Making Shooters Better
Making Shooters Better is where real shooter stories turn into smarter training and preparation for everyone. Each episode dives into the journeys, wins, and lessons of competitors, instructors, and innovators from across the firearms world.
Hosted by Terry Vaughan—former British Royal Marine Commando, Top Shot competitor, and firearms instructor—this show delivers more than talk. You’ll get the mindset, methods, and motivation to train sharper and perform better, on and off the range!
Making Shooters Better
Most Armed Citizens Prepare for the Range… Not the Fight
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In this episode, firearms instructor Karl Rehn joins former Royal Marines Commando Terry Vaughan for a brutally honest conversation about the dangerous gap between shooting skill and actual survivability in a violent encounter.
Drawing from decades of experience training armed citizens, law enforcement officers, and competitive shooters, Karl explains why minimum qualifications often create false confidence, why competition shooting helps more than most people realize… until it doesn’t, and why decision-making under stress is the skill most gun owners fail to train.
The conversation explores situational awareness, force-on-force training, concealed carry realities, medical and unarmed skills, and the hard truth about what actually holds up when chaos replaces the script.
If you carry a firearm for self-defense, this episode may completely change how you think about training.
There's a lot of people that don't carry off the range. Competition shooters are among the worst about this, that they have their $5,000 carry rig, and when it's time to leave the range at best, they have a J-frame stuck in their pocket that they never practice with. And their assumption is, well, I'm really good with my gamer gear, and so I'll be really good with my snub. And it's just a hypothesis. It's not tested and it's not validated. Luckily, we live in a safe enough society. Most of them never get tested and never find out the gap in the in that theory.
SPEAKER_01Carl Wren, our guest today, thinks that's incomplete, because the ugly truth is this. The people who fail in real fights usually don't fail because they missed, although that happens too. They fail because they never saw the problem early enough, never made the decision to act fast enough, and never built the kind of life-ready skill set that survives chaos when the script disappears. Carla spent more than three decades teaching armed citizens, competitors, law enforcement officers, while also obsessively remaining a student himself, logging more than 3,000 hours, that's right, 3,000 hours, of formal training from over a hundred different respected instructors throughout the industry. Now that combination I think really matters because there's a big difference between someone who teaches what they know and someone who never stops pressure testing what they believe. In this episode, Carl is going to help us dismantle some of the biggest myths in firearms culture. Why qualifications create maximum false confidence, why your carry gun should be in the most streamlined, convenient size possible. And why competition shooting can make you dramatically better prepared until it doesn't. If you carry a firearm, teach others, or simply want to understand what actually holds up when fear, confusion, and violence collide at full speed, then this episode may completely change how you train. Carl, welcome to the podcast. So I start out every episode asking each guest, when did you first start shooting? Um 1988. How old were you then? Was about 19. Really? So relatively late.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's so uh my dad died when I was three. We had guns in the house, my mom had no idea what to do with them. Um, we didn't really know people that were shooters. Um, so it didn't really have exposure to any of it for you know any particular time. And when I became an adult, she's like, Well, if you want to fool with these guns, you got to go figure out uh what to do with them. And so part of my pathway to becoming an instructor was a byproduct of me having an incredibly hard time finding anyone to teach me as an adult that didn't grow up, you know, shooting tin cans in the pasture with grandpa, that uh that sort of evolved along the way. And uh interestingly enough, the first thing I took was a small bore uh 22 rifle shooting class down on the university campus. And then uh that led to other things, very quickly led to shooting USPSA because the local USPSA club shooters were willing to take on somebody that knew absolutely nothing and teach them how to shoot a pistol. And so, you know, I've my origin story very quickly started with USPSA and stayed there for a long time. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm sorry to hear that your dad passed at such an early age. I do want to just go back for a second. Did you say on a university campus you did the shooting?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so back in the 80s, uh the University of Texas ROTC program has an indoor range. Texas AM also has an indoor range on their campus. And there was a program the University of Texas had called Informal Classes, and people could offer courses open to the general public and university students to teach them about odd topics that uh weren't really university level material. And there was a crusty old guy that ran the rifle beginner rifle class, and he did it as basically a public service, and he would go down to that indoor range like every Wednesday night, and it was open shooting. You could pay for 22 ammo, and they had loner guns and loner ammo, and you could go in and shoot. And like he was my first shooting coach, and my real interest was mainly in pistols. Uh, in addition to other things, I've been a musician performing in bars and clubs since I was about 17. And uh shortly after getting involved in the uh rifle shooting stuff, um, I got mugged in the alley behind a nightclub loading my gear into a van, and that broadened my perspective into um self-defense very quickly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, I'll bet. So they took all your your musical instruments, they took all your gears.
