Dry Firing Rules

Last week, I gave my justifications for using dry firing as a regular technique for improving marksmanship. I mentioned that I cover some rules meant to make dry firing safer. Here are the dry-firing rules that the DPS teaches all new recruits in their training academy:

1) Unload your gun in a specific spot reserved for that purpose. Leave all of your ammo at that place.

2) Go to a 2nd specific reserved spot in another room to do the actual practice. That room must contain no other guns or ammo.

3) Use only one pre-determined target.

4) Practice whatever skill you plan to improve (trigger squeeze, drawing from concealment, drawing from concealment while rolling on the carpet, or whatever) for the time that you have allotted, or until you have achieved the results you planned for that practice session.

5) This may be the most important step: Make a definite mental break when you are done dry-firing. It is best to say to yourself aloud, “I am done dry-firing”.

6) Go back to the place with your ammo, and either restore your gun to carry status, or stow it.

Always start your dry-firing practice at rule #1!

Dry Firing

One of the things I cover in my CHL class is how to dry-fire safely. I present some rules for dry firing that arose from an unfortunate incident involving a DPS officer, and show how each of those rules is designed to prevent a similar negligent discharge.

Why would we want to practice dry-firing? There are some excellent reasons for practicing with an empty handgun, but at least one drawback (covered below).

The first reason that occurs to just about everyone is that dry-firing is cheaper than live firing. That was true even before the availability and price of ammo got ridiculous a little over a year ago. But that might not be the most important reason.

Note that dry-firing a center-fire pistol manufactured in the last 100 years or so should not damage it. However, if you are the least bit concerned about that aspect of dry-firing, you can get a dummy round (the ones sold at the local gun stores are the SnapCap brand) with a semi-hard plastic insert in the place of the primer. They cost a couple of dollars each, and are sold in packs of 6. Although pricey, they can be re-used indefinitely. If you have a rim-fire gun (typically a .22), you MUST use a dummy round to prevent damage to the firing pin.

Dry-fire practice gives you the opportunity to go through some things that you just can’t reasonably do with a loaded handgun. Indeed, practicing a draw from concealment will get you kicked out of most shooting ranges. With an empty handgun, you can (relatively) safely practice things like jumping sideways or rolling on the carpet while drawing from concealment — skills that might someday come in very handy.

Dry-fire is also very good for marksmanship training. This may be counterintuitive, since the main difference is that in dry-firing, the gun doesn’t make a loud noise and try to jump out of your hand, so it isn’t ‘realistic’. The problem is that even though you should always perform the squeeze sequence so that the trigger-break is a surprise, the fact that you know that the gun is going to recoil makes it very difficult to avoid anticipating it. Dry-firing leads to a different type of “muscle memory”, where you honestly are not considering the recoil, but the follow-through. That “muscle memory” will carry over to live-fire practice (and to actual defense use), and your marksmanship will be better on that account.

You can get some of the benefit of that no-recoil “muscle memory” by getting a .22 conversion kit if there is one available for your particular handgun, and use that for at least part of your live-fire practice. While it still makes a noise, it isn’t nearly as loud, and the recoil is so slight you might not even notice it.

A potentially major drawback of dry-firing is that you don’t get quite the same trigger pull sequence as you get with live fire. For instance, with a Glock, you have to manually rack the slide every time before you get to the normal trigger pull, because the Glock is single-action-only. On a D/SA pistol, the first round can be fired double-action (the trigger-pull cocks the gun) and subsequent rounds are then fired single-action, because the recoil of the live round does the work of cocking. When dry-firing a D/SA, every trigger pull is double-action, which is typically several times the force required for single-action. I have actually experienced a case (during a DPS range test) where this slight difference in “muscle memory” caused me to drop a point on the 2nd round. After that, I knew what the problem was, and corrected it — but in a real firefight, that might be a disaster.

Still, I recommend a combination of live fire and dry fire practice. As mentioned above, a .22 conversion kit can be useful for practicing your live-fire marksmanship at a cost substantially lower than using centerfire ammo.

Is it time to buy a gun?

For me, it’s time to buy a gun pretty much anytime I can afford another one. In fact, I’m shopping for a couple of them right now. I want a .22LR semiauto and a .22LR DA revolver for demonstration use in the NRA Basic Pistol course. Maybe more than one of each. And eventually, I’d like to get a 9mm SA that has an available .22LR conversion kit so that I can afford to practice more with it.

