In a Gunfight, Your Greatest Weapon Isn't Skill. It's Cognition.

Can you trust your training when everything goes wrong?

In this episode of Making Shooters Better, Terry Vaughan sits down with Erick Gelhaus, retired law enforcement officer, military veteran, firearms instructor, researcher, and founder of Cougar Mountain Solutions.

Erick has spent decades bridging the gap between academic research and real-world violence, earning a reputation as one of the firearms industry's leading "pracademics" someone who understands both the science of human performance and the reality of applying it under extreme stress. 

Together, Terry and Erick explore:

✅ Why good people sometimes make catastrophic decisions under stress
✅ How overconfidence can be more dangerous than lack of skill
✅ Why traditional firearms training often fails to prepare people for real-world encounters
✅ The science behind decision-making, visual processing, and use of force
✅ How scenario training changes the way we perceive threats
✅ Why police use of force is often misunderstood by the public
✅ The surprising research on "mistake-of-fact" shootings
✅ How to train judgment, not just marksmanship
✅ Why every shooter should understand medical emergencies as well as firearms skills

Along the way, Erick shares practical drills, fascinating research, and hard-earned lessons from nearly three decades in law enforcement, military service, and teaching. 

This isn't just a conversation about shooting.

It's a conversation about how humans think, fail, survive, and learn.

Connect with Erick Gelhaus:

• Cougar Mountain Solutions
• Instagram: @cougar_mountain_solutions
• American Cop Magazine

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So something I that I was thinking of when you were talking about this was the elbow flare. And this has come up a lot lately with guys who are more involved in the hands-on skills, right? Picture somebody reaching behind them, behind themselves for their wallet, right? They carry their wallet in their back pocket, which is pretty common. How does the arm look when they reach behind to grab that versus how does the arm look if they're going for a pistol appendix carry? So in one, the arm's kind of down, swings back behind. In the other, it's a very noticeable once you've seen it, 45 degree flare of the elbow. Whether that's going for appendix, whether that's going for strong side hip, right, or even small the back carry. The arm looks completely different once you've seen it in context, like, oh, I know what that dude's doing because it's not reaching for his wallet to hand me his license.

SPEAKER_02 0:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00

Hello and welcome to Making Shooters Better. My name's Terry Vaughan. I'm going to tell you more about laser ammo, the sponsor of today's episode, later in the episode, but today's guest has spent a lifetime standing in the uncomfortable space between theory and reality. He's not only been an infantryman in ground combat, a decorated law enforcement officer, he's also been a firearms instructor for more than two decades. And all of that is on top of the fact he has a master's degree that was focused on how we teach, evaluate, and explain the use of force. So in a world where everyone seems to have a bloody opinion about firearms training, Eric has spent his career asking a much harder question. How do we know we're actually making people better in high stress, life-threatening situations? Eric, welcome to the podcast, mate.

SPEAKER_00 1:49

Terry, thank you for having me. Uh it's good to be here. Thank you for accommodating my weird schedule this week. Much appreciated, sir.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

No worries. I know. Travel's a bugger. And when the plans change, what can you do? You just got to adapt, right? So I ask every guest at the very beginning, how old were you when you first started shooting and who introduced you to it?

SPEAKER_00 2:08

Well, that would have been Uncle Sam and my drill sergeant. Um I maybe shot twice in high school, maybe. Um and it wasn't anything structured, it wasn't anything formal. Uh but when I went to basic training in the summer of 1983, that was when I first got exposed to shooting um with the institutional training that goes with it. The fun thing called basic.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

But that was the first time?

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Yeah, that was the first that I mean like actual structured. Here's a gun, this is your gun rifle, right? But work from there.

SPEAKER_01 2:40

That's funny. So how old were you when you actually when you enlisted?

SPEAKER_00 2:44

18. I left for basic training on my 18th birthday two weeks after I graduated from high school.

SPEAKER_01 2:49

And how did mom and dad feel about that?

SPEAKER_00 2:51

I think they were glad to see me go. Um, yeah, I think my dad was glad to see me get out of the house.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

That's funny. All right, so when you first shot the first time in the structure structured environment, how did it go? Any were you good? Did it feel natural?

SPEAKER_00 3:06

It didn't feel natural. I wasn't necessarily good at it. I think it was my first or second squad leader when I got to my first duty station, um, was less than thrilled with my skill set. And he was the first one who really kind of sat me down and taught me about shooting. Um, not just the institutional by the numbers thing, but like how to shoot. Um came back to the States, got plugged into an armor position and being kind of de facto being the guy with the keys to where the guns were, people thought I knew something about shooting, so I kind of started to figure it out. Got came off active duty, went to the reserves in a place that had a lot of teaching responsibilities. Uh, got tapped to do some teaching there. Uh, I had friends who who drugged me into the teach some of the teaching programs, started shooting competition. Uh, about three years after I got on the sheriff's department, um, I was shooting competition. There was an opening for an instructor, and it was like, hey, you can you shoot matches, you should teach. Oh boy. Um, in hindsight, that was way too soon to be an instructor. Like I did not have enough time on the job. Um, had a really bad case if I thought I knew something. You know, eventually I did. Yeah. But it was a long, hard-growing curve in hindsight.

SPEAKER_01 4:17

That's funny. Well, I'm always interested, and the reason I asked that question is because as a former Brit, now you're a citizen, of course, the right way. But living here, my impression before coming to the US was even after my military service where I cross-trained with a number of different uh branches from the US, was everyone in America grows up shooting. Like you just you're born, you start crawling, you walk, you run, someone gives you a gun. Like I figured it was that early. And it's always interesting how many guests have come on here from world-class shooters to guys like you who have been teaching for decades, and they started later in life, later, at least, maybe in my biased opinion, later than I would have expected them to start as Americans.

SPEAKER_00 5:03

Yeah, it it seems to be more common now than maybe it was like with the people who taught me. They might have well have grown up shooting. And some of my peers, uh, one Wayne Dobbs, who lives up in the Dallas area, Wayne talks about shooting off of a family member's lap at like two or three, and he remembers it, right? That was absolutely not my experience. Not that it was bad, just it was different.