SPEAKER_00No, my musical gear was too heavy. They just took all the cash in my wallet and ran down the street because I had keyboards and a PA system and a lot of heavy stuff that was hard to pawn and certainly hard to carry when you were on foot, just walking down an alley, uh seeing a target of opportunity, you know, distracted after playing a four-hour show in a bar at 2 30 in the morning on a Tuesday night. And so uh they didn't get very much. We weren't getting paid very much, but uh, you know, pointed a gun, grabbed the money, took off running, and it was like, oh, well, that's I need to maybe be a little more alert about what's going on. Texas did not have concealed carry at that time, and even now carrying in a bar is a felony, so uh that's not you know drawing and shooting the guy probably wouldn't have been my solution then, even if I'd had advantage to all those things.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, even if you'd seen it in time for being able to draw your firearm.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. And like I said, it was a real simple here, give me all the money in your wallet, they'd grab the cash and took off running. So but it was an educational experience, for sure. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01No, I'll bet. It does have a way of changing your entire perspective, doesn't it? I had a guest recently who had uh someone tried to kill him with a knife. I don't think he tried very hard, because usually when somebody goes all in to actually uh you know achieve the objective of serious injury with a blade, they can achieve that objective. It was a half-hearted attempt. However, it was still a huge uh wake-up call for him in terms of how he started to see the world and also then started his journey towards probably similar to you, with changing how he thought about guns and certainly how he thought about self-defense and situational awareness and sort of tuning into what's going on around him.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. I get students like that all the time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I have had my fair share over the years, and it's always interesting that a lot of the fallback arguments for conceal carry, etc., or defensive um posturing always seems to fall back on it. If X happens, I have my gun with me, I'll just respond with my gun. And uh trying to stress to people that you may not see the problem coming from far enough away to even get your gun into the fight is uh it is a challenge, to say the least.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and my my friend and mentor uh Tom Gibbons has a saying. He says, you know what happens to paranoid people? Nothing. Nothing happens to paranoid people. So it's you know, there's some some value to being a little more paranoid than the regular people.
SPEAKER_01Agreed. It's so funny. Because one of the other questions I get is how do you end how can you achieve situational awareness and preparedness without getting paranoid? And I'm like, achieve a certain level of awareness, dialed up or dialed down in accordance to the environment, the time of day, the people around you, etc. So that you're not always like wound tight. You can relax a little bit. You're never switched off. But it's always interesting that people will say, Well, I don't want to get paranoid. Like, but but that's half the battle is being there.
SPEAKER_00Well, what what I explained to people is uh, you know, Jeff Cooper, bless us, bless his heart, he you know, he told everybody, well, you should always be in condition yellow. Well, that's not really true. Uh you often can be in condition white if you have what uh uh part of my world was uh doing research for military security programs back in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and we used to talk about the term compensatory measures. In other words, if the camera goes down, you have to have patrols wandering around more frequently uh that are the eyeballs that replace the cameras when the cameras aren't working and that sort of thing. Well, on the flip side of that, you know, if you're gonna sit on the sofa with the dogs and watch television, if you have lights, cameras, dogs, fences, locks, etc., well, that buys you time to shift from comfortable, happy conditioned white into conditioned orange and hey, what's going on outside? Maybe I should check the cameras, maybe I should turn on the lights, what's the dog barking about? So you don't have to be ultra paranoid all the time. But like you said, when you have compensatory measures in place that buy you the time to make that shift, then you're doing it the right way, as opposed to being oblivious walking down Sixth Street in Austin with your earbuds in looking at your phone at two o'clock in the morning. We didn't have earbuds and phones back in 1988 or 1990 when I got mugged, but uh no, it's the same sort of concept that that when you're standing in an alley with $5,000 worth of music gear loading it into a van, that is not the time to zone out and not pay attention to the world around you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, which is actually difficult because once you've been on stage and had that level of fatigue, and most people, of course, have not uh had to do something like that. I get up to speak frequently, and you know, sometimes there are eight-hour events. I'm exhausted at the end of it, but I have to remind myself when I'm leaving. Just because I'm tired and I've had a very, you know, hectic and cognitively demanding day doesn't mean I can switch off as I leave this conference room. Correct. Yeah, and it's does take that decision.