But lately, I’ve been getting news from some unusual sources about the increased interest of the general public in buying guns. Any time the government makes some obvious move to restrict gun ownership, gun sales soar. Clinton’s gun ‘ban’ did more to boost gun sales than just about anything else he could have done. And one of the side-effects of the last presidential election was a run on guns and ammo — starting about a month before election day. At that time, I also experienced a sizable jump in demand for my CHL classes. During the last week of December 2008, I had over 100 students, which caused a temporary crisis when I ran short of official certificates (that problem has been eliminated now). The demand for CHL classes and the shortage of ammo persisted for several months (and ammo is still more expensive than it was in 2008), although by last April, the CHL class demand had returned to a more manageable level, and I even had some classes that did not sell out.

The demand for CHL classes is once again growing dramatically. All of a sudden, I’m scrambling to make arrangements for larger classes, and having to turn away potential students because of schedule and range limitations. I’ve started bringing in another instructor to handle the renewal students, which means that I don’t have to turn away so many initial applicants. Yet, there hasn’t been any specific governmental action that I can readily identify as being a cause for this.

Tuesday, I got a financial newsletter with the title “It’s Time to Buy a Gun.” Interestingly, the author also could not point to a particular triggering event. Here is what he had to say:

“But good times for gunmakers are almost always temporary. The boost in sales caused by political uncertainty never lasts more than a few months. That’s a big reason why gunmaker stocks – despite achieving high double-digit sales growth – haven’t really participated in the market rally over the past year. Stocks in the sector trade, on average, for only seven times earnings and 0.7 times sales.

“However, there’s something different happening this time. In the 22 years I’ve known my wife, not once, ever, has she even considered owning a gun… until now.”

He went on to advise a covered-call strategy for a gunmaker stock. Since I didn’t pay any money, I don’t know which gunmaker he is recommending.

Since there doesn’t appear to be an overt gun-grab in progress, I’m guessing that this is a general reaction to the economy, and a suspicion that our government is lying to us about the health of the banking system. Idle chat with other CHL instructors has included phrases like “stocking up on water and canned goods — and ammo, so I can keep the water and canned goods.” I don’t really think that rioting in the streets is going to happen in the very near future, but I can certainly see that having an emergency stash of distilled water and canned food is relatively cheap insurance in any case, and it’s better to have and not need than to need and not have. So, yes, I have several weeks’ worth of distilled water and canned/dry foods in the pantry. I use distilled water on a regular basis for my heated humidifier on my CPAP, and I remember clearly back when some idiot government bureaucrat said that everybody needed to stock up on distilled water, plastic sheeting, and duct tape right away — and I was unable to buy distilled water for nearly a month after that.

That’s my guess, anyway.

If you think you have a better explanation, please enlighten me in the comments.

Related post: What Kind of Gun Should I Buy?

Funny thing happened on the way to El Paso…

I got on the plane, put my stuff in the overhead bin, and sat down & fastened my seat belt. After a few minutes, a female voice started droning on about the various safety features, yada, yada, yada. I was well on my way to zoning out (in a mild funk about having to fly anyway) when … “our flight time today will be one hour, twenty-one minutes, and fifteen seconds.”

“Huh?” I wasn’t sure I’d actually heard that right. Must’ve imagined it. I started to drift off again.

“yada, yada, yada… our cruising altitude will be thirty-six thousand and three feet, five and one-half inches.”

“Huh?“ Looked around, but nobody else appeared to be reacting. But this time, I’m pretty sure I heard it right.  Stewardess gotta be bored out of her ever-lovin’… “place your own mask on first, then assist any children, or other adults acting like children.”

All right, I get it. I opened up the safety information sheet, read through it, and located the nearest exits like a good boy. Guess it worked, eh?

I adjusted the neck support as best I could, and tried to settle in for a one-hour, twenty-one minute, and fifteen second nap.

How to Get the Best Deal on Health Care

Healthcare has been in the news a lot lately, and that has caused me to reflect on some of my own experiences with healthcare.

I had a brief and largely unsuccessful ‘career’ as an insurance agent. (I allowed my licenses to expire long ago, so you don’t have to run shrieking for the door.)

Why insurance sales? Well, I had worked as a contract programmer for a larger life insurance company for about a year and a half, and during that time, I had completed most of the LOMA courses, and would have qualified for the LOMA Life Master designation if they hadn’t discontinued it a couple of months before I would have been eligible. So I knew a lot about insurance, including the math and actuarial science behind it, the laws governing insurance companies, the principles of operation, and owing to my work on a quoting system that agent could use to help maximize their commissions from a given mix of insurance products, I knew a lot about how agents work. Or so I thought. Any rate, when the contract programming market went soft in 2002, I got my insurance licenses (both P&C and L&H), and tried for a while to make a living that way.

