Gun Guy Rant

Here in the good ole US of A, we have a thriving gun culture. Guns have been part of our DNA since the very first day of us being our own nation (See “Gun confiscation attempted” in Lexington and Concord.)

We, as a nation, nearly invented the Mandalorian religion. Our rugged history shows how we integrated the gun into daily life. In those formative years, it was common for a dude to be fully skilled prior to joining the Army and going to war. Even in the 20th century, many guys went to war knowing how to fight and shoot before they signed up to do so on foreign soil.

I don’t think, as a whole, we are that people any longer. Sure, the nation doesn't have a dangerous frontier any longer, and society has tried its damnedest to demonize guns, which have all had some effect. But there seems to have been a change inside the collective of “gun guys” as well.

Don’t get me wrong, we have an unprecedented number of gun owners, shooters, hobbyists, and such. The disconnect from before is the amount of shooting vs. the amount of all the other stuff those before us would bring to the table. I’m uniquely positioned as a full-time trainer to see a larger swath of “gun guys.” Not the typical cat who looks for deals at his local gun shows and buys stuff because it looks cool and is cheap. Not the typical Fudd type. At $250 per training day, dudes who come to class are more serious than the typical gun owner. These “serious-er” gun guys are the ones that typically fill classes.

The part that surprises me most is the percentage of those guys who end their skillset on the range. They love guns; they have a lot of them, have a lot of ammo, and shoot a lot of ammo through those guns. A good portion of those cats can shoot. It makes the teaching part on Day 1 easy. But they are satisfied with that being their entire relationship with guns. The last time they were in the woods was with a 3 room tent pitched beside their station wagon in a commercial campground. Their iPhone is the only tool they can use to find that campground, and they didn't even bring a gun since they were going to be at the adjoining waterpark the entire time.

I’ve had this discussion with colleagues and peers; we often discuss the “why” and come up with a multitude of possibilities. Economic success coupled with lower manufacturing costs kept cropping up, which I hadn’t necessarily thought about on my own, but in a moment, I’ll try to illustrate how that's a distinct possibility.  

The US has been so prosperous for so long that it is not only more affordable to “get into” something, and generally, people have more income to do so. Of course, that’s a recipe for divided attention, but one of the aspects of 4 years ago vs. 40 years ago is the economy of shooting. Bullets are cheaper, and there’s more money to buy them. Hell, as a kid, I never saw a case of rifle ammo. I don't think I’ve purchased it in any size smaller than a case in the last decade. That makes it easy to spend a lot of time behind a trigger. And the alarming trend I see is that time comes at the expense of time spent getting good at the other things that matter.

The Best ever in the woods.

The sad part is that being a pretty good shooter isn't terribly difficult. In fact, it’s really simple, even if it’s not the absolute easiest of all things. But complex, it’s not. The allocated time spent to be “good in the woods,” as MACV-SOG would say, if taken completely from range time, would probably only result in a negligible degradation of shooting skill. From the personal data I have collected, there would be no noticeable difference. But the “gun guy” will fight it. So many of them can’t accept that a dude needs anything more than “tiny groups at a fast pace.”


I’ve been following some dudes from a European country where gun ownership is a thing, but shooting a thousand rounds a week generally isn't. These dudes are humping those guns up in the mountains a few weekends every month. They plan and execute a trip with all the logistical requirements to navigate a dozen guys 15 miles away, sustain themselves while they are there, build fighting positions, and then return home. They do this year-round, in all the weather that keeps the average “gun guy” from even going to the range. These dudes, who are not fully immersed in a “gun culture,” would devour most dudes who like “tiny groups, machine gun pace” in most armed conflicts. Why do these cats do this? Because they don't have 5 different ranges within a half-hour drive. They don't buy ammo by the pallet to specialize in just one fraction of skills. When they do go shoot, they make it count and go with a plan for every round spent. In between, they train for free in skills that will make the fight. Gun guys here? “Aint got the time.”

These aren't the dudes referenced, but you should follow them too.

The part that surprises me the most is that ammo costs since the beginning of the Wuhan shutdowns have increased significantly. There was some incentive to train more economically. Barely made a blip on the radar. The fear of the world going to shit did have a huge effect. People embraced preparedness. I’ve seen many more people growing food, raising chickens, and stockpiling wheat for longer-term storage. Although the Wheat thing is surprising since most folks will need somebody else to help them figure out what to do with it. There was a proverbial “wolf at the door” (Tom Wolf here in PA), which got them to alter course. But it didn’t seem to alter their course when it comes to fighting skills that aren't “one ragged hole, at cyclic rate.” Now they have a lot of guns, a lot of ammo, and a lot of food and supplies. They still shoot well, and if their imaginary fight looks like the final scene of Young Guns, they will likely perform spectacularly.

