The Unbearable Whiteness of Being by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: Close the schools, every one of them. There is an opportunity here as some of the laziest people in human history, teachers in K-PhD, demand and clamor to retain their salary and benefits which have always been far more generous than they should thanks to unions and tenure for teachers and professors respectively. And these shiftless people also bear most of the responsibility for the intellectual wasteland that is the brainpower of three generations. Taking seriously the notion that the War to Save Josef Stalin made the world safe for communism, the entire American education took that on as a mission statement. 

And here we are. 

This about sums it up. Rod Serling was a seer.

Is the education establishment primarily responsible for the disaster that is 2020 for free range humanity? No, root cause has many parents. Critical thinking skills and the wherewithal to question authority has taken a long sleep in today’s Amerika.

 Defund universities and the police, that’s a good start. Everything government funds is poisonous and turns whatever it touches to shit.

 Government is the maximalist application of moral injury on a wholesale scale.

 You can thank half a century of climate alarmism based on nonsense, non-science, communist fever-dreams and the elevation of “experts” as the gateway drug to the deluded opium den delusions of the Peking Pox and its weaponization to game political power.

 Then the floodgates open as yet another victim of government policing assumes room temperature and the usual suspects in the government supremacist industry stoke the fires and spin the tires to behave destructively and predictably in the urban hives run by the CPUSA for decades.

All of this frisson and fire may magically evaporate if Comrade Joe and his bloated VP-thing manage to commit enough fraud to stuff the ballots for the Party that gave us the KKK, segregation, lunch tables, lynching, Jim Crow, the Great Society and the entry into every major conflict in the twentieth century until 1980. 

The Democrats as a party were founded to protect chattel slavery. Nothing has changed, the plantation boundaries and legal niceties have changed.

 In the end, left and right are an illusion as I have tirelessly opined but the Left [if I suspend my belief in self-assignation], they are the real plantation owners and leave right wing aspiration to owning human cattle in the dust. Just think of all the former inmates from totalitarian countries and their children that have come to America to be free and now they see the nightmare begin anew. I can only imagine the horror.

 Masks.

What tyrannical nonsense and that is where we live today. And keep in mind that the Karens of both sexes who call you out for not wearing a mask is not due to health concerns, but you don’t share their imperial conditioning. Nor do they have any faith their mask will protect them. Curiouser and curiouser. Prove me wrong. 

The Peking Pox peaked in April according to even the Fedgod.

Remember, if you oppose human slavery, communism and/or infanticide, you are now an enemy of the people. Burn that into your brain.

Per weapons, remember that every FFL dealer is a non-funded BATFE field office and their business depends on their Vichy collaboration with the agency that has brought you so much death and destruction. The F-Troop has so many informants now, they have Federal Form 3252.2.

…and get OFF social media. Social media, like the urinalists in the media, is a free range asylum.

In better news, have you listened to Pat Metheny’s latest album, “From This Place”? If not, you should.

While I am loathe to ban comments, any anti-semitism will be shunted to the trash. There are many places on the ‘net where you can spew and vent with abandon frothing with like-minded nitwits. Not here.

 Been to the range lately? -BB

“We would have been very (loath) to hurt the feelings of our fellow Jews, by going to a land that would exterminate them if it could.”

 — Sammy Luftspring and Norman “Babe” Yack (Canadian-Jewish boxers), July 6, 1936

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

― Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45

“Totalitarian politics—far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist or communist—use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of factual reality, from which the ideologies originally derived their strength and their propaganda value—the reality of class struggle, for instance, or the interest conflicts between Jews and their neighbors—have all but disappeared.”

 “As far as the Jews were concerned, the transformation of the “crime” of Judaism into the fashionable “vice” of Jewishness was dangerous in the extreme. Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape. A crime, moreover, is met with punishment; a vice can only be exterminated.”

 “A fundamental difference between modern dictatorships and all other tyrannies of the past is that terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient. Terror as we know it today strikes without any preliminary provocation, its victims are innocent even from the point of view of the persecutor. This was the case in Nazi Germany when full terror was directed against Jews, i.e., against people with certain common characteristics which were independent of their specific behavior. In Soviet Russia the situation is more confused, but the facts, unfortunately, are only too obvious. On the one hand, the Bolshevik system, unlike the Nazis, never admitted theoretically that it could practice terror against innocent people, and though in view of certain practices this may look like hypocrisy, it makes quite a difference. Russian practice, on the other hand, is even more “advanced” than the German in one respect: arbitrariness of terror is not even limited by racial differentiation, while the old class categories have long since been discarded, so that anybody in Russia may suddenly become a victim of the police terror. We are not concerned here with the ultimate consequence of rule by terror—namely, that nobody, not even the executors, can ever be free of fear; in our context we are dealing merely with the arbitrariness by which victims are chosen, and for this it is decisive that they are objectively innocent, that they are chosen regardless of what they may or may not have done.”

 ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

 “As a form of neurosis, race-conscious nationalism almost always ignores logic and knowledge: In the East European civil wars between 1918 and 1920 Jews were slaughtered for a variety of contradictory reasons, as capitalists and as communists, as friends of the Ukrainians, as Polonophiles, as pro-German-just as it suited the circumstances.”

― Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism Revisited: from de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot

“Except for Christianity, the Nazis reject as Jewish everything which stems from Jewish authors. This condemnation includes the writings of those Jews who, like Stahl, Lassalle, Gumplowicz, and Rathenau, have contributed many essential ideas to the system of Nazism. But the Jewish mind is, as the Nazis say, not limited to the Jews and their offspring only. Many “Aryans” have been imbued with Jewish mentality—for instance the poet, writer, and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the socialist Frederick Engels, the composer Johannes Brahms, the writer Thomas Mann, and the theologian Karl Barth. They too are damned. Then there are whole schools of thought, art, and literature rejected as Jewish. Internationalism and pacifism are Jewish, but so is warmongering. So are liberalism and capitalism, as well as the “spurious” socialism of the Marxians and of the Bolsheviks. The epithets Jewish and Western are applied to the philosophies of Descartes and Hume, to positivism, materialism and empiro-criticism, to the economic theories both of the classics and of modern subjectivism. Atonal music, the Italian opera style, the operetta and the paintings of impressionism are also Jewish. In short, Jewish is what any Nazi dislikes. If one put together everything that various Nazis have stigmatized as Jewish, one would get the impression that our whole civilization has been the achievement only of Jews.” 

― Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government

 

If you read the last sentence of von Mises quote above, it parallels what passes for “wokeness” today.

Replace all the white and whiteness talk with the word Jew or black and step into a time machine back to the 1930s in Germany or the American South respectively and things ring very familiar. Imagine that we live in a world where the pigmentation that happens to coincide with Christendom, expanded human freedom in commerce and most scientific advances are systemically racist? The word racist has been bandied about with such abandon and furor it means nothing now.

We can all guess whose skin and gender has no legal protection in the corporate world much less the corridors of government power. Imagine a world in which your entire worldview is set on destruction of the dominant paradigm that you will replace with an economic framework that puts all power in the hands elected and mostly unelected apparatchiks because we all know that free markets can’t deliver bear the death, destruction and poverty that communism can. Communism is for two kinds of people: psychopaths and college graduates. And it always ends the same way without exception. Mass deprivation, starvation, destruction and death and the lies; the mountains of untruth, delusion and constant re-framing of the same fundamental question: why are we so fucked no matter how many regulations, diktats and statistics we manipulate.

Because central planning has never worked. The genius of free markets is the atomization of the answers whether worthy or not in ten of millions of daily decisions made by free men using prices [subjectivist marginalist price theory] to rationally allocate resources and time. Once the bureaucrat destroys that system by employing guns instead of specie, you end up with history’s boneyard (figuratively and literally) of communist and socialist shit-pits extant and dead.

We live in a world whose warp and weft are not intersected but bundled under both real and illusory oppression.

You are not an individual human whose identity is dictated by your pluck, persistence, intelligence, luck and work ethic. You are now merely a meat marionette with a carbon armature whose skin tones and groin tackle determine everything that makes you human.

This may be the latest variant in the ambition to make every human on Earth a more effective widget in the planetary government supremacist ecology.

Welcome to Communism 2.0 or homo Sovieticus beta.

To paraphrase Michael Collins, your refusal is your most powerful weapon. You owe it to your children but I did just pick up a mask in Rhodesian brushstroke.

Prepare accordingly.

“It has often been said that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools; it would be more accurate to say that socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals…”

― Theodore Dalrymple

“The bottom line, as Raul Hilberg put it, was that most people thought that, even if Jews shouldn’t be killed, they weren’t worth saving.”

― Victoria J. Barnett, Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust

 

* This article was originally published here

Police Academy: The Totalitarian Trail of Tears by Bill Buppert

“The fall of moral civilization has always been brought about by those who were “just doing their jobs”.”

― Jeremy Grantham

Publisher’s Note:  Welcome to the new and improved ZeroGov. Protected for now from the vagaries and barbaric sensibilities of the Robespierres of the Silicon Slavers. 

A few thoughts.

The fate of statuary in America is not a big concern of mine but I do think one erases any history at your peril, witness the astonishing whitewashing of the sole Democratic party ownership of slavery in the US, lynching, the KKK, Jim Crow, segregation, lunch counters and on and on. My solution is the government stops funding art for and to itself and sell every last remaining statue at fire sale prices to private investors who will then remand it to private property where theft or vandalism becomes…problematic. 

You must get to the range, you must develop a core team of trusted individuals who can assist you in the coming spicy time. You must tend to your kit. You must take every article of camouflage fabric you have in your closet to “stand to” and bury it. You must use drab mono-colors on all your ready gear. 

The coming conflict will be “suit and tie” like Michael Collins. You will not wear a uniform, your uniform will be what you go to work or to the beach or hiking and you must plan appropriately carry the minimalist kit to defend yourself or tend to your “wasp” duties. 

Take advantage of the ridiculous mask-wearing regime to lower your profile. Wear sunglasses and ballcaps or boonies.  

Get to the range, get your kit in order and get your health and fitness up to seed for the coming spicy times. I have written extensively and referenced smarter people than I on what to get and how to train. 

I am hoping the present over-reach and radicalization of the communists in America this summer leads to a new Thermidor. Peter McPhee gives a delightful overview of the dénouement of the French Revolution in 1794 in his magisterial essay, “The White Terror” in A Companion to the French Revolution on pages 359–377. 

It was and will be delicious in the Second Act unveiling here in Amerika. 