SPEAKER_01 5:24

Yeah, just different. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with having not growing up shooting. It's just my impression. And most Europeans' impression, I imagine, is you're American, you've got guns, you've been shooting since you were knee-high to a grasshopper. It's just interesting to find out where the origin story for shooting actually began. It really is. So you've described yourself as a prachodemic. And for people hearing that term for the first time, what is that?

SPEAKER_00 5:50

So that, to the best of my knowledge, was coined by Cecil Birch. Uh Cecil works of the hands-on space to out to about five feet. Um, what would be the entangled fight space? And Cecil coined it in or in relation to a discussion several of us were having about the need to be able to take the academic research that's out there, marry it up with people who have practical experience, and kind of have folks who can transit through both areas, right? Who can work who are comfortable in working both spaces, who can sit down, look at a paper and go, okay, this was written for folks in the Ivory Towers of Academia, but here's how it applies at two o'clock in the morning in a ditch.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

I like that. Yeah, because you've taken that academic approach and twisted it so that it actually fits the real world. Because one of the things I did when I was teaching self-defense was always try to put the spin on it that, you know, there's there's what you might do for a traditional martial arts, and then there's what you're going to need to do in an actual fight. And having a gunfight or a defensive encounter at five feet or less, for most people is just unfathomable.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

And if when you kind of start to look at it, there's some things that they sound good on paper, they sound good in advertising, and then you turn around and try to apply them in the real world, and maybe they only work half the time. And when I say work, I mean like actually function that's designed, not where perfectly successful. So one of the things in in my the paper for my master's, we were looking at taser employment. I happened to be able to get the numbers for my old agency and for LAPD. And in both places, the success rate of a taser was just over 50%, like 51, 52% of the time you pressed the trigger on a taser, it worked as designed, right? Like both probes hit, you got connectivity, and it worked. Now, not that the person gave up instantly at that point, right? But that was just it functioned as design and had some impact. And yet if you talk, you talk to folks who aren't in the application side of things, that's like a hundred percent tool. It always works every time. Why didn't you just tase them and end the thing? Why did you have to do other stuff? Well, here's the deal: 50%, 51% of the time, right? Once folks see that a few times, they're already prepared, hopefully, for it to fail and have a plan B or potentially a plan C. But that may not make sense to the folks who don't understand it. They've just seen the advertising or what the news media has told them should be the case.

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Yeah, and you can always count on the news media to be completely unbiased and absolutely accurate. Oh, yeah. In in every area possible. So you spent nearly 30 years in law enforcement?

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Yeah. Did so uh got hired in September of 1990. I retired in September of uh 2019, did it all with a large sheriff's office out in California. Depending on the year, we were somewhere between the 11th and 15th biggest out of 58 counties. Um we were big enough to have a bunch of things, but not so big that you got stuck in one specialty. So over the course of my career, I worked patrol, community policing, gang suppression, was on a federal task force for a while, went back to patrol, went back to gangs, was a training officer. Through all of that, I had a collateral, almost all of that, I had a collateral assignment as a firearms instructor and eventually supervised the program uh once I promoted to sergeant.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

That's fantastic. So do you think there's one thing the public, and I I know this is an incredibly broad question, the one thing that you think the public fundamentally misunderstands about police use of force?

SPEAKER_00 9:23

Yes. And to boil it down, I don't think they understand how much the nature of the encounter, like what we're what we're told we're dealing with, what we perceive we're dealing with, and the behavior of the air quotes bad guy, the suspect, drives the outcome of the event. Um, there was a pretty good study done back in 2008, and uh it was done by it was funded by a consortium of insurance companies that represented municipalities, and they were thinking that race drove it. And then they were thinking maybe clothing drove it. So there were a bunch of cops in it. Everybody involved saw scenarios that were recorded on video. And when they they had the actors and they had the actual actors role-playing as bad guys, not just cops role-playing as bad guys, which makes a totally different setup. But some of the actors overacted the behaviors. So they had to go in and actually codify like how the bad guys were appearing. And what they found was, again, if the more violent the call, the more aggressive or oppositional the behavior was, the more likely force was going to get used. The lower the level of the call, the more cooperative, compliant somebody was, the less likely force was going to be used. And that I'm to to take it out of the race term, how they came out of the paint shop and how they came out of the body shop didn't matter.

SPEAKER_01 10:42

So the behavior element of that, there isn't necessarily um a correlation between the level or seriousness of the call and the likelihood that somebody actually then becomes violent. It can escalate it in either case. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:59

In either case, but this was looking at the officer's response. So if they got set to a uh a raw in progress robbery or assault, and they had somebody who was very confrontational, very oppositional, that was then you were far more likely that there was gonna be a use of force by the officer, right? That's what they were looking at.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Uh so you think the officers are going into it, obviously feeling hyped already, expecting there to be trouble, and because of that, that's influencing their behavior when they arrive. What's your interpretation?

SPEAKER_00 11:28

I don't think that's wrong. Right. I think we we do start to form things and there's thin slicing, right, where you're looking, you start to see a certain pattern evolving. You're like, okay, I've seen A, B, and C. I know that D E and F are gonna follow that, right? So they're they're prepared, the officers are prepared to go into that mode, right? Because it's already there. Um it's like if you're if you're driving, you know, from your house, say to the store, right? And if your attention is only on what's on the grocery list, right? And now the car right in front of you slams on its brakes, that's gonna be a lot harder to deal with. But if you're going to the grocery store and you hear on the news there's a traffic jam, there's already a wreck and everything else, you're already kind of pre-flighting that. Oh, I might need to get on the brake more, I might need to change lanes, I gotta pay attention to what's going on. You're pre-flighted for it. Doesn't mean that you want to be in a collision. It doesn't mean you want to slam on the brakes, right? But you know it's coming, or it's likely that it's coming, so you're set.

