Magpul Art of the Dynamic Handgun
- Thread starter Gunner4life
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A few thoughts.
I've been reading this thread with a keen eye for some time.
It seems to me that there's bit a bit of beating around the bush as to the "what doctrine versus which" is being discussed here. For those in the know, it's clear. To those who aren’t, it's Tactical Response's methodology that has become the standard for comparison, for a select few, posting in this thread. Let me preface this by saying that I took a big gulp of Yeager's kool-aid when I began shooting, less than three years ago. Yup, three years. In that time I have gone from being dogmatic and close-minded in my opinions of tactics, fundamentals, and technique, to carefully analyzing the hows and the whys behind what I do. To put it simply, I have deviated substantially from what I learned in those four days.
The following are just some examples:
Position Norte/Up/High-high ready/Sabrina no longer makes sense as a go-to ready position. A high-and-tight sul offers me good retention (better than anything Norte could), prevents me from becoming fatigued while running around with a long gun, and allows me to reholster my weapon without having to sweep vertically from a position near my face to my holster. One of the central drivers behind Tactical Response’s use of Norte is for lowest common denominator teaching (no, I’m not insulting the alumni or the instructors by saying this). By bringing your weapon close to your face as a position for movement and scanning, you have essentially taken two movements (that for scanning and movement, as mentioned, and that for reloading and clearing malfunctions) and turned it into one. This, unfortunately, fails to recognize the disparate needs of a ready position versus those of the almost ubiquitous position that has become known as the “workspace” (elbow tucked into side, weapon canted, magazine-well facing the shooter, about a foot from the face). A ready position should offer, at a minimum, the ability to employ a firearm quickly and easily to a threat, but prevent muzzling unintended “targets”. The workspace position allows a shooter to keep himself situationally aware while he deals with reloads and malfunction clearances, as well as allowing him to visually identify what is going on with his pistol (that could mean a quick glance to the leading edge of the magwell during a reload or performing quick cant and glance to check that a dead trigger meant a double-feed). Unfortunately, Norte as I have described and been taught, only fits the bill for one of those two positions. While it keeps the head up and the shooter situationally aware, it is far too close to the face to allow for that quick glance on reloads. Don’t think that half second look is important? Think keeping your eyes on the threat is so much more vital to the outcome to a gunfight? I’ve seen officers and citizens alike bungle reloads, losing several seconds (not one or two, but five or six) because they have become stressed-out to the sound of a shot-timer’s buzzer and couldn’t put the small metal rectangle into the small metal box. It’s been said before, I’m just reiterating it: seconds are hours on two-way ranges. On top of this, I’ve seen the same people become entirely faster and substantially smoother in their reloads because they took that extra moment to look at what they were doing. Similarly, such a glance as a diagnostic tool does not take much time at all. For a half second, you could look into your chamber and see a double-feed versus spending several more trying to figure it out by tap-racking it (again, part of Tactical Response’s methodology: tap-rack-fight twice, then go to remedial action). If you believe you’re going to get sucked into a mind-problem because you are juggling options while under stress (ala, Hick’s Law), don’t prescribe to this theory. It’s not for you.