In other news, I received a sample  Faraday Bag from a reader who produces them a month ago. I normally use a Mission Darkness Faraday bag but this one not only performed on par with it but had the unique feature of actually being able to view the device in the bag to confirm visually it was still “locked out” of service. I highly recommend them. Just went to lunch with friends and the bag held 5x smartphones and didn’t blink. If you don’t think you need to practice better communications hygiene, you are not paying attention. 

Comments. I love comments and I will not patronize a site like the commies at “The Atlantic” who have none. Recently, “The Federalist” in a cowardly nod to collectivist angst pulled their comments function which had been described by the usual Marxoid pearl-clutchers as racist [fill-in-the-black]. How easily the conservative intelligentsia crumples before the onslaught of faculty lounge witches and millennial women of both sexes who wear their underwear way too tight. 

Fuck them. Don’t accept comments? Your site is a propaganda organ and nothing else.

Please get in touch with me on any improvements you may wish to see at the site. I am trying to improve the search function and maybe even have a blogroll. -BB

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Perhaps it was true a century ago—I deeply regret that it is no longer true—but the United States criminal justice system long ago lost any legitimate claim to the loyal cooperation of American citizens. You cannot write tens of thousands of criminal statutes, including many touching upon conduct that is neither immoral nor dangerous, write those laws as broadly as you can imagine, scatter them throughout the thousands of pages of the United States Code—and then expect decent law-abiding, unsuspecting citizens to cooperate with an investigation into whether they may have violated some law they have never even heard about. The next time some police officer or government agent asks you whether you would be willing to answer a few questions about where you have been and what you have been doing, you must respectfully but very firmly decline.”

*

“If a police officer encounters you in one of those moments, he or she has every right to ask you two simple questions. Memorize these two questions so you will not be tempted to answer any others:

Who are you?

What are you doing right here, right now?

If you are ever approached by a police officer with those two questions, and your God-given common sense tells you that the officer is being reasonable in asking for an explanation, don’t be a jerk.”

― James Duane, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

“That concentration camps were ultimately provided for the same groups in all countries, even though there were considerable differences in the treatment of their inmates, was all the more characteristic as the selection of the groups was left exclusively to the initiative of the totalitarian regimes: if the Nazis put a person in a concentration camp and if he made a successful escape, say, to Holland, the Dutch would put him in an internment camp. Thus, long before the outbreak of the war the police in a number of Western countries, under the pretext of “national security,” had on their own initiative established close connections with the Gestapo and the GPU [Russian State security agency], so that one might say there existed an independent foreign policy of the police. This police-directed foreign policy functioned quite independently of the official governments; the relations between the Gestapo and the French police were never more cordial than at the time of Leon Blum’s popular-front government, which was guided by a decidedly anti-German policy. Contrary to the governments, the various police organizations were never overburdened with “prejudices” against any totalitarian regime; the information and denunciations received from GPU agents were just as welcome to them as those from Fascist or Gestapo agents. They knew about the eminent role of the police apparatus in all totalitarian regimes, they knew about its elevated social status and political importance, and they never bothered to conceal their sympathies. That the Nazis eventually met with so disgracefully little resistance from the police in the countries they occupied, and that they were able to organize terror as much as they did with the assistance of these local police forces, was due at least in part to the powerful position which the police had achieved over the years in their unrestricted and arbitrary domination of stateless and refugees.”

*

“…the consequences of this shift of emphasis from the police to the military in the power game were of great consequence. It is true, ascendancy of the secret police over the military apparatus is the hallmark of many tyrannies, and not only the totalitarian; however, in the case of totalitarian government the preponderance of the police not merely answers the need for suppressing the population at home but fits the ideological claim to global rule. For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence and will rule conquered territory with police methods and personnel rather than with the army. Thus, the Nazis used their SS troops, essentially a police force, for the rule and even the conquest of foreign territories, with the ultimate aim of an amalgamation of the army and the police under the leadership of the SS.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

 

I remember writing for some local rag in Tennessee in the 1990s pressing for folks to get their heads examined in their unadorned love and affection for political police forces. If a dime of state money funds a police agency, it is de facto and de jure a political police mechanism. Politicians are violence brokers, they just managed to massage the vocabulary to get their real jobs buried under the linguistic confetti of Mom and apple pie. There is not a politician in existence across the spectrum who doesn’t mean you harm if you don’t bend a knoee and comply and obey.

Not one…even the clown posse in the Libertarian Party.

Of course we should defund and defang the police, they have been a clear and present danger to all human liberty since they were foisted on the hapless subjects in the American plantation in the urban centers in the 1800s. Now we have a mass movement of communists in the US wanting to “defund the police” but they don’t really mean what they are saying because whatever destruction of the 19,000 police infestations they dismantle, they will reflag or erect a new policing and enforcement system that will be a clever hybrid of the secret police mechanisms so common in communist countries with a chaser of secular Sharia that will make the Saudi Arabian religious police look the Keystone Cops. Call it what you will: communism, socialism, environmentalism, neo-conservatism, government supremacism and on and on, no matter the label the usual suspects wish to put you and yours on a plantation where you will be monitored, regulated, exacted and when necessary, culled.

So far, my friend Brian  at Fatal Encounters has identified over 28,000 corpses stacked up by the American police since January 1st, 2000. I remind everyone that this number is low due to mis-, non- and under-reporting and only covers the free range targets outside the vast penal system in the country.

Unless you are a government supremacist, the cop will never be your friend and always your enemy.

You need to wrap your head around the fact that the cops have never been there to protect freedom, they have never been a thin blue line to stop barbarism. They have been the Leninist vanguard to advance every scrap of government ambition to expand and interfere with every notion you have of living free and being a productive member of your family. I already spoke to this in my last blog post.

You are on your own and no one is coming to save you.

History does not have any examples of government making your life better. None. You simply trade one predator for another.

Free markets aren’t a species of economics, it is the baseline of all human behavior despite what the communists in the Long March Through American Institutions are telling you via all their captured propaganda nodes in the media and the “universities” (ask yourself: what is the opposite of diversity?). Every other economic theory or train of thought has one goal in mind: the complete sublimation of your atomized behavior to be puppeteered by the coercive controls in place enforced by a police mechanism. I made that easy for you.

In recent history, the Great War in 1914 started thanks to the Gavrip Princip[le] where a young Bosnian Serbian Nationalist accidentally ran into the car carrying the Archduke and his wife and his two rounds were the communist shot heard ’round the world that set the stage for the slow motion car crash that would make the world safe for communist domination in 1945 at the close of the Second Act of the War to Save Government Supremacism (1938-1945). We even see the Germans inject the communist bacillus into the body of Russia on the armored train when they injected V.I. Lenin into the system. The rest is blood-drenched history. What you are seeing this summer is a culmination of over a century of shaping the conditions for the creation of a prison planet. The combination of many factors to include the government indoctrination of the young in K-PhD in the vast indoctrination complex yielded entire generations of humans whose critical thinking skills were negligible and were innumerate and illiterate on an industrial scale making for perfect fodder for political manipulation as enthusiastic if not willing serfs so sensitive a stray word could send them to the fainting couches.

A word.

So enjoy the decline, those of you who have championed the police or reflexively defended their barbarism, you get what you deserve.

Ride the wave, Buttercup, we are to blame for this along with every other man going back to the Founding that tolerated this state of affairs.

“So what is the answer? How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared?

What do you need to make you stronger than the Interrogator and the whole trap?

From the moment you go to prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: “My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there’s nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die—now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me.”

Confronted by such a prisoner, the Interrogation will tremble.

Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory.”

― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books I-II

 

 

 

* This article was originally published here

The Unmasking by Bill Buppert

 

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

― Buckminster Fuller

“Better to die fighting for freedom then be a prisoner all the days of your life.”

― Bob Marley

 

Publisher’s Note: Think you have the stones to rebel, think again.

 But you better think hard.

“That said, some people may have more naturally non-conformist personalities than others, at least in periods of their lives. Whether such rebels are successful in breaking out, however, may partly depend on how convincingly they can justify to themselves, and defend to others, that we don’t want to conform.

If so, we would expect a tendency to adopt non-standard norms to be linked to verbal ability and perhaps general intelligence in individuals who actually rebel, which there’s some evidence to support.

How we react to unfairness may also affect our propensity to rebel. One study found that people who are risk averse and easily trust others are less likely to react strongly to unfairness. While not proven in the study, it may make such individuals more likely to conform.”

I happen to think that some Celtic people are naturally anti-authoritarian but then again look at the socialist disasters in both “free” Ireland (Eire) and the occupied north country. Even after 1922. Socialists are killing socialists to create a better socialism.

I’ll take Zomia any day.

On another note in these tumultuous times, the Viking culture has much to tell us. I recently finished Shippey’s terrific “Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings”  (læjandi skalk deyja).

It’s an uncut presentation of Viking behavior, straight up, no chaser. Where women appear not a single time in this book, however, is as warriors, because Viking women warriors are a total myth.

If you laughed as your enemies killed you, because you knew how they were going to die soon too and you’d get your vengeance, that was admirable. The goal wasn’t stoicism (which was often the goal of other martial societies, particularly the American Indians); it was getting one over on your enemies, and knowing it. Or if you bided your time as a defeated slave, forming a plan to kill and mutilate your enemies, then chuckled over their bodies, that was admirable too. (It is, as Shippey says, no coincidence that our word “gloat” comes from Old Norse.) Waiting to get back at your enemies so as to do it well is high-class behavior; it’s low-class thralls that lose their tempers and strike back hastily. And if you simply can’t get vengeance, you can make a dark joke, like the saga hero who, cut terribly across the face in hand-to-hand combat onboard a ship, grabs his gold, says “The Danish woman in Bornholm won’t think it so pleasant to kiss me now,” and jumps overboard to sink beneath the waves. Being humorously nasty is also admirable, like the man who, as he is about to be decapitated after a battle, asks for one of his enemies to hold his hair back so it doesn’t get bloody—then, as the axe falls, jerks backward so the helper’s hands are cut off, and dances around, laughing and shouting “Whose hands are in my hair?!”

Being comfortable with losing continued even after death. Those warriors chosen for Valhalla were not promised eternal life or eternal happiness; they were promised a good time until Ragnarok, the final battle, whereupon all of them, and all the gods, were to lose and die permanently. In the Viking ethos, this makes sense, because you can only show that you will never give in if you can be defeated. The goal isn’t to avoid defeat, certainly not by switching sides to gain advantage. It’s to show your worth, come what may. Many have pointed out that the gods in the Iliad are, in a sense, lesser than men because their immortality makes everything they do ultimately trivial. Not so for Vikings, or their gods.