SPEAKER_00As Tom has pointed out, uh Tom's unique in the industry. He's trained about 50,000 people. He's had 74 involved in actual shootings, which is uh a high number, but after 50,000 people, and most of his training was conducted in Memphis, which is one of the highest crime, most violent cities in the U.S., um, that uh the patterns become emergent. It's transitional spaces. It's not when you're in the car, it's not when you're in the house, it's when you're moving between the two, from the parking garage to the hotel, from the gas station to the indoor gas station bathroom to you know your driveway to the front door. And, you know, those things require more attention than some of the others. And so the the shifting the shifting of the awareness level can be only for the time that it needs to be, and then you can let it let your armor down again. But that's uh people don't think about that. One of my pet peeves with concealed carry people in Texas is everybody just wants to carry in the car. And like, okay, well, you have to go into the sketchy bat uh you know, sketchy gas station bathroom at eleven o'clock at night. Well, your gun in the car doesn't do you any good at all other than psychologically you've like, well, I have a gun. You know, it's like but that's that's the hardest challenge for me in the last decade, is even though Texas has extremely real liberal concealed carry laws, most people simply find it uh inconvenient to take the minor effort involved to even have a holster with the gun that's in the car. Never mind a holster that could be quickly put on and quickly untucked the shirt for those last minute, gosh, we're out of gas, and I have to stop here at this sketchy gas station that's already closed and the lights are off, but the pump is working, and I have to fill up here because if I don't, I don't know where the next gas station is. Uh, you know, nobody thinks through those. It's like, oh, well, I'll be in downtown Austin and I'm sitting in my car and I can just open my glove box and grab my pistol. That's not how a lot of these things look when you look at the actual situations.
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SPEAKER_00Probably their ability to make decisions under stress. That everything we have, with very few exceptions in the training world, is all about pre-programmed behaviors. It's I blow the whistle, I tell you what you're going to do, I blow the whistle, I haunt the horn, I hit the button, I flash the light, I turn the target, and you do the thing that you were thinking about 10 seconds ago, and you execute that skill, and then when it's over with, you shut down. And very few programs, right now there's a few. The late John Holson, who was working with Dustin Solomon and the NeuroUnit, John was a pioneer in that area. John Hearn has a program. Eric Gellhouse and John Murphy in the training community are all trying to explore that kind of thing. And I've been doing force on force scenario-based training since the 90s. And to me, I mean, that's the full, the full scripted scenario where the instruction is do what you would do, and you're presented with a 3D, 360 live action incident that you have to make the decisions. Um that's I think, you know, ultimately that's the well-scripted force on force is the best, but very few people do it because it's A, not profitable, and B, a lot of people that won't sign up for it because they don't feel ready. And their concept of being ready is, well, I need to be better at doing things really fast when the whistle blows. And they don't make the connection that none of those skills, for the most part, none of them translate over to the scenarios that uh because the things they're practicing don't aren't the skills they're missing. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01And you think that's why so many citizens and even police officers stop once they get to the qualification level?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's it's easy. It checks the box. Very few, very few of us are hardcore hobbyists that are devoted to going to the range and dry firing every day and working with a shooting timer and excuse me, the average practice session for the average gun owner. And I have longtime friends that have never gotten off high center regarding this. They go to the range, I've got three boxes of ammo. I'm going to set up some random target, shoot at it with no goal, no marksmanship standard, no timer, no structure, uh done no planning as to what I'm going to do when I go to the range. Oh, I had fun, I pulled the trigger, the gun went bang 150 times. Cool, let's go home. And for the vast majority of shooters, that is their enjoyment of shooting, that is their structure of shooting. Well, I don't want to compete because that now I have to, you know, be reminded that my skills maybe aren't as good as they should be, or I just not a competitive person. There's lots of people that just aren't into competition in any way, and I get that for sure. That uh but i there's this giant gap between the 99% and the 1%. And some of the 1% turn into the 0.1% who more recently have been in become insufferable online with their uh judgmental attitude toward the 0.99% that are out there that aren't doing it exactly the way that they would do it, or shooting to the standards that they feel like, you know, you have the wrong equipment and you're you're just doing it all wrong. And uh there's a handful of those people that uh have become particularly uh irritating on the internet in the last few years.
