rounds? For two reasons. One it's 97%.
Speaker 1:Hornady's done the math. If you go up to 50 or 60 rounds, your group size will only increase by 7%. I'm going to math in public, but we're talking about 7%. If you've got a three-inch group, we're at a quarter of an inch, which is what I found. I fired up to 60 round composites. After that, first 30 rounds is fired. You draw a circle around them. You only get your outliers are a bullet diameter. They're just on the outside of the circle. The group size doesn't increase, you're just filling in the holes in the middle. You just get one big ragged hole and you keep shooting. Hornady's done up to 500 rounds. The group size never increases Beyond 50,. The group size doesn't increase. They just wallow out the middle.
Speaker 1:Why that's important? One for zeroing purposes. When I was growing up I'd zero my deer rifle. It holds three bullets. I fire three. You go down there and you're like okay, I need to go up and right. And you click it up and right and you go down there and they're like it's supposed to be here but it's actually over here. You're like, oh, maybe I clicked it the wrong way.
Speaker 1:And then you walk up and down the range chasing three round groups, the clicks and the scope or whatever. But it's just as likely that what you're getting if you would have just kept firing, you're only getting three out of your cone of fire. What you saw the first time were these three over here. Then you made some adjustments and you moved the group correctly, but then you only saw these three over here. And then you made some adjustments and you moved the group correctly, but then you only saw these three over here. The group would have been centered over the bullseye, but you're only seeing the edges. And so then you click it and you move your cone of fire way over here. And then you get these Like, oh no, I went too far and you end up chasing that cone of fire when it was probably at some point it was centered. You just weren't seeing the total cone of fire. So it makes zeroing easier.
Speaker 1:I've talked to guys that are like every time I go to the range I've got to adjust my zero. Two things about that. One, if you're always having to change your zero. Your scope has one job. The scope's one job is to tell you where the bullet's going to go. If it doesn't do that one job, we have a word to describe that it's broken. It's broken. It's not something you shouldn't have to keep tweaking that with something that is operating correctly. To keep tweaking that with something that is operating correctly. But the other part is you may just be seeing a piece of your cone of fire. So I go out and next week I see the top right corner and this time I see bottom left corner. If you get a good baseline, so a 30-round composite, it hurts people's feelings because everybody wants to have the one MOA gun. Or I've got a half MOA gun, but when you ask them you've got a one MOA gun. Here's a one-inch square, can you go hit it Like? Well, maybe.
Speaker 1:No, if it's a one MOA gun, you should be able to point to that spot and hit it.
Speaker 3:So it hurts your feelings because everybody's one MOA gun turns into a two and a half or three MOA gun. That's a pet peeve of mine. Everyone on the internet or not everyone, I shouldn't speak in absolutes but everyone's like it has to be at least MOA. If it's not sub-MOA, it's a trash barrel, it's like well, most of the guys claim that can't shoot one MOA anyway, I think one MOA barrels is something that's like. I don't think a lot of the guns out there are actually one MOA that are claiming to be one MOA. Like if you fired a 30-round composite, it's going to be way more than one.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, and that's the thing. Group size tells you how tightly some of your rounds might be clustered. Sometimes In the real world that has no application. I need to know can I hit that thing or not? Because they'll be like, well, yeah, it's three rounds. But whenever they post like, look, I fired all these three-round groups, they're in different places in relation to the aiming point, like, okay, well, that doesn't do me any good. I need to know if I can hit the thing or not. And so 30-round composites resolve some of that problem for you. Because, okay, I know that my cone of fire is centered over the bullseye and then when I go to check my zero next time, I can fire. And if I know that my cone of fire is three inches centered around the bullseye, then I go out and I fire five. As long as those five are within that three-inch circle, I know that I'm still zeroed. It eliminates all of this headache and drama where, every time I go to the range, most of my range time is spent dealing with zero.
Speaker 2:It's so funny you're saying that when I first started shooting I would get so mad because I'm like I zeroed it on the bullseye. Why am I not hitting the bullseye every time? I just remember thinking back to that. It's just so funny.