Fighting was the number one Viking activity, of course.

In all the sagas, there is a definite exaltation of strongly masculine behavior, mostly fighting but wine and women as well. Vikings had a general love of constant violence, including games intended to create violent disputes among friends out of nothing. They also invariably reacted with a hair trigger to insults; and when they lost their lives, as they expected to someday, if not laughing ideally offered dying last words that were not self-pitying but were laconic, such as “bear to Silkisif and our sons my greeting; I won’t be coming.” Self-control was extremely important—showing any weak-seeming emotion or offering any reaction (other than violence or laughter) was looked down on, even if severely injured or having lost a child or wife. Vikings didn’t cry, ever. All this behavior was, collectively, drengskapr, basically a code of honor, the function of which Shippey analogizes to later European dueling, which served important functions tied to the core male need for validation and hierarchy. Its opposite, naturally, was dishonorable behavior, such as killing the defenseless, cowardice, or breaking an oath; such actions meant either a loss of face or expulsion from the community.

So consider even in defeat, you can win.

And my readers know how I feel about dueling….

I wanted to mention that Pete at Western Rifle Shooters Association has been nuked by the mandarins at WordPress. If one opposes communism, human slavery and infanticide, you are subject to censorship in twenty-first century Amerika.

I have renewed my presence at Gab to honor Pete; find and follow me at @zerogov. -BB

 

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

“The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.”

― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours: The Class Foundations of Moral Practice

“It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing, one loud noise, and its gone. But the people are so cowed and disorganised. A few might take the opportunity to protest, but it’ll just be a voice crying in the wilderness. Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the people’s voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.”

― Alan Moore & David Lloyd, V for Vendetta

Unless you were in hibernation, American policing suffered yet another bad public relations fiasco when one of its low IQ thugs murdered George Floyd in Minneapolistan; Floyd has history and difficulties but the typical brutish bully scrum so popular with American coproaches saw him asphyxiated by one of the badged heroes on the ground during an official kidnapping.

Anyone acquainted with this blog knows I have warned about the political enforcers and their misdeeds ever since I have been writing. I published “Just Say No to Cops” in 2009.

Absent cops, no politician can rob a single human of their liberty. Full stop. Until humankind owns that notion, every pursuit of liberty and freedom will be a forlorn hope. Now we’re even hearing the usual suspects in the deep state media talking about reducing or eliminating police departments (there are currently 19,000 of these Loyalist army units in America from the Federal to the local level). The Bluecoats today are the analog of the Redcoats riding roughshod over British colonials before the divorce proceeding from London started in earnest. The cops are the standing army the Anti-Federalists warned us about.

While I am encouraged by such sober thinking, the government supremacist on the left have failed to grasp that their fetid Sovietopian dreams need cops to be realized. No communist state can exist without two important ingredients: a robust police state and a very large segment of the subject population who are either unpaid or paid informants for the state. These two elements are intimately married to each other and no leviathan can exist absent these things.

The latter notion of an informant society is the glue that terraforms the building of homo Sovieticus. And make no mistake, the iron dream of every [national] socialist and communist is complete control of the physical and mental landscape of the serf populations.

If fear and obedience are the brick and mortar of the state, the informant and casual compliance with state codes may be the foundation of the steel house of the government plantation.

I have no need to choose between the dying liberal order and the Mango Emperor, as I have no need to choose between Lucifer and Baphomet. Both major parties in the US are mere complements of one another. One, the Democrats is nothing more than an asylum structure to house the Bolsheviks while the scolding and invertebrate Mensheviks of the Grand Old Politburo are embarrassed that the gibbering of the Democrats says out loud what they are thinking.

Both parties want nothing more than your chained obedience.

It’s supreme irony that the government supremacists in Antifa, BLM and their Democrat party sugar daddies are calling for defunding the police. The very entity that makes all government shitholes enforceable under their inhuman rule.

Tucker Carlson does a great job deconstructing the cargo cult that is communism.

Who knew that the post-apocalypse movies would be a glimpse into what we are now seeing in cities today.

I lecture on antifragility and the latest manufactured crisis have shown just how delicate and might I say, snowflake-like urban infrastructure is. Peter Grant over at BRM does a great overview.

The political violence you are seeing is nothing new in the last fifty years, for insight into the daily bombings and mayhem, one need look no further than the late sixties until 1984. I recommend Bryan Burrough’s book Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI and the Forgotten Era of Revolutionary Violence. Mind you, Borroughs is a fellow traveler with the government supremacists. Comrade Obama was an acolyte of the era.

Burroughs:

“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States,” notes a retired FBI agent, Max Noel. “People don’t want to listen to that. They can’t believe it. One bombing now and everyone gets excited. In 1972? It was every day. Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed. It was commonplace.”

“…radical violence was so deeply woven into the fabric of 1970s America that many citizens, especially in New York and other hard-hit cities, accepted it as part of daily life. As one New Yorker sniffed to the New York Post after an FALN attack in 1977, “Oh, another bombing? Who is it this time?”  

“…as hard as it may be to comprehend today, there was a moment during the early 1970s when bombings were viewed by many Americans as a semi-legitimate means of protest. In the minds of others, they amounted to little more than a public nuisance.”

There’s an interview here with Burroughs by a bearded woman of both sexes from The Nation (the commie rag). Pack an air sickness bag for some of the commie apologetics by the host.

My point here is that domestic communist violence in America is nothing new.

In January, the political coup conducted by the deep state against the Mango Mussolini came to naught and then the usual suspects weaponized a novel new variant of the common flu or cold (both Corona subsets in viral taxonomy) to attempt to destroy the economy. I found it curious the most non-essential business of all, government, was deemed essential but when you control the levers of power the vanity project informs otherwise. You will also note that the approved “essential” workers throughout the economy were apparently and without evidence immune to exposure.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Hence the sudden trigger of yet another human being savaged by the government thugs becomes a cause celebre that literally enflames the nation.

Well, at least in urban areas.

Gold, guns and groceries remain a top priority for 2020 and 2021 should be even more sporty.

The real resistance is the refusal to acknowledge that communists are human beings. 

“William: “I’m sure we can all pull together, sir.”

Vetinari: “Oh, I do hope not. Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny. Free men pull in all kinds of directions.”

― Terry Pratchett, The Truth

 

* This article was originally published here

Village Praxis: Quarantine Dryfire and Other COVID19 Ramblings by John Meyers

Publisher’s Note: I was a middling saber fencer in college; I’ve always been intrigued with Western martial arts after a flirtation with Eastern martial arts in Aikido. I have tremendous respect for the Asian swordcraft but it is curious that they simply can’t compete on the world stage. It has its place. Kodawari is certainly a key to me mastering the red dot on my weapons.

You will note that MMA is dominated by non-Eastern practitioners. The Greeks gave us western wrestling which is a large component of the successful grappling ground game.

Excepting the Orthodox factions today, there is no muscular Christianity in the West; all the Protestant and Catholic factions have been in a race to feminize their congregations to the point of the weak-kneed and morally anemic flaggots that people the American churches from sea to shining sea. They fly national flags in their worship halls and the prevailing government supremacist interpretation of Romans 13 is illustrated no better than the prostrating positions and keening wail of obeisance during the mass house arrest of the Peking Pox.

Starting in the eleventh century the Crusades began against the Muslim foe for hundreds of years; this set the tone and honed the temper for the creation of martial chapter-houses, brotherhoods and the knight ideologies that created the notion of bladed and close-combat training salons where adherents refined the martial arts of the west to a very high degree.

There are probably hundreds of training manuals in Latin and German yet translated from those eras. Before the advent of firearms in the common use, the blade was the choice in close combat and private instructors were abundant. monastic orders literally provided warrior muscle for the Crusades. You can find many of these translated text here courtesy of Wiktenaur.

There are already organizations out there exploring this like the Historical European Martial Arts community. You may have a studio near by where you can see what training is offered.

This is not the cosplay LARPing of the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA), these are real bladed training venues.

This is in no way to be construed to substitute for firearms training, simply expanding one’s martial portfolio to be prepared.

It may be time to revive these martial monastic orders to perfect the way of the gun aligned to a philosophical mission apart from government service. Much like the Flinters in F. Paul Wilson’s La Nague Federation or the Freehold universe of Michael Z. Williamson.

I will explore this in a future essay.

“Agesilao had his rivals even in Italy, chief among them Eugenio Pini from Livorno, who could be just as short-tempered. When he fought Rue “The Invincible,” the French master who, hit twice in succession, failed to acknowledge being hit as etiquette dictated, Pini pulled the button from his foil and with his next attack ripped open Rue’s jacket. He then tore off his mask and shouted, “I suppose that one didn’t arrive either?”

― Richard Cohen, By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions

I am of the firm belief that everyone needs at least one thing in their life where they can pursue perfection. We need that to balance and center our lives. It doesn’t have to be something grand, but even something simple as making what you consider the perfect cup of coffee in the morning, or mastering rifle or pistol, hell even parking in your spot perfectly centered, something. Everyone needs at least one thing in their life they can have pride in. Pursuing perfection does not imply you’ll ever achieve it, that’s the main realization: it’s the effort you put into that goal that grows you as a person. There is no destination of perfection, there is only a journey.

In other news, I recently received a sample of a Faraday Bag from a reader who produces the “Billfodl” line. I normally use a Mission Darkness Faraday bag but this one not only performed on par with it but had the unique feature of actually being able to view the device in the bag to confirm visually it was still “locked out” of service. I highly recommend them.

Bryan at Billfodl embraces the Mises ethos with vigor:

 “It is irrelevant to the entrepreneur, as the servant of the consumers, whether the wishes and wants of the consumers are wise or unwise, moral or immoral. He produces what the consumers want. In this sense he is amoral. He manufactures whiskey and guns just as he produces food and clothing. It is not his task to teach reason to the sovereign consumers. Should one entrepreneur, for ethical reasons of his own, refuse to manufacture whiskey, other entrepreneurs would do so as long as whiskey is wanted and bought. It is not because we have distilleries that people drink whiskey; it is because people like to drink whiskey that we have distilleries. One may deplore this. But it is not up to the entrepreneurs to improve mankind morally. And they are not to be blamed if those whose duty this is have failed to do so.”

