I wanted to do a recap of my Tac Con and give an AAR of the classes I took with my main takeaways. This was my 5th or 6th Tac Con, the first of which was in 2010. For me it’s as much a family reunion as it is a training event. Forgive any typos as I’m typing as fast as I can remember. Big thanks to Tom and Lynn Givens for putting it on and for inviting me back.

Larry Lindenman – Adaptive Close Protection

This 2-hour block was all about defending a third party from a close range gun attack. Larry’s work in personal protection, the recent United Healthcare CEO killing, and the contextual carry over to being a solo guardian of a third party is what spurred Larry to teach this block. He started by explaining how in a perfect world of executive protection, you would be in a team of more than three folks who would have assigned roles in the event something kicked off. But his observation is that more often than not, they’re working as a singleton operator and all responsibility is on that one person. Facing this reality, much like a solo guardian to a family member, you have to decide that if you see a gun being presented at someone you care about should you draw your gun and fire back, step in front of your “client”, or take up space to crash the muzzle of the gun and create attachment and control? Larry reckons it’s the third option, so that’s what we worked on.

As with all practical weapons based grappling, taking up space and gaining limb control is absolutely the top priority. So to summarize the approach you must:

• crash the weapon bearing limb with your forearms to off-muzzle the gun
• depending on if you’re outside or inside of the gun arm, either achieve a Russian tie (outside 2-on-1), or get inside 2-on-1 control and hip switch to convert it to an outside 2-on-1
• Drag them to the ground and shin pin and disarm/strike

The second part of the class was on escorting people who are either unaware of what’s happening and standing around, or frozen in place. He showed several, depending on your orientation to them when you decide to move. All of them used some clever mechanical trick to keep them attached to you, or get them moving. Pretty neat.

Chris Fry – Counter Knife Clinic

This is a topic that I regularly teach in my self defense classes, and most of it was informed by guys like Chris Fry (MDTS and PFC). I took this one to pick up on his coaching cues and drill progressions. In this 2 hour block, we went over the unentangled knife problem. The shorthand for the block was ICAT:

• Intercept the weapon bearing limb
• Control the weapon bearing limb
• Angle and begin to work outside the weapon bearing limb
• Transition to takedowns, improved position, strikes, etc

Chris said that in western countries, we tend to see three main lines of attack in stabbings. A horizontal slash, a downward stab, and an upward (straight-line) stab. So Chris covered the safest ways to crash those attacks, which came down to variations of an X-block, or a superman style crash to interrupt the forward pressure and allow attachment. We then worked on the inside 2-on-1 double wrist control and transitioned to the outside 2-on-1 (Russian Tie again). From there he showed going to the back and getting inside the arms at the elbow to keep hands separated and stay connected (like a marionette). We finished with a simple takedown that sits the bad guy to the floor on his butt.

Cecil Burch – Just Enough Jitsu

For me as a hobbyist brown belt who coaches lots of white belts, it’s always fun to see what a long time black belt prioritizes and how they coach fundamentals. Cecil (Immediate Action Combatives) is such a good coach. It was very basic breakfalls, get ups, and other fundamental movements and principles taught in a thoughtful progression for his audience of rank newbies. I didn’t participate in this, but it was good to take notes.

Justin Dyal – Task Confidence: Building Skills You Can Believe In

This was the standout classroom presentation for me. Dyal is an excellent instructor and has a very engaging speaking style. I’d love to get to one of his shooting classes soon. The main drive of his presentation was how we effectively build shooting skills in a way that we can count on them on our worst day. When we learn skills, it is best to learn them:

• As a skill in isolation
• As a skill to a standard
• As a skill in context and “under pressure”

We are constrained by:

• Time
• Energy (Our internal energy and drive for practice and training)
• Resources
• Facilities
• The Instruction we get

He warned against practicing for the drill, citing Goodhart’s law, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”, instead recommending a thoughtful but steady rotation of drills and variation to avoid this. He then relayed mastery of a skill as your Odds of on demand performance, where:

• 100% is a skill you can do on your worst day (hungover, no sleep, rain, injured)
• 80% on most days
• 20% on your best days
• Aspirational – one day

Marksmanship is not what you HAVE done, it’s what you can do on demand. So the goal of skill building isn’t to shoot a best day score and then never do that drill again, but rather to try to move a 20% skill into an 80% skill, and on. Most people get obsessed with 20% performances, but professionals work on improving those 80% performance levels over time. And regression to the average skill is as predictable as gravity. Instead of worrying about achieving a high score, have a longer horizon view and think about “what went right/wrong that run?” and train around those failures over time. Fail non-judgmentally.

One more cool thing he shared was general accuracy standards for different problems:

• Under direct attack – 10″ accuracy standards
• In a fight – 8″
• Joining a fight in progress – 5″
• Going on the attack, initiating the fight – 3″

All of them are different technical shooting problems, and we as private citizens are probably in the first two categories. You need to understand what it takes and what you can do at most distances.

He then covered Primacy and Recency. Primacy being the first thing you learned and practiced, and recency being “when did you do it last?”. He made the analogy of a small leak in a tire. If you address it in 3 days, there’s no danger but you may lose some gas mileage (dry fire). If you address it in 3 weeks, you’re in more danger (live fire frequency). If you don’t address it for a year, you’ll be on the side of the road (dead in the streets). He thinks the entry level to excellence is 300 rounds fired a week. Operational excellence is 300 rounds a month (my note: probably a sweet spot for serious students). Basic understanding is 300 rounds a year.