Speaker 1:What I'm more interested in. Rather than finding out how tightly some of my bullets can sometimes be clustered, I want to know if I can hit a thing or not. The offensive-defensive nature, right. If I look at a thing, I want to know what's my likelihood of hitting that thing. That's what Cone of Fire does for you. It helps you make shoot-no-shoot decisions If I see a partial target. In our classes we use either full C-zones or 8-inch plates. 8-inch plates represent a partial target, a piece of someone, either a piece or an incapacitating hit. If I hit you in that 8-inch vital zone, it's incapacitating. So I look at that 8-inch target and I'm like OK, well, at this distance from this position, my cone of fire is 12 inches and I'll have an 8 inch target with a dirty background. Right, there's a guy like looking around the back of a truck at me and I've only got eight inches to shoot at. Behind him is the elementary school, right, like he was fixing to go into the school. He heard me pull up and he turns on. He's shooting at me. If my cone of fire is 12, I can't just start pressing the trigger knowing that 30% of my rounds best case scenario, 30% of my rounds, are going to miss him and go into that school, into that playground. So it helps you make shoot-no-shoot decisions, like in an offensive-defensive scenario. It also helps in match settings. I've used this. Yeah, it also helps in match settings. I've used this.
Speaker 1:If I know, at the Sons of Liberty, the carbine match over there, they've got a target at 500 yards. I put my 500-yard hold I'd been watching the wind, I knew my hold held center, pressed the trigger and didn't get a hit. I couldn't see it. I got no indication that I had hit or missed. Ro didn't call hit. I immediately just sent another one because I knew that at that distance my cone of fire was potentially larger than the target, or the same size roughly. What happens is if your target is this big and your cone of fire is this big, what you don't want to do is immediately start making big adjustments Like, oh, maybe it's the wind, I'll aim over here. No, maybe you held everything perfect and you just sent this one instead of this one. So I immediately just followed it up with another one Exact same hold and got a hit. And that was related to cone of fire, not environment. So in match settings it can also help make shoot-no-shoot decisions. What am I going to do for this target? So, anyway, the 30-round composite. Sorry, out of the rabbit hole.
Speaker 1:The first thing we do that morning is fire 30-round composite. We're going to see what is our cone of fire. We talk about all those things we just said why it matters and what we can do with that information. But then we put up a fresh B8, fresh 30-round mag. Start standing, drop to prone it's not off bipod, just magazine prone. Drop to prone, fire around, stand up. Drop to prone, fire a round, stand up. Drop to prone, fire a round, stand up. You can do that for 30 rounds. The goal is to keep them all in the black in five minutes. It gives you 10 seconds per shot, which is enough time. I think Ike finished with 30 seconds to spare. Yeah, I was way too fast on that one. Yeah, like it's enough time if you just do things correctly.
Speaker 1:Then what we do? We have a B8 with a 30-round composite, another B8 with a 30-round composite under heart rate and field conditions less than ideal conditions, and you can see the difference between the two. My gun best-case scenario with me behind it shoots a three or four-inch cone of fire, but on this drill it was eight inches. Well, that's good information to have whenever I'm making those shoot-no-shoot decisions. Can I pull the trigger on this person, on this high-risk target? Should I press the trigger or not? You can't be thinking I've got my one MOA gun. I can do this. Right now. What you have is an eight-inch cone of fire. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. What we take away from that it's just GoPro, go prone fire around, stand up, go prone fire around.
Speaker 1:The guys over on the Rock Slide Forum. They have a long-range hunting school. Some of the things that they've talked about that have come out of that is that they do 10-round groups. Just drop to prone fire around in 10 seconds. It's not all one string. Then stand up, start the timer, drop to prone fire a round in 10 seconds. What they found is that 10-round group is very representative of field condition shooting. They do that and then they spend a week in the mountains shooting off of boulders and trees and packs and prone and stuff. They've said that the 10-round group you get under that drop to prone represents the accuracy that people can replicate in field conditions, which is the conditions that you're going to have on the roof of Costco or you're going to have over the hood of your patrol car. The new 30-round composite tells us this is what I can do, perfect, and this is what I can do from field positions to give us just more information. The more information we can have about our shooting, the better off we'll be, yeah, accurate data for sure.