― Ludwig Von Mises, Interventionism: An Economic Analysis

I recently read one of the most edifying books on Vikings called “Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings” by Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, highly recommended. And Charles’ review is scintillating.

On to John’s terrific essay on keeping one’s skills honed during the Beijing Bug crisis, wholly manufactured and brought to you by big government planet-wide. -BB

 

“Blow up your TV, throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home.
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try an find Jesus, on your own”

– John Prine

 

“Party politics today is a race to the boxcars; first team there gets to make the other team ride.”

– Tamara Keel

The Holocough has engulfed the nation. Unemployment is easily at its highest rates since the Great Depression and will soon dwarf the record.  Hippie moms have traded in their elderberry syrup and organic patchouli cleaning solutions for narcotics and bleach.

Local governments have locked their citizens down across the country. North Carolina estimates that half of the small businesses in the state will be no more on the other side of quarantine.  The bottom has fallen out of oil and topped out at -37$ a barrel. We are seeing gas prices we haven’t seen in 20 years. Grocery store shelves are bare. The economic fall out and government “solutions” will undoubtedly lead to greater catastrophe than the Coronavirus itself.

The initial response from the political Right was that Kung-Flu is merely an election time charade orchestrated by the socialists and George Soros to crash the stock market and take away Trump’s chances of re-election.  The political Left continues its grasping to engage in partisan theatrics in an effort to gain favoritism with the populace. Despite the polemics, both sides are united on unseen debt and enslavement.

A theme in my musings has been the hypocrisy of the various political factions and current epizootic offers us no shortage of material.

The Republican government has completely removed any façade of honoring their supposed principles of limited government, fiscal restraint and stemming the tide of Leftism by enacting a six trillion dollar Keynesian “Stimulus” racket financed entirely by deficits and money printing. The FED has all but removed interest rates completely. Wall street got its Corona-package. The helicopters dropped 1200$ per adult and 500$ per child into the laps of the American public, making Andrew Yang, the object of previous Republican scorn, grin from ear to ear. It merely took a crisis to remove the Emperor’s clothes and show the entire country Trump is a commie, something the well informed already knew. When a democrat proposed such levels of economic intervention, Republicans would have none of it, allegedly. When Orange Man does it, he is literally the second coming of Jesus. Bernie cannot nationalize the economy if Trump does it first, eh?

The President declared himself dictator and said “when somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s gotta be. It’s total.”

The Right cheered. The left sneered. If the rolls were reversed and a democratic president said this, an entire militia movement would have formed to institute an overthrow of the Offal Office, and the left would have defended unlimited executive power till the death. What’s new? Each faction has no issue with total power they just want to be the ones wielding it.

Peter Schiff, who predicted the housing market collapse in 2006-2008, pointed out that the national debt clock just ticked past 24 trillion, and is up four trillion, since Trump took office. Trump ran on a platform of eliminating the debt. He added more debt in four years than Bush did in eight. If re-elected, he will add more debt than Bush and Obama combined. Instead of draining the swamp, Schiff said, “he is draining the nation.” Trump supporters, Republicans and conservatives cast no more illusions that they are merely progressives with an R suffix.

All you have to do is look at the treatment of poor Tom Massie and how Trump attacked the libertarian minded congressman from his bully pulpit for daring to have the audacity to question the wisdom of a six trillion pork-package for Wall street, the Airlines, the Special Interests, the statist pet projects, and a UBI bone tossed to the American people to keep the masses from going absolutely ape shit.

Anthony Gregory pointed out on social media “It’s a good thing Trump hasn’t squandered three years of unprecedented prosperity by avoiding deficit spending.” There is a strange silence from the Trump fan base about the unprecedented unemployment and stock market crash. If he gets credit from them for the ‘prosperity’ (merely a bubble) to be logically consistent he should get credit for the crash.

The freedom movement is also rife with discontent. Previously plumb line liberty folks have come out in favor of national shut-downs, government interventions, forced quarantine and quasi-martial law in favor of combatting the crisis. Arguments and discussions are made that not only can the state shut down the entire country, it can also forcibly quarantine anyone simply for having a common cold (or being healthy without a facemask on) and that entering public space is necessarily aggression against the innocent that has a mens re and legitimate criminal intent to prosecute.

Others make the argument that government checks are simply reclaiming confiscated wealth, something I can sympathize with. Although they gloss over the fact that those hand-outs are literally no different than the checks welfare queens receive that the critics deride every day of their existence as exsanguinating the state and giving up their self-reliance. Engaging in mental gymnastics to justify it all is something they always deride the other side for doing, yet here we are. The Trump voter literally sees no contradiction in Trump making the statement “America will never be a socialist nation” and the same man signing a six trillion debt-buck welfare package and sending each American family an average of 2000$ printed out of thin air.

Demo-publicans tell Republi-crats to tear up their relief checks because it’s socialism. Republi-crats tell Demo-publicans they must tear up their relief check because Trump isn’t their president. There is one thing you can count on, when it comes to the issues, Pelosi and Trump stand together when it means destruction of the nation.

The elites in the political class, the state capitols, the media, the politically connected corporations all function in a capacity similar to the WWE wrestling. It’s merely a show to entertain Mencken’s Booboisee, while keeping themselves enriched. The Rawlesian “Mother of all Bailouts” is on the horizon and is already in play. Prepare for the long haul. We aren’t getting out of this anytime soon.

Liberals are buying guns and realizing those ‘loopholes’ they always yapped about are bogus. Ammo has been panic bought (to stack in a basement with no intention of actually training with it or actually using it during spicy time, I might add) to the point of no return. What we are experiencing might be the 2013 gun panic on steroids. While most of the country is engaged in state-jingoism on their march to peak authoritarianism, we are simultaneously seeing probably the biggest unintentional times of mass non-compliance.  Much of this cannot be enforced. But that isn’t stopping people from getting arrested for watching the sunset with their kids or lone paddle borders getting arrested on the beach for ‘endangering the public’ on a barren coastline.

Despite these interesting dichotomies, I remain critical of government overreach, while using precautions to avoid contracting COVID19 itself. The long-term government response to this crisis is most likely irreversible as Robert Higgs eloquently pointed out in his seminal work, Crisis and Leviathan.

Most of this is largely out of our span of control. What can you be doing right now? Most have time re-arranged giving them opportunities to become PT studs and increase their shooting ability to unseen levels with dry fire, just for starters.

With ammo being somewhat unavailable at the moment at reasonable prices, and the thought of resupply is dismal, dry fire should be dominating your practice regimens even more now than ever. World champions have been built largely with dry fire. One of the most important aspects of shooting, the visual connection to the gun, can be drilled relentlessly with dry fire. Mechanics and manipulations can be fine tuned with it. Movement and transitions can be worked as well as draws and single hand only work. Injured shooter and malfunction clearances can be done dry as well as precision rifle work and even tactics up to team level.

Nothing that I’m going to talk about in these pages is anything groundbreaking to those that frequently train or have received instruction from reputable sources. Everyone’s situation and weaknesses are different. If you are a Grandmaster in USPSA, but things are looking a little hinky and you think maybe you ought to learn to run that home defense / preparedness rifle (to use Mosby’s term) finally, you probably should be focusing hard on that rifle versus pistol for example.

Personally I focus 80/20 pistol to rifle. I focus on pistol the majority of time for several reasons. It’s my daily carry, I can shoot a rifle better than pistol so it needs more work in general, and I’m more likely to have a pistol on me than a rifle. Pistol mechanics generally translate to good rifle shooting but rifle craft doesn’t usually lend itself to better pistol shooting.

There are several volumes of work you should be seeking out, but I’m merely throwing some things out for you to work on if you do not have access to these materials. Dry fire volumes by Steve Anderson, Ben Stoeger, and Mike Seeklander should be bought soonest.

Starting with dry practice the first thing to ensure is that the weapon is indeed dry. It has to be empty. Jeff Coopers first rule of gun handling is that “All guns are always loaded.” Other versions are “Treat all guns as if they are loaded.”

Better.

Yet the problem remains dry fire breaks the rule as it is worded. I prefer:

“Know the status and condition of your weapon at all times.”

When it needs to be loaded, it absolutely needs to be loaded. When it needs to be unloaded, it absolutely needs to be unloaded.

I verbally say “dry fire” at the start of each session. I then remove the magazine from the weapon and lock the slide/bolt to the rear. I visually inspect the bolt face and chamber, then the magwell, then back to the chamber and bolt face. I close the action up declaring its empty and commence.

Also note that you will be breaking other rules of pointing guns at things you normally wouldn’t want to destroy such as targets on walls in your house. Refer back to knowing the status of your weapon at all times.

These dry fire exercises can be executed with a timer to start or not. Probably over 50% of my dry fire reps are without a timer. I generally perform 3 sets of 5 of each exercise.  It’s a good general starting point until you are able to dial in exactly how long you can maintain the focus and the proper grip needed to get good dry reps in.

I generally employ a progressive overload methodology in much of my dry practice. I’ll start at a slow or moderate speed, and slowly increase over the session, to a failure point. This can be done with a shot timer and progressively increasing the speed by .1 or .2 per set. It can be important at various times to push yourself past your failure point in order to overload your system and push yourself. It allows you feel what it will feel like when you reach that level.

Be advised some of these drills are heavy on mechanics. Mechanics only do one thing for you. They allow you to get the gun back up in front of the eyes and score points whether that’s a gunfight or just casual shooting in the backyard.  Most of the focus and bulk of the dry work should be focused on the visual connection needed to make the shot at hand. It is extremely important to have determined in live fire what you can get away with as far as a sight picture for a certain shot and repeat that in dry fire. If you are tossing the gun up and mashing a trigger to meet an arbitrary par time, but you are not even seeing the gun/sights at all, you are doing it wrong.

One last note about micro drilling; determine your weaknesses and work to improve them. If you are shooting the FASTest for example, which requires a draw and 2 shots to a horizontal index card at 7y, a slide lock reload, then 4 rounds to the body, and you determine you are not making the visual connection on the small target to make the shot, you need to work that. If your reload sucks and takes 6 seconds, work on that. If your draw is bumbled every other time, because you cannot establish a proper grip on the gun, work solely on moving your hands to the gun and getting that grip for several sets.Do not cheat yourself on your grip. If you are not feeling physically tired after 10-20 minutes of dry fire exercises, you are not gripping the gun hard enough and/or not mentally focused enough.