When we do live-fire study groups, we get 10-25 people to attend. They get their shoot on. Significant cost money for ammo, targets, and range rental, but they come out to blast away. We do some Land Nav for free, and we’ll get 8-10. We spend a night in the woods after doing some land nav/patrolling, and it’ll be 6. Just yesterday, we went out in the snow. Rucked a couple of miles and built an OP/LP. In the cold, hard work with shovels, picks, and saws netted us 4 participants. I intend to ask every student I have in class this year if they have ever built an OP/LP, and I’d wager that number will be pretty small, yet nobody came out to do that at no cost.

At the end of this, you may say, “ Garry, ok. But what’s your point?” I’d like to say I have a solution, but I don't, or I’d have better numbers in the previous paragraph. But Maybe just raising awareness is the point, and maybe somebody reading this will realize it’s them that I’m talking about.

The ideal Zero distance for your AR is.....

 

Garry: “Hey bro, your rifle is totally not zeroed. You didn’t read the gear list?” Student: “Oh, it’s zeroed.” Garry: “Dude, you’re more than a foot low” Student: “Well yeah, at 50 yards. It’s not zeroed for 50 yards.” Garry “I know.” Student:.... Garry:.... Student:.... Garry: “What distance is it zeroed at?” Student: “7 yards, the average distance for shootings” Garry:.... Student: “What?” Garry: “Can you see people at 300 yards?” Student: “uh, yeah.” Garry: “ What’s your hold for that distance?” Student: “I dunno.” Garry “Me either.”

That's a true interaction from a basic carbine class I was teaching for a former employer. I had to bust out a calculator to get him his answer because that's not the kind of info I would ever memorize. I’m not going to disclose what department this fella worked for as to save them the embarrassment, but this was from someone whose profession was to carry a gun.

Now there’s not a lot of reason to rehash another article about the different zero options out there. Most of the time, it’s either somebody trying to reinvent the wheel so they have something to attach their name to ( The 77.25 Meter zero anybody?) or it’s simply someone looking for content and they nearly plagiarize someone else’s article. The only thing we really do differently than most at classes is the diagrams we use show where hits would be on a target at those different ranges as opposed to those side-view diagrams of a giant arc. We found that it’s a better learning experience for a student to see the result than a graphic rendition of the flight path.

I snagged this from a class I took. An SOF instructor called this bush-league drawing a proper training aid.

I learned this trick from a former coworker. He had made up a few of these for his old unit and would show them to civilian students. I had asked him once if he had something other than 62Grain (M855) out of a 14.5” barrel (~2800FPS) as this is far from the most common combination we see at class. He didn’t, so I set about making one. I had to borrow a chronograph to get some velocity data and shot some various weight ammo out of my Midwest Industries Recce Rifle with it’s 16” barrel. Once I had this data, I used a free online ballistic calculator to get some figures. Now here’s where we get some divergence from the data and real life. There are some things in those calculators that can be adjusted, but real life has more things going on than a free calculator has parameters for. So the data represents what happens in the bullets flight path extremely well, you probably won't get the same numbers if you try to recreate it on the range. The velocity is wildly affected by brand, line and lot of ammo. I ran Federal American Eagle for the 55 Grain,Lake City for the 62 grain, Black Hills for the 77 and Wolf for the 7.62 x39 out of my AK (Romanian kit). Switch to a different brand and you are going to see different velocities. Obviously, your barrel will yield different velocities and we’re not even taking into account any atmospheric considerations. But the point remains valid even if the real word numbers will vary.

Sometime this summer we’re going to make a video showing this performed at the range and most likely with different ammo than I used to get velocity data from and while we will see different numbers, the poa/poi ratios will be strikingly similar so these cardboard aides we bring to class still tell the moral of the story.


When talking about zero’s, the reality is that your ability to use the zero is vastly more important than whatever zero option you choose. If you instinctively know your holdovers for various distances and then the second critical part, and that is knowing what range your target is at. This is where most folks fail. The ability to look at a dude and accurately tell the distance is not a skill many shooters excel at. The further away, the less accurate people are at rangefinding and also the more critical it is for us to be accurate in our estimation.

How far away is this dude in each of the photos?

I prefer to recommend that shooters use a zero that requires the fewest known holdovers as that allows them to just put the dot on the heart of the bad guy without having to be as precise on the range estimation. Here are some photos of a dude at various ranges out to 400 yards. For a lot of folks, that's about as far as they are going to see a dude without some level of magnification. If we’re using a magnified optic, such as an LPVO, the reticle is likely designed around a certain zero distance so we’re going to stick to non-magnified optics out to 400 yards.

