What is Defensive Marksmanship?
Recently, I have been getting some emails asking about our Defensive Rifle and Defensive Pistol courses, and the biggest question I get is what are they? A lot of people see defensive marksmanship classes posted online and a lot of times they sound fun, sexy, and exciting. At the end of the day it’s a class designed to help you defend yourself or others in a defensive scenario, but how do we get there? Our defensive marksmanship classes are based in the principles and fundamentals of Combat Marksmanship that I taught to Army Infantry soldiers during basic training as a civilian contractor at Ft. Moore/Ft. Benning (it’ll always be Ft. Benning, Home of the Infantry, in my heart). Here I’ll talk a little