{"id":2916,"date":"2014-10-24T22:29:57","date_gmt":"2014-10-25T02:29:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=2916"},"modified":"2014-10-24T22:29:57","modified_gmt":"2014-10-25T02:29:57","slug":"blowing-a-shot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/blowing-a-shot\/","title":{"rendered":"BLOWING A SHOT"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago in Arkansas, I was teaching a 40-hour class for armed citizens and off duty cops. The course finishes with a tough written exam on deadly force law and tactics, and a 60-shot live fire qualification encompassing dominant hand only, non-dominant hand only, speed reloads, shooting from cover positions, and cetera.\u00a0 Before the students shoot, the staff runs a \u201cpace-setter\u201d: we shoot the timed course of fire while they watch, so they can get a good mental image of what the stances and techniques they\u2019re expected to perform look like, and how fast they\u2019ll have to do it to score well.\u00a0 Given that there are fixed time limits, this also lets the observers kinda \u201cset their internal clock.\u201d\u00a0 Part of the incentive is, whatever score I shoot, if the student ties me they get an autographed dollar bill inscribed, \u201cYou tied me at my own game,\u201d and if they outshoot me, they earn an autographed <em>five<\/em>-dollar bill that says, \u201cYou beat me at my own game.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Nothing makes me prouder of my students than giving them one of those dollar bills. I confess, however, to mixed feelings about having to pay out a fiver.\u00a0 On the one hand, as I tell them beforehand, there\u2019s no greater compliment a student can pay an instructor than to outperform the teacher in the skill being taught.\u00a0 On the other hand, there\u2019s the personal excoriation of \u201cOh, crap, I blew it!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>I normally shoot it with a perfect 300 out of 300 points score, as I damn well <em>should, <\/em>having run this course for decades.\u00a0 But \u2013 less than half an hour after telling them to stay at a \u201cconscious competence\u201d level and think about every shot as they\u2019re squeezing it off, I violated my own rule and let myself slip into the \u201cunconscious competence\u201d mode sometimes called \u201cautomatic pilot.\u201d\u00a0 The sight alignment was hard and solid from the fifteen yard line, but my stance wasn\u2019t quite perfect for natural point of aim apparently, and about the time that I saw the well-aligned sights had drifted to the right and realized that I was automatically pressing the trigger, there was a very brief instant when I thought, \u201cThe sights need to come more left but my finger is pressing the trigger and\u201d\u00a0 &#8212; BANG!<\/p>\n<p>The sights told me the story before I saw the bullet hole: I had broken the shot prematurely with the gun aligned to 3 o\u2019clock of where I needed the shot to go, and that was exactly where the 230 grain Winchester .45 ACP hardball bullet hit\u2026just outside the maximum 5-point zone and into the four-point zone.\u00a0 I did what I should have done beforehand, and turned off the auto pilot and went back to conscious competence \u2013 thinking about what I was doing.\u00a0 The rest of the shots went center, but I finished with a 299 out of 300\u2026and yes, that cost me more than one five-dollar bill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A few weeks ago in Arkansas, I was teaching a 40-hour class for armed citizens and off duty cops. The course finishes with a tough written exam on deadly force law and tactics, and a 60-shot live fire qualification encompassing dominant hand only, non-dominant hand only, speed reloads, shooting from cover positions, and cetera.\u00a0 Before [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,14],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2916","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-competition","8":"category-training"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}