Speaker 1:The drill started when I first did that. It was supposed to be like a PT, like yeah, we're going to get our heart rate up or whatever. And since then what I've learned is that it's not about that as much as it is mental management, because you see those crossers, they kind of bounce off the black and you've got to decide am I going to take one more second or not? Every second matters. Am I going to wait two seconds and break or not? Every second matters. Am I going to wait two seconds and break it in the black, or am I just going to hope for it?
Speaker 1:I've found that the guys who can manage the mental part of it are the ones that are successful on that. It's not the super fit guys, it's just the guy that can go. I'm only going to press the trigger when I know it's a hit, because I know that my gun can do it. I'm only going to press the trigger when I know it's a hit because I know that my gun can do it. So I'm only going to press the trigger when it's a hit. And having that mental discipline is a separate skill that should be developed for people in like an offensive, defensive kind of situation.
Speaker 2:Definitely Very cool.
Speaker 3:I think it's a good drill, I think it reveals a lot. And then you know, like also to uh, like I've done it twice now. So the first time I think it reveals a lot. And then you know, like also to Like I've done it twice now. So the first time I think I broke the last shot, like as the timer went off, yeah cuz. So then the second time around, I'm like okay, I'm gonna have to pick up the pace a little bit, you know. And then I lost track of how many shots I had after like 15. So like I was like, oh shit.
Speaker 3:How many Speeding up way too fast. I had a few Flyers on that one. Well, like speeding up way too fast, I had a few flyers on that one. Like you said, making sure that when you press a trigger, those crosshairs are where you want it to be. Also, one thing I've found is good enough is You're trying to keep it all in the black right. It doesn't have to be perfectly in the center. Is my wobble zone going over that black section and press a trigger when it's good enough? You're not trying to hit a 1 inch square, you've got an 8 inch. How big is the black?
Speaker 1:one. The black is 5 1⁄2. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You've got a 5 1⁄2 inch thing that you're trying to hit. Good enough is Break it when it's there, not when it's perfect. Yeah, the mental aspect to it is a really big part of it, and then with that it's stress of your heart rate and all that kind of stuff. It's a good drill. I like it. It covers a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't do the tactical games, I'm not that guy.
Speaker 3:It's not CrossFit with a gun, yeah exactly.
Speaker 1:So there's no other drills really in that class that are super. There's some stuff where we're moving around and we're active, but I tried to make it. Yeah, we're going to get our heart rate up for a purpose. We are going to learn things Every drill. I think you should be learning. You should be gathering information from every drill. If there's a drill that you're not learning from a very specific thing from, we can cull that one. We can replace it with something else or something better.
Speaker 3:So on that note, I guess pretty much the last half of day two is the target discrimination stuff. We spent a lot of time on that. Can you talk about that and kind of why it makes the case for having a magnified optic?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so here's what we found. Target discrimination is a thing. People disagree on whether or not an LPVO is the ideal tool for that, and it is true. There are many situations where the bad guy is very obvious. It's the guy shooting. I go. Ok, I don't need magnification to say that's the one. But there are times when that's not the information you have. Maybe the information is Ike had the gun and he's running into that place. He's chasing that guy. Okay, well, who's chasing that guy? I'm going to go kill him. I'm running into the school. Well, there might be three people running into the school. Three of them are teachers that are trying to get inside and lock down and one of them's the bad guy who's been identified. We know for sure that dude's got the gun. He's the bad guy. He's going into the school. You need to be able to see which one. It is Making shoot-no-shoot decisions In the real world.
Speaker 1:There's a kid in the the town that I work. There is a kid alive right now because a patrol cop had a 1-4 optic on his patrol rifle. We get the call. There's a kid with a gun on the football field. He's going into the elementary school. They get there. They're looking for him, looking for him. They come around the corner of the building and they see him. He is carrying a rifle. He's going into the school this friend of mine, he looks and he sees him. He said it was just demeanor. He's like something wasn't right. He went to 4X, braced off the corner of the building and he immediately knew it was a BB gun. He goes. I've had BB guns. I know what a BB gun looks like. That's a BB gun. He's able to get on the radio. You, you can imagine, like all the cops, who's coming.
Speaker 2:Everyone yeah, how crazy.