SPEAKER_01What do you think competitive shooters do consistently better than non-competitive shooters?
SPEAKER_00Uh they have goals. People that shoot competitively, uh they analyze their performance, they do some form of practice, whether it's dry or live, um, they bring a seriousness to the attitude about development. You know, they're always looking to do better, and they're always looking to identify what do I need to get better at. And all of those things are wonderful. And as someone pointed out recently, uh John Bull, who's an army shooter, has a really good blog, and he he talked about the fact that uh many of us have come around to the idea that somewhere around IDPA expert or USPSA B class is a good sweet spot for anyone that wants to be competent with a handgun should develop to that skill. If you think that basically law enforcement training gets you to maybe low C class, that going beyond that, particularly from concealed carry, you don't have to be a grandmaster, but you need to get out of the state minimum trap, right? But in spite of that, the majority of people that shoot USPSA and IDPA are down in that C and D class category. And so uh even in within the competition world, there are people that just go out and shoot and have fun with their friends on the weekends and don't put that next level into it. But there's a there's a level I think that most people don't get to that they either get they don't get to the level of competence and then maintain it. If they're in, they'd go all in. And they're like, well, it's it's grandmaster or nothing. You know, I'm gonna devote my life to this, and I'm gonna drive fire in my basement every day and post videos constantly and and you know, chase all these things, which is great. And I did that. I I I know these people because I have been that person. Um looking back, uh I should have listened to others around me, I think, that counsel me to maybe spread my training interest out over a broader area. And uh that's been sort of my my battle over the last ten years is to uh balance things out a little better.
SPEAKER_01So where do you think the line um is drawn between useful competition habits and then habits and competition that could be liabilities in the real world defensive encounter?
SPEAKER_00I don't I don't think that the competition habits are necessarily liabilities. I think it's the lack of sorry, I have a fly buzzing around me. Very unfortunate. We're out in the country and sometimes the flies get in the house. It's that the things that aren't being trained. It's the idea that, well, I'm good at stage planning, so I'm gonna be really good in a dynamic situation where there's eight people involved, and each one of them gets to change in their idea about what they're gonna do as soon as the first round is fired. And I'm gonna be really good at that sort of improvisation when all I've done is practice sight reading, basically. The analogy I give as a musician, right? You're in a high school band and you go to sight reading competition, and you sit down and they hand you this thing you've never seen before, and you get a finite amount of time to look at it, talk through it, but you don't get to play it until the first time that you play it is for score with an audience. Very much like a USPSA stage. And that's great. You can be good at reading sheet music and translating that into a concept in your brain. Here's how I'm gonna play this, and we plan out okay, I'm gonna get quiet here, I'm gonna get loud here, whatever it is that I've got to get done, and then it's go time. Well, that's not uh right. Real world real world incidents are more like you show up for the gig, you jump on stage, the band doesn't tell you what song they're playing or what key it's in, and the drummer counts off the song and it's time to go, and you're up front, right? And you're the lead singer or the lead guitar player, and all of a sudden every all eyes are on you and it's it's you know, do or die. That's very different. That's a very different skill set than having the opportunity to plan everything out, even if you're really good at quickly planning something out. That is not the same as making decisions in the moment based on what you are seeing and hearing. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01Does so I actually read and I agree with you here that uh practice with your regular carry and practice with your duty gear instead of the high speed, low drag toys that most people want to take to the range obviously will help them in a defensive encounter. I think along with training in the clothes they intend to wear, the ink or the holster they're going to use, all of these factors come together to help them be better in a defensive situation. Would you add anything else to that?