Another: running the bolt/slide/charging-handle every time on reload. I was taught that the loss of one round is not detrimental to a gunfight, that the insurance that an overhand rack offers will beat out the merits of a reloading using the slide-lock/slide-release/bolt-catch. I disagree. Depending on the platform I am using, I will switch between these two techniques (as a lefty, I cannot reach the slide-release on a P226, so I rack it; on my Glock 17, it’s easy-peasy, so I press it), but my preferred method is to send the slide forward using that little tab. Why? It’s easier to do, and it’s more reliable. I’ve heard the counter-arguments: the last ten-percent of recoil-spring compression (any spring, for that matter ) offers the main of its force in extension, sending that bolt/slide forward with more “oomf” when finally released; that you cannot perform fine-motor-skill movement under stress, that your hands turn to flippers when the adrenaline starts pumping; that allows for the elimination of steps (any reload, your rack the slide, no “thinking” about it). For the first point, so what? In my experience, it just does not matter. In recent classes, I have put enough rounds through my gun (read two-to-three thousand) without a cleaning, just more lube, to know that, even when it’s hot, muddy, and full of crud, it will still work by simply pressing that button. That’s not enough, you say? A certain member on this board knows a certain fella that put something on the order of ten-thousand rounds through his pistol without a cleaning, simply added more lube, without experiencing a failure of the slide to go into battery. That, simply put, is enough for me. For the second point, I have to call out-and-out bull####. Not only is this an antiquated term that has been thus far debunked in several circles, it reveals a case of selective focus in weapons manipulation. That is, if pressing a slide-release is so hard, how has anyone performed a reload, where they have to press a similarly small button to eject a magazine? Doesn’t that fall under the same category of “fine-motor skills”? Wouldn’t it be similarly impossible under the adrenaline dump of a fight-or-flight reflex? What about the finest-motor skill of them all: squeezing a trigger smoothly to the rear as to not disturb the orientation of the muzzle? God forbid pressing a small button, but pressing a small lever while simultaneously keeping it steady while go-juice is bugging out your brain? The reason why we are able to do these things under the stress of combat is because of the inoculation of training. Doing something enough times, specifically under the right circumstances, will negate much of the effect that stress has on us. This is why certain police departments down south are able to field SWAT teams who have taken documented lights-out head-shots at distances, with pistols, that where most novice shooters would be hard pressed to make a similar shot, sans stress. They trained hard, and trained often, and they trained properly. As for the last point...As I have evolved as a shooter, I have found that the deduction of quarter-seconds and half-seconds are what make me fast, and it is in this pursuit that I turned from racking the slide. Besides costing me somewhere between a quarter and a half second instead of pressing a button, racking the slide also gives me the opportunity to ride it forward, negating all that stored energy within the coils of the spring, meaning I have to take yet more time to fix my mistake. Despite being trained not to do this, this has happened to me, and whatever is said here, pressing the slide-release twice is a whole lot easier than either racking a slide twice or fixing the fubar you just induced.
And lastly...The use of a speed reload in the place of a tactical reload, yet another facet of the Tactical Response methodology. Again, I’ve read the arguments for it: you’re getting your gun back into the fight faster, you can retrieve the ammunition you dumped when you have the time/opportunity, you don’t need to be fumbling around with two magazines at the same time. This, as with the Norte/workspace dilemma, brings two conflicting ideas and tries to marry them together. A speed/emergency reload is meant to bring your firearm back up to full capacity in the fastest manner possible, without regard to whatever exited that magwell during the reloading. Why is this disregard for what you just dropped important? Because that source of ammunition you just let hit the deck is now fouled. Don’t believe me? Take a partially loaded magazine and dump it from chest height on concrete, several times. You will see your rounds nose-dive, flip over themselves, bounce right out of the magazine. Worse yet, your follower could become jammed within the magazine body, meaning you might get one shot off before your ammunition failed to cycle into your gun, necessitating immediate action to clear the stoppage. In taking this reload and the malfunctions it creates and applying it in the circumstances that a tactical reload would otherwise fill, you have essentially put a malfunction-inducing magazine back into your source of ammunition. Now, instead of having a half magazine’s worth of ammunition that could possibly save your life, you now have a disaster in the making. Why all this? The move away from the tactical reload to the speed reload is not the failure of this particular technique, but the failure of its application. Too many people use a tactical reload without fully understanding the need for time and opportunity to complete it, often necessitating a full scan of the surrounding area to make sure that you have those commodities before going ahead with the reload. It still has a purpose. It’s still valid. Some people just don’t know how to use it.
Why all this in a thread about a Magpul DVD? In simple terms, the constant evolution of tactics, skill, and training in necessary for the life of the firearms training industry as a whole and for the survivability of the individual gunfighter individually. Without this pursuit of better/faster/smoother, we would be stuck with what Jeff Cooper was teaching decades ago, more boys in A-stan would be dead as a result of failures to apply the proper (or novel, but effective) techniques and tactics, and competitors wouldn’t be as sharp (see holy-$@(# fast, or just youtube Dave Sevigny) as they could be. While we have a few vanguards of the training industry to thank for the steady evolution of tactics, the big explosion in recent years has been Magpul Dynamics, Christ Costa, and Travis Haley. The idea that these two men are teaching anything other than an effective, efficient, and consistent method to shoot or manipulate a weapon is laughable when one looks at their own competition between their peers. Can you nitpick them for not saying the same thing twice in one of their DVDs? Sure. Are they wrong, and are caught being wrong on tape? Again, sure. But they practice what they preach, and their ability to go toe-to-toe with other world-class shooters at the invitationals on certain boards is a testament not only to their skill but the worth of what they sell. That despite fumbling over themselves, they still pull off reloads, splits, transitions (both to the secondary weapon and between targets), and malfunction clearances at such speed and such smooth fluidity, while under the stress of competition and the shot-timer, to leave most other trainers, never mind other shooters, in the dust, shows the heights that some people will achieve with constant practice, an analytical mind, and an unending pursuit of the unattainable word: perfection. Do I agree wholeheartedly with their methodology? Absolutely not. I believe they overcomplicate malfunction clearances, particularly those of a handgun, and their opinions of appendix-carry do not seem to stem from experience, but they are doing something good to the industry as a whole. They’re shaking things up. They’re getting faster and better all the time, fueling the drive to cut those last tenths of a second. And that is a good thing, no matter how many bruised egos they leave in their wake.
tl;dr Chris Costa, Chris Costa, Chris Costa.
I've been reading this thread with a keen eye for some time.
It seems to me that there's bit a bit of beating around the bush as to the "what doctrine versus which" is being discussed here. For those in the know, it's clear. To those who aren’t, it's Tactical Response's methodology that has become the standard for comparison, for a select few, posting in this thread. Let me preface this by saying that I took a big gulp of Yeager's kool-aid when I began shooting, less than three years ago. Yup, three years. In that time I have gone from being dogmatic and close-minded in my opinions of tactics, fundamentals, and technique, to carefully analyzing the hows and the whys behind what I do. To put it simply, I have deviated substantially from what I learned in those four days.
The following are just some examples:
Position Norte/Up/High-high ready/Sabrina no longer makes sense as a go-to ready position. A high-and-tight sul offers me good retention (better than anything Norte could), prevents me from becoming fatigued while running around with a long gun, and allows me to reholster my weapon without having to sweep vertically from a position near my face to my holster. One of the central drivers behind Tactical Response’s use of Norte is for lowest common denominator teaching (no, I’m not insulting the alumni or the instructors by saying this). By bringing your weapon close to your face as a position for movement and scanning, you have essentially taken two movements (that for scanning and movement, as mentioned, and that for reloading and clearing malfunctions) and turned it into one. This, unfortunately, fails to recognize the disparate needs of a ready position versus those of the almost ubiquitous position that has become known as the “workspace” (elbow tucked into side, weapon canted, magazine-well facing the shooter, about a foot from the face). A ready position should offer, at a minimum, the ability to employ a firearm quickly and easily to a threat, but prevent muzzling unintended “targets”. The workspace position allows a shooter to keep himself situationally aware while he deals with reloads and malfunction clearances, as well as allowing him to visually identify what is going on with his pistol (that could mean a quick glance to the leading edge of the magwell during a reload or performing quick cant and glance to check that a dead trigger meant a double-feed). Unfortunately, Norte as I have described and been taught, only fits the bill for one of those two positions. While it keeps the head up and the shooter situationally aware, it is far too close to the face to allow for that quick glance on reloads. Don’t think that half second look is important? Think keeping your eyes on the threat is so much more vital to the outcome to a gunfight? I’ve seen officers and citizens alike bungle reloads, losing several seconds (not one or two, but five or six) because they have become stressed-out to the sound of a shot-timer’s buzzer and couldn’t put the small metal rectangle into the small metal box. It’s been said before, I’m just reiterating it: seconds are hours on two-way ranges. On top of this, I’ve seen the same people become entirely faster and substantially smoother in their reloads because they took that extra moment to look at what they were doing. Similarly, such a glance as a diagnostic tool does not take much time at all. For a half second, you could look into your chamber and see a double-feed versus spending several more trying to figure it out by tap-racking it (again, part of Tactical Response’s methodology: tap-rack-fight twice, then go to remedial action). If you believe you’re going to get sucked into a mind-problem because you are juggling options while under stress (ala, Hick’s Law), don’t prescribe to this theory. It’s not for you.
Another: running the bolt/slide/charging-handle every time on reload. I was taught that the loss of one round is not detrimental to a gunfight, that the insurance that an overhand rack offers will beat out the merits of a reloading using the slide-lock/slide-release/bolt-catch. I disagree. Depending on the platform I am using, I will switch between these two techniques (as a lefty, I cannot reach the slide-release on a P226, so I rack it; on my Glock 17, it’s easy-peasy, so I press it), but my preferred method is to send the slide forward using that little tab. Why? It’s easier to do, and it’s more reliable. I’ve heard the counter-arguments: the last ten-percent of recoil-spring compression (any spring, for that matter ) offers the main of its force in extension, sending that bolt/slide forward with more “oomf” when finally released; that you cannot perform fine-motor-skill movement under stress, that your hands turn to flippers when the adrenaline starts pumping; that allows for the elimination of steps (any reload, your rack the slide, no “thinking” about it). For the first point, so what? In my experience, it just does not matter. In recent classes, I have put enough rounds through my gun (read two-to-three thousand) without a cleaning, just more lube, to know that, even when it’s hot, muddy, and full of crud, it will still work by simply pressing that button. That’s not enough, you say? A certain member on this board knows a certain fella that put something on the order of ten-thousand rounds through his pistol without a cleaning, simply added more lube, without experiencing a failure of the slide to go into battery. That, simply put, is enough for me. For the second point, I have to call out-and-out bull####. Not only is this an antiquated term that has been thus far debunked in several circles, it reveals a case of selective focus in weapons manipulation. That is, if pressing a slide-release is so hard, how has anyone performed a reload, where they have to press a similarly small button to eject a magazine? Doesn’t that fall under the same category of “fine-motor skills”? Wouldn’t it be similarly impossible under the adrenaline dump of a fight-or-flight reflex? What about the finest-motor skill of them all: squeezing a trigger smoothly to the rear as to not disturb the orientation of the muzzle? God forbid pressing a small button, but pressing a small lever while simultaneously keeping it steady while go-juice is bugging out your brain? The reason why we are able to do these things under the stress of combat is because of the inoculation of training. Doing something enough times, specifically under the right circumstances, will negate much of the effect that stress has on us. This is why certain police departments down south are able to field SWAT teams who have taken documented lights-out head-shots at distances, with pistols, that where most novice shooters would be hard pressed to make a similar shot, sans stress. They trained hard, and trained often, and they trained properly. As for the last point...As I have evolved as a shooter, I have found that the deduction of quarter-seconds and half-seconds are what make me fast, and it is in this pursuit that I turned from racking the slide. Besides costing me somewhere between a quarter and a half second instead of pressing a button, racking the slide also gives me the opportunity to ride it forward, negating all that stored energy within the coils of the spring, meaning I have to take yet more time to fix my mistake. Despite being trained not to do this, this has happened to me, and whatever is said here, pressing the slide-release twice is a whole lot easier than either racking a slide twice or fixing the fubar you just induced.