Turns out that knowing how insurance works, and being able to sell it effectively are unrelated skills. In fact, one of my observations during my stint as an agent is that the best-performing agents didn’t really know much about insurance at all; what they knew was sales.

Having actually run some numbers, it was obvious to me that the very best deal available (to a non-politician) in the health insurance business is a combination of a High-Deductable Health Plan (HDHP) and a Health Savings Account (HSA). Very few companies actually offer this combination, probably because it is inexplicably unpopular. I tried many times to explain this to potential clients, and it’s like it was talking to a brick wall. With very few exceptions, everyone wanted health insurance that covered EVERYTHING, including such items as yearly checkups, immunizations, and routine office visits.

I was appalled. This is like trying to buy car insurance that covers oil changes, wiper blades, and tires! It is a guaranteed recipe for paying about four times as much as you really need to for healthcare. You will get a MUCH LOWER overall medical care expense if you get insurance that doesn’t cover anything at all except catastrophic injury or illness that costs more than $5000, and set aside (preferably in an HSA) that $5000 in an emergency expenses account. The insurance premiums will be about 20% to 30% of what full-coverage runs, which will probably save you well over $5000/year. The basic principle at work is that if any time you “insure” against something that is predictable, you aren’t really getting insurance. You are pre-paying for routine care, and your money will be skimmed at least 3 or 4 times before it actually pays for that care. The purpose of insurance is to shield you from the unpredictable — the insurance companies are much better at predicting things than you are, and will gladly charge you for that.

There is yet another really important principle at work here — the fact that insurance companies stand between you and your doctor drives up the cost of all medical care dramatically. Part of this is due to the fact that there are 2 or 3 extra fingers in the pie, and part of this is due to the Faustian bargain that the medical industry has made with the insurance industry. The doctor now receives some arbitrary fee for his/her services, and gets that money from 90 to 120 days later. Meanwhile, the doctor has a business to run and employees to pay, and often ends up doing so on borrowed money. If the arbitrary fee happens to be arbitrarily denied, then the doctor has to either eat it, or go after the patient. So they end up playing the “insurance game”.

Let me illustrate this with a personal anecdote. About 20 years ago, I was shopping around for the best deal on an overnight stay in a sleep clinic. I called ten different sleep clinics (back then they were relatively challenging to find), and got quotes that varied from $4500 to $6500 for what amounts to a stay in a high-tech hotel with a couple of full-time attendants (one for each 4-5 patients), strapped to monitoring equipment that costs maybe $25,000. I was getting really discouraged. But the last one I called gave me a shocking clue: The girl that gave me the the quote asked me why I cared about the expense. “After all, your insurance will pay for it, less a small deductible.”

I replied with the explanation that I did not have health insurance (actually, technically, I did, but it had a $5000 deductible), and that I would be paying cash. To my utter astonishment, she came back with, “Oh, the cash-in-advance price is $1750.” Less than half of the first figure she mentioned.

After I hung up, and gave that a few minutes to sink in, I went back and called all of the other sleep clinics again, this time asking for the cash-in-advance (“I’m paying for this out of my own pocket”) price. The prices quoted were in the range $1100 to $1750, down from $4500 to $6500.

Quite a revelation. That’s the cost of insurance that covers “everything”.

Project 2996, Remembering Michael J. Berkeley

I signed up for project 2996 about a month ago, and was assigned a name of one of the 2,996 people killed in the WTC atrocity. The name was chosen at random.

The name I drew was Michael J. Berkeley.

Michael J. Berkeley was murdered, along with many of his co-workers, on his 37th birthday, while working for Merrill Lynch’s sales and trading section at the World Trade Center.

Michael Berkeley was born on September 11, 1963, in New Rochelle, New York. He was a standout athlete as early as grade school, playing both basketball and football, but his real love was golf, starting at the age of 12, when he started caddying at the Winged Foot Golf Club. His passion for golf never subsided. At the time of his murder, he was a member at Winged Foot Golf Club, Atlantic Golf Club, Muirfield Village Golf Club, and Hudson National Golf Club.

Michael is survived by his wife, Lourdes, and his two sons, Eric, and Jason. His wife founded, and serves as the chairperson of, the Michael J. Berkeley Foundation, a charitable organization that provides scholarships and other assistance to minority youth, helping them to realize their highest potential in the sport of golf, through education, business ventures, or a professional golf career.

RIP

Rest in Peace, Mary Jo Kopechne.