Speaker 1:Everybody, everybody's coming to shoot this kid, to burn it down. Yeah, like everybody is coming to shoot this kid and he's able to get on the radio and say nobody shoot. I am telling you, don't shoot him, don't shoot him. That's not a real gun. Um, and without four X magnification, that kid would be dead, yeah Right, and like a lot of lives ruined. You know not just the legal aspect of it, but like you just shot a kid for no reason, that kid is dead. His mom doesn't have a kid anymore because of you. Um, so like, yes, like, in the real world, magnification matters For target discrimination. There's absolutely a place for it, at least for that kid there was.
Speaker 1:We start with some range estimation stuff If it is LPVO-specific. We don't use the C-zones a lot. We try to use partial targets. We have eight-inch plates all the way out to 250 yards. We expect to be able to hit them. You can't just use the rough math like I'll be four inches high and four inches low, not with a cone of fire on an eight-inch plate. You have to know exactly where your bullet's going. But the other part of that is I need to know how far away it is so that I'll know where to hold. We do some range estimation on a live actor. My partner, john's usually with me. I'll send John downrange, he'll stop and we'll talk at 100 yards.
Speaker 1:How do you know people are at 100, 200, 300? We typically stop the class at 300. At 100 yards you can generally recognize people. I can see Ike's face. If I know Ike, I would recognize him At 100 yards. You can see people's faces At 200 yards, between one and two, you can see people's hands, distinguished, like you can actually see hands Out to 300, at 300, you start losing hands.
Speaker 1:You see arms but you lose hands. At 200, you start losing face. At 100 you see arms but you lose hands. And at 200, you start losing like face. At a hundred I can recognize you. At 200. Yeah, he's got a head, but I don't. I don't see his face anymore, but I can definitely see his hands. All right, well, if you can't see face but you can see hands, this guy's in between one and two, right, and so now I can start bracketing between I don't know exactly, but I can bracket between one and two If I say, ok, I see that he has a face, but now I've lost his hands. Ok, well, that guy. He's beyond 200 yards but I can know that he's inside of 300, because I can see arms being distinguished. So I don't see hands, I see arms. He's inside three. I can bracket for two and three on a full target. We do real-world range estimation. Look at that person. These are the things that you're looking for.
Speaker 2:This is under magnification, or just straight, yeah, just eyes as soon as you introduce the magnification.
Speaker 1:So, naked eye, I'm looking around at people. Okay, there's the guy, what can I see on that guy? And then we can use magnification to make decisions about shooting him or not, to further PID, yeah, and so then that's the other thing we do. We'll send somebody downrange with handgun and cell phone and he just starts walking the range. So he's walking the range, everybody.
Speaker 1:So we take bolts out of rifles you were looking at a real person with a real gun, with your rifle. So we take bolts out, we safe everything. And then you just get on a barricade and we watch that guy, and so he stops and then he'll turn around and present something, um, either pistol or cell phone, um, and then you've got to make shoot, no shoot, decision. Like, look at him through the, through the optic, would you press the trigger? And if you say yes, I would press the trigger. Then the question is okay, come off the optic and tell me how far away he is. Okay, and then, after you decide how far away he is, tell me in your optic, where would you hold Right? So either well, I know that he's within 100, I'm going to hold on, or I believe he's at 250, and in my reticle this is my 250 hold, so we start incorporating at the end of day two, all of the things we've been doing go into that one drill.
Speaker 1:We have somebody just start roaming the range. We spend 15 or 20 minutes and he just stops at random places. We've been gathering data For target discrimination. What do you really need? It changes. We found a big difference if gun is in profile versus gun at you, if I'm squared up to you, like this, versus if I hold it out to my side. If I hold it out to my side, it's real easy, but if I turn around and it's obscured or it's blocked, the backdrop is the person. It's real hard to tell. We've found that in those real-world scenarios and I don't ask do you think it's a gun?
Speaker 3:Because it's two different questions right.
