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Hidden Training Dangers: Peer Pressure and Blind Obedience

Robert Farago - comments No comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5wB2vkLb6Y

Dennis Kennedy runs the Counter Terrorism Institute of America (video above). According to the company’s combat-terror.com website, David’s “served in the military as an Army Special Forces weapons NCO, Military Police SRT Instructor and Air Force Security Forces SRT Leader. As a Peace Officer, he worked in Utah and California depts. where he served in patrol, jail, vice, warrants and K9. He is a Utah POST certified Instructor as well as certified NRA Law Enforcement Patrol Rifle Instructor. He is also certified as an Instructor in Taser, OC, Defensive Tactics, Impact weapons and PPCT and Explosive Detection Dog Handler.” Awesome. Here’s my problem . . .

Live fire training is an inherently dangerous business, what with bullets whizzing about and all. The more variables you introduce into that training—additional people of various skill levels, difficulty in visual or spoken communication, rough terrain, limited visibility, physical discomfort, etc.—the more dangerous it becomes.

With that in mind, there is no ‘effing way I’d participate in the session shown above. The trainer could be the reincarnation of General George S. Patton. My classmates could be the Navy SEALS who took out Osama Bin Laden. It wouldn’t make any difference. I simply wouldn’t take that risk. I’d walk away. Fast.

But then that’s me. Plenty of new and even advanced shooters do exactly as they’re told in training situations, no questions asked, no matter what. They surrender their safety to their instructor both out of reverence and fear of looking like a pussy.

That’s understandable if you’re in the armed forces, where your life and livelihood depend on your ability to submit to authority and get along with your mates. It can be genuinely life-threatening if you’re not.

In a winter exercise like this, a fellow shooter could slip, fall and shoot you dead. You could slip, fall and shoot yourself dead. In another training class, well, anything.

There are only three possible relationships between humans: lead, follow or get out of the way. As a civilian taking firearms training never forget the last option. If you see something you consider unsafe, say something. If the trainer rips you a new you-know-what for daring to question his or her authority, walk. If they fail to correct the problem, walk.

You don’t have to sign a liability waiver to know your safety is your responsibility. Remain skeptical about any live fire exercise and remember to take that responsibility with deadly self-aware seriousness. Your life depends on it.

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Robert Farago

Robert Farago is the former publisher of The Truth About Guns (TTAG). He started the site to explore the ethics, morality, business, politics, culture, technology, practice, strategy, dangers and fun of guns.

0 thoughts on “Hidden Training Dangers: Peer Pressure and Blind Obedience”

  1. I’m flummoxed.

    What do you see that is so dangerous? The range looks well run, I don’t see any safety issues. Are you telling me that you live in New England and you’re afraid to train in the snow?

    The time to learn how to deal with shooting in the snow is not when your life is in jeopardy.

    Reply
  2. The good Senator refuted, in a terse statement about HELLER, the incredible mass of hot air, devoid of any substance, offered by the over-caffinated Joe.
    I only wish he had emphasized that HELLER showed that MILLER specifically concerned the protection of the “right of the people to keep and bear ” arms useful for military purposes. The objections of the gun-grabbers to “military style” AR-15s in civilian hands would only serve to assure the Miller court “that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment [and] that its use could contribute to the common defense”, and therefore a type of weapon the people have the right to keep and bear under the 2nd Amendment.

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  3. Looks like fun to me – and I’d rather die doing something fun than something boring. I’ve done similar things during arctic combat training – only with a little more dispersion and full auto. I haven’t died, and I don’t have any additional holes.

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  4. Ummm not sure what you dont like? I expected them to be doing live fire tactical retreat exercises or something….shooting past each other.

    You can slip and fall and point you weapon in any class….snow or no snow.

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    • Really!?! Saying that every post RF has put up in the last several days is a steaming pile of crap is a flame now? I just want a way to get legitimate TTAG posts without getting distracted by RF’s consistent nonsense. Every post is misleading, cherry picked garbage. If pointing this out is a “flame” then whatever. Enjoy the company of 13 year olds because that is all that will stick around at this rate.