SPEAKER_01 12:23

So something you just mentioned about thin slicing, which I am particularly interested in from a human behavior standpoint. This is sort of an interpretive interpretive position where someone uses heuristics or uh assumptions or decisions or assessments based on a very limited amount of data, and from that formulates behavioral responses. They they assume and read a few signs, or they get a radio call that puts them into a heightened state. And because of that, as you said, the the A, B, and C has already occurred. The cascading downstream effects of that information causes and likely initiates an already emotionally uh tuned potential response, knowing it's likely to come. And so it's fascinating to me that we take a little bit, a snippet of information and potentially fill out a whole story based on it. It's a little bit why uh I think we so often profile and assume we know something about a person based on a very limited amount of data, and we do it all the time in every situation we go into because we don't have the time day to day, let alone law enforcement, to assess to the degree necessary to be truly accurate in every type of assessment.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

And with that goes the discarding of things, right? So I think this is another area that folks don't understand. As you go through life, as I go through life, like today, I've got to get over to the airport, I got to check in, I gotta go deal with security and everything else. As I'm going through that whole process, there's a whole bunch of people that are gonna be around me that I'm gonna interact with. But if it's something more than like eye contact or a passing nod, my brain's discarding. Right? Like it's not a concern, right? As I'm walking up to the TSA screening point, really my only concern is is there any immediate threat around me? And do I have my license out so I can stick it in the card reader so the dude will let me go to get my bags cleared? Everything else, while it's going on and I'm aware of it, it's like being discarded because it's not important, right? So as cops and everybody else goes through their day, they're discarding the things that aren't a threat.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:31

So that the brain.

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Yeah. And this is that would lead me to want to talk about the reticular activating system and how we can program it, right? So if go, because uh this fascinates me, it really does.

SPEAKER_00 14:46

That's good, that's getting into my weak area, not my strong suit right now on it. Um, but it's putting people in scenario training. It's putting people in simulation training. And I think one of the questions you had mentioned wanting to discuss was like, how can we do this? You've got to expose people to things, you've got to get them the reps, right? And get them the reps where there's decision making and get them the reps once they know how to make a good decision, right? To reinforce that. Um, one of the things I did when I was a patrol supervisor, we were in the process of trying to buy a big simulator for the office. Um, we'd done some proposals on that previously. I had written a paper on it in school. But we didn't have the simulator yet. So what I'm doing is taking YouTube videos, other agencies, body more camera stuff, where we know what the outcome is, showing them in briefing a couple times a week. So I've got my shift in there, we're getting ready to head out to work, watch the video. Okay, pause, right? Like this is what's gone on. What do we know? What's the information that's been shared? Okay, where's everybody's dis thought process at, right? Play, let it go another 30 seconds, a minute, pause, and have those conversations because while we didn't get a simulator run, what everybody had a chance to do was look at this video, think through it, see it evolve, and make some decisions on it, have a discussion about it, which reinforces good versus not so good, right? Like even if the video showed a horrible decision or horrible outcome, like we could at least talk about it and give guys a rep for the next event they had.

SPEAKER_01 16:11

Yeah, it's exposing them to the different possibilities. So they start seeing different potential triggers. Because the reticular activating system screens out superfluous information. It has primary objectives, uh, basically top-down cognitive thinking, where the captain of the ship is instructing the brain, this is what I think is important in this moment. And then that expectation can and does distort perception. So if you give people a multitude of variables in a scenario like you were just talking about, video scenario that plays out and makes them think, they'll start cataloging those specific behaviors preceding the violent outcome and put themselves in a better decision-making process, or at least in part a better decision-making process because they recognize that this shit is about to happen.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Yes. Um, and one of the things is it gives them a chance to see behaviors in context. So something that I was thinking of when you were talking about this was the elbow flare. And this has come up a lot lately with guys who are more involved in the hands-on skills, right? Picture somebody reaching behind them, behind themselves for their wallet, right? They carry their wallet in their back pocket, which is pretty common. How does the arm look when they reach behind to grab that versus how does the arm look if they're going for a pistol appendix carry? So in one, the arm's kind of down, swings back behind. In the other, it's a very noticeable once you've seen it, 45 degree flare of the elbow. Whether that's going for appendix, whether that's going for strong side hip, right, or even small the back carry. The arm looks completely different once you've seen it in context, like, oh, I know what that dude's doing because it's not reaching for his wallet to hand me his license.

SPEAKER_02 17:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:50

But you got to show folks that explain it to them, right? And then make sure they can see the differences and let him train on the differences.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Yeah. I love that. And one of the things they used to teach was that we are humans, just like every animal, we are calorie conscious. Everything we do is to try to conserve energy. So if you see movements that are larger than necessary to achieve what you what could be possible in this instance, reaching for a wallet, we don't go wide to get to the back end of our pocket. We go close to the body. It's less muscular engagement. But if we're going to reach for a gun, appendix carry, or some idiot's got it stuck in his pocket, he's got to go wide to get into and around, right? And it's that subtle difference in a flared elbow that can be that quarter fraction of a second response to, oh, it's on like Donkey Kong, and here's the signal that triggered me.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

And what you, as the individual involved in the vet, need to know is like, hey, I got shown this, right? This flare of the elbow. Myself as a trainer or our expert witness or the attorneys, then need to explain to the others, right? Be it the prosecutor who's reviewing it, the media who's talking about it, right, or the trier of fact, the courts, why this went the way this did, right? Like, why would why were they taught that? Why was it reasonable to, based on the totality of the circumstances, to believe that's what that was.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

And that education is absolutely invaluable. It's another reason why I I love the simulator, particularly video scenarios, because the general public in most cases has no idea how much pressure an officer is under during what should have been or could have been a routine stop or a routine anything. Absolutely of that pressure.

SPEAKER_00 19:37

And it gives the officers the reps, right? Like we can take we can take the citizens run th when we're running a citizens police academy, which was a hugely in invaluable tool. Right? Like that was amazing to have that available, put folks in. I heard people refer to it as an empathy machine. Um But now public seen it, they've seen the exposure of the training, but now I can get a bunch of reps with that. I'm not having to deal with protective equipment, iPro, ear pro, right? I'm not having to deal with restrictions on the range because I got multiple people. I can plug one, two, three officers into a thing, get them several reps, put them back on the street, grab more officers and do it.