Speaker 1:Do you think it's a gun or are you going to press the trigger? Yes or no? That's two very different questions. When can I be 100% certain that I would press the trigger? I am positive that's a gun. What we found is 4X gets you to about 125 yards. It's not very far. 6x, most people can get to 200-ish. The guys that come with 1-8s can get to 250 or so. We've had a couple of people come with the Razor 1-10s and at 300, nobody has been able to tell me. Yeah for sure. The question is not do you think it's a gun? The question is would you press the trigger? And even with 10X at 300 yards and that's part of the reason we stopped the class you know, for my application I'm not going to be pressing the trigger on somebody beyond 300 yards. You know, in a real-world scenario and beyond 300, you're not going to be able to tell if it's them or not anyway.
Speaker 1:So yeah, the 4X is not a whole lot and I've taken second place at the Suns match in limited. So that's shooting a dot. You just shoot the whole match with a dot. I've shot limited a lot competitively and, yes, you can hit targets a long way off. I'm not saying you can't do that. You can definitely hit targets a long way off. I'm not saying you can't do that. You can definitely hit targets a long way with just a dot. That's not what I'm talking about, though. I'm talking about deciding if you're going to kill a man.
Speaker 3:And keep it on him, and keep it on him.
Speaker 1:And only hit part of him. I see a piece of him and I'm going to be able to hit that small piece of him. After I look at him and decide to kill him. That's a very different conversation. When you have that conversation, magnification really starts mattering. It really starts coming into its own at 6x. If somebody's like I've got a 4, we'll shoot the 4. You can shoot the entire class with 4. The 4X suffers in that real-world application of shoot-no-shoot decisions. 4x suffers. But shooting the plates, everybody can hit them. You can shoot the whole class with a dot if you wanted to. Shooting steel at 300 yards is not difficult. Making shoot-no-shoot decisions is more difficult.
Speaker 3:And having big penalties for misses.
Speaker 1:Big penalties. Yeah, by the end of the class there'll be five or six people all shooting on different barricades at once, doing relays around all these different barricades and stuff on steel. I can't stop and grade your target, but by the end of day two, I think what we've instilled, though, is the inherent penalty. I think everybody's taking the class real serious. We're talking about shooting at people. What we want is 100% round accountability. By the end, my partner's down there pointing a cell phone. You can't actually shoot him.
Speaker 1:We haven't figured that part out yet, but we'll set up photorealistic targets. We'll put up photorealistic targets with corresponding steel. If the guy in this target has got a blue shirt, there's a C-zone painted blue. You look at the photo target and decide if you're going to shoot it or not. Then go find that piece of steel and engage that piece of steel. And then go find that piece of steel and engage that piece of steel. There's ways that you can incorporate target discrimination with live shooting and round accountability, because if the piece of paper is down there at 200 yards, nobody's going to aim at it.
Speaker 1:Everybody's going to send some and you're going to go down there and there's going to be a bunch of bullet holes and nobody's going to claim them. But having the corresponding steel helps with that. If you're going to shoot, then shoot the steel and everybody's watching.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and everybody can hear it too. Yeah, who did that?
Speaker 3:You got those Caldwell, or is it the Hornady or the Caldwell the?
Speaker 1:Caldwell, the flash bangs. Apparently they're coming out. It's just a hit indicator that you can see they're real bright and they're tough. We shot through every class. I lose two or three of them. Every class cost me like $100 in those flashbacks, Apparently, at shot they changed them. The problem with them is they flash for like four seconds. It's just flash, flash, flash and they kind of taper off. They're changing. They've got settings on them now, yeah, so now I've got to, I've got to, I've got to buy you know 15 new ones now. But they've got settings now where you can change it to where it's just yeah, Like you can have it, you know, for three seconds or like just have it flash, which is what you need for being able to engage twice.
Speaker 3:That's one thing I noticed when we were shooting there. I'd have to wait four or five seconds for the thing to stop flashing. I could hit it again, but then it's like whoa, is that the second flash that it's doing, or is that because there was a hit?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we're going to have to get all new ones.
Speaker 3:Nice, just give it a couple classes, you'll forget them anyways.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they'll filter out.
Speaker 4:I I definitely like that you're including the decision-making and it's not just straight shooting performance. In my opinion, a lot of the decision-making is almost more important than just being able to put a round.