SPEAKER_00Um, one thing that I have done for the last decade or so is every year I Teach a small gun class. And that's usually at the start of the summer. And it's usually bring your subcompact, bring your pocket pistol, bring, you know, the gun you're going to wear with your filster Enigma down underneath your gym shorts. Bring a gun you're going to carry in your fanny pack. And we train with that. And usually at the end of class, we also shoot a drill or two with uh the full size gun, right? Bring your range toy, and we'll shoot the same drill with both. And it's very rare that I see someone shoot as good with their carry gun as they do with their range gun. Right? There's this myth largely promoted by online influencers who want to look good on their videos, that quote unquote, training is you show up with your battle belt or your USPSA open carry belt with your non-retention minimal holster and your five magazines on the front of your belt, and working at that, which is optimizing your skills for match day, is that's all we need to do when we train. And in reality, okay, what do you carry when you go to dinner? Well, I've got a Glock 26 and a deep carry, and I have to stick my hand all the way down my pants to get to it because it's it's not even uh up a belt level because I'm trying to carry to not be, you know, not be printing in public. Well, okay. The problem is, my own experience is if you get good at shooting a gun with a two-pound trigger, somebody hands you a gun with a five-pound trigger and it's a struggle. If you learn to shoot a five-pound trigger and you have a gun with a two-pound trigger, it's a delight. But everybody wants to be good and everybody wants to be fast. So the fast way to get there is to have your five-pound steel frame, long slide, giant dust cover carry gun, or sorry, gamer gun with a compensator and a you know light that's not even a real light that's made out of brass that weighs even more. And then you put the ginormous uh, you know, uh SRO or ginormous window, optic window on your pistol, and none of this is anything you're gonna use anywhere but on the range, probably not even gonna use it for home defense. But yes, you can shoot really good scores with that kind of gear, but never going back and evaluating, well, how do I do with the gear I'm actually going to be using? And I think the byproduct of that is most people aren't serious, to be brutally honest. And I know that's a mean thing to say, I guess, but there's a lot of people that don't carry off the range. Competition shooters are among the worst about this, that they have their $5,000 carry rig, and when it's time to leave the range at best, they have a J-frame stuck in their pocket that they never practice with, and their assumption is, well, I'm really good with my gamer gear, and so I'll be really good with my snub. And it's just a hypothesis. It's not tested and it's not validated. Uh, you know, most of them, luckily, we live in a safe enough society, most of them never get tested and never find out the gap in the in that theory. But uh I think it's not that hard to put in some time with a carry gun and make sure, and it may cause you to carry a better carry gun, right? There's a middle ground in there. There are there are people that train seriously with their carry guns. And uh there's a young man that's shot multiple perfect scores at the Rogers shooting school, and he does it with his Glock 19 that he carries every day with a minimally modified pistol, better sights, and a slightly better trigger, but it's a street legal defensive pistol grade trigger. And, you know, his shooting skills uh are significant because he's developed that skill with his carry gun. Uh Gabe White is another guy. Gabe does all the things that he does with his daily carry gun. And when he you know shoots turbo pen scores in his own program, he's doing it with the gun that he wears all day, every day, everywhere. And I guess I'm much more uh interested in that or looking at that path for the regular students that I have much more than here, go spend all this money on this other thing, and yes, great, go have fun. But I think it's important to understand that gap and not to assume that it doesn't exist, because it does exist and we can measure it. Most people just don't want to measure it.
SPEAKER_01So I think if somebody has become reasonably competent with their carry gun and assuming that they've put in the time, you also advocate that there are other skills that they should be practicing and developing rather than just trying to attempt to shave tenths of a second off their time. What are those things?
