Day 2
Day 2 started with automatic gunfire. 10:00 am had us on the 100 meter line hammering bursts of 7.62×51, 300 Blackout, 10mm, 9mm, and .45 ACP into steel targets and grinning ear to ear.
My personal favorite was the G3 build however the little D300 DMR set on automatic wearing an Omega from SilencerCo was incredible.
After an hour of hammering steel we went cold on the 100 meter and pulled our MP5’s and other subguns out on the 50 meter. Time to get to work.
After hitting on proper positioning and stance we lined up and let rounds fly.
Many of the same drills we’d shot Day 1 made an appearance. Fundamentals are fundamentals regardless of platform, just with differences in how they are applied.
We ran rhythm drills, lateral movement, target transitions, each one trying to hone down and polish a specific or set of essential skills.
We broke for lunch and went back to the classroom to eat and cover some more more information.
Discussion over different projectile designs, how they wound, and how they perform through different obstacles like vehicle safety glass and how to adapt and plan ahead. There is a mountain of hearsay online and finding well cited and sourced information can be a challenge but acquiring it helps refine your plan and training.
For instance a more vertical windshield like that on a Jeep Wrangler won’t deflect a round nearly as much as an angled windshield like that on a Ford Taurus. The greater the angle the greater the deflection. Shooting into a windshield, rounds deflect downward, shooting out they angle up.
We went live again after lunch (catering was terrible honestly but it was food there and no fault of the class or club, the caterer didn’t deliver on promise) and began working with the vehicles.
Working with and around the cars put a lot of moving pieces into motion. You had to adjust your shooting due to obstacles, fire from awkward angles, get yourself out of the vehicle (without gravity getting the better of you or seat belt keeping you planted), move around the vehicle efficiently, and don’t get yourself mentally stuck in one location (firing too many rounds from the seat for example and not actually moving out of the spot you were attacked. AKA Get off the X/Get out of the Kill Zone).
Then we took it a step further. Now it was getting a two person team out of an ambush while maintaining fire superiority and all the rest! It was a blast. Pun absolutely intended.
Quick tap on the breaks here… These vehicle drills seem ridiculous on the surface. They are. They’re meant to be. The action movie style ambush against a disabled vehicle with multiple targets, blasting through the windshield and around doors (or through those too), moving while your partner covers you and you cover them… it’s some action packed drama right out of Strike Back… and it’s fun! You want to do it.
The practical side of it is, one, you want to do it. Two, it forces your use of all the fundamentals you build with the more blase drills. Three, while the likelihood of that scenario ever coming up (outside being on a force protection/personal security detail) is astronomically minute, individual aspects of it are far more likely however.
That Hollywood worthy shoot and move familiarization drill covers a great many small details you might need in an individual defensive gun use. Getting your seat belt off and clear. How to shoot through glass properly. Where your vehicle offers the greatest protection.
And most importantly what it feels like to do all those things. Removing the fog of inexperience is what FamFire (familiarization fire drills) are for. They build an exposure and an experience on an otherwise unfamiliar situation that is incredibly difficult to visualize effectively. Having done it a couple times a shooter isn’t going in completely blind to the circumstances.
Now if you are actually on a PSD and vehicles are what you’re operating around you’re going to spend days running these drills until you can execute them like SEAL Team 6. That’s how they do it actually, drill the mission components until all the aspects you can practice are effortless to execute.
Saturday’s night fire was much like Friday’s. Spending time exposing our subgun shooting to the enhanced environmental difficulty of darkness. We wrapped up with an AAR around 11:30 pm once again.