SPEAKER_01 20:13

Yeah, no, I do. I think it's invaluable. It's great training. And I love putting civilians in a situation that they think will be clear-cut and easy to manage, and watching the wheels come off their wagon as the stress of it gets to them, and suddenly they're making really shitty decisions. And and you might think from, you know, sitting on your couch, you're like, why are they making that decision? I'm like, because stress has shut down the part of their brain that has the would or would have had them thinking clearly.

SPEAKER_00 20:41

Yeah. Um I know a lot of law enforcement agencies have them. Some, I'm gonna say the word civilian, but I don't mean it negatively, right? But some civilian training providers have them. Uh one gentleman north of you, Bill Armstrong, up in Mead Hall, Oklahoma, or McLeod, Oklahoma, the Mead Hall Range, Bill went out and bought a simulator for his facility so he could run these normal human beings and cops through scenarios at his place when the weather got to the point where they couldn't train outside.

SPEAKER_01 21:08

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SPEAKER_00 22:49

It'd be like any other any other skill set that's physical on one end and requires thought process on the other. So I don't know what sport you grew up playing, right? I'm going to guess you were you played what we call soccer. You guys called football when you were a kid. No? Okay. Rubby. All right. Fair enough. Even better. Um I was about two steps above the world's worst athlete is at in high school, right? I was on a team, but like my playing time was measured in minutes, not games. Um but what you look at is there's people who have a physical skill set. So I can take somebody out, teach them how to grip a pistol, align the sights, press the trigger. I've got to get them to the point where that can run as a subconscious program. Because if their whole brain is focusing on align, gripping the pistol, aligning the sights, pressing the trigger, their brain's not focusing on trying to solve the problem and making the decisions. One of the gentlemen I was lucky enough to train under several times, Scotty Reetz, former Los Angeles Police Department. Scotty has a phrase he'll talk about the fact that the higher the level of skill you have, the longer you can let an event degrade before you have to act. Right. So the longer you can let something go before, like, okay, I absolutely have to intervene in this problem or I absolutely have to do something. The more the skill is, the more the brain can process what's going on. And then they can apply it, right? I got to teach them how to do the skill first and then do it. So it'd be you know you go back to sports, right? Like you might understand how to do the pass, how to underhand pass the rugby ball back to the dude behind you, but then you have to know when to do it. You have to know when you go for the try versus when you pass the ball off to the guy behind you. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_01 24:29

Yeah, no, it absolutely does. It's that cognitive processing because people have a lot less actual bandwidth consciously to utilize in any given situation. And I I read somewhere, and I know we're not a computer, so it doesn't directly correlate, but our conscious mind can process about 42, 43, 44 bits of data per second, which sounds pretty good, until you compare that to the subconscious that can process 11 million bits of data per second. So the faster we take any uh physical or cognitive task and can train our subconscious brain to utilize and be doing the processing, the more bandwidth we have up front. And just as you said, if somebody's you know focusing consciously on their grip of the of the pistol and whether the support hand goes and the trigger press, they've probably used up the majority of their decision making at a conscious level on that task.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

And you also got to pre-flight them to the point, right? They have they have to be willing to acknowledge that X, Y, and Z can happen. Um, think about you're sitting on your computer, you go to open up a program, right? You just you powered the computer up a couple hours ago, you haven't had this program open up before. So you go over, you hit the icon, you double-click whatever you want, Word, web browser, whatever. It takes time to come up. Now, it's a whole lot faster than they were in the late 90s when I started messing with computers, but it still takes time for them to come up, right? Versus if I've already had the program up and I just reach over, click the work the icon for a Word document, bang, it's right there because the thing's already loaded. And there also has to be a little bit of that too.

SPEAKER_01 26:03

Yeah, agreed. So you obviously you spent absolutely years in a master's degree in it, use of force and critical incidents. When things go catastrophically wrong, do you attribute that to one individual part or several? I'm thinking here like, is it training? Is it tactics? Is it a human biology problem? Or maybe a bit of both?

SPEAKER_00 26:23

I think it starts with a human biology problem, right? And just in how humans interact. I can think back to mistakes I made. Um I when I look through the questions, I was specifically thinking of three people I worked with over my career who were fired and prosecuted for issues relating to use of force. And I and I will tell you, I agree with the firings in all of them. Um, one of the prosecutions I'm I'm still a little bit iffy about decades later, but I understand why the prosecution happened, right? And in these cases, um, as I was thinking about it, I'm like, okay, that one happened because he knew better. He was just lazy.

unknown 27:02

Right?

SPEAKER_00 27:02

He'd use force when it was reasonable. What he didn't do was the follow-on backside to it to actually make the physical arrest of the guy. And the issue came up with he had this this coworker of mine had used force, let the guy go, and then it became he had another encounter with law enforcement, and it came up that this first one had been done because he didn't follow the protocol. He didn't do things the right way, he got terminated and later prosecuted. Um there was another coworker, in this case, incredibly educated individual, had a had a postgraduate degree. Um, had we were not the first agency they had worked for. They used force when they clearly didn't have the ability ability to use it legally, lawfully. Um I still can't think of a single good reason for why that individual used force in that event. Um he was fired and prosecuted, and he was it was an overconfidence, or just outright, I can do this because, and the system worked. The issue was identified, it was investigated, both administratively and criminally, he was terminated, he was prosecuted. Um in the third one, it was I think again it was an overconfidence issue, which is a human biology problem for starters. He had had training. Um he did, he really didn't read the room. And when I say that read the room, I don't mean the one he was in at that moment, because it was on a traffic stop. He hadn't processed the changes in the world that had happened within the last few years, not only legally, but in terms of how society viewed things. And while his partner looked at the same situation and backed out of it to get distance, this guy charged into it, forced a forced an event he shouldn't have forced. Um the suspect, bad guy in this case, um, ended up dying, probably would have died anyway from some of the medical issues that he had going on, uh, very high levels of control substances on board. But we will never know because the behavior of former coworker, I had left the department by that point, I'd retired, was such that it exacerbated it at the very least. Right. And again, it was identified, investigated administratively, he was terminated, the court the criminal justice system investigated and prosecuted him. You know, and in each of those cases, it it wasn't a training issue on the front end, right? It was either a laziness or an overconfidence issue that then got exacerbated by other things.