1. Draw to sight picture/first shot

Its important to practice the draw stroke in a variety of manners, particularly if this practice is for defensive use. You must be able to get the gun out as fast as you can while achieving a proper grip and “seeing what you need to see” with the sights/dot to make the appropriate shot. You should be training to pull the gun out of the holster, achieving a sight picture with your finger indexed on the frame, other times with the finger on the trigger, other times with the finger on the trigger and prepped and still other times with the gun coming out of the holster with the decision to shoot already made and the shot breaks as soon as you see the proper sight picture.

Whipping the gun out of the holster and mashing the trigger every single time can create a very bad training scar.  You do NOT want to do that when in a self-defense context that is rapidly evolving and while you are cognitively processing and problem solving the situation and shoot when you have not make the decision to.

The other thing to watch with the draw stroke is ensuring that you see the sight picture you need to see, in the appropriate aiming area of the target, every single time. Pressing the trigger when you do not have a sight picture in order to meet a par time is not beneficial.

Work on those different sight pictures. With optics you will be using a target focus and super imposing the dot on the aiming area. Precision rifle may require more of a focus on the reticle itself.

Work on your index. Upon extension the sights are lined up automatically. Work on seeing a soft sight focus where appropriate, a hard sight focus for those small targets or precision shots, and even seeing gross or flash sight pictures for up close 3 yard and in type targets, such as just seeing a set of sights (with or without good alignment) in the aiming area or just the slide of your gun in the aiming area. You don’t need sharp front site focus and perfect alignment to get hits on an A-zone at 3 yards for instance and you are wasting time if doing so.

If a trigger is pressed, you must watch and manage the sights while maintaining that visual connection and note any movement of the sight picture before, during and after the trigger press. If the gun is moving around, be sure to correct the problem. Most of these problems can be corrected in dry practice.

A common technique I use when working the draw is progressive overload by using a timer. I’ll perform 5 reps or so at a given par time. I generally start slow to moderate speed with times I know I can hit with little effort. After 1 or 2 sets of perfect reps, I’ll increase the time by .1 or .2 seconds. I’ll perform 5 more reps. I’ll continue this to I meet a par time where I see failure about 25% of the time. I’ll then focus on this time frame for 3 sets of 5. I’ll usually then push the time .1-.2 second faster to overload a bit. Then dial it back for at least one more set at my working par time.

There are also lots of benefits from starting cold, at your fastest time standard and seeing where you stack up. This is more of an evaluation rather than something you do every session. For beginners I recommend starting your dry practice with slow, deliberate execution of the fundamentals of grip and sight picture, and making sure you are doing everything right, every single time, before upping the par time. There is also benefit for intermediate and advanced practitioners in doing this periodically.

You can do the work from concealment, duty/tactical/combat rig, or competition rig.

A typical work out might look like:

Combat rig with ALS retention on holster. 2 empty magazines on belt.

1.5 par time on pro timer

Perform 1 set of 5 reps. Ensure perfect sight picture, grip, presentation and trigger manipulation if you are pressing triggers for these iterations

1.3 Par:

1 set of 5

1.0 Par:

3 sets of 5

.9 Par:

1 set of 5

.8 Par

1 set of 5.

After missing some at .9 and some at .8, I’ll then dial back to either .9 or 1.0 and work another 3 sets of 5 at that time. Or if time is short, I’ll just hit 1 set.

Also, alter your start position from hands at sides, arms crossed, surrender index/wrists above shoulders, etc.

To give everyone an idea of par times, the nationally recognized standard for competency in the draw is 1.5 seconds to a realistic size target at 7 yards. Most police departments have a qualification time of 2.0 seconds. Even just moderately good shooters are doing 1 second draws from an ALS holster to a 7-10 yard target all day. Competition shooters live in the .8-1.0 second range. 1 second concealed draw is the holy grail for most.

2. Draw to 2 shots or multiple shot strings

Pay important attention to what the gun is doing when you press triggers. For instance, if the sight is moving left, you may have to tighten your support hand grip more or stop squeezing with your whole firing hand instead of isolating the trigger finger during the press. If your entire wrists are breaking and the gun is going a foot low or low left, you need to stop breaking your wrists or elbows. It’s a mental problem. I suffer from this problem to a small degree if I do not keep up on my dry and live fire sessions.

Per running the trigger multiple times in dry practice: Glocks go dead after the first trigger press. You can either break your first shot, then press the dead trigger the appropriate amount of times for the exercise you are doing, releasing your finger the same amount you would on the trigger during live fire. Another trick is to put a zip tie through the chamber of the gun, with the locking head sticking out to the side @ 2 o’ clock therefore breaking the action between the slide and breach of the barrel. This will give you a trigger that you can work and feels mushy during the entire press. It isn’t perfect but it works. You’ll probably get more use out of a technique like this than running the trigger only once and stopping with a Glock.

DA/SA (double action/single action) guns: On multiple shots, you can either just run the trigger in double action twice (or however long your string is) or more realistically you can run the trigger in DA for the first shot, then instead of releasing the trigger all the way out, only release halfway then press it again, imitating the shorter SA pull.

3. Draw to Multiple Target Transitions

On timer beep or your decision to start, draw, ‘fire’ 1-2 shots per target, and run through the targets. Be sure to see what you need to see for each shot. Make sure the gun isn’t moving off the aiming area on the trigger press. Dry firing target arrays in dry fire will do worlds of good for your transition game. You must learn to call your shots, ensure you got a ‘hit’ before twitching the eyes to the next target. Eyes lead, gun follows. Set up various arrays and run them. This can be done on the move as well. A classic example of a multiple target drills is 3 targets about a target or two’s width apart. From the draw, engage each target with 2 rounds. You can also practice transitions without even touching the trigger and simply running the gun to the targets and getting the correct sight picture

To test this out, you can run exercises like Blake Drills or El Prez and take note of your times and work the skills needed to get better.

A key skill to work on during these iterations is cadence.  If you count a cadence in your head, your trigger should be breaking on every number you count. Your goal is to get the target to target split times to be the same as if you were shooting those same 2 shots on a single target for reasonably close together targets. This really helps target-to-target transitions. It’s also probably the most realistic way for the average Joe to train moving targets. Keep in mind this rhythm across target transitions is only really applicable to targets that are close together. The distance between targets in the real world, coupled with your ability to see and track your sights will dictate shooting cadence. Run the sights, not the trigger. You can only shoot as fast as you can see and process.

4. Draw to SHO or WHO shots

Draw to Single Hand Only or Weak Hand Only to me is more about simply mastering the mechanics of the gun and not necessarily training you to be a wiz bang trick shot. It also sets you up for contingencies in case you are shot or injured in the hand in the real world in a violent encounter.

Pay particular attention to the trigger press and ensure the gun isn’t moving when doing so. WHO is a weak point for me personally and I’m sure most others as well.

5. Reloads
   

There are as many ways to work reloads as Carter’s got little liver pills, but a classic is the one, reload, one. (1R1) I tend to do most of my work from the draw, because it simply gives me another draw stroke.

Draw, 1 round, perform reload then another shot. It’s important to get back with a proper grip after the reload is performed. Reload mechanics are pretty simple once learned. A few key take a ways; it helps to see in the inside of the magwell when making the magazine insertion. In an ideal world, the magwell is pointed toward the source of the magazine, i.e., at your mag pouch. Achieve a proper and repeatable grip on the magazine and a visual shift from target to magazine well upon insertion is critical in my view. It doesn’t absolutely NEED to be done, but the fastest and most efficient reloads will be the result if you use the visual shift technique.

One way to measure reload speed or ‘split time’ with a timer in dry fire is to start with the gun on target, on timer beep, execute the reload, and press a shot before your preset 2^nd par beep goes off. This will give you the actual time it took you to reload.  I practice slide lock reloads mostly with ‘reduced capacity reloads’ done secondarily with my defensive guns. Sport guns I’m mostly spending time on ‘reduced capacity/IPSC style reloads.’ (gun is loaded and in battery, partial magazine is dumped and new mag is inserted)

Its been said the best slide lock reload is a reduced capacity reload, and I cant argue with the logic, however for defensive usage slide lock reloads still need to be repped. (Even though the likelihood of a civilian needing to reload in a gunfight is statistically 0. Then again, no one ever heard of COVID19 till a couple months ago, eh?)

Another good reload drill is “4 Aces” which is simply draw, fire 2 shots, reload, fire 2 shots.

The best way to work on perfecting the reload is something called a “Burkett Reload” named after pro shooter Matt Burkett. It’s simply a micro drill of the reload and it teaches you to slightly pause upon magazine insertion to ensure you do not dork it up.  Start sight picture on target, finger on trigger. On timer beep, drop the mag in the gun while the trigger finger indexes on the frame, bring the new mag to the gun but stop right as the magazine enters the mag well. Do not insert, you are merely lining it up to be inserted. It helps to have your timer set for a second par beep. For instance set the par for 1 second. Once the first beep sounds, drop the mag and bring the new mag to the insertion point before the second beep. I’ll generally run this with a .7 or .8 par. It will do wonders for you if you are having trouble getting the correct magazine insertion.

6. Malfunctions

With the use of ST dummy rounds, you can set up and clear any number of malfunctions. This is pretty self-explanatory however an in depth overview of malfunction clearance methods isn’t suitable in this article. Get professional instruction if you have not learned these techniques yet.

In short, set them up, fix the gun. Time pressure can help simulate a type of stress that some might find beneficial.

Rifle Work 

Most of the exercises outlined in the pistol section can be applied to rifle as well. A few modifications are in order however. Instead of a draw, we have the presentation of the rifle. Ensure you are achieving a natural point of aim on presentation. Work presentations from the various ready positions. Do not just work one, as the real world situation dictates which one you will be using. Be sure to rep high ready, low ready, patrol ready and the variations.

Achieve the visual connection with the target and sight relationship. If you are using a dot, see the target clear and impose the dot where it needs to be to make the hit happen. If using irons, ensure proper alignment and placement. If using an LPVO (low powered variable optic) or other magnified optic, ensure you are seeing a clear focused reticle and proper placement on target. I prefer a day light bright red dot in my LVPO’s and will not be going back to any models without it. You must call your shots when any trigger is pressed. You must achieve ‘hits’ not just simply tossing the gun around and mashing triggers.

In regards to sight placement on the target, make sure you ‘see what you need to see.’ A part of this I haven’t touched on yet, that crosses both combat and competition shooting is the concept of ‘good enough’ to get a hit. If you determine your aiming zone on the target is a full USPSA A-Zone (alpha) for competition style training, or perhaps a 4×6” or 3×5” index card size area for defensive use in vital hit zones, assuming you can press the trigger straight and not move the gun, if you see that dot or sight picture on any portion of that aiming area, break the shot. For cases where you simply need to hit the aiming area, and you are spending your time trying to get an exact center hit and stack subsequent rounds in the same hole when time is of the essence, you are wasting time. Your opponent is going to score more hits than you all things being equal.