What I thought I would do a little different for this article was instead of using an old cardboard target marked up accordingly, I’d use a photo of a dude. The targets are easy to read and are cut down to fit in a pelican case along with a rifle while flying to classes, but this is the interwebs and we can pull off a little more with technology so we’re going photo realistic.

For a point of aim, I used the heart. As opposed to a brain shot, the heart has much larger room for error and with a non-magnified optic. At some of these ranges, aiming for the brain box wouldn't be ideal, and for some it would be an unobtainable result. For the main description, We using that Federal 55grain ammo, out of a 16” barrel. I’ll include the data and photos for 62 and 77 as well. The spread will be different but the point is still the same. Were going to aim at the same spot on the badguy so the POA is no longer a variable. With a chosen zero, we will see where hits are (POI) at various ranges without moving the point of aim (POA). Well try out the 3 most common zero distances, but before we do, let's bust a couple of myths. 50/200 is not. Maybe with some weight bullet out of some length barrel is, but I can't recreate that with anything I own. 50 is very common, but it’s not 200. The next is the 25/300. That one is a farce of grand scale. It’s not remotely close to being the same at 300 as it is at 25, you’ll see. I don't consider a 25 yard zero a real zero so we’ll include it but as an afterthought not to be considered as an actual option for zero distance.

100Yard POI

Let's take a look at the 100 yard zero. It’s the most common zero distance I see with newer shooters. Our point of aim is the same, center of the heart. Like all choices, we are 2.5” low at point blank. Which leaves us with a solid hit in the heart. At 50, we’re 1.25” low and obviously at 100 we are dead on (pun intended). Out to 200 we’re about 2” low, which is a great hit in the old pump. Here’s where it starts to fall off. By 250 yards, we’re below the heart and have a better chance of hitting the less critical organs than the descending Aorta. By 300, yards we’re getting gut shots. Not a great location for making hits and then we multiply that by how bullets perform with their terminal ballistics (what they do inside the body) and we have fallen out of a desirable hit.

50Yard POI

When we switch to the 50 Yard Zero, which is the most common that I see from more experienced shooters. We obviously have the same point-blank distance, and at 50 we are dead on (same pun, it’s just less funny now). At 100, we’re an inch and half high, which is still in the heart, and at 150, we get up to about 2” high, also still in the heart. As we stretch out to 200 yards, we find our hits an inch low, which is still a great heart hit. We don't drop to the 5” low region until 300 yards. We essentially bought ourselves another 50 yards of distance for hitting a human heart without holding any differently. 

36 Yard POI

The newest one that I have seen is the 36 yard zero. I really don't see it often, but I do see it enough to talk about it. By now you know what the point-blank result is (2.5” low) and were making perfect hits at 36. At 50 we’re an inch high and right in the good part of the heart. By 100 we’re right at the sternal notch. Thats gonna end a badguys day as long as you’re windage is perfect. Once we get into neck hits, our chances of missing greatly increase since the neck is very thin compared to the torso. That's why we picked the heart as an aiming point. Even if we hook or slice the shot, we still hit some important body parts. By 150 yards we’re up top the Adams apple and we really need to start considering a holdunder. This of course is completely doable if you are aware of how low to hold and can rapidly estimate the difference of a bad guy between 100-150 yards. We don't get drop down to that 5”(ish) low mark until 350 yards. Essentially buying another 50 yards of distance without using a holdover but at the cost of needing a holdunder in the 100-150 yard ranges.

Now out on the outside edge at 400 yards, where it is getting harder to see our bad guy, these three distances do have some significant differences. That 100-yard zero has us hitting a bad guy in the thigh. The 50-yard zero will be impacting in the belly and the 36 will be in the intestines. The thing to factor when deciding which zero is what sacrifices are made for what gains. None of those three are wrong, they just have different strengths and weaknesses. And then the hard part starts, learning to rapidly make precision hits at varying ranges with the zero that you chose.

25 Yard zero is stupid! Don't Fucking do this!

By the way, the answer for that officer? 76” low is his holdunder. So yeah, he’d need to aim 6 feet low to make that hit.

Ambi Charging Handles

It seems the trend of yesteryear to make an AR charging handle as large as humanly possible has somewhat subsided. The idea that the latch needed to be 900% larger than the stock design has dropped down to about 300%, but the current trend is to take all that mass off the left side and add it back on the right side under the guise of making it "ambidextrous." I put that in quotes as the factory charging handle is already ambidextrous; allow me to explain.

When we run the charging handle, for whatever reason, there's a pretty simple set of steps.

1: Rotate the rifle so that the ejection port is facing the earth.
2: Grab the lever and sharply run the handle as far back as it will go.
3: Leave go of the lever, allowing the rifle to work as intended.

Notice the orientation of the factory charging handle lever at the end of step one. It is facing upward. Notice how I never mentioned which hand is on the grip and which hand is going to grab that lever that is now on top of the rifle facing the sky? That's because it doesn't matter. We don't change any of those three steps regardless of which had we are firing the rifle with. Once we point the ejection port downward, allowing gravity to assist with every conceivable function of that port, a stock charging handle is in the most prominent position it could be in. Why would manufacturers find the need to add a second latch hidden underneath the rifle?

Marketing. A simple way to get folks to spend money on gear instead of training. They offer a gear solution to a "problem" that is solved on the first day of any rifle class by demonstrating the proper technique. 

The perfect class?!

I was asked over the weekend if I believed that Dynamic Carbine is the perfect rifle class.

"Nope" 

Neither you nor I have the time and/or money to take the perfect rifle class. I might not be the guy to detail out the perfect rifle class, but I can get the outline down rather well. Classes are always based on trying to get the best bang for the buck. Developing curriculum has a number of issues that need to be weighed, but time is always the most demanding need. There are X number of training hours and Y number of lessons. In case you were wondering Y is always larger than X by an order of magnitude. The perfect class would have boundless training hours.

The perfect rifle class wouldn't likely even involve rifles for more than a week. Students might not shoot a live round until the second month of training. If we had all the time and money available, each block of instruction would be validated with Force on Force directly after each block was finished. If we start a class with marksmanship and then pressure test it, no matter how accurate the student can shoot, they will fail at lightspeed with a 100% rate of failure. But it always starts there. Why?  Not because it is the basic building block, but because it's the easiest to teach. 

What if the class started with how to use Cover and Concealment and then transitioned onto Movement? We could pressure test and validate each block as we went. We could teach people how to survive even if they weren't armed. I could spend days teaching nothing but how to use a single piece of cover. There are nuances that can be explored near infinitely. And right away, that first block of instruction makes you harder to kill. I'd love to hear the rationalization of how marksmanship makes someone harder to kill anytime they are in danger from a ranged weapon.(Hint: it only applies if you have a gun in your hands)

What if we explored all the techniques that could be used on different types of cover? I've had people ask me "What do you mean different types of cover? Do you mean Cover and Concealment?" That tells me a lot about their level of understanding. It's like the old joke "I like both kinds of music, Rock AND Roll, har, har, har". <Insert Djent vs Thrash joke here> 

.

I've never made a complete list of the different types of cover but I can tell you that there are at least 6 different qualities we can measure, with dozens of answer ranges for each quality, and we multiply those to get data on one single piece of cover that is being analyzed. This is without regard to that piece of cover's orientation to any additional pieces of cover. This can not be taught in a 15-minute block of instruction. Nor even in a single training day. But it would be the absolute basic foundation to not dying while facing lethal projectiles. Newsflash, if you are dead, you will never get a chance to think about how awesome your marksmanship is, let alone use it. Why is this never taught first?

I can tell you why. It takes a lot of time. It can't be done with 20 students on a firing line. The investment is high. And that instructor still has his logistics to contend with. He has costs associated with range rental/upkeep, Insurance, business licensing, consumables, payroll, all the backend costs of running a website or storefront, and oh yeah, he'd like his business to be profitable as well. All of those things are making the tuition go up, and when we cut down the number of students because we're can't run 3 relays or have 40 students at once, that makes the individual cost climb wildly. In a perfect world, we'd validate each block with Force on Force, easily doubling the cost of running the class.

Now that the altruistic reasons are out of the way, there's another seedy reason. Lots of instructors simply don't know what to teach in that regard. They know marksmanship, so they claim it's the #1 building block. If they would just bill their class as a Marksmanship class, an enlightened student would know that's a class to take, albeit later along the path than the first step.

I've seen combat vets teach the thing that worked once for themselves. And on the surface, I am probably like everybody else, I say "aha! Validated".  But it's been validated a small number of times (often only a single time) in one specific circumstance with one very specific set of variables. Then I come back down to earth and start to dig into the details. Pressure testing anything should involve a countless number of repetitions with small changes to the variables. The reality is, combat does not offer this opportunity. Exploration of the variables needs to include failure points. Each variable needs tested to the point where there will be guaranteed failure. Doing this against an armed enemy would result in everybody being dead just trying to explore a particular technique or skill. It needs to be explored with Force On Force.

This drill was repeated dozens 
of times changing one 
variable at a time.

When I see schools do Force On Force, I get excited. Then I see their entire Force on Force course catalog is based on scenarios where the focus is on making decisions under stress. Sure, something a student did in their one run through the decision-making scenario might be great, or it might have luckily worked one time. With no opportunity to spar, over and over, there is little learning going on. The exercise is simply to test a student's decision making. While that is important, testing a student's ability to choose between different techniques when he hasn't tested any techniques is quite literally putting the cart before the horse.

My personal view on looking for any type of training is to find an instructor who is constantly taking quality, civilian-run courses and then continuously develops their curriculum as the pressure testing continues. For each hour of instruction, the instructor should have 100 hours of pressure testing the topic. I'm not talking 100:1 training hours, I'm talking 100:1 pressure testing hours. People learn at different rates,  so I'm not suggesting that it takes an instructor 100 hours of being a student to teach for an hour. I'm saying that the guy writing the instruction needs to have pressure tested that hour of instruction for many hours against a resisting opponent for it to have any validity at all.

If I am learning about entering a corner fed room for CQB, I don't care how many hours of training my instructor has, I don't care how many live-fire reps he has. What I want to know is how many hours he has spent developing the techniques against a resisting opponent. And development isn't "It worked once, next" It's a thorough debrief after every single run with multiple attempts and then repeated while changing a single variable. And that needs to be done for every conceivable variable. That's how a technique is validated. 

So back to that perfect rifle class. Marksmanship is remarkably simple. If a student is expected to live long enough to execute it, there's a boatload of other skills and techniques that take precedence. Teaching those to students first will absolutely get the best results, but the danger is making it work logistically. It takes 10 times the output from a school to teach the non-marksmanship skills and techniques. It's easier on both the school and the student to teach a large group simple marksmanship training and then offering the more time and labor-consuming training to the smaller group that wants to go further down the path than it would to offer a class based on working cover to 5-6 students, getting 1 that will want to go further and doing that 20 consecutive times to be able to fill a marksmanship class. It just makes more sense to run those 20+ folks through an assembly line of marksmanship training and then taking the 5 that want to go further from that group and working on the more important tasks. 

Given the current cost of ammunition, it seems like a great time to work on those more important skills and techniques that wouldn't be simple range masturbation of shooting groups. But for some reason, I still see 3-day/1400 round live-fire classes quickly filling up and Force on Force classes being canceled for lack of signups. I couldn't use my own data in this observation as all of my 2020 classes were sold out, both live fire and FoF. But I have spoken with a number of my peers and that was a trend. I said trend, not a hard and fast rule, calm down Nancy.

That perfect rifle class would start with the most important stuff first and constantly validate it against resisting opponents before progressing to the next topic. Instead, because of time and money, it's done backward. It's wrong, but it appears sustainable. 

Dynamic Carbine? I'll sneak in as many of those important skills and techniques as I can while still getting some marksmanship in. Then I invite all of my students at the conclusion to attend Study Groups where we hammer that important stuff. The ones who take me up on that offer invariably become harder to kill than the average student.  

The R.O.P.E. Bag*

I have a pair of married students who have been gracious enough to give me a Yule gift every year for the last few years. Last year there was this squat little sling bag in the box. I kept it in my office for a while trying to figure out what to do with it.


I normally keep a Deadpool-inspired duffel bag full of magazines handy for range trips. It will hold more than I want to carry. I took a few mags out one day to lighten my load and set them beside that slingbag inadvertently. When I came home and started refilling my empty mags I had a " You got chocolate in my peanut butter" moment.  I might as well throw some mags in there.


Since I already had a bag with mags in it, I still needed a purpose. So I added a few more things and designated it as a kit for my friends, teammates, training partners, students etc. At a Study Group, we brainstormed an acronym.

R.O.P.E. - Replenishing Other Peoples Equipment.

The bag fits 7 AR mags in the main compartment. That was a pretty good start. I didn't want to go buy stuff to fill this bag, I just wanted to refill a buddy for stuff out of a single package. So I looked around my shelves and closets to see what I had extras of that dudes might need.

I settled on a Patriot Smoke in the top, and a couple of Road Flares and some 123 batteries in the bottom. This isn't a bag of "You may need this" which is why there is no medical gear in it. It's a bag of "since you used yours up, here's some more" If a dude used all his med gear up, we need to be taking him, not giving him more bandages.

As I was going through my stuff, I found a couple of old AK mags full of Tula. I don't own a 7.62 AK any longer so they got shuffled behind some stuff for a long time. I put those in there too. We still get some die-hards for metric guns, so I can show them some love too. (I'm just funning with the AK dudes, relax).



I didn't put pistol mags in there for a couple of reasons. Since the most usable mag would be a G17 mag. It's the most popular caliber for the most popular brand that fits some of the most popular models. Problem One: the bag only has so much space  and if a dude has gone through his pistol mags too, for sure he wants some more rifle mags. Problem Two: I only own a small handful of G17 mags, I didn't really have "extra" to stow in the ROPE bag.