BRASS: Key to Good Marksmanship

A common acronym used by the military to teach elementary marksmanship is BRASS. I use this in my CHL classes. It stands for:

• Breathe. The sequence of events leading up to firing a round starts with taking a normal breath.
• Relax. Next, let out about 1/3 to 1/2 of that breath, and hold it. The rest of the sequence should take less than 3 seconds, so you won’t be holding your breath long. If the rest of the sequence takes longer than about 5 seconds, that’s just too long, and you need to start over from the top
• Aim. This means that you will properly align the sights, with the front sight typically just below the part of the target you intend to hit. I teach my students to first align the sights while still at “low ready”, and bring the front sight up to the target.
• Slack. Now that the front sight is on the target, you place your finger inside the trigger guard for the first time in the sequence. “Slack” means pull the slack out of the trigger. All modern semiautos have a little slack in the trigger. Generally, a newer or well-maintained gun will have less slack than one that is worn or abused, but they all have some. In the case of a double-action handgun (such as my Ruger revolver), I find it useful to pull the trigger to the point where the gun is cocked, and stop there. That takes a bit of practice to develop muscle memory.
• Squeeze. The final part of the firing sequence. Continue to squeeze the trigger until the gun fires. The trick to getting the shot to go where you want it to is to squeeze steadily and straight back, so that you don’t know exactly when the gun will fire. This will keep you from flinching or pushing.

There is actually one more step to this sequence, and that is the “follow through”, or bringing your front sight immediately back to the aim point after the round fires.

The whole BRASS sequence, including the follow-through, should take less than 3 seconds.

My Marksmanship Epiphany

Epiphany (n): A sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.

I wasn’t always a good shot.  I studied (and even taught) marksmanship in high school — I was in JROTC, and I tried out for the rifle team, and actually made it.  But I certainly wasn’t the best shot on the team.  In fact, I was usually the lowest scorer on the team in most matches.

Fortunately for my team, in a rifle match, you only had to count the top 5 scores (out of 6), so I was nearly always the “scratch man”.  Good enough to get on the team (just barely), but not good enough to really help them.

I could shoot really well in the prone and kneeling positions.  I would typically shoot 99/100 or 100/100 prone, and 95/100 or better in kneeling.  Respectable, but so could all the other team members.  I would then proceed to drop 30 or more points in the standing or “offhand” position, compared to 10 or fewer for the other team members.

I knew all the theory; BRASS (Breathe/Relax/Aim/Slack/Squeeze), natural point of aim, etc., but I just could not get my offhand score up into a decent range.  I tried a number of things.  I practiced nearly every day, coming in an hour before school started, and coming back to the range after school for an hour. I tried lifting weights and various other strength training exercises. All that helped, but not enough to move me out of “scratch” position.

During the very last match I ever shot with the Irvin HS Rifle Team, something happened that had a lasting effect on my marksmanship skills.  I went into the match with my usual 100/100 in prone, dropped only 2 in kneeling, and then… just by pure dumb luck, my first offhand shot was a scratch-bull.  I knew it when the shot went off; it felt dead on.  That did happen from time to time, so that wasn’t a Really Big Deal.

But then one of the coaches on the other team turned to his assistant coach, and said “I thought you said this Harkness character couldn’t shoot shit for offhand.”  Even with my hearing protection on, I heard it clearly.  That remark had a truly wonderful (in the original sense of the word) effect on me.  It was like a giant hand came out of the sky to steady my rifle.  The next shot was also a scratch bull, but this time, it wasn’t pure dumb luck; I simply COULD NOT MISS.  The next shot was a pinwheel, followed by another scratch bull.  I only dropped 4 points offhand that day, which moved me from “scratch man” to high scorer, and I finished with a 294/300, the highest I had ever shot, even counting practice sessions.

After the match, my coach came up to me, and asked, “What the HELL got into you, Harkness?”  I told him what had happened, whereupon he replied, “Shit.  I wish I’d thought of that two years ago.”

To this day, I can’t put the sights on target without hearing “I thought you said this Harkness character couldn’t shoot shit for offhand” in my mind.  And the effect has never worn off.

NRA Basic Pistol Instructor Certification

I had a busy weekend. I made the trip up to ShootSafe Academy to take the 20-hour instructor’s course to qualify to teach the NRA Basic Pistol course. The whole thing was pretty exhausting, but worth the effort.

I learned a lot more than I thought I would. While I will be getting my instructor’s credentials in a few weeks, I still have some major effort in getting my presentations ready. But I can already incorporate some of the useful information I got from Bill and Dan in my regular CHL courses.

Meanwhile, I have identified some other courses that I would definitely like to qualify on, such as the “Refuse to be a Victim” course. ShootSafe hasn’t scheduled the instructor’s course for that yet, so it’s likely to be a few months before I get to take that one.