      Reply
  5. Training in cold weather, even snow covered conditions makes sense. I taught cold weather mountain warfare to include live fire exercises for years. Unfortunately we cannot choose the threat(s) we will face or the environmental conditions in which they will present themselves. If the RSO is a loose cannon or the range generally unsafe then it behooves the students to speak up. Other than that, deal with it or don’t waste the money or the trainer/student’s time.

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  6. I respect the point of the article – we should all make our own decisions about potentially risky activity. However in this video I saw people training in adverse weather conditions. Although the weather looked atrocious, I didn’t see any shooting drills that looked particularly hazardous.

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  7. I don’t think I can shoot down a drone with my 12 ga. And I don’t think anyone would sell me a surplus Hawk anti-air defense system.

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  8. If I am legally shooting at birds, and a drone clears the treeline over my posted private property, no one should wonder why it gets shot down.

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  9. Well at least the guys in the video had their holosights on correctly. Today I ran across this article from no less a Brit paper, pointing out a SWAT team member with the holosight on backwards in a real shootout…I guess the really cool guys do it that way. Reminds me of that story a while back of the officer with the magazine reversed in the AR.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2294225/SWAT-officer-attracts-ridicule-s-pictured-rifle-sight-backwards.html

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  10. Jamming the communications is presumptively illegal, as is shooting across a (public) roadway. What about lasers? Not enough to “shoot it down” or damage avionics, but what about dazzling the image sensors with a little extra light?

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    • Hmmm… that’s an idea. Don’t know about the legality of shooting LASERs at a non-living target, but it’s a delightful image.

      Use a CO2 cutting LASER. It emits in the infrared, so proving how the wee birdie got itself cooked would be more than a tidge tricky.

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  11. Well, the first thing I want to know is “who are the trainees?”. Are they LEO’s or private security? Or just your average guy that wants to learn advanced tactics? We all know the old adage “Train like you fight, fight like you train”. If these are just random people, who want to prepare for a possible encounter in their daily lives, then the danger I see is that the training does NOT reflect what would happen in sudden contact scenario and what a shooter should do in that circumstance. Doing live fire drills in inclement weather can be a good confidence builder and I didn’t see any glaring safety violations, but the danger level is always increased when you step away from the firing line of a controlled gun range. So, the author has a valid point. It is up to each individual to make the decision to participate or not.

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  12. There were a lot more Henry rifles that were used in the Civil War than those the government bought. Many union soldiers bought them privately and even some officers flipped the bill to equip their men with the rifle. A few Henrys found their way to the Confederate side. Even Jefferson Davis’ body guards had them.

    As nice as it was the Spencer saw more widespread use and had a more powerful cartridge. The Spencer also had Presidential approval, Lincoln urging his generals to adopt the repeater which they did, many reluctantly. 11 years after the Civil War the troops on the Little Big Horn were equipped again with single shot rifles. Military thinking.

    There is a beautiful Henry in a gun store near here. It is engraved with the battles it was in. If you want an original Henry get ready to pay and pay big!

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  13. The other reason that folks in the military will undertake riskier training is because it is worth it. Yes, you might suffer a casualty 1 out of every 10,000 times, but if you are training on a vital technique prior to taking a unit to war, it might be worth it.

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  14. Robert, my state was not at war, it is either the War of the Rebellion, the War for Southern Independence or the Civil War…… wouldn’t think you’d fall for an early PC re write of history……

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  15. It’s very satisfying to know that we’re not the only country to have Joe Bidens. I guess it’s like having locust, they appear in the political framework in every country you can name and they use their mouths to ruin wherever they’re at. Gotta be the water.

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  16. I’m not a big keltec fan, but I have to agree with the other commentors about ALWAYS cleaning and lubing a new gun out of the box no matter what the brand, and NEVER taking a dremel to the rails of a gun no matter what the brand.
    Being a big 1911 fan I like “tuner” guns and the pf9 reminds me of the 1911s many of us like to “tune” on.