So there you have it. A nifty little Yule gift that got turned into something pretty handy to have around. The ROPE bag.

* No actual rope is stowed in this bag.

Twilight of the Red Dot? All hail the LPVO?

Are we in the era where the Red Dot Optic is falling out of serious use on a rifle?

There was a time, not too long ago that folks went to combat, en masse, with just iron sights. The Global War on Terror help usher in a change of optics on rifles across the board.  Aimpoint Comp Series and EoTechs were mounted on top of shiploads of rifles headed to the Middle East. The venerable ACOG from Trijicon saw a lot of work as well with it's fixed low powered magnification as well. As if the brass finally made a decision to make America's Warfighter MORE lethal instead of the "business as usual" model of leadership.

This proliferation of Red Dot Optic (RDO) use helped us in the civilian world as well. Manufacturers started putting more into their R&D because there were large numbers being bought by the Military and that certainly trickled right over to the civilian market as well. Smaller players might not be able to get that elusive Military contract, but now we were seeing civilian contracts at the Department and Agency level sweeping into the market as well. Let's not discount the massive buying power of the average American gun owner. Quality AR15's were coming down in price which put a lot of rifles out there ready to accept the miracle of an RDO. With all of this, the RDO manufacturers were now competing with each other, not just on price, but quality and features as well. As a consumer, all of this is good news for us. The golden era of RDOs was here. We now have a plethora of RDO's to choose from. Along with the aforementioned brands, Trijicon knocked it out of the park with the MRO. Primary Arms, Vortex, Sig all make good and affordable RDOs and Holosun found a way to bridge the quality of the big names with the cost of the new school brands. The ones mentioned are just a sliver of the brand options available.



I remember reading about the Smidth and Bender Short Dot over on lightfighter before I had ever met somebody who had actually seen one. It sounded pretty cool, giving the user essentially an RDO and an ACOG all in one. at 1.1x it acted a lot like a typical RDO and it could sweep up to 4X and use a BDC for longer distances. It had some downsides. It was neither light nor small like an RDO, and it wasn' what you could call wallet-friendly. But like the RDO market, the concept was solid and soon there would be competition.

Right now there are almost as many companies in the Low Power Variable Optic (LPVO) market as there are in the RDO market. And like before, that is good news for us consumers. As models began flooding in, the prices came down and I decided to dip a little into the LPVO world and see what it was about. I liked what I saw. I got a great deal on a Trijicon Accupower 1-4 so that's what I started with. I really liked the optic. 4X made seeing things a LOT easier. It just so happened that it made shooting easier too. Most folks jump right to the assistance in making hits at longer distances. And while that is certainly true, I think the biggest advantage is being able to see things more clearly and further away. I found that most of my shooting was still done at the ranges that I typically use an RDO. I found it easier to be more precise with that 4X. Of course, I also managed to stretch out ranges to make longer hits. That particular LPVO had a BDC for 55grain 5.56 out of a 16" barrel. It was set up to go all the way out to 800 yards. I did not think that combo with me behind the trigger was going to work. I was proven wrong. I had a former Scout Sniper scoff at my doubts and he had me go prone and use a pack to rest the gun on. He read the wind and gave me where to hold laterally and I made that first round hit on an 18"x24" plate at 800 yards. I flipped the safety on, stood up and slung the rifle. I'm keeping that 100% hit rate.

A good friend of mine asked me about my thoughts on a 1-8X LPVO. I told him that while I had tried a few out on student's guns but I hadn't spent a lot of time as I didn't own one. So, he gave me a Primary Arms 1-8. I swapped that with the Trijicon and have been running it. It has the much-touted ACSS reticle. Let me tell you, I am impressed. The optic has not been babied as you can imagine with any gear I own. All of my optics are mounted in the Midwest Industries mounts and there has been no movement from mount to gun nor mount to the optic. The reticle is everything I hoped it would be and more. Now the glass isn't as clear as the Trijicon that it replaced, but it also has an MSRP of less than half of the price, so I knew there would be areas where the Trijicon comes out on top. I have been running that optic a fair amount and I like its efficacy at all the ranges I've been using it at. Including ones further away than I normally do. At any rate, all of this is the backstory to the real meat here.

Yesterday I was trying out a Weaver Laser Range Finder in my home town. In case you are wondering, it worked well and when I used google earth to get some verification, it seemed spot on. I spent most of the day walking around my town, ranging everything in sight. A little background on my town. It is solid suburbs. There is no urban core (thankfully) and no rural areas. We're sandwiched between a river, some creeks, and a highway. There are rural areas outside the water/highway quarantine. Farmers fields and swaths of forest in all directions, but not areas where one could just inadvertently stroll into. One would have to swim or cross the second-longest interstate highway to reach these, so it's usually an obvious choice to go there. All the spaces in between have been filled up with a typical small town. In fact, we are the only town in Pennsylvania. Sure we have some business, and little manufacturing, and a college. Downtown is lined with multi-story buildings, but we're talking about 3-4 floors. Up on the hill is the college, and it has the typical layout of a college. Everything else is just small-town neighborhoods. Technically they aren't separated so the entire town is like one small-town neighborhood.

