Defensive Shooting Club: Scenario Day, "Target Discrimination"

Today we had a large group of people! Everyone was great too. We even had a couple of families including their sons ages ranging from 12 - 16.

Today was a "blind" shoot. Everybody was corralled at the far end of the range while Jeff set up the scenario. No one sees what is going on ahead of time. This allows everyone to experience the situation fresh without rehearsal or even knowing what to expect. It's the ultimate simulation of what could really happen. Believe me your adrenaline starts up and emotions come into play even though it's a contrived, controlled environment!

Jeff Patane focused on "Target Discrimination"

The four steps of Target Discrimination are:

1. Take in the big picture looking for out-of-the-ordinary behavior or actions.
2. Scan for suspicious aggressive or otherwise deliberate motion.
3. Check waist band and hands for signs of a weapon
4. Determine optimum area to engage a determined threat.

Of course these steps happen quite fast and it's easy to skip a step and start experience tunnel vision by focusing on only one threat or group of threats that are clustered together.

Also, when we determined a threat we tried to conceal the fact that we are armed till the last possible moment to engage the threat. This will optimize the advantage of surprise and if there are multiple threats this will allow for some kind of strategy to maximize survival.

We we shown various ways to distract possible threats by raising our support side hand blading our body in such a way to conceal our weapon while simultaneously reaching for our weapon to draw.

There is also a verbal component that plays into confrontations as you would ultimately like to talk down or slow down the threat to allow for time to get into position or distract or provide witnesses with verbal clues that you tried to stop whatever events are unfolding.

Once the threat has been eliminated, one way or another, it's still very important to maintain situational awareness and continue to take in the big picture.

In general it's a very fluid situation and practice doing scenarios like this gives us the chance to participate, critique, learn how we would react and improve in a controlled environment.

One thing that is clear to me it is easy to "intellectualize" the situation, and believe that you could do this and that, well once you participate in a scenario like this you'll see it's an eye opening experience , everything you "thought" you would do goes out the window. Also, when thrown into such a situation the first reaction is to stand there and think "Is this really happening?" but converting that to action where you immediately recognize the situation for what is is and react accordingly in a defensive way that could save your life, that's where training comes in. The constant inculcation that you need to do something now because the bad guy is not going to wait for you is one of the move valuable lessons to learn!

That's where this training clearly separates the "martial arts" use of firearms vs the gaming use of firearms in it's various forms.


Here is some video of the great day: