Saturday, April 17, 2010

Post Class AAR

So this morning was a Force on Force class. Mainly to iron out the bugs of some new scenarios for Polite Society.

In addition, two students from that other university in Texas wanted to come out and take some pictures and interview people for a project and potentially for their blog. Nice guys, I'll be interested to see the final result of their work.

Anyway, as for class, an important lessons reinforced, be aggressive enough soon enough. Many of the scenarios really needed the "potential victim" to react to the incoming unknown contacts soon enough and appropriately. Keep your head up people and be aware of your surroundings. If something doesn't seem right, PAY ATTENTION TO IT.

For some reason, people don't seem to want to do much FoF training. They will spend big bucks on a gun, maybe shoot it a little or even more rare, get some training on how to shoot better. A very small percentage seek advance training to improve their skills with their firearm. However, that is maybe 5% of a lethal encounter. The other 95% involves questions like.

Should I be shooting?
Is there something else I should be doing instead of shooting?
How do I recognize a situation that I would be better off avoiding?
What is the right branch to take in this situation?
Now that the shooting has ended, what next?
Has the shooting really ended?

These are by far not all the questions, just a few to stimulate discussions and learning.

FoF classes are really the closest that anyone could come to actually being in a lethal encounter without actually risking being killed. This gives the students the opportunity to experience all the physiological issues that can occur during a lethal encounter. Auditory exclusion, time distortion, degradation of fine motor skills, all the fun stuff that may or may not happen in an encounter. Even though this is a class and done with simunitions, airsoft or redguns, students often experience these symptoms as if it was real life encounters.

Why don't people want to learn and experience this? Your Thoughts?

2 comments:

  1. I guess you post those questions because you didn't have many people out there today? Only reason I couldn't was because the Wife had plans thus the kiddos were mine to mind today. Else I would have been there.

    Recently I wondered such things myself.

    I'm not sure why. But my guesses:

    1. People just don't know. They just aren't aware of such training, that it exists or the value of it.

    2. People are afraid. We're naturally afraid of the confrontation... we acknowledge it, thus why we get and/or carry guns in the first place, but we're just scared. Thus people don't want to seek out putting themselves into that "scary place".

    3. People are afraid, of the training. In my years in martial arts, I know a lot of people that just do not want to spar. They have various reasons, but they have no desire to hit people, or probably more importantly, no desire to get hit. They may be afraid of what FoF training involves.

    That's why in my above blog posted I wanted to make it clear that FoF isn't necessarily some high-end UFC style throwdown. It's like you said: it's a lot more mentally involved than physically, but certainly there's some physical. But it's really physical that almost anyone should be able to handle.

    So, I'm still not sure why people avoid FoF, but the above are my hypotheses.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yep, those were my thoughts, too. Most folks (that are interested) know about CHL class, but unless their CHL instructor is in the know and tells them about FoF, they don't even know it's available.

    But the big factor has to be fear. My previous employer held an "Employee Health Day" once a year, and one year they had a self-defense instructor... Nth degree black belt in disciplines I can't pronounce. He was a really good instructor, and he kept it simple... he talked a lot about awareness, and then demonstrated and got us to practice 3-4 simple moves. Maybe 10 people showed up for that presentation (out of ~ 350 employees) and I was the only one who would engage at all. I let him use me for the demos because no one else would step up, and then I couldn't practice anything because my partner would just whine and cringe if I touched her... and I don't think she applied more than 2 oz of pressure while practicing on me, either... and the rest of the group was pretty much the same.

    Probably the same applies to handgun FoF training. Very few people really want training. A few others might want to watch a class and then go away thinking they've learned something, but they're afraid to actually get hands-on. Most are too afraid to even go that far.

    And then there are a few on the other end of the spectrum with "talisman disease"... they think just owning a gun is enough to keep the unthinkable from happening to them.

    ReplyDelete