And lastly...The use of a speed reload in the place of a tactical reload, yet another facet of the Tactical Response methodology. Again, I’ve read the arguments for it: you’re getting your gun back into the fight faster, you can retrieve the ammunition you dumped when you have the time/opportunity, you don’t need to be fumbling around with two magazines at the same time. This, as with the Norte/workspace dilemma, brings two conflicting ideas and tries to marry them together. A speed/emergency reload is meant to bring your firearm back up to full capacity in the fastest manner possible, without regard to whatever exited that magwell during the reloading. Why is this disregard for what you just dropped important? Because that source of ammunition you just let hit the deck is now fouled. Don’t believe me? Take a partially loaded magazine and dump it from chest height on concrete, several times. You will see your rounds nose-dive, flip over themselves, bounce right out of the magazine. Worse yet, your follower could become jammed within the magazine body, meaning you might get one shot off before your ammunition failed to cycle into your gun, necessitating immediate action to clear the stoppage. In taking this reload and the malfunctions it creates and applying it in the circumstances that a tactical reload would otherwise fill, you have essentially put a malfunction-inducing magazine back into your source of ammunition. Now, instead of having a half magazine’s worth of ammunition that could possibly save your life, you now have a disaster in the making. Why all this? The move away from the tactical reload to the speed reload is not the failure of this particular technique, but the failure of its application. Too many people use a tactical reload without fully understanding the need for time and opportunity to complete it, often necessitating a full scan of the surrounding area to make sure that you have those commodities before going ahead with the reload. It still has a purpose. It’s still valid. Some people just don’t know how to use it.
Why all this in a thread about a Magpul DVD? In simple terms, the constant evolution of tactics, skill, and training in necessary for the life of the firearms training industry as a whole and for the survivability of the individual gunfighter individually. Without this pursuit of better/faster/smoother, we would be stuck with what Jeff Cooper was teaching decades ago, more boys in A-stan would be dead as a result of failures to apply the proper (or novel, but effective) techniques and tactics, and competitors wouldn’t be as sharp (see holy-$@(# fast, or just youtube Dave Sevigny) as they could be. While we have a few vanguards of the training industry to thank for the steady evolution of tactics, the big explosion in recent years has been Magpul Dynamics, Christ Costa, and Travis Haley. The idea that these two men are teaching anything other than an effective, efficient, and consistent method to shoot or manipulate a weapon is laughable when one looks at their own competition between their peers. Can you nitpick them for not saying the same thing twice in one of their DVDs? Sure. Are they wrong, and are caught being wrong on tape? Again, sure. But they practice what they preach, and their ability to go toe-to-toe with other world-class shooters at the invitationals on certain boards is a testament not only to their skill but the worth of what they sell. That despite fumbling over themselves, they still pull off reloads, splits, transitions (both to the secondary weapon and between targets), and malfunction clearances at such speed and such smooth fluidity, while under the stress of competition and the shot-timer, to leave most other trainers, never mind other shooters, in the dust, shows the heights that some people will achieve with constant practice, an analytical mind, and an unending pursuit of the unattainable word: perfection. Do I agree wholeheartedly with their methodology? Absolutely not. I believe they overcomplicate malfunction clearances, particularly those of a handgun, and their opinions of appendix-carry do not seem to stem from experience, but they are doing something good to the industry as a whole. They’re shaking things up. They’re getting faster and better all the time, fueling the drive to cut those last tenths of a second. And that is a good thing, no matter how many bruised egos they leave in their wake.
tl;dr Chris Costa, Chris Costa, Chris Costa.
Well researched, well thought out and well written. To say it's scary that someone this new to the world of shooting knows this much is an understatement. I've had the pleasure of watching Invidion grow from rank beginner to one of the best shooters locally. His youth is a deception, he is more mature than I am for gods sake. A blank page that soaks up everything around him, uses what suits him, and stores the rest in case he needs it. While perhaps not quite at the point of being a "pro" he is well on his way, as should be evidenced by his above essay. This is someone who's videos you'll be paying for someday.
And I think with that, we are done
And I think with that, we are done
- Status