There is absolutely a time when you need to pick out that very specific small aiming point on a bigger target as well, i.e. aim small, miss small, and work precision shots. Its just not every pistol shot. Be sure to train both techniques.

One addition that you can do with the rifle is micro drilling getting into and out of position. Use your most used shooting positions like kneeling, prone, rice paddy/kimchi squat, etc. Determine your par times to get into position and get hits. Mosby over at Mountain Guerrilla likes to use a par time to get from standing to prone or standing to kneeling and get a precise hit at 50 or 100 yards, respectively. I’ve found that not only does this translate into the world of the Small Unit and the doctrinal concept of the 3-5 second rush, but you’ll also find if you attempt Kyle Defoor’s prone rifle qual at 100 or kneeling at 50, (or similar drills) getting into position in 3 seconds or under is critical.

Don’t’ forget about those rifle to pistol transitions.

Tactics 

There is no reason we are not dry flowing through our house and working the concepts we have learned under respectable trainers and teachers in the realm of CQB or working around vehicles. There is no reason you cannot drill your SUT in the same manner, however this article is focused on Quarantine training. Most of us are probably holed up with our families not with 10-20 of our ‘team.’ (Don’t get me started)

The ‘draw stroke’ or ‘presentation’ of CQB is the entry through the door. Dry fire this relentlessly, dig your corners, drill the myriad of different methods. This is an area where reputable instruction is critical.

Medical

There is no reason we can’t be dry firing medical skills either, assuming you have them. Got a med kit stashed away with that Bug Out Bag? Why not a drill requiring you to run to that bag and put on a tourniquet on your leg in under the amount of time a typical femoral bleed kills you? And no, you don’t get to first dig it out from under the 900lbs of junk on top of it and pre stage it, either.

In short, the national lockdown is not lifting any time soon. Many, if not a majority of Americans are laid off or under employed at present and have time on their hands. Use this time to do work. You cannot control what the clowns in the state houses, county commissions and oval offices are doing, but you can improve your own situation.

Much like James C Scott’s famed concept of “Irish Democracy” which has graced the pages of this blog numerous times, a friend brought it to my attention a concept that expands on what Scott calls “anarchist calisthenics.” For the weaker kneed readers, don’t let the name soil your drawers. The concept crosses many boundaries. While this is not a recommendation it could be a useful mental exercise. What if injustice became so great, you couldn’t take it any longer? What if you were a “Boog Boy” and after walking to the end of your driveway, you actually saw a dozen other guys with rifles and you realized it was finally ‘time,’ are you mentally and physically capable?

Scott recalls a story of hordes of people who would refuse to jay walk across a street, despite absolutely no traffic coming, but the street crossing sign still hadn’t told them it was legal for them to cross. He stated that in the course of 5 hours, only 2 had the audacity to disobey the law, all while being scolded publicly by the law- abiding public.

He expands:

“One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay ‘in shape’ so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is ‘anarchist calisthenics.’ Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you’ll be ready.”

You don’t even have to go so far as breaking a state edict. You could apply the same concept while on lock down. Exactly what does the freedom movement in collective terms have for excuses for not getting in shape, doing dry fire and honing skills that will be useful in the future?

Hopefully this short essay will give you some ideas.

And remember training is a journey, not a destination.

Montani Semper Liberi.

 

* This article was originally published here

Quarantine Dryfire and Other COVID19 Ramblings by John Meyers

Publisher’s Note: I was a middling saber fencer in college; I’ve always been intrigued with Western martial arts after a flirtation with Eastern martial arts in Aikido. I have tremendous respect for the Asian swordcraft but it is curious that they simply can’t compete on the world stage. It has its place. Kodawari is certainly a key to me mastering the red dot on my weapons.

You will note that MMA is dominated by non-Eastern practitioners. The Greeks gave us western wrestling which is a large component of the successful grappling ground game.

Excepting the Orthodox factions today, there is no muscular Christianity in the West; all the Protestant and Catholic factions have been in a race to feminize their congregations to the point of the weak-kneed and morally anemic flaggots that people the American churches from sea to shining sea. They fly national flags in their worship halls and the prevailing government supremacist interpretation of Romans 13 is illustrated no better than the prostrating positions and keening wail of obeisance during the house arrest of the Peking Pox.

Starting in the eleventh century the Crusades began against the Muslim foe for hundreds of years; this set the tome for the creation of martial chapter-houses, brotherhoods and the knight ideologies that created the notion of bladed training salons where adherents refined the martial arts of the west to a very high degree. There are probably hundreds of training manuals in Latin and German yet translated from those eras. Before the advent of firearms in the common use, the blade was the choice in close combat and private instructors were abundant. monastic orders literally provided warrior muscle for the Crusades.

There are already organizations out there exploring this like the Historical European Martial Arts community.

It may be time to revive these martial monastic orders to perfect the way of the gun aligned to a philosophical mission apart from government service. Much like the Flinters in F. Paul Wilson’s La Nague Federation or the Freehold universe of Michael Z. Williamson.

I will explore this in a future essay.

“Agesilao had his rivals even in Italy, chief among them Eugenio Pini from Livorno, who could be just as short-tempered. When he fought Rue “The Invincible,” the French master who, hit twice in succession, failed to acknowledge being hit as etiquette dictated, Pini pulled the button from his foil and with his next attack ripped open Rue’s jacket. He then tore off his mask and shouted, “I suppose that one didn’t arrive either?”

― Richard Cohen, By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions

I recently received a sample of a Faraday Bag from a reader who produces the “Billfodl” line. I normally use a Mission Darkness Faraday bag but this one not only performed on par with it but had the unique feature of actually being able to view the device in the bag to confirm visually it was still “locked out” of service. I highly recommend them.

Bryan at Billfodl embraces the Mises ethos with vigor:

 “It is irrelevant to the entrepreneur, as the servant of the consumers, whether the wishes and wants of the consumers are wise or unwise, moral or immoral. He produces what the consumers want. In this sense he is amoral. He manufactures whiskey and guns just as he produces food and clothing. It is not his task to teach reason to the sovereign consumers. Should one entrepreneur, for ethical reasons of his own, refuse to manufacture whiskey, other entrepreneurs would do so as long as whiskey is wanted and bought. It is not because we have distilleries that people drink whiskey; it is because people like to drink whiskey that we have distilleries. One may deplore this. But it is not up to the entrepreneurs to improve mankind morally. And they are not to be blamed if those whose duty this is have failed to do so.”

― Ludwig Von Mises, Interventionism: An Economic Analysis

I recently read one of the edifying books on Vikings called “Laughing Shall I Die: Lives and Deaths of the Great Vikings” by Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey, highly recommended. And Charles’ review is scintillating.

On to John’s terrific essay on keeping one’s skills honed during the Beijing Bug crisis, wholly manufactured and brought to by big government world-wide. -BB

 

“Blow up your TV, throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home.
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try an find Jesus, on your own”

– John Prine

 

“Party politics today is a race to the boxcars; first team there gets to make the other team ride.”

– Tamara Keel

The Holocough has engulfed the nation. Unemployment is easily at its highest rates since the Great Depression and will soon dwarf the record.  Hippie moms have traded in their elderberry syrup and organic patchouli cleaning solutions for narcotics and bleach.

Local governments have locked their citizens down across the country. North Carolina estimates that half of the small businesses in the state will be no more on the other side of quarantine.  The bottom has fallen out of oil and topped out at -37$ a barrel. We are seeing gas prices we haven’t seen in 20 years. Grocery store shelves are bare. The economic fall out and government “solutions” will undoubtedly lead to greater catastrophe than the Coronavirus itself.

The initial response from the political Right was that Kung-Flu is merely an election time charade orchestrated by the socialists and George Soros to crash the stock market and take away Trump’s chances of re-election.  The political Left continues it’s grasping to engage in partisan theatrics in an effort to gain favoritism with the populace. Despite the polemics, both sides are united on unseen debt and enslavement.

A theme in my musings has been the hypocrisy of the various political factions and current epizootic offers us no shortage of material.

The Republican government has completely removed any façade of honoring their supposed principles of limited government, fiscal restraint and stemming the tide of Leftism by enacting a 6 Trillion dollar Keynesian “Stimulus” racket financed entirely by deficits and money printing. The FED has all but removed interest rates completely. Wall street got its Corona-package. The Helicopters dropped 1200$ per adult and 500$ per child into the laps of the American public, making Andrew Yang, the object of previous Republican scorn, grin from ear to ear. It merely took a crisis to remove the Emperor’s clothes and show the entire country Trump is a commie, something the well informed already knew. When a democrat proposed such levels of economic intervention, Republicans would have none of it, allegedly. When Orange Man does it, he is literally the second coming of Jesus. Bernie cannot nationalize the economy if Trump does it first, eh?

The President declared himself dictator and said “when somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s gotta be. It’s total.”

The Right cheered. The left sneered. If the rolls were reversed and a democratic president said this, an entire militia movement would have formed to institute an over throw of the Office, and the left would of defended unlimited executive power till the death. What’s new? Each faction has no issue with total power they just want to be the ones wielding it.

Peter Schiff, who predicted the housing market collapse in 2006-2008, pointed out that the national debt clock just ticked past 24 trillion, and is up 4 Trillion, since Trump took office. Trump ran on a platform of eliminating the debt. He added more debt in 4 years than Bush did in 8. If re-elected he will add more debt than Bush and Obama combined. Instead of draining the swamp, Schiff said, “he is draining the nation.” Trump supporters, Republicans and conservatives cast no more illusions that they are merely progressives with an R suffix.

All you have to do is look at the treatment of poor Tom Massie and how Trump attacked the libertarian minded congressman from his bully pulpit for daring to have the audacity to question the wisdom of a 6 trillion pork-package for Wall street, the Airlines, the Special Interests, the statist pet projects, and a UBI bone tossed to the American people to keep the masses from going absolutely ape shit.

Anthony Gregory pointed out on social media “It’s a good thing Trump hasn’t squandered 3 years of unprecedented prosperity by avoiding deficit spending.” There is a strange silence from the Trump fan base about the unprecedented unemployment and stock market crash. If he gets credit from them for the ‘prosperity’ (merely a bubble) to be logically consistent he should get credit for the crash.