SPEAKER_00I would put medical as number one. I have used the medical skills that I have learned in classes more times in my life than I have used firearms in my life. That I have drawn a gun on someone twice in 35 years of doing this stuff. I have used medical skills half a dozen times to deal with situations that needed to be stabilized before the person could be either brought to medical care or stabilized well enough that they could be or stabilized while the the uh medical professionals were coming. Most people underestimate that and they they don't. Uh friends of mine, I have a very good friend Cale Causey with Lone Star Medics, and he and I joke that, you know, he and I chose to go into the the areas of training which are the least have the least marketing appeal, which is medical training, force on force scenarios, and I do a class on the history of handgun training, which is absolutely the least interesting topic to the widest majority of shooters, that the idea that they should go back through the last hundred years and find out who mattered and how shooting technique evolved, uh, that's proven to be a very, very niche market that maybe I can get one class a year where people come out to learn that stuff. And these are people that are instructors, thousands and thousands of instructors nationwide, and very few of them have any interest in learning that archival material, right? But for the regular person, I think it's pepper spray, I think it's medical, um, I think it's unarmed, right? The guys in the Shiftworks collective, that Craig Douglas and Cecil Birch and all of those folks, uh, they've correctly identified that most gun people have literally no usable skills for unarmed response inside arm breach, and they don't have any usable skills when it comes to someone trying to uh stuff their draw or uh grab their pistol and all that. And I think that kind of training is super important. And again, it's one that gun people, they're like, well, I have a gun, I don't need to learn that stuff. Well, you should watch some videos of real incidents, that we have a wealth of that information. And yeah, every fight doesn't result in Brazilian jujitsu wrestling around on the ground, but it's certainly if you don't want to end up on the ground and you don't want to end up grappling with someone over your pistol, you certainly need to understand how things can go wrong and how much more space that you need to avoid that happening and how much more proactive that you have to be to make that not happen. Craig has a great curriculum called Managing Unknown Contacts that teaches people how to interact with approaching strangers. And that's another skill that people need because uh failure to perceive potential risk and not not reacting to it, not moving away, not verbally de-escalating, not getting the pepper spray in the hand, not having any response plan whatsoever, uh that leads to things going bad and sometimes situations going very sideways that can result with people end up, you know, in jail, going to court, in handcuffs, or injured or harmed. And so uh, you know, those things, they just don't have the same appeal. The sort of person that likes to shoot pistols fast, the appeal of that is the speed and the measuring and the and the competition side of it, and they're not thinking real world self-defense. And I used to be one of those people, so it was a long evolution for me to go from I'm just a competition purist to I should be well prepared to take care of myself in the real world. And uh I think a lot of people maybe have to get that competition stuff out of their system for a while. They got to go chase the dragon of, you know, how can I go faster and faster and faster and faster? And eventually they'll either hit a plateau or they'll realize the amount of work that it takes to go beyond where they are is more than they're willing to commit. And then often at that point, then they start looking around and going, well, what else is there? And they'll finally, finally go seek out some of these related topics.
SPEAKER_01So as you've trained law enforcement and armed citizens, what decision-making failures do you think show up again and again across both parties?
SPEAKER_00Well, I would I would put those in two different categories. The problem law enforcement has now is the constant judging, micro-judging, and uh public review of everything that they do. Uh one law enforcement trainer, a friend of mine commented that the the body cams have been a blessing for the most part because many uh complaints about excessive force or why did you shoot that guy, or why did you tackle that guy, why did you do whatever, that when people see the body cams, the downside to that is they don't have the discretion that they used to have because everything has to be done exactly by the book because it's being recorded. And if they use their discretion and they go easy on someone because their judgment tells them that's the right thing to do, that can also be a problem. And so I think the biggest challenge for law enforcement now is trying to deal with knowing that everything you're going to do is going to be microanalyzed by people that weren't there, that don't have their life perception of the people they're dealing with and the way situations work out. Um, armed citizens, for the most part, it they fall into simple categories, failure to carry, which is number one, they don't have the gun with them. Right? Tom Gibbons refers to he has 71 wins and three forfeits among his 74 students that were involved in incidents. The three forfeits were unarmed at the time they were attacked and they were killed because they had no way to defend themselves. And so, you know, the armed citizen blind spots are having no unarmed skills, having no pepper spray, and not carrying, assuming that the gun in the car is going to be the solution. I work expert witness court cases for people from time to time. And uh the last one I just got consulted on was a gentleman that uh shot two people in an incident. The first one, the person had a gun, and the second one was did not have a gun in his hand yet when he was shot. And there's been, you know, because he was preemptive and didn't wait until he had visual confirmation, now he's going to trial, and we're gonna have to try to explain to a jury why he had reasonable belief that he was about to get shot even though there wasn't a gun in the other person's hand. And explaining that to a person that's not a gun person that doesn't understand the speed and and intensity with which things can happen, uh, that can be a challenge. That can be a challenge. So a lot of people uh don't have a full perspective on how fast things can go bad, how much distance they need, and so it's just uh, you know, they're not not prepared with all the non the peripheral non-shooting parts.
SPEAKER_01So you made a point earlier about that stage planning and competition shootings isn't the same as real-time decision making under stress. So what do you think is missing from square range training that force-on-force scenarios expose almost immediately?
