Ever wonder what would happen to ammo stored in your home in a house fire? So did SAAMI (Sporting Arms and Ammunition Manufacturers’ Institute) and the International Association of Fire Chiefs, who burned, blasted, drove into, ran over, ground, and shot other bullets at over 400,000 rounds of handgun, rifle, and shotgun ammo to find out.
A self-defence instructor muttered that to me, in exasperation, about three older ladies who’d come along to his seminar. He’d grown exasperated because, when asked to practice
patty-cakesknife disarms, the ladies in question had baulked.They had a damn good reason not to play: they all suffered from severe arthritis and osteoporosis. One could barely use her hands even for everyday tasks, and when she did, it hurt her. The others were still relatively functional, but their ability was declining. For them to practice what he was teaching would not only have been unpleasant, but severely unrealistic. If their lives depended on them being able to use their hands to disarm an opponent, they were dead, and they knew it…
Continue reading at God’s Bastard
Valdiserri’s blog is a must-read, check it out. She also wrote a couple of books…
For the first time, an international team of scientists has shown that the amygdala in the human brain is able to detect possible threats in the visual environment at ultra-fast time scales. By measuring the electrical activity in the amygdala of patients that had been implanted with electrodes in order to better diagnose their epilepsy, the researchers provide new data on how information travels between the visual and emotional networks…
Continue reading at Science Daily
Maija Soderholm, author of The Liar the Cheat and the Thief: Deception and the Art of Sword Play:
“Well I hit you too” really means – I do not need to change.
“I expect to be cut” really means – I’m good enough as I am.
“Why would I need to practice this dance-y stuff”? really means – My imagination is too small.So how do you show someone a reason to change? How do you create the space in their brains to entertain the idea of change? And how do you get them to actually change?
Continue reading at Sword and Circle
A lot of Soderholm’s writing looks like it’s about sword dueling. It is, but it’s not just about sword dueling. Not by a long shot. There’s lots of useful stuff for instructors of any discipline who are willing to look at the principles and foundations that she talks about. Highly recommended.
Melody Lauer of Central Iowa Defensive Training on getting started as a defensive shooting instructor.
Nick Grossman of Bolt Defense (and the Instructor Development Journal):
A few weeks back there was a discussion among a few instructors about whether the Flashbang bra holster was safe to allow in classes. I’ve played with one a few times with guidance from Kathy Jackson of Cornered Cat, who first taught me to use one in an instructor development class of hers last year. Haven’t done all I’d like or am planning to with it yet, and there’s plenty that I simply can’t, but here are a few notes so far:
All holsters can be used dangerously. Not all can be used safely…
Continue reading at Bolt Defense…
Photo courtesy of Tamara Keel
If you only read one thing today, this is worth it:
Get away with doing something unsafe or substandard enough times and the unsafe and substandard become your standard…
Continue reading The Normalization of Deviance at The EMT Spot
Kathy Jackson of Cornered Cat:
A few things to learn from a medical emergency on the range as reported <here>. According to eyewitnesses, at an action pistol match, one person was pasting targets in one bay while another person was shooting a stage in the next bay over. One of the shooter’s rounds apparently ricocheted (or traveled directly through) a crack in the concrete barriers separating the two bays, striking the taper in the chest.
The linked article has more to say, but — in part because of my current writing project which is a book for instructors — I’m thinking about instructors today. What do instructors need to learn from incidents like this?
1) Safety is not “everyone’s job.” It is the job of each one of us, individually…
Continue reading at Cornered Cat…
The video that was on YouTube has been made private, but this screenshot of the preview frame is more than enough to see that mistakes were made. Especially when we consider that USPSA has a 180 rule (section 10.5.2).
What do you see here? Sound off in the comments.
UPDATE: The video has been re-uploaded. Thanks to Annette Evans of Beauty Behind the Blast for letting us know!
Massad Ayoob of the Massad Ayoob Group demonstrates the gold standard for how to run the Tueller Drill.
This is run in a shooting class, but it’s useful across all disciplines for showing how far away someone can be and still pose a serious threat with a contact weapon.
Note: the Tueller Drill is up there with Col. Boyd’s OODA model on the list of things that are catastrophically misunderstood in the defensive training community. (For example, there is no such thing as a “21 foot rule”.)
Check out the original source, which is Dennis Tueller’s How Close Is Too Close? article in SWAT Magazine.
Gila Hayes did a follow-up interview with Tueller called The Tueller Drill Revisited in the journal of the Armed Citizens’ Legal Defense Network. (ACLDN and their journal are great resources, check them out.)
What about the MythBusters test of the “21 foot rule”? There were some problems. Richard Johnson breaks it down at Blue Sheepdog.