SPEAKER_01 29:35

Yeah. It's interesting though, and it's lessons for us all because overconfidence is one of the things I frequently ran into with guys I was training back when it would, you know, it was Moy Titan Edge weapons, but uh, I I would try to spar with them at least once a quarter because invariably there was this sense after they'd had a few weeks and in some cases a few months, where they started to sort of get a little extra swagger in the step. You know, they felt like I got this, right? They have that little puff up going, and you're like, you need to calm the hell down. Like, no, shit's gonna go. It doesn't matter whether the other guy has mass, you know, amazing skills, or he just gets lucky. It's not gonna make any difference to you. The loss is gonna be the same and potentially the ass kicking, but it's taking some of that overconfidence out and keeping them the ego in check so that they realize, okay, is there is there an alternative to me just engaging with every potential, you know, asshole out there? Or is there a way, or should there be a way for me to consider, okay, I can back out of this, I can leave it, and I don't have to engage. And sparring with them was a big portion of that. It was just helping keep them that a realistic perspective on the situation and and show them that there are alternatives that they should absolutely explore before they ever get themselves into a situation where they're going chest to chest with some dude in a parking lot.

SPEAKER_00 30:54

And what I'll say for the folks listening to this is the system worked as it should have, right? The agency saw the issues in each of those, addressed them, resolved the problem.

SPEAKER_01 31:05

So how do they do that for law enforcement? Where you have to kind of have the command presence and com and confidence, but also read the room.

SPEAKER_00 31:14

You try to explain it to people. It's it's the supervisors on the front end. I think that's the biggest, it's it's the peer group, but it's really the supervisors who set the tone, right? What's what is acceptable, how we're how things are gonna be done. Um we're better at it now. I think we're better at it now. Um body warning cameras definitely have worked worked better for law enforcement than than um the anti-cop crowd thought they were gonna. They thought it was gonna just hang us all out to dry. And it's really showing the behavior that people we're dealing with. But you have to set parameters, the left and right limits, and work your people within those. And I'm not gonna say I was perfect for all 29 years. You know, I I I stepped on uh parts of my anatomy over the course of time, yeah, you know, and and learn from it, right? So you you just kind of have to tee up those things and give them the exposure. Simulators, scenario training, anything where they can get the reps on decision making, because then it will carry over. If you can make good decisions about when to use force, you're probably gonna make good decisions about driving. Right. And I've seen more and more officers, former officers of late, get prosecuted for their driving. And it's also happening to the public. Like, you know, what the posted speed limit is, what's a reasonable, but when you exceed it, what's reasonable versus okay, that's completely unreasonable, and now you you just bought a vehicular manslaughter charge because of because of your driving, right? So hopefully the decision-making stuff carries over broader than just the skill set.

SPEAKER_01 32:42

Yeah. But it's another fabulous argument for never cutting the budget to law enforcement. You want officers trained to the highest degree possible. Cutting their bloody budget does nothing but undermine that.

SPEAKER_00 32:54

And that training takes time. And I've got to pull the officers either off the street to do it, which means I've got to put somebody else out there. If I was still in the business, I would have to put somebody else out there. Or I've got to train them on overtime, and yet we want our officers to be arrested. We don't want our officers to be burnt out. We want them to do all the normal human things, even while they're doing shift work and everything else, right? So we've got to find ways to do that. Part of that's overtime, part of that's staffing. And right now, there's not a lot either. I mean, there's a lot of overtime, but not a lot of staffing, and that's not even getting into the training side.

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Yeah. No, and I'm very fortunate with Laser Ammo going to the conferences that we do, because there's a lot of law enforcement conferences there, chiefs of police, you know, tactical um events. And the this the underlying problem from my perspective, every time someone rolls up and has a look at our equipment, is I don't know if we have this in the budget. And you know, the flip side of that is how could they not have this in the budget? This allows them to train scenarios in a variety of different situations before they ever potentially encounter it for real and give them the training that they need. And it's funny because so many officers that I speak to, their intentions and the reason they do the job is for exactly the reason you would want someone to go into law enforcement. They want to protect those that can't protect themselves and stand in the way of the anarchists that would like it any other way. And it's it's heartbreaking a lot of times to see people roll up, they want to train, they want the classes, they want the equipment, they would put in the time, no one's giving them the money.

unknown 34:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:29

Pisses me off.

SPEAKER_00 34:31

And you can only spend so much of your own money and time going to training. You know, at some point, like I never had kids, but at some point, if you do have kids, you taking money away, take spending the money on a shooting class, no matter how likely it is to keep you alive on the back end, right? No matter how the payoff and confidence towards decision making. But at some point, there's sports, there's weekends, there's birthday parties, there's just playing time with mom and dad.

SPEAKER_02 34:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:00

That you you yourself can't always take away to prep for the job, right? So the organization has some responsibility. I understand people saying, well, if you're doing it, you should go out and get better training. I get that, but there's also life realities.

SPEAKER_01 35:13

Yeah, no, for sure. You gotta make it as easy and affordable. And that means the uh department has to pony up the money to get them the training that they need. When it's on the clock, it's part of the job, it's part of their responsibility, it's part of their need to train so that we have better decision makers under stress.

unknown 35:32

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

It's heartbreaking that it doesn't happen. So I know one of your presentations was examined mistake of fact shootings. Right. Expand on that.