The freedom movement is also rife with discontent. Previously plumb line liberty folks have come out in favor of national shut downs, government interventions, forced quarantine and quasi-martial law in favor of combatting the crisis. Arguments and discussions are made that not only can the state shut down the entire country, it can also forcibly quarantine anyone simply for having a common cold (or being healthy without a facemask on) and that entering public space is necessarily aggression against the innocent that has mens rea and legitimate criminal intent to prosecute.

Others make the argument that government checks are simply reclaiming confiscated wealth, something I can sympathize with. Although they gloss over the fact that those hand-outs are literally no different than the checks welfare queens receive that the critics deride every day of their existence as exsanguinating the state and giving up their self reliance. Engaging in mental gymnastics to justify it all is something they always deride the other side for doing, yet here we are. The Trump voter literally sees no contradiction in Trump making the statement “America will never be a socialist nation” and the same man signing a 6 Trillion welfare package and sending each American family an average of 2000$ printed out of thin air.

Demo-publicans tell Republi-crats to tear up their relief checks because its socialism. Republi-crats tell Demo-publicans they must tear up their relief check because Trump isn’t their president. There is one thing you can count on, when it comes to the issues, Pelosi and Trump stand together when it means destruction of the nation.

The elites in the political class, the state capitols, the media, the politically connected corporations all function in a capacity similar to the WWE wrestling. It’s merely a show to entertain Mencken’s Booboisee, while keeping themselves enriched. The Rawlesian “Mother of all Bailouts” is on the horizon and is already in play. Prepare for the long haul. We aren’t getting out of this anytime soon.

Liberals are buying guns and realizing those ‘loopholes’ they always yapped about are bogus. Ammo has been panic bought (to stack in a basement with no intention of actually training with it or actually using it during spicy time, I might add) to the point of no return. What we are experiencing might be the 2013 gun panic on steroids. While most of the country is engaged in state-jingoism on their march to peak authoritarianism, we are simultaneously seeing probably the biggest unintentional times of mass non-compliance.  Much of this cannot be enforced. But that isn’t stopping people from getting arrested for watching the sunset with their kids or lone paddle borders getting arrested on the beach for ‘endangering the public’ on a barren coastline.

Despite these interesting dichotomies, I remain critical of government overreach, while using precautions to avoid contracting COVID19 itself. The long-term government response to this crisis is most likely irreversible as Robert Higgs eloquently pointed out in his seminal work, Crisis and Leviathan.

Most of this is largely out of our span of control. What can you be doing right now? Most have time re-arranged giving them opportunities to become PT studs and increase their shooting ability to unseen levels with dry fire, just for starters.

With ammo being somewhat unavailable at the moment at reasonable prices, and the thought of resupply is dismal, dry fire should be reigning your practice regimens even more now than ever. World champions have been built largely with dry fire. One of the most important aspects of shooting, the visual connection to the gun, can be drilled relentlessly with dry fire. Mechanics and manipulations can be fine tuned with it. Movement and transitions can be worked as well as draws and single hand only work. Injured shooter and malfunction clearances can be done dry as well as precision rifle work and even tactics up to team level.

Nothing that I’m going to talk about in these pages is anything ground breaking to those that frequently train or have received instruction from reputable sources. Everyone’s situation and weaknesses are different. If you are a Grandmaster in USPSA, but things are looking a little hinky and you think maybe you ought to learn to run that home defense / preparedness rifle (to use Mosby’s term) finally, you probably should be focusing hard on that rifle versus pistol for example.

Personally I focus 80/20 pistol to rifle. I focus on pistol the majority of time for several reasons. It’s my daily carry, I can shoot a rifle better than pistol so it needs more work in general, and I’m more likely to have a pistol on me than a rifle. Pistol mechanics generally translate to good rifle shooting but rifle craft doesn’t usually lend its self to better pistol shooting.

There are several volumes of work you should be seeking out, but I’m merely throwing some things out for you to work on if you do not have access to these materials. Dry fire volumes by Steve Anderson, Ben Stoeger, and Mike Seeklander should be bought soonest.

Starting with dry practice the first thing to ensure is that the weapon is indeed dry. It has to be empty. Jeff Coopers first rule of gun handling is that “All guns are always loaded.” Other versions are “Treat all guns as if they are loaded.”

Better.

Yet the problem remains dry fire breaks the rule as it is worded. I prefer:

“Know the status and condition of your weapon at all times.”

When it needs to be loaded, it absolutely needs to be loaded. When it needs to be unloaded, it absolutely needs to be unloaded.

I verbally say “dry fire” at the start of each session. I then remove the magazine from the weapon and lock the slide/bolt to the rear. I visually inspect the bolt face and chamber, then the magwell, then back to the chamber and bolt face. I close the action up declaring its empty and commence.

Also note that you will be breaking other rules of pointing guns at things you normally wouldn’t want to destroy such as targets on walls in your house. Refer back to knowing the status of your weapon at all times.

These dry fire exercises can be executed with a timer to start or not. Probably over 50% of my dry fire reps are without a timer. I generally perform 3 sets of 5 of each exercise.  It’s a good general starting point until you are able to dial in exactly how long you can maintain the focus and the proper grip needed to get good dry reps in.

I generally employ a progressive overload methodology in much of my dry practice. I’ll start at a slow or moderate speed, and slowly increase over the session, to a failure point. This can be done with a shot timer and progressively increasing the speed by .1 or .2 per set. It can be important at various times to push yourself past your failure point in order to overload your system and push yourself. It allows you feel what it will feel like when you reach that level.

Be advised some of these drills are heavy on mechanics. Mechanics only do one thing for you. They allow you to get the gun back up in front of the eyes and score points whether that’s a gunfight or just casual shooting in the backyard.  Most of the focus and bulk of the dry work should be focused on the visual connection needed to make the shot at hand. It is extremely important to have determined in live fire what you can get away with as far as a sight picture for a certain shot and repeat that in dry fire. If you are tossing the gun up and mashing a trigger to meet an arbitrary par time, but you are not even seeing the gun/sights at all, you are doing it wrong.

One last note about micro drilling; determine your weaknesses and work to improve them. If you are shooting the FASTest for example, which requires a draw and 2 shots to a horizontal index card at 7y, a slide lock reload, then 4 rounds to the body, and you determine you are not making the visual connection on the small target to make the shot, you need to work that. If your reload sucks and takes 6 seconds, work on that. If your draw is bumbled every other time, because you cannot establish a proper grip on the gun, work solely on moving your hands to the gun and getting that grip for several sets.Do not cheat yourself on your grip. If you are not feeling physically tired after 10-20 minutes of dry fire exercises, you are not gripping the gun hard enough and/or not mentally focused enough.

1. Draw to sight picture/first shot

Its important to practice the draw stroke in a variety of manners, particularly if this practice is for defensive use. You must be able to get the gun out as fast as you can while achieving a proper grip and “seeing what you need to see” with the sights/dot to make the appropriate shot. You should be training to pull the gun out of the holster, achieving a sight picture with your finger indexed on the frame, other times with the finger on the trigger, other times with the finger on the trigger and prepped and still other times with the gun coming out of the holster with the decision to shoot already made and the shot breaks as soon as you see the proper sight picture.

Whipping the gun out of the holster and mashing the trigger every single time can create a very bad training scar.  You do NOT want to do that when in a self-defense context that is rapidly evolving and while you are cognitively processing and problem solving the situation and shoot when you have not make the decision to.

The other thing to watch with the draw stroke is ensuring that you see the sight picture you need to see, in the appropriate aiming area of the target, every single time. Pressing the trigger when you do not have a sight picture in order to meet a par time is not beneficial.

Work on those different sight pictures. With optics you will be using a target focus and super imposing the dot on the aiming area. Precision rifle may require more of a focus on the reticle itself.

Work on your index. Upon extension the sights are lined up automatically. Work on seeing a soft sight focus where appropriate, a hard sight focus for those small targets or precision shots, and even seeing gross or flash sight pictures for up close 3 yard and in type targets, such as just seeing a set of sights (with or without good alignment) in the aiming area or just the slide of your gun in the aiming area. You don’t need sharp front site focus and perfect alignment to get hits on an A-zone at 3 yards for instance and you are wasting time if doing so.

If a trigger is pressed, you must watch and manage the sights while maintaining that visual connection and note any movement of the sight picture before, during and after the trigger press. If the gun is moving around, be sure to correct the problem. Most of these problems can be corrected in dry practice.

A common technique I use when working the draw is progressive overload by using a timer. I’ll perform 5 reps or so at a given par time. I generally start slow to moderate speed with times I know I can hit with little effort. After 1 or 2 sets of perfect reps, I’ll increase the time by .1 or .2 seconds. I’ll perform 5 more reps. I’ll continue this to I meet a par time where I see failure about 25% of the time. I’ll then focus on this time frame for 3 sets of 5. I’ll usually then push the time .1-.2 second faster to overload a bit. Then dial it back for at least one more set at my working par time.

There are also lots of benefits from starting cold, at your fastest time standard and seeing where you stack up. This is more of an evaluation rather than something you do every session. For beginners I recommend starting your dry practice with slow, deliberate execution of the fundamentals of grip and sight picture, and making sure you are doing everything right, every single time, before upping the par time. There is also benefit for intermediate and advanced practitioners in doing this periodically.

You can do the work from concealment, duty/tactical/combat rig, or competition rig.

A typical work out might look like:

Combat rig with ALS retention on holster. 2 empty magazines on belt.

1.5 par time on pro timer

Perform 1 set of 5 reps. Ensure perfect sight picture, grip, presentation and trigger manipulation if you are pressing triggers for these iterations

1.3 Par:

1 set of 5

1.0 Par:

3 sets of 5

.9 Par:

1 set of 5

.8 Par

1 set of 5.

After missing some at .9 and some at .8, I’ll then dial back to either .9 or 1.0 and work another 3 sets of 5 at that time. Or if time is short, I’ll just hit 1 set.

Also, alter your start position from hands at sides, arms crossed, surrender index/wrists above shoulders, etc.

To give everyone an idea of par times, the nationally recognized standard for competency in the draw is 1.5 seconds to a realistic size target at 7 yards. Most police departments have a qualification time of 2.0 seconds. Even just moderately good shooters are doing 1 second draws from an ALS holster to a 7-10 yard target all day. Competition shooters live in the .8-1.0 second range. 1 second concealed draw is the holy grail for most.