SPEAKER_00Well, the the one that the the one that I put out the other day, which uh people thought was was good, as I said, if you wanted to make a USPSA stage more realistic, you would have two or three robot activated no-shoots that at the start of the stage, these robot no shoots would be like on, you know, attach them to like iRobot vacuum cleaners, right? And they start moving around within the stage. And as you're trying to execute your stage plant, you have these three random no-shoots buzzing around inside the stage area. And oh, by the way, if you muzzle the no-shoot with your gun, that's a felony. That's an automatic stage DQ. If you if you point your gun at the no-shoot, then and like in Texas, if you muzzle someone that's not uh a threat to you, that's a that's an aggravated assault, potentially, if they want to charge you for it. And so, you know, adding that by itself to competition pistol stages would certainly change the game completely. Similarly, just making it where if you muzzled a no-shoot at all, that that was a a stage DQ or a stage zero, uh, that would radically change the way people shoot because they just run around waving their guns at everything. Uh in the force on force scenarios, there's good and there's bad force on force. I like to run my scenarios where about half of them are no-shoot scenarios, where the successful resolution of the scenario is I left, I retreated, I got away from the situation, didn't involve myself in the situation, uh, whatever it was, I I maneuver my way through that so that I am not pulling my gun and I am not shooting anyone. And sometimes that may even mean to the detriment of other people in the scenario who may end up in a bad situation because I didn't act. There's a misperception there that if you are carry a gun as an armed citizen, that you're acting as a police officer and you feel obligated to involve yourself in every incident that involves people you don't know. Uh, all the people that train for that stuff seriously, particularly like Masad Ayyub has been teaching for years that the risk of getting involved in a situation that doesn't directly involve you as an armed citizen can be incredibly costly financially and everything else, physically. Yeah, I mean I think the force on force part is just people don't realize that they're not good at winging it. They're not good at making it up on the fly when they have to make it up on the fly. And and they don't think of the not shooting solution. They've been programmed to think that the right answer when the scenario starts is to pull my gun and shoot twice on everything that's that I'm supposed to shoot at. Well, what if the winning solution is, you know, you stay in the bathroom with your gun out and you wait for the situation to be over because if the dude's robbing the 7-Eleven and all he's doing is firing a warning shot in the air and grabbing the cash in the register and running out, uh, you know, do you really need to get out in involved in the middle of all that? And this hurts people's feelings. They have a perception that that they want to get involved in everything. But then when they do, and you role-play that at the end of the scenario, and you say, well, okay, you're now you've you've shot this guy, and uh 7 Eleven's not gonna protect you because you're not working security for them. And okay, now you need to come down to the station and the rest the rest of your day is gonna be, yeah, do you have a lawyer? Do you know what your, you know, you what's your lawyer's phone number? Is it in your phone? Do you know who you're gonna call? Oh no, I didn't plan for that. Oh my, you know. There's there's just so many extra details that go along with it that are peripheral to the well, but but my split times are really good, right? My draw was really quick, wasn't it? Well, yeah, yeah, it was. Does it does it matter?
SPEAKER_01No, not right now, not so much. So what beliefs about self-defense training do you think have changed the most for you personally over the years?
SPEAKER_00Uh I've certainly come down the road where I've become a bigger advocate of unarmed and pepper spray. Um, I used to be, I always used to carry, you know, uh knives. I I was into uh knife training for quite some time, and the more I looked at it, the more I realized that uh knife defense against a knife was important, but the likelihood that I was going to draw a knife and use it in self-defense, I decided that that was probably not a good plan after doing a fair amount of training with different people. That um the problem, and if nothing else, is explaining to the people in the court, the nice Sunday school teacher lady that uh bike makes brownies every week for church, and she's on the jury and like, well, look what you did to this person with your knife. And, you know, if there's a perception in society that good people don't do that sort of thing. And so uh I still carry a knife, carry a knife every day. It's a utility knife, and I use it for all sorts of utility tasks, but I will say that my response is much more now pepper spray and and firearm as appropriate than it is to with the knife. So that's some of that stuff changed. And the biggest part of it was just getting a reality check on how much distance I need from a person to be able to have drawing without them interfering with it. Uh, that distance is quite a bit further than most people want to know, no matter how fast your drawstroke is. Um, if the other person moves first, they can close a lot of distance very quickly before your gun is halfway out of your holster, no matter even if you have a one-second draw. And so, you know, those all those things have changed for me over time.
