A class drills on live fire at the Georgia Public Safety Training Center.

Credit:

Georgia Public Safety Training Center

Many tendencies can surface, good or bad, when a police officer hits the range. Firearms instructors are there to help recruits, seasoned veterans, and everyone in between shoot their best. But it is not knowledge of firearms, nor shooting, that makes a great instructor. To become an outstanding instructor, one must be a top-notch communicator.

Communication and Observation

One of the bigger challenges for instructors is navigating how the brain works, says Lon Bartel, vice president of training and curriculum for VirTra. As a firearms instructor, he knows often instructors will tell new shooters what not to do. “Don’t slap the trigger” is the prime example.

“The way our brain functions, I tell somebody ‘Don’t do this,’ well the first thing that people do, is they imagine what it is they're not supposed to do. We're reinforcing the actual behavior we don't want them to engage in,” Bartel explains. “As opposed to ‘be on the front sight,’ and ‘nice, smooth trigger press.’ There's a big difference between that and ‘don't slap the trigger.’”

Language and choice of terminology are crucial in communicating clearly what the student should do when he or she steps up to the firing line.

Bartel says how instructors interact with the students and what they expect from them has to be clearly communicated to the shooter in a way that they understand it, not necessarily as the instructor understands it. Some of those phrases won’t mean anything, for a new shooter.

“To me, if a student isn't performing, I have to start first with the instructor. Is the instructor the issue? To me, that's the ultimate question,” explains Bartel.

What Are You Doing?

Bartel likes to ask new shooters to explain what they are doing. That can be telling, he points out, as they convey back to the instructor their take on what they think they have been instructed to do.

“That starts bringing to light if they understand what it is that's expected. Have them explain it to you in their words and their understanding. That can show where communications, and instruction, break down,” he says.

Don’t just ask what they see, but also what they feel.

Bartel says every shooter has a natural wobble to the sights, and new shooters may focus on stabbing at the trigger when sights have wobbled into the proper alignment.

“Let's just try to minimize the wobble as much as possible. And as long as that wobble is somewhere in there, go ahead and let the trigger break,” he tells them.

The results, when those new shooters try that, they get hits all day long.

“Observation and communication are critical components for a great instructor, especially working with newer students,” stresses Bartel.

Alex Rozier, an instructor at the Georgia Public Safety Training Center, says mandate training at the academy now often involves recruits from a younger generation — they have not shot before, or have very limited experience with handguns.

“It’s not a cookie-cutter process for everyone,” Rozier says. “I think teaching brand new shooters is all about explaining things in a way that they can understand it, conceptualize it, and then put it into practice because you can't just say, ‘Hey, do it this way.’”

And just like Bartel, Rozier says good instructors must learn to use terminology that novice shooter can grasp clearly.

Dig for Understanding

Bartel uses the example of working with a shooter on headshot drills at 15 yards, with the target’s torso blocked and the head as largest center of mass available. The shooter fired a big pattern. Why?

“I can't say that it's consistently mechanics of the grip, or anything dealing with specifically with the mechanical feature of the forearm. I'm seeing something else,” recalls Bartel.

So, he asked the shooter to explain what he is doing.

“Well, lining up my sights and I'm pressing the trigger,” the trainee replied.

Bartel then asks the shooter to explain what he meant when he said he lined up his sights. The first reply was simply, “I’m lining up my sights.” But that yielded no insight.

That is a case where the instructor needs to drill deeper and get that understanding of what the student means.

“At 15 yards, with the sights that they had at the time, if you're lining up the three dots the front sight is going to cover that entire head. They couldn't necessarily see a reference point of the head, they were kind of guessing it, and then taking their shot, which explained this big wide pattern,” says Bartel.

Was the shooter getting that target alignment? No. The difference between the dot, the center of the dot and the top edge of the front sight made all the difference in their ability to get a headshot at 15 yards.

“If you don't dig into their understanding, you're never going to know where the shortcomings are. Having them explain things back helps you solidify whether they're understanding or not,” explains Bartel.

Watch Shooter, Not Target

“A sign for me of a good instructor is not somebody who's watching the target, you better be watching your shooter,” emphasizes Bartel.

He says he often stands next to the shooter, facing their elbow and their hands, so he can see what is going on at the gun and the trigger. Instructors cannot get a clear look at those details from behind the shooter, stresses Bartel.