2. Draw to 2 shots or multiple shot strings

Pay important attention to what the gun is doing when you press triggers. For instance, if the sight is moving left, you may have to tighten your support hand grip more or stop squeezing with your whole firing hand instead of isolating the trigger finger during the press. If your entire wrists are breaking and the gun is going a foot low or low left, you need to stop breaking your wrists or elbows. It’s a mental problem. I suffer from this problem to a small degree if I do not keep up on my dry and live fire sessions.

Per running the trigger multiple times in dry practice: Glocks go dead after the first trigger press. You can either break your first shot, then press the dead trigger the appropriate amount of times for the exercise you are doing, releasing your finger the same amount you would on the trigger during live fire. Another trick is to put a zip tie through the chamber of the gun, with the locking head sticking out to the side @ 2 o’ clock therefore breaking the action between the slide and breach of the barrel. This will give you a trigger that you can work and feels mushy during the entire press. It isn’t perfect but it works. You’ll probably get more use out of a technique like this than running the trigger only once and stopping with a Glock.

DA/SA (double action/single action) guns: On multiple shots, you can either just run the trigger in double action twice (or however long your string is) or more realistically you can run the trigger in DA for the first shot, then instead of releasing the trigger all the way out, only release halfway then press it again, imitating the shorter SA pull.

3. Draw to Multiple Target Transitions

On timer beep or your decision to start, draw, ‘fire’ 1-2 shots per target, and run through the targets. Be sure to see what you need to see for each shot. Make sure the gun isn’t moving off the aiming area on the trigger press. Dry firing target arrays in dry fire will do worlds of good for your transition game. You must learn to call your shots, ensure you got a ‘hit’ before twitching the eyes to the next target. Eyes lead, gun follows. Set up various arrays and run them. This can be done on the move as well. A classic example of a multiple target drills is 3 targets about a target or two’s width apart. From the draw, engage each target with 2 rounds. You can also practice transitions without even touching the trigger and simply running the gun to the targets and getting the correct sight picture

To test this out, you can run exercises like Blake Drills or El Prez and take note of your times and work the skills needed to get better.

A key skill to work on during these iterations is cadence.  If you count a cadence in your head, your trigger should be breaking on every number you count. Your goal is to get the target to target split times to be the same as if you were shooting those same 2 shots on a single target for reasonably close together targets. This really helps target-to-target transitions. It’s also probably the most realistic way for the average Joe to train moving targets. Keep in mind this rhythm across target transitions is only really applicable to targets that are close together. The distance between targets in the real world, coupled with your ability to see and track your sights will dictate shooting cadence. Run the sights, not the trigger. You can only shoot as fast as you can see and process.

4. Draw to SHO or WHO shots

Draw to Single Hand Only or Weak Hand Only to me is more about simply mastering the mechanics of the gun and not necessarily training you to be a wiz bang trick shot. It also sets you up for contingencies in case you are shot or injured in the hand in the real world in a violent encounter.

Pay particular attention to the trigger press and ensure the gun isn’t moving when doing so. WHO is a weak point for me personally and I’m sure most others as well.

5. Reloads
   

There are as many ways to work reloads as Carter’s got little liver pills, but a classic is the one, reload, one. (1R1) I tend to do most of my work from the draw, because it simply gives me another draw stroke.

Draw, 1 round, perform reload then another shot. It’s important to get back with a proper grip after the reload is performed. Reload mechanics are pretty simple once learned. A few key take a ways; it helps to see in the inside of the magwell when making the magazine insertion. In an ideal world, the magwell is pointed toward the source of the magazine, i.e., at your mag pouch. Achieve a proper and repeatable grip on the magazine and a visual shift from target to magazine well upon insertion is critical in my view. It doesn’t absolutely NEED to be done, but the fastest and most efficient reloads will be the result if you use the visual shift technique.

One way to measure reload speed or ‘split time’ with a timer in dry fire is to start with the gun on target, on timer beep, execute the reload, and press a shot before your preset 2^nd par beep goes off. This will give you the actual time it took you to reload.  I practice slide lock reloads mostly with ‘reduced capacity reloads’ done secondarily with my defensive guns. Sport guns I’m mostly spending time on ‘reduced capacity/IPSC style reloads.’ (gun is loaded and in battery, partial magazine is dumped and new mag is inserted)

Its been said the best slide lock reload is a reduced capacity reload, and I cant argue with the logic, however for defensive usage slide lock reloads still need to be repped. (Even though the likelihood of a civilian needing to reload in a gunfight is statistically 0. Then again, no one ever heard of COVID19 till a couple months ago, eh?)

Another good reload drill is “4 Aces” which is simply draw, fire 2 shots, reload, fire 2 shots.

The best way to work on perfecting the reload is something called a “Burkett Reload” named after pro shooter Matt Burkett. It’s simply a micro drill of the reload and it teaches you to slightly pause upon magazine insertion to ensure you do not dork it up.  Start sight picture on target, finger on trigger. On timer beep, drop the mag in the gun while the trigger finger indexes on the frame, bring the new mag to the gun but stop right as the magazine enters the mag well. Do not insert, you are merely lining it up to be inserted. It helps to have your timer set for a second par beep. For instance set the par for 1 second. Once the first beep sounds, drop the mag and bring the new mag to the insertion point before the second beep. I’ll generally run this with a .7 or .8 par. It will do wonders for you if you are having trouble getting the correct magazine insertion.

6. Malfunctions

With the use of ST dummy rounds, you can set up and clear any number of malfunctions. This is pretty self-explanatory however an in depth overview of malfunction clearance methods isn’t suitable in this article. Get professional instruction if you have not learned these techniques yet.

In short, set them up, fix the gun. Time pressure can help simulate a type of stress that some might find beneficial.

Rifle Work 

Most of the exercises outlined in the pistol section can be applied to rifle as well. A few modifications are in order however. Instead of a draw, we have the presentation of the rifle. Ensure you are achieving a natural point of aim on presentation. Work presentations from the various ready positions. Do not just work one, as the real world situation dictates which one you will be using. Be sure to rep high ready, low ready, patrol ready and the variations.

Achieve the visual connection with the target and sight relationship. If you are using a dot, see the target clear and impose the dot where it needs to be to make the hit happen. If using irons, ensure proper alignment and placement. If using an LPVO (low powered variable optic) or other magnified optic, ensure you are seeing a clear focused reticle and proper placement on target. I prefer a day light bright red dot in my LVPO’s and will not be going back to any models without it. You must call your shots when any trigger is pressed. You must achieve ‘hits’ not just simply tossing the gun around and mashing triggers.

In regards to sight placement on the target, make sure you ‘see what you need to see.’ A part of this I haven’t touched on yet, that crosses both combat and competition shooting is the concept of ‘good enough’ to get a hit. If you determine your aiming zone on the target is a full USPSA A-Zone (alpha) for competition style training, or perhaps a 4×6” or 3×5” index card size area for defensive use in vital hit zones, assuming you can press the trigger straight and not move the gun, if you see that dot or sight picture on any portion of that aiming area, break the shot. For cases where you simply need to hit the aiming area, and you are spending your time trying to get an exact center hit and stack subsequent rounds in the same hole when time is of the essence, you are wasting time. Your opponent is going to score more hits than you all things being equal.

There is absolutely a time when you need to pick out that very specific small aiming point on a bigger target as well, i.e. aim small, miss small, and work precision shots. Its just not every pistol shot. Be sure to train both techniques.

One addition that you can do with the rifle is micro drilling getting into and out of position. Use your most used shooting positions like kneeling, prone, rice paddy/kimchi squat, etc. Determine your par times to get into position and get hits. Mosby over at Mountain Guerrilla likes to use a par time to get from standing to prone or standing to kneeling and get a precise hit at 50 or 100 yards, respectively. I’ve found that not only does this translate into the world of the Small Unit and the doctrinal concept of the 3-5 second rush, but you’ll also find if you attempt Kyle Defoor’s prone rifle qual at 100 or kneeling at 50, (or similar drills) getting into position in 3 seconds or under is critical.

Don’t’ forget about those rifle to pistol transitions.

Tactics 

There is no reason we are not dry flowing through our house and working the concepts we have learned under respectable trainers and teachers in the realm of CQB or working around vehicles. There is no reason you cannot drill your SUT in the same manner, however this article is focused on Quarantine training. Most of us are probably holed up with our families not with 10-20 of our ‘team.’ (Don’t get me started)

The ‘draw stroke’ or ‘presentation’ of CQB is the entry through the door. Dry fire this relentlessly, dig your corners, drill the myriad of different methods. This is an area where reputable instruction is critical.

Medical

There is no reason we can’t be dry firing medical skills either, assuming you have them. Got a med kit stashed away with that Bug Out Bag? Why not a drill requiring you to run to that bag and put on a tourniquet on your leg in under the amount of time a typical femoral bleed kills you? And no, you don’t get to first dig it out from under the 900lbs of junk on top of it and pre stage it, either.

In short, the national lockdown is not lifting any time soon. Many, if not a majority of Americans are laid off or under employed at present and have time on their hands. Use this time to do work. You cannot control what the clowns in the state houses, county commissions and oval offices are doing, but you can improve your own situation.

Much like James C Scott’s famed concept of “Irish Democracy” which has graced the pages of this blog numerous times, a friend brought it to my attention a concept that expands on what Scott calls “anarchist calisthenics.” For the weaker kneed readers, don’t let the name soil your drawers. The concept crosses many boundaries. While this is not a recommendation it could be a useful mental exercise. What if injustice became so great, you couldn’t take it any longer? What if you were a “Boog Boy” and after walking to the end of your driveway, you actually saw a dozen other guys with rifles and you realized it was finally ‘time,’ are you mentally and physically capable?

Scott recalls a story of hordes of people who would refuse to jay walk across a street, despite absolutely no traffic coming, but the street crossing sign still hadn’t told them it was legal for them to cross. He stated that in the course of 5 hours, only 2 had the audacity to disobey the law, all while being scolded publicly by the law- abiding public.

He expands:

“One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay ‘in shape’ so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is ‘anarchist calisthenics.’ Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it’s only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you’ll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you’ll be ready.”

You don’t even have to go so far as breaking a state edict. You could apply the same concept while on lock down. Exactly what does the freedom movement in collective terms have for excuses for not getting in shape, doing dry fire and honing skills that will be useful in the future?

Hopefully this short essay will give you some ideas.

And remember training is a journey, not a destination.

Montani Semper Liberi.

 

* This article was originally published here