SPEAKER_01So if a listener carries a firearm daily and they want to become meaningfully harder to kill over the next 12 months, what was your training roadmap for them look like?
SPEAKER_00Uh, number one, it would include having a realistic set of performance standards. Uh, for example, Gabe White's program, if you can earn a light pin with your carry gear in Gabe's program, I think that's good. If you can shoot IDPA expert level scores on the IDPA classifier with your carry gun from concealment, if you can shoot the FBI agent qual course from concealment with your carry gun, those are all good standards. Not as many people can meet that standard as they think, right? And then I would say get training in things like low light shooting and medical and unarmed and seek out uh, you know, force on force if it's available, or if not, just watch more videos of actual incidents. Don't watch videos of some dude in his basement dry firing at USPSA targets. Watch videos of actual actual incidents. They don't have to be narrated by influencers. You just need to look at actual incidents. In fact, I recommend when you watch those videos, turn the sound off. Don't listen to whatever the narrator is saying and just look with your eyes and think about what I would do if, in those situations, uh that's that's what I would tell people to do. And that is what I tell people to do. It's great.
SPEAKER_01So if someone's interested in taking classes, where do they need to go to contact you?
SPEAKER_00Oh, krtraining.com. Or if they want to read all the stuff that I've written, which is substantial, blog.krtraining.com. Uh the short answer is I do very few road classes anymore. I play 150 dates a year on stage as a musician, mostly on the weekends. So I just don't travel like I used to. People come in to see me. Most of the stuff that I do is half day classes, although I will stack three or four or four-day classes or sorry, four-hour classes over a weekend. End of October at home here in my Central Texas place, we're going to have a Friday, Saturday, Sunday weekend that will include force-on-force instructor, force-on-force scenarios, two nights of low light shooting and a day of live fire shooting. So if somebody wants to come in and visit, that would be that end of October weekend is the time to do it. Otherwise, I'll be in New Orleans in July doing Force On Force instructor and advanced handgun training. And I'll be in Georgia teaching at a law enforcement conference in October. But for the most part, I'm at home and I do stuff, and I mostly now just coach local people, and I'm trying to get people that can't commit to a two-day class to come take a four-hour class. My my real mission in life at this point is to get people with carry permits to take any training beyond the state minimum to get some skills that they wouldn't get otherwise. And there's what a lot of traveling trainers don't want to know or don't care about is their customer base is only the hyper-motivated shooting is my life, people. And there's a large segment of the population that shooting is not their life, and but they do need to be better. And so I've been trying to make those classes more accessible, cheaper, shorter, easy to get, to get those people to get past. I shot the carry permit test, so I'm good to go, because I think that's a huge logical fallacy. That's uh mostly what I do is I I I'll post articles online and I go to oh training conferences, Rangemaster Tactical Training Conference. I've been a regular speaker there for the last 25 years, every year, one of the OGs with that. And uh there are slots available. It's already scheduled for 2027 in Dallas, the first weekend of Jan, uh sorry, first weekend of April. And uh you can already register and buy tickets. And if you want to get your training act together and you've never been, you should go. It's over three dozen trainers offering lots of two-hour blocks over a three-day weekend. And it's the world's biggest buffet of high quality training from top-tier national level trainers that uh you're gonna find. And so, you know, if you only do one thing, I would say buy yourself a ticket to Tac TACCON and come in 27 because it'll expose you to everybody in the industry and all kinds of things. Let you sample, you know, a two-hour class on unarmed and a two-hour class on force on force and a two-hour class on knife and a two-hour class on legal stuff. Uh, there's nothing like it. There's really nothing like it. It it it was the mold, and there's other people trying to do similar things, but uh TACCON is by far the top tier for that sort of thing as a training conference. And I'll be there.
SPEAKER_01Good to know. Appreciate it, and thank you for joining me for this recording on making shooters better. Thanks for having me. Thank you for joining us for today's episode. Don't forget to hit the like button and then share and subscribe so you never miss an episode. Also, that helps support the channel and help us keep bringing you the guests that you want to hear from for now. Thanks for tuning into this episode, and we'll see you in the next one. Cheers.