Are they getting a pre-ignition push? Are they closing their eyes in anticipation gun firing? You can't see that from sitting over the shoulder, he explains.

“I need to see what's going on with that student and I have to be in a position to do it,” Bartel says.

Cognitive-Led Approach

Bartel is a fan of a constraint-led approach that comes from the athletics training world. That can create a more realistic training event than punching paper on a normal, static range. Shooting well enough to pass qualification has little correlation to success in a gunfight, according to Bartel.

“A constraint-led approach means you set the environment as much as you can to replicate the task, or the environment when a task is going to be called on,” Bartel says. “So, setting up a range where it's looking like a residential neighborhood, setting up a range where I've got cars, setting up a range that's realistic even in its appearance, helps to prime the cognitive mind into a better performance window.”

That cognitive-led approach is critical, he stresses.

Dry-Fire Training

To become a better shooter an individual must expend effort on training. That training, however, does not always involve live fire nor range time and the expense of ammo.

“What is it that you are going to do on your own to ensure that that skill is still there and appropriate for when you need it?” Bartel asks. “If your answer doesn't include some form of dry firing, then you're probably making a mistake.”

Over and over again, Bartel has witnessed shooters improve greatly over the course of a week simply by committing five minutes a day to dry-fire practice. Trigger activation should become an automatic effort, not a conscious effort. Because in the middle of a gunfight, Bartel points out, the conscious mind has much more to focus on other than trigger manipulation.

When off duty, officers can simply train in their homes. To add realism, an officer can work his way through the home, navigate past a kitchen table, or around the corner of the bed, to bring realism into the dry fire training. Dummy mags can even be incorporated to drill on reloads.

It is all about adding realism to the training, again a constraint-led approach even in dry fire practice.

“I'm not at a range, I'm in a real-life environment where I might actually be in a shooting and there's TVs, and obstacles, and counters, and all kinds of stuff that I have to deal with and think about working around. this is a realistic environment for a shooting,” says Bartel.

Retraining the Experienced Shooter

Rozier says on the range, when working with veteran officers he functions more as a peer and less as an instructor telling them what they should do. He says it is very hard to get a veteran officer to try something new when they are accustomed to something that gets them by. Even if that is not the best way of doing it, they may have made it work so far.

He will suggest something along the lines of “Try this.”

“There’s zero bravado out there on the range. I’m not arrogant, I’m not cocky,” Rozier explains. “I am there to help them because I want them to be better. I want them to survive.”

Bartel likewise knows the challenge of teaching veteran officers and how they may be set in their ways.

“The first question that I ask is, ‘Are you okay with the current level of performance?’ Because if they're okay with their current level of performance, they're not going to give you any energy or any effort. There's no motivation for them,” says Bartel.

Sometimes, it might be coaching an experienced shooter on simple mechanics.

But instructing an experienced shooter to make a major shift such as changing grip comes with challenges, and Bartel is honest up front. He tells them at first their performance may decline. But as he says, “Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward.”

“But you're not going to talk to him from an authoritative perspective. You’re going to talk to him as somebody that really cares, because that's what matters. I care about your performance. I want you to get better,” he adds.

What Rozier often encounters with veteran officers is not necessarily centered on grip, sight alignment, or even how they break the shot. It is more of a big picture issue with the habits of the officer.

“What I see typically from older shooters that have been on the road a while is they're not efficient in their movements. they do goofy stuff when they draw the gun, their gear might not be set up the right way to be efficient to conduct a reload or conduct a proper draw out their holster. It is little things like that,” Rozier explains.

What Keeps Cops from Being Better Shooters?

“Ego. Number one,” says Bartel.

“Two, lack of making that skill a priority,” he adds.

Not making handgun skills a priority, Bartel says, is caused by two reasons – laziness, and they think the onus is on someone else, like their agency.

That latter mindset is one of “If the agency wanted me to get better, then they’d give me more training time,” explains Bartel.

A cop saying a department doesn’t give him enough training time is just fuel for the veteran instructor.

“I've never, ever seen a headline that said that an agency was killed in the line of duty. So, I don't know about that. I think ultimately, it still falls on you,” Bartel will tell shooters when he hears them putting ownership of training on the department.

The third reason, Bartel says is probably lack of knowledge. They don’t know what they don’t know.

“If they make the decision to go out and get that information, it can have an impact,” Bartel adds.