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  17. Sorry, but I have to call B.S. on Mr. Dumm claiming a single action gun with a safety is more dangerous to pocket carry than a double action with no safety.
    There are a lot of reports out there of people accidentaly discharging their “safe action trigger” safety-free wonder guns.

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  18. We all know that the movies exaggerate everything, particularly the the capabilities and functions of firearms. However, when I talk to a pro-gun control person, they agree that virtually everything in movies is unrealistic and grossly exaggerated, EXCEPT firearms. Among other things, most of them seem to believe that you can easily hit anything and everything you aim at. If you believed that, of course you wouldn’t see the problem with a magazine capacity limit. In their mind, a 10 round magazine is sufficient to deal with up to 10 assailants, because you only have to shoot each one once and then they are incapacitated. I don’t have any official figures, but based on most of the DGU articles I have read, I estimate the average shots fired to hits ratio is about 4 to 1. For the Highly-Trained-and-More-Equal-than-You NYPD, it is closer to 9 to 1, if you don’t count the innocent bystanders as hits. But they don’t understand this, because years of watching bad action movies has ingrained in their mind what firearms are and are not. This is why no amount of arguing with gun control folks will make a difference. The only way to make an impact is to take them to the range so they can see what firearms’ true capabilities and limitations are.

    It is also about changing the perceptions. I remember as a child, a CHILD mind you, watching movies and TV shows and the only people that carried guns were the police, the bad guys, and occasionally the protagonist if they were a bad a**, which also usually meant that they were operating outside the law too, but for the good. TV made me believe that you were up to no good if you had a gun and that only the bad guys carried them around concealed. A lot of these programs also pushed the idea that the Fed’s were the most competent at everything and whenever they showed up on the scene, the local cops just needed to get out of the way. While I didn’t understand due process, I remember always being so annoyed when the cop had to respect the accused’s rights. He is the bad guy, just shoot him! Arrest him, and then shoot him again! As a kid, among other things, I also thought that the President should be like a king (because that was cool), and that individual rights should never usurp national security, and that the government really was there to help us. “Because this is America! We are the good guys. We beat the Nazi’s for crying out loud! That has count to for something!” It is that child-like misunderstanding and dependence on authority (when convenient) that handicaps much of the people in this country. Understand too, I was not raised a liberal. My parents voted straight Republican and I thought of myself as Republican because I opposed social welfare, abortion, etc. (mostly because even as a kid, I didn’t like the idea of someone taking what I earned and giving it to someone that wasn’t me). I am now 27, but I remember when I was in high school and Bush passed the Patriot Act, post 9-11. I didn’t have a problem with it, I mean, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about, right? Plus, Bush was a Republican and he was one of the good guys. I have since revised my evaluation of Bush and put him in the bottom third of U.S. Presidents, based on constitutional integrity. Why do I say all of this? The gun community has to break through the deep seeded, child hood mis-perceptions about who carries and uses guns, even among conservatives. Thankfully, my eyes were opened to reality during the 2006 mid term elections, when I started actually paying attention and studying instead of just believing what I was told. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that haven’t had that epiphany yet.

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  19. LOL! Florida is light blue and that is only because of the wacko senator that wants mental health testing to buy ammo, They are really wanting to make it look like they are winning. NOT!

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  20. As far as I know, there is no real legislative threat in Pennsylvania, but there may be some gun control legislation that I do not know. I believe the new Democratic Attorney General is moving to end reciprocity for FL CCW’s who are not FL residents, which may be the only action in the works. On the other hand I am not aware of any pro-gun initiatives.

    So painting PA light blue is possibly accurate, but not a true reality. In the worst case, it’s an attempt to “paint” a more blue picture on their map with has a definite yellow, i.e. pro-gun, appearance.

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  21. Shawnmoore81,

    ND has an unemployment rate under 4% and roughly 3% of the population has a CC license (and that number is.growing). You’re welcome any time if you want to ditch the Northeast.

    Reply

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