SPEAKER_00 35:41

So um the whole pro that whole presentation is made up of a series of research studies, but the the lead one on that is ready positions and better outcomes. Um essentially it's building resilience into the decision-making process. It was done by Professor Paul Taylor up at the University of Colorado, Denver. And what he looked at was just where the ready, where your ready position was, right? Which kind of historically is both hands on the pistol, the car being the shotgun, whatever, lowered down. Now, when I started, low ready was about the belt. Like you could point the muzzle at about the belt of the person you were dealing with. Then somebody said, Ah, it's got to be a little lower, let's point it at the thigh. And then they finally said, like, no, we're running muzzles across people, which is kind of a violation of rule two. Never let your muzzle cover anything you're not willing to destroy until that decision is made. So maybe the muzzle needs to be going to the ground or up in the air, right? It's like a compressed high ready. What Taylor looked at was three ready positions, looking through the sights pointed in on the upper chest, which is not a ready position, muzzle lowered to about the bottom of the officer's sternum, right? So he they brought it down to the sternum, right? So it was lower on the person, or lowered down to about the navel of the officer. So it was probably about mid-thigh on the person they were dealing with. Um 300 plus cops. It was either the bad guy pulled a gun out of a pocket. So picture a Jframe coming into play, a little two-inch revolver, or a cell phone coming into play, right? So the good news was every time the bad guy in the study pulled the pulled the firearm, he got shot. Cool. Let's jove that one aside. The problem was what happened when the person pulled a cell phone out. And there's some data out there about I've got I include stuff from LAPD, LA Sheriff's Department of Philadelphia PD, about their perception shootings, mistake of fact shootings, cell phone shootings. And it kind of sits in the area of about 10%, maybe up to 15% of shootings over the course of a year during the times these studies looked at those agencies who fell into that category. I'm not saying they're horrible. There were more things in there, but this was just the fact that the object was not a firearm, a knife, right? So when they were pointed in looking through the sights, they had a 64% likelihood of shooting the person pulling the cell phone because they were seeing movement, not the object, right? So they're going off with behavior what's. Lowering the muzzle down to the sternum dropped it to 50%. Lowering the pistol down to about the officer's navel, right? So about 18 inches, maybe a little more, took it down to 30%. So just lowering the pistol that much gave you an over 100% reduction in mistake effect shootings in that study. And that's not even where I'd as low as I'd want the gun, right? Like I would want it off of them. Um so Taylor also talks about using that to build resilience in. And the analogy he uses is a rumble strip on the highway. Right? It's not going to stop you from going off the road. It's not going to stop you from ending up on the dirt shoulder with a 45 degree down angle, but it's telling you you're about to have problems.

SPEAKER_02 38:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:50

The more things that can be built into the decision-making process along those lines, the better off everybody's going to be. Um, I referenced a study from 2008 that was done by Tom Avini. And one of the interesting, scary things that came up in that Avini study, and this was the behavior, the nature of the call and the behavior, was in every one of the videos there were people downrange of the bad guy. So it was the officer looking at the video, there's the bad guy, and on the far side of the bad guy are either victims or uninvolved people. The study says many of those were shot, but it doesn't get into how many, right? So we've also got to start pushing scenario training that takes in rule four, right? Because we you destroy your target and what's beyond it. And then we put a two-dimensional target up in front of a 40-foot berm of armor plate, sandbag, shredded rubber.

SPEAKER_02 39:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:39

And but don't necessarily expose people to what's on the backside of that.

SPEAKER_02 39:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

One of the things I there's a gentleman by the name of Dustin Solomon. He was a Naval Academy graduate. Um, he came out of a thing called a neuro, and it's it's an incredibly smart shot timer tied to a laser projector that gives you go, no, go, don't shoot, shoot imagery while running a timer behind it. So here's the time from when the stimulus appeared. Here's when it went away. If you shot, how long did it take you to shoot? How many shots did you fire? What were your split times? If you were shooting when the stimulus went away, how much longer did you continue to shoot? So now we can start to collect some data and start working on training with that, right? And you can set it up. I've seen it run. I have two of the boxes, so I can run two problems at the same time. Um, I've watched it used with up with up to three boxes connected to each other. So now you have targets in depth, all giving you different stimulus, and you have to work the visual processing problem, right? So you already have to know how to shoot or be close to it. But now we can start working the visual processing. And I was in a class yesterday here in Connecticut, um, where there's a lot of work with the timer done. Well, auditory stimulus is very different from visual stimulus. Auditory is simply a go-no-go, right? Like when you hear the thing, the beep, you start, you go and do whatever it is you're told to do. There's no thought process about it. It's just, oh, there's a signal, I go. Giving people don't shoot, shoot visual stimulus and then taking it away really starts to work on some of these things, right? And how we can process stuff. Um, the late John Holson, who's was one of the guys who was working with the neuros, John used the analogy of it's going to the gym for the mind. So you go to the gym to work out, like stress stuff, improve stuff. But scenario training like that is like going to the gym. You're forcing yourself to work on these things to get better at it.

SPEAKER_01 41:41

So, in addition to the positioning of the p of the pistol once clear of the holster, giving you potentially additional time to process what's actually happening versus what you think is happening based on what is probably a very small movement. There's also how do you maintain cognitive processing abilities in that stressful position? So, or in that uh stressful situation. So, do you have any exercises or tips that you would give someone to help them improve cognitive processing and decision making outside of scenario training, which obviously does an amazing job to help expose someone to things they might not otherwise ever get exposed to until a critical moment? How do you get that person to manage the stress of something that is going to push their heart rate way up, their cloud their thinking, and all of these other physiological responses?

SPEAKER_00 42:35

Do things that make you uncomfortable.

unknown 42:37

Right.