Speaker 1:Where it needs to go is knowing whether or not a round even belongs there in the first place. Yeah, there's a trend on the internet. The internet's a terrible place. Right On the internet the internet's a terrible place. There's the trend of what the world needs defensive shooters need is performance shooting. That's true, but for a different reason than what many people are saying. What I don't need is a sub-two-second bill drill as an engagement sequence. I'm going to actually bill drill somebody. I think most people get that, but not everybody does. What I need are the skills that a bill drill assesses, so that my shooting is running in the background. All my mental capacity is spent making decisions, and that's what gets most people in trouble. It's rarely shooting that gets people in trouble, it's the decision-making. Even in the terrible videos that you see like, yeah, I got shot, you know 20 times and he missed every time. Yeah, he never should have shot.
Speaker 3:You know, like.
Speaker 1:That's not a shooting problem, that's a decision-making problem, 100% it's a decision-making problem. It's a decision-making problem made by a guy who's a terrible shooter, but at the foundation it's a decision problem. If you can use performance shooting, uspsa the stuff that we've learned from competitive shooting, if you can use that to make yourself a better shooter so that the shooting is running in the background and then I can use a realistic engagement sequence for the problem that I'm processing in front of me, that's what we want. I've seen cops bill drill people. There's videos out there of a six-round engagement. The problem is it's like round one, round two, round three on a bill drill. Some of them land kind of high in the A-zone. That's another problem. Uspsa target doesn't have a neck.
Speaker 3:It's very deceiving.
Speaker 1:You're like, yeah, they're all center mass by center mass. You just mean they're not in the head, which is where the neck would be. It's not anatomically correct. That A-zone is real tall. Whenever we start shooting people, that A-zone on that target runs way up right underneath the head. Those shots that would have been high on the A-zone are actually here. Round three of that real-world engagement sequence. Round three hits here, severs a spinal column and the guy drops. Well, round four, five and six went right over the top. They would have been hits, but the guy's not there anymore. So four, five and six are going into the apartment complex.
Speaker 1:I've seen real-world bill drills and they don't work like they do in theory in actual application. People don't like to say it but real-world shooting looks a whole lot more like bullseye shooting than what you know, like the slow down and get your hits. I don't like that. That's not what I'm saying. That's not what I'm saying. But if cops and defensive shooters could just draw their gun and quickly hit a partial target by partial I mean six to eight inch target every time that would solve most of the problems. Then we wouldn't need round seven, eight and nine. What we need is people that can know where every round's going to go. You've got to have that accuracy On-demand Foundation. Yeah, get that as the foundation and then build in the performance side of it and then let all of that run in the background and teach people to make better decisions.
Speaker 4:What's that FBI statistic? That's like the average law enforcement or civilian shooting. I think it's like five yards over and under five seconds, under five rounds, or it might be three yards or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've heard three yards, three seconds or something like that, and I don't know really where that. You know, that's one of, like they say, yeah, the what's like cop, cop shooting statistics.
Speaker 1:You know like nationwide. You know cops only hit and I've heard everything from like 8% to 15%, which both of those are terrible. I'm not saying 15 is better. Yeah, unless you're standing behind a bad guy, I'd rather you be a 15% shooter than an 8%. I guess you know like that's better than nothing. But like that statistic, that statistic doesn't exist. Yeah, there are some people that have done some studies with some other people, but there is no nationwide statistic. It's just not there. There's some statistics taken from large agencies.
Speaker 1:Lapd harvests a lot of information and they shoot a lot of bullets at people. They may harvest some information but then whenever you try to apply that to Conroe, texas PD, it's not apples and oranges, it's not apples to apples. It's not a fair comparison. There's two kinds of lies. There's lies and statistics. You can make them say really whatever you want. Part of the problem that you run into is you can get one incident or just one person that wildly skews the statistics. You know what I mean. You have one incident and it doesn't account for.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I know of police shootings where cops shot and intentionally didn't hit the bad guy. So you're behind the limestone wall or whatever. I've got to keep you right there. You're behind your car. I've got to keep you there so I can flank you and shoot you. If I let you get up, you're going to keep shooting at these people. I send around every three seconds or so into that limestone rock or into that engine block and I, and maybe you'll pop up and maybe I'll. Oh, well, there he is and I'll be able to shoot you, but my only purpose is to hold you right there while ike goes and shoot you. Well, in the statistics, all of those are misses. I might have shot 15 times and missed every time. Well, yeah, but 15 times I hit what I was aiming at. Yeah, you know so, like that. And then ike goes around and he gets a one-shot kill. All right, so we missed 15 out of 16. Well, that's not really representative of what happened.