Claude Werner – Off Duty LAPD Shootings

Claude (The Tactical Professor) cataloged his study of recent off-duty LAPD shootings and built a database to share with us. He studies the LAPD shootings because they are well documented and told play-by-play and LAPD is encouraged not to take duty actions while off duty. They are also rated on several factors like if they used good tactics, justified in accessing their gun, as well as if the force used was appropriate. There are lessons for private citizens to learn from. Here’s a few tidbits.

He broke them down into unintentional discharges, shooting people, and shooting animals. The first category was unintentional discharges. The primary causes were:

• Improperly dryfiring and reloading (always have rigid dry-fire procedure)
• Cleaning loaded weapons
• Administrative carry or handling of loaded guns
• High stress patrol situations around vehicles (sympathetic hand movements, keep finger in high register)
• Drunkenness

The UD’s with a revolvers were caused by not confirming empty or having unsafe dryfire protocols. For autos it was unsafe dryfire, hand swapping the gun, sympathetic hand movement, an in-car manipulation, and an immediate draw to shot (not occasionally training a draw to challenge).

Claude told an interesting story of the use of a warning shot, that while historically not allowed by the LAPD was warranted as a good use of force. The short story is a cops wife was trying to kill him, chasing him, and he drew a backup and fired a warning shot to dissuade her further (055-06). So warning shots can be useful, if the circumstances warrant it.

As far as animal shootings go, they were about a quarter of the events he cataloged. He told the story of a hero cop who saved a baby from being eaten by a pitbull (035-14)

He told a story about the viability of off-body carry, and despite it being poo-pooed generally, it can and does work in real shootings. Off body carry isn’t the kiss of death. He told another story that ended in a cul-de-sac long distance shootout (041-23) in a nice neighborhood. Claude emphasized that there are nice neighborhoods, but not completely safe ones. He also noted that back up guns save lives (047-14)

Weems, Gelhaus, Hearne – Favorite Studies from the TacCon chess club

This was a fun block in which the presenters outlined their favorite performance studies and gave takeaways that might benefit the training community.

Lee Weems (First Person Safety) outlined a Basketball performance study and related it to shooting. He noted that there should be a high contextual relationship between practice and the game (much in line with Dyal). He emphasized that cold skills matter (like Dyal). He contrasted Open and Closed skills. Closed skills being skills in isolation in ideal circumstances and Open skills being those that are done in unpredictable uncontrolled environments (game day or adverse conditions)

Erick Gelhaus (cougar mountain solutions) presented a study from Force Science about a shoot/don’t shoot study in trained and untrained people. The study looked at things like personality traits of the participants. Those with a higher fight tendency led to more shooting errors, and those with a higher flight tendency tended to shoot later.

John Hearne (Two Pillars Training) presented a few related studies on performance and the role of multitasking and the enhanced learning curve associated with interleaving and referenced his Mississippi Casino Drill as a good way to build skill while multitasking. He also gave general goals for ‘blackbelt’ levels of shooting:

• Ron Avery said the USPSA B-class is the black belt of shooting
• Matt Little/Frank Proctor said similar here
• Karl Rehn says a good goal is IDPA expert of the boundary of b/c class

He also talked about the phenomena of heuristic completion, which is the innate push to finish a task we start when it comes to draw-shoot if that’s all we practice. He also reckons that malfunctions in real world shootings happen more than we think so he recommended clearing different kinds of stoppages in practice.

Andy Stanford – The History of the Southwest Pistol League

Andy presented a thorough history of the southwest pistol league that Cooper started as a way to pressure test the combat shooting they were doing at Gunsite. He passed around lots of historic magazines and articles that cataloged the process and the evolution of the techniques they used. It was a fun history lesson, and Andy is a very unique character.

Rhett Neumayer – Intro To Deep Concealment

Rhett (Demonstrated Concepts) is on the cutting edge of doing magic with guns carried completely below the belt line. In this block he outlined his methods for accessing a deep concealed gun and gear considerations to allow it. From holster setup (phlster enigma) to belt type (cheap walmart floppy belt), what kind of belt buckle he prefers, as well as how to attack the draw from the small triangle formed at the magazine-well side of the gun and pants, sliding across to a full firing grip. Some really cool stuff that will also work well for belt-carried clipdraw or hamre forge gripped snubs like I favor.

Craig Douglas -Experiential Learning Lab

This will be the last time Craig (Shivworks) does the ELL at TacCon. I went as an observer to watch 15 people go through an ambiguous and open ended force on force scenario. As usual, it was very interesting to watch how each person handled it. On a personal note, it’s always a pleasure to watch Craig instruct. I always learn something from him.

Chuck Haggard – Revolving Guns are Real Guns

In this block, Chuck Haggard (Agile Training) gave a crash course on running revolvers. I was lucky enough to hang out and take notes even though I wasn’t shooting. He also did a cool thing where he gave three ways to do every manipulation, since revolvers can be tricky and one method may work better than another for a given person. He covered:

• Trigger manipulation
• Reloading methods (speed strip, speed loader, loose rounds)
• Grip (he prefers overwrapped thumb for J-frames)
• Setting up speed strips for .22, .38, .32
• 3 kinds of drills to work through flinch
• 3 kinds of command fire (standard response, failure drill, head shots)