SPEAKER_00 42:37

There's not, I don't think there's a direct analogy about shooting a match. Right. And one thing I will say in matches is I wish they had more surprise stages where you don't know what it is. You get told make ready and go, and that's when you first figure out what it is. But do anything that makes you uncomfortable and makes you think with the tool in your hand. Right. Um I will do things that involve blue painter's tape on targets. Right. I'll put up a bank of three targets. I call it the judgmental pres. I mentioned Scotty Reetz earlier. I took it from Scotty, he called it the blue tape drill. But when I put it in lesson plans, people would be like, what's that? Uh call it the judgmental pres. And everybody goes, well, it's three targets, they're kind of spread apart. All right, and thinking's involved. So that I didn't rename it for me, I renamed it for the folks I was training. But one only one of those will be a shoot target. And I'm not telling you which one it is. You have to turn and see it, right? That shoot target is either going to be a single shot to the head, a pair to the body, or a failure drill, depending on how many pieces of blue painter's tape are anywhere in the scoring area that target. So you do a 180-degree turn, look at target one, look at target two, look at target three, figure out which one of those is the shoot target, and then shoot the solution. But that's not where the question ends. Right. I look at look at the people watching, I'm like, did he shoot the right target? Yes, no. Yeah. Okay, did he deliver the right hits? Yes, no. Did he put them in the right place? Like if it calls for a headshot, is it in the scoring area of the head? Mm-hmm. Or did you shake it and now it's down in the neck somewhere?

SPEAKER_02 44:02

Right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:03

And then the question I've started asking the last few years is did they did whoever was shooting muzzle any of the other targets? Right? Did you did you run a muzzle across everybody, or did you actually keep the muzzle off of it until you got to a threat?

SPEAKER_01 44:20

I love that. I love that.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

Um years back, I I was teaching a class, we were shooting on a bunch of steel, and whoever had painted the steel had took these five kind of gumdrop-looking steel plates and painted them red, red, blue, red, red. I'm about the third or fourth person in, and the stadium light goes off over my head for me. It's like, oh. Finished up what we were doing on that, took them back to the square range, ran a couple drills, brought them back to the steel bay. And I said, as we walked in, all I said was, by the way, the blue's a no shoot. Didn't say anything else. So I had about 13 people in the class. Um, I watched 11 of them go bang, bang, run the muzzle across the no-shoot, bang, bang. Okay. I had one dude fire the shoot on the first two, actually like keep the muscle down range, but turn look at me, just briefly, move the muzzle, shoot on the other two. Another guy who shoots, moves the muzzle up and over the no shoot, shoots at her two. I'm like, cool. What's rule two? Never let your muzzle cover anything you're not willing to destroy. Right? Does that matter? I think it does. That's a family member down there, right? The person with the gun is not you with all your training, it's the person you least trust to have a loaded firearm. And now your family members down there. If we're gonna say the rules matter, then they need to matter. So even that little bit gets people to start thinking about it, right? And had some pretty good discussions. Um, I was teaching, I've been on a New England swing. I've been hosted by another company out here and doing a swing through the Northeast. And the pistol class we taught Sunday, they had a plate rack on the range. So had everybody shoot the plate rack a few times, started out on a deliberate run. Like let the dots, and everybody was shooting a pistol with optics on it, right? So let the dot settle, press, let the dot settle, press all the way through. Cool. Give them a couple runs. Come back now and tell people like you can let your inner Ricky Bobby come out, right? If you're not first, you're last. If you're not rubbing, you're not racing, work the plate rack like that. And watch how as the speed increased. Some people were able to control what they were doing performance-wise, some people weren't. And now it starts being a whole bunch of extra more shots, and it's taking longer than the deliberate run. Pulled out a visible laser for the next set of runs. And I'm like, hey, when you see the laser come on, that's the ghost stimulus. But whatever target the laser's pointed at is a no shoot. And then watch people do the same thing, right? Bang, bang, run the laser right, run the pistol right across the no shoot, continue on. Okay, let's have some conversation about this. If we say it matters, it matters. It matters. And just even that little bit can get people to process it. Now, what was funny was my host, the the owner of the company who hosted me, he was the first one to run it with the laser on. And when the laser came on, he drew the pistol, shot the plate with the laser on it, and put it away. Like, didn't even engage any of the other things. Very, very trained individual, very experienced individual. He has been around applied violence his entire adult life. But even under that little stimulus, like, oop, took a took a hard left turn on something.

SPEAKER_01 47:23

Yeah. I I do not want this moment to pass by without without saying how powerful that those teaching methods are. That is huge. Because we do say these are the safety rules for firearms, you know. But the minute we get on the range, you're right. There's a berm downrange.

SPEAKER_00 47:47

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 47:48

We immediately associate that with I can shoot anything down there. It doesn't really matter. And yet the reality is if you take that berm away and now you're having to start cognitively processing decisions on where is that round going and where is my muzzle pointing when I'm not actually shooting, right? That that break in the in the habit that's usually been formed with people on the range is incredibly powerful. Now, one of the things I can kind of correlate it to is we have a video scenario inside of the smokeless range that is a hostage situation. And it's a very short clip. It is a second man in the stack, enter the room, button hook, take out the shooter. And we have had we run cops through it at every level, from you know, sort of relative newbies to the SWAT guys who are high speed, low drag. Second man in the stack. What do you think they do as they're getting ready for this scenario to play? Point the gun down range, right at the back of the head of the first man in the stack.

SPEAKER_00 48:49

And they probably put the finger on the trigger.

SPEAKER_01 48:52

Yes. And it's and you're like, okay, we're gonna well let the whole thing play out. And then I say, I want you to imagine your first man in the stack, and the second guy behind you did what you just did. How happy are you? And you can see the color drain out of the face as they realize that, oh, I would never. I'm like, yes, treat this scenario, treat that training on the range as real, not just a place that you go play and shoot some, you know, send some. This is where you train. This is where you actually try to put yourself in a situation that's as close to real as possible. And I love what how you're doing that. That's brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 49:31