With that little description, let me tell you what I found. Inside houses, obviously, we're looking at the typical CQB distances that are so popular to show on Instagram. I get it though, filming something that's watchable has a number of limitations. I make videos, I understand. However, with the hordes of short-range shooting on the interwebs, there are a lot of gun-owners that focus everything they do on replicating those videos both in their training/practice regimen and their gear purchases. I walked into many random yards, front yards, back yards, side yards. Yep, there are those CQB distances we see all over the gram. You know what else is there? A dozen available shots in the 200-400 yard ranges. In between every house, or garage or shed were a larger number of potential mid-range engagement distances than CQB distances. Given our town's lack of high buildings, we don't have those long narrow open areas one would find in an urban area. There were few areas to remain obscured like in the shadow of a skyscraper. In fact, the vast majority of places I hade my feet on terra-firma there were roughly 300 degrees of visibility to those low, multi-story homes and buildings. Those were mostly 3-600 yards away as shown on the range finder.

I started looking for longer and longer distances. From the high school to the airport I was getting 1100 yards with the town park, town pool and town skatepark in between them. So there certainly are those areas where a larger caliber gun with a higher power optic would be the ticket. But what I didn't find, was a plethora of those. Given the topography and the typical small-town road layout, I didn't find enough long streets that I would be thinking that a heavier 308 would be a better choice. I own an MI10 with a 4-14 on top of it. If I were heading out of town where there are crop fields galore, that might be the primary choice, but not here in town.

Typically, my go-to rifle has been a 10.3" suppressed AR with an RDO on top. It shines indoors. The terminal ballistics from the velocities of an SBR aren't a concern at these distances. The volume of the gun becomes a concern that's been alleviated as well. The RDO is fast and forgiving at these ranges. At further ranges, I would just press it into doing what I need. The terminal ballistics change drastically but the real concern was simply seeing targets that far away. Now if we add in ID'ing that target we compound it further. So for me personally, it would seem my go-to rifle should be the rifle set up for these intermediate ranges and if need be, I can press it into urban/CQB ranges as well as reach out better if I need to press it into those longer/rural ranges.

Over in my alumni+ Facebook group, I posted this last night and it led to some great dialog. A few of my closer pals started texting me about it and I talked to a few friends who ran an LPVO deployed last year and buddies in the industry. It looks like we are past the "trend" of moving to LPVOs and we might be in a full-fledged movement. With a cursory search, I found LPVOs from known manufacturers from under 200 dollars up to 2K+. But the price range that got my attention are the choices between 300-500 dollars. This is the price point that has been dominated by the big name RDOs for quite some time. If I can get a quality LPVO in the same price range as a quality RDO, I'm hard-pressed to give the nod to the RDO. It marginally does better in the close ranges, has some drawbacks at those intermediate ranges and struggles at the longer ranges, if just from finding and ID'ing the target. At class, it used to be the outlier to have an LPVO, then we started seeing them regularly but no in the same numbers as an RDO. Many classes currently have been similar numbers between the two options. Everything from PA, Vortex, Burris, Sig, Trijicon, Kahles, Steiner, Leupold, EoTech, S&B, Nightforce have shown up in students' hands in front of me in the last year. Hell, there may have been others that I didn't either notice or am forgetting.

Are we seeing the LPVO become the choice for the common man? At the prices I am seeing, I expect to see more and more LPVOs and fewer RDOs. They certainly fill the role of a "does most things pretty well" optic better than an RDO or a higher power magnified optic. I have a 3-10 scope here that I put on an AR once in a while for a few specific reasons. I use it to fill a niche. Most folks reading this wouldn't hesitate to say that that magnification range is meant for a specific purpose and it limited when pressed into other services. With the LPVO becoming so prolific are we seeing or going to see them push the RDO into niche service as well? We will see soon enough, but for this guys' needs, it sure looks like it might.

Dry Practice

Dry Practice

We call it dry practice and not dry fire because there isn't going to be any firing. Words have

meanings and by calling it fire, we are in the beginnings of programming ourselves to expect

firing. Here’s the great thing about dry practice, the goal is to practice all the things in

between the shooting. Believe it or not, if you are at the point on your journey that you are

dedicating time to dry-practice you can probably press the trigger just fine. I’m willing to

wager that you do that better than all the other things we do with a gun.

