When looking at training classes, it’s important to ensure you’re constantly improving, and that a given class can benefit you beyond giving you an excuse to bust caps or LARP with your Carbine+PC. Certainly that stuff is fun, and fun is all the reason you need to want to go. That said, if that’s what’s eating your annual training budget (you have a training budget, right?) as a non-sworn, non-doorkicking regular citizen, then you’re not actually training for anything you’re likely to encounter. Do rifle classes all you want, but not to the exclusion of something that will make you a better concealed carrier, home defender, or whatever skillset that best fits in the tactical envelope that is your life. A basic, or advanced pistol class would likely serve the majority of us much better, as it’s the fundamentals, and keeping them fresh, that make a shooter good.
Fundamentals are never more fundamental than when they mean the difference between life and death, or continued freedom and living in a cage for 10-20. Officer Privette in the Active Self Protection video below, seems to have ignored Rule 1 to his own detriment, and that of the suspect he was attempting to apprehend. We weren’t there, we didn’t see what happened, but from the video, it’s difficult to imagine another scenario. He exits the vehicle, gun up, and almost before he can finish his demand to see hands, the pistol discharges, to which his response is “Oh shit!”.
If this truly was an unintentional discharge, it’s probably because his finger was on, or near the trigger, as he completed his shooting grip. Maybe as his left-hand fingers squeezed together, he had a sympathetic response and his right-hand fingers did the same, maybe he slipped, but whatever it was, there doesn’t seem to have been a threat that reached the level of lethal force. An investigation will determine this, but it seems plain this discharge wasn’t intentional, and the officer keeping his trigger finger in a high-register would have served him better than whatever he actually did.