And you asked about the prakademic side. So I'm gonna kind of take a detour to come back to it. Please do. But we have the four safety rules. So I'm gonna use these as an example, right? And they're four sentences on the wall, and I see a lot of people parrot them. I I remember a time when I paired them. I would just read them off the sign, right? And then as you you spend more time doing this, if you're thinking about what's going on, breaking down, all guns are always loaded. All right. So there's a time they are, there's a time they aren't, because we have to do dry practice, we have to take them apart to clean them. So they're not loaded when you've got them apart for these things. If you're doing force on force, what needs to be the condition of the gun? If you're gonna leave the range that day, what needs to be the condition of the gun? Uh Roger Anoka, I don't know if you've heard of him, he's a researcher hand scientist who looked into why we have negligent discharges. So if I could change the wording on every firearm safety rule sign, I would, it would say, keep your finger up on the frame slide interface until you have made the decision to shoot and your sites are on target, right? Adults do better when you tell them what you want them to do than telling them what you don't want them to do. We're making the decision before we're muzzling people. So I think it should read that way. But regardless of what you do, it like people need to understand why that's important. So Anoka identified three reasons in his research on negligent discharges in the hand as to why the gun, people will fire the gun when they don't intend to. Interlimiter action, what one side of the body does, the other side of the body wants to do. So if I'm opening and closing a door, but I got my finger on the trigger of a pistol, when I open and close that door, there's a good chance I'm gonna fire the gun if it's off safe and my fingers there. Loss of balance. If I slip and fall, right, I'm gonna tighten up on the way to the ground. And if I get startled or spooked, as happened to a former coworker of mine on one, where he pulled through a very long double action trigger pull. Um, like if I don't explain to people like this is why this is important, this is why this matters, then they just here don't do that. Right. So that's one of those things where you take the academic side and you should apply it to the practical application side as a as an instructor, as a trainer.

SPEAKER_01 51:42

Brilliant. Well, you've spent a literal lifetime studying violence, decision making, training, human performance. If there's one thing you wish every shooter would adopt, one mindset that you think would make them safer, more effective, maybe harder to defeat, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 51:58

So it's going to be a stepped one. You have to acknowledge that it will happen to you. If you can get to the end of this race we call life without ever having to do it, that's awesome. But you have to accept that it that it can happen to you. And with that acceptance, then comes an obligation to yourself, if no one else, to be at least a little bit better on as much as you can be every day. Um medical training, right? We we all talk about medical training. Okay, fine, you can plug a hole if an accident happens on a range. But what if one of your family members slips and falls through a plate glass window? Can you stop the bleeding to the limb? Right, and at least maintain the blood in the body until that's over with, right? Until you can get firefighters, paramedics there to do the rest of the stuff. Can you recognize an environmental injury? Right? Cold weather exposure, frostbite issues, hypothermia, heat-related stuff, both heat stroke, um, heat exhaustion. Can you recognize those? Can you treat those, right? Um talk about when you do the medical brief in classes. One of the things I bring up is I've had more legit medical issues in classes than I've had trauma issues in classes, fortunately, right? Knock on wood. But I had a student a few years back who didn't say anything to us, the instructors. He would talk to another, another student about, like, hey, I'm having this pain in my chest and it's going up my neck and it's going down my arm. And he had a history of cardiac issues. He had cardiac meds, but he doesn't think to call anybody, he doesn't tell us. And now we're five minutes before class starting that day, and the dude's in his truck having a cardiac event, which necessitates doctors, firefighters, paramedics, and everything else, right? Knowing that when somebody's telling you, hey, I got chest pain and it's like here to here, you know, from my neck down to my arm, elbow, like knowing that much, like you don't have to know how to deal with a cardiac arrest. You just need to know that that dude's having major cardiac issues. It in addition to being able to handle the firearm, being able to handle your physical skills, right? Be just 100% better at something.

SPEAKER_01 54:00

Yeah.

unknown 54:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 54:02

And I think a medical emergency is one thing that most of us, at least at some point, are going to face. And people, they're not ready for that either. We're really not. Well, you're a wealth of information. I think probably most as important as any of that is it's your teaching style that I think is probably brilliant. I would love to take one of your classes. Where can people get a hold of you, or how would you like them to follow you, et cetera?

SPEAKER_00 54:27

So the name of the company is Cougar Mountain Solutions. It is named after a terrain feature in the San Francisco Bay Area where I was born and raised. It's it's the high ground at the south end of my old county. Um, so cougarmountain solutions.com for the company. You can find me on social media either via Cougar Mountain Solutions or especially on Instagram. It's cougar underscore mountain underscore solutions. I'm also the editor for American Cop magazine, which is AmericanCop.com. So I do a little bit of writing in addition to everything else. It's internet writing. It's worth what you pay for, which is free. Just go to the website, you'll subscribe. I promise it's one, maybe two emails a week telling you what the articles are. Um, it's not just law enforcement centric, right? Every now and then there are some things that are purely law enforcement centric, but like this week's article was on finding the dot with a red dot pistol, like ways to show people how to find the dot when they're bringing it from the holster from a ready position. So those are pretty much the places you can find me. Um in the coming rest of the year, I've got classes in scheduled in Texas, Puerto Rico, Connecticut, um, Ohio, Washington, California, Georgia, uh, Oklahoma, and back to Washington. So I've got several things coming up, and I'm more than interested in talking to folks about next year, next year's classes as well.

SPEAKER_01 55:52

That's fantastic. So you'll go to other states, obviously, to teach. And in in uh your home base, you're teaching classes there as well? So a range?

SPEAKER_00 56:01

I live in Utah now. I moved out of California a few years ago. I escaped. Um, I am trying desperately to find a home range in Utah to teach at. I've got places I can shoot, but I haven't been able to get into any to teach. So if there's any listeners in the greater Salt Lake area or down into Utah County who have access to a range who are like interested in hosting me, please reach out because I need to find a home range there.

SPEAKER_01 56:21

Okay. No, that's great. Brilliant. Honestly, you I think you have dropped uh more than enough golden nuggets during this particular podcast. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. So thank you for joining me for this uh this episode.

SPEAKER_00 56:34

Terry, thank you so much for having me. Even that Kristen gal who's our friend for putting us in contact. So yeah, I know.

SPEAKER_01 56:41

I'm gonna say thank you. Yeah, it's a great introduction. All right, thank you for joining us for today's episode. Don't forget to hit the like, share, subscribe button. It helps the algorithm push out the content to more people, more shooters, and it helps support the channel more than you could know. We thank you for that, and uh, we look forward to seeing you in the next episode. Cheers, everyone.