Real life example of why fundamentals matter
Beau Doboszenski, Owner/Lead Instructor
Originally published August 30th, 2018
On July 21, 2018, LAPD patrol officers chasing a murder suspect opened fire from their squad car, accidentally hitting and killing an innocent bystander inside a nearby building. Here’s the story.
Undoubtedly, the officers involved in this incident will spend their lives replaying their shots, while the victim’s family will always wonder how their innocent loved one died that day, instead of the armed murder suspect. We Defenders need to use this tragedy as an opportunity for self-reflection: are we doing what we NEED TO DO to carry a firearm correctly?
The Physiological Response to Stress (PRS) is probably the single biggest factor in all that went wrong in this shooting. This is one reason that training to deal with PRS should be a central portion of your skill development.
PRS is a chemical and neurological response by your brain and body to sudden and intense situations. It has the following impacts:
It limits your ability to think - that is, to rationally make decisions and take in new information
It diminishes your unpracticed fine motor skills
It supercharges your body’s survival structures - your heart rate shoots up to keep blood moving, breathing rate skyrockets to push more oxygen in the bloodstream, and adrenaline acts as a cheap energy source allowing maximum large muscle output
There are two important ways to train for PRS: Stress Inoculation and Proper Neural Pathway Development.
Stress Inoculation
There are many ways to induce stress in your training, including certain types of drills, time hacks, increasing standards of accuracy, and competition. How ever you can bring stress into your training will be beneficial for you, though nothing as beneficial as force on force training. You will never experience as much stress as when you are “competing for your life” against another human.
Mind you, in force on force training, if done well, the instructors should be looking for you to engage in specific neural pathways like deterrence, proper draws, or stoppage remediations, and their scenarios should reflect that. However, poor instructors often design “crap sandwiches” of scenarios that are pretty much an exercise in watching someone drown, ideally a bit less unsuccessfully than previous times. Choose your force on force instructors wisely to get useful training rather than an overload, knowing that this type of training will get you as close to the reality of a lethal force conflict as you can possibly get. Those who train for defensive applications of firearms need to train this way to be prepared for a real life encounter.
Force on force isn’t the only means of stress inoculation. The others I mentioned definitely can help. As Col. Grossman notes in his lectures (which I’ve paraphrased here), the more often we as defenders can move in and out of stressful situations, the less likely we will ever get to panic mode, and thus we’ll still be able to function effectively. So don’t be afraid to jump into that competition or improve your times for first shot on target, since stress in small doses acts like a vaccine to panic.
Physical fitness is also a critical part of preparing for lethal force stress. The more fit and adaptable you are, the more pressure/stress you can handle. So if you’re finding yourself huffing and puffing just carrying your bag to the range, you really need to take control of your fitness.
Proper Neural Pathway Development
For any cure, there is unfortunately often a side effect. Stress training, though fun and exciting, may actually hinder your development. The reason is that without properly developed neural pathways for the skills that you are pressurizing under stress, you will be creating a massive barrier to the effective use of that skill.
Let's use a vaccine as an analogy. Vaccines are the injection of weakened or dead viruses into the healthy person. The body of the injected then fights off the weakened virus and learns how that virus attacks. Note something very important: the vaccine is weakened or dead and the body is healthy and strong. That same vaccine, injected into a sick and weak person, may result in death.
This same concept is true for stress training and the defender. If the neural pathways are strong, the defender becomes yet more capable of deploying those deeply ingrained skills when faced with a real threat. However, if the neural pathways are weak, the defender’s responses become twisted and unruly, with the result being an ineffective defense or even no defense at all.
There was one skill, in particular, that I noticed was a problem in the video of the LAPD officers from the grocery store shooting. A neural pathway that wasn’t properly developed was the concept of split speeds in relation to the range of target and standard of accuracy.
The concept is that as the range of your threat/target or the successful standard of accuracy changes, your shot speed should also change. This is called shot modulation. If you need to put three bullets in a 1 inch circle at 30 feet, you’re probably doing 1 second splits or more, nothing faster. Now what if there are threats at various ranges? Say 10 feet, 20 feet and 60 feet, would you shoot each of them at the same speed? You shouldn’t. That full speed cycling at 10 feet in a 6 inch circle would probably turn into 6 foot circle at 60 feet. This is exactly what happened with these officers in this particular shooting, making their far-off shots wildly inaccurate. From the audio, it’s clear they were shooting much too fast for the range between themselves and the target, roughly .30 splits at a moving target almost 30 yards away.
Armchair quarterbacking aside, these officers were suffering from PRS, and had already exchanged shots with the suspect, so I’m not suggesting that they could have come up with accurate shot modulation in the heat of the moment. Instead, this is a skill that should be regularly practiced by law enforcement and defenders.
So how do you train for shot modulation? Here’s a video:
A lot of defenders want to train under stress, but few want to take the time to hardwire the underlying skills necessary to make the stress training a truly valuable and growth-inducing experience. If you don’t master the fundamentals, you can’t move on to the advanced steps. I've heard it said that people avoid the fundamentals because they don’t have the guts to become great at them.
This is exactly right. Every advanced tactic is BASED upon the MASTERY of the fundamentals.
Do you have the courage to simplify, and focus on what needs to be done? Slow, gradual, and proper neural pathway development must come first, and then stress inoculation. These are the keys.