I have students that the closest range doesn't let them move, or even draw from a holster.

Great, when at that range they can focus strictly on trigger presses and at home, they can

dry-practice that draw. When I dry-practice, after all of the safety considerations below, I

always start with drawing the gun. This is a perfect draw, slow and deliberate. I take at least

one giant sidestep but will do more depending on available space. At this point on my

journey, I’m programmed to start moving my feet anytime my hands move towards my gun,

that's exactly where I want to be. The point of dry practice is to build that neural pathway so

I don't have to put any conscious thought into adding that step.

On that same note, every single time I reholster my pistol, there is a full 360* scan

preceding it. The same thing, I have a neural pathway established at this point to get a full

picture of my surroundings before I put my gun away. I could easily do a 5-minute dry

practice session and do nothing but draw the gun and aim in. Then scan and reholster and

get good results on gun handling skills.

One of my favorite things to practice is clearing malfunctions. This is actually one of the few

times I touch a trigger during dry-practice. I will load a few magazines up with dummy

rounds and after the draw, I will aim in at my target and press the trigger without disturbing

the sight alignment. When I get a click, I move my feet and clear that malfunction. Often I’ll

set up different types of malfunctions, some with empty brass and practice those without the

draw. The reason behind that is I don't want to build a habit of drawing the gun and

expecting a click and instantly go to fixing a gun after the first press of the trigger. When I’m

actually shooting, starting immediate action after the first shot is counter to my goals.

I’ll practice reloads, usually from a ready position (High-ready, Low-ready, Gun-Up,

Gun-Down, Assess, Position 3) with the sear already tripped. I get that dead trigger/gun

empty feel and move my feet and reload my gun from my primary magazine location before

I get the sights on target. I will often press the trigger on this one to trip the sear. I can then

practice a tactical reload and have a dead trigger to set up the next emergency reload.

2 reload practices per rep.

The thing I focus on in these is to initiate movement at the beginning and as much as

possible during each rep. Many times that will be moving into a piece of simulated cover.

I usually dry practice at my house and it is full of different sizes and shapes that I can use.

The safety considerations below mention that you should have a backstop behind your

target that will stop bullets if you ignore all the other considerations. Folks will let a brick

wall or something similar define their dry practice location and not be able to utilize cover

or even movement. The simple solution is to make your target smaller than your plate

carrier and simply stick it on the front with a binder clip and then hang your plate carrier

wherever it works for you.

Dry-practice probably has the largest ROI (Return On Investment) of any practice that you

could possibly do, but it can be overdone. Each rep should have 100% focus. After

removing all possible distractions, it’s still easy to burn yourself out and start cutting corners. Corners cut in safety can be catastrophic, corners cut in execution will certainly cease

progress and most assuredly lead to regression. This is why I limit my sessions to a strict

time limit. For my self, it’s never more than 5 minutes at a time. You can pick whatever time

limit suits your ability to completely focus, but I suggest starting shorter than what you think

you can go. The good news is that you can do multiple sessions in a day after you’ve had a

chance to decompress. I think we all could see a large increase in gun handling abilities

with a small investment of our time. Let’s take a look at the actual procedure.

Procedure
Follow all firearms safety rules while dry practicing.

If you are interupted during your dry-practice, (phone call, knock at the door, etc)

Start over at step 1.

1. Go into your dry practice area and remove all possible distractions (phones, Tv ect turned 

    off).

2. Unload your gun.

3. Do a three-point check to assure that it is empty ( Chamber, Breachface and Magwell should

    be EMPTY).

4. Put live ammo outside the room and close the door behind you.

5. Do another three-point check on your gun.

6. Put up a target on a backdrop that will stop a bullet.

7. Do another three-point check on your gun.

8. Announce out loud “I am beginning dry practice”

9. Perform a perfect draw, with movement. Continue on with whatever regimen you decided to

    work on prior to starting. Even if you are not working on the draw (why not?), any time the

     gun comes out of the holster it should be a perfect draw. Every time it goes back in the

    holster it should only be done after a good scan. Practice each rep perfectly, never sacrificing

    good form for speed. Like a musician, we need to get the notes perfect before we get them

    up to speed. Nobody plays Holy Wars on their first day of guitar lessons.

10. Repeat these reps until your allotted time has passed. If you are losing focus or getting

      sloppy, STOP.

11. When you are finished, Take down your target and announce “I am done with dry-practice”.

      The verbalization will cement in your mind that it is over. Taking down the target reduces

      the temptation to do “one more rep”.

12. Unload the dummy rounds from your gun. Put away any dummy rounds.

13. Open the door to your dry practice area and retrieve your live ammo on the way out.

Charge your gun and reholster it. (Did you scan?)