Speaker 2:Um technically correct, but it completely misses the real world stuff Just gets so tricky.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so tricky. I know a guy, I know a cop that has he shot two people. He has two. One shot kills like he's killed two people with two bullets. He's only ever fired his gun at another human twice and he's killed two people. You never hear about that statistic, right, but all it takes is like that build drill scenario we have eight bullets, three out of eight missed, and if that's the only story you've got, that's 36% misses. 36% of the rounds that these people are firing are missing. That's not good. Well, it's not representative. That's one guy doing one thing, kind of a fluke situation where we severed spinal column and then two one-shot kills. I'm real leery of Every time. Somebody's like yeah, well, the statistics, okay, well, just show me when are they? That one in particular. Now that I've got a platform, I'm just throwing this out there. It's just not representative of reality, necessarily. I'm not saying cops are good shooters, I'm saying that that particular statistic does not prove it.
Speaker 3:It's hard to capture the reality of all the intricacies and all the different scenarios and all the context. It's hard to capture that with statistics like that. I don't think you really can, for all the reasons you just named.
Speaker 1:We talk about it in the class. You're looking for a guy in the green belt. You're manhunting in the green belt and you find him. He's down in the creek bed with a limestone cliff behind him. If it's me and him, even if I'm not sure of the shot, my cone of fire is too big. I'm unstable. I'm sending some.
Speaker 2:What's the penalty for missing? There's no penalty right.
Speaker 1:Why would I not press the trigger? It doesn't represent all of that stuff. That's part of what we try to incorporate in the class. Hey, sometimes send it. It's the size of the target and the risk associated with it. Even if it's a small target, it's also very low risk. Send them. One of them is going to hit you, but I'm sending rounds that I know may miss and don't matter. There's just so much to it. When you actually start pressing triggers, you realize how much more goes into it.
Speaker 1:Where can folks sign up for a class? Cornerstoneperformanceorg. Everything that is currently scheduled is there. I don't know when this will air, but we're adding a couple of more classes here next week. There'll be a couple more coming up Nice and most of the stuff through March is full. If you're a Texas cop, if you see something on there that you want to go to, I've got coupon code for the Pastore Foundation. If you're a cop in Texas you want to come to the class, email me first. It's Eric at Cornerstone. Email me, send me a message on Instagram or something and I'll get you the coupon code to sign up.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of the stuff that is either fully funded or can be partial, like hey, this is a $600 class, can you help me out some? That's stuff that we can talk to the Foundation about helping out a little bit to make it easier for people. What's the Instagram handle? Cornerstoneeric? Cornerstone Performance is a computer company in South Africa that hasn't used it in forever. I've tried calling them and they also don't answer the phone. I wanted to call like hey, can you just log out? Can you shut it down? But yeah, cornerstoneeric.
Speaker 3:Well, thanks for coming down and chatting with us for a little bit Appreciate you coming on. I think this was a pretty good one yeah.
Speaker 1:I feel like I just said a bunch of numbers and stuff. I don't want to go to class. He's boring. No, that was awesome.
Speaker 2:I think he offers a lot of great stuff. The real-world application stuff that you're doing is so cool, man, so so cool. It's so hard to replicate that stuff. I can't wait to take one of your classes. Honestly, but from what I'm hearing and from people that have taken it, dude, it sounds so much fun and so useful, so I.
Speaker 1:So much fun and so useful, so I think you're definitely filling a huge gap in the community. In the application there's a lot more crossover, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's very, very cool man, very cool.
Speaker 3:Well cool, we appreciate y'all watching. Thanks for checking us out. Go like, share, comment, subscribe all that stuff and tell your mom, tell your friends, listen to the podcast, buy some stuff. Yeah, Spend your money, We'll see you next time. I guess Ian used to do all the closeouts. Do you have any fun, witty thing to say to close this out?
Speaker 4:Stay strapped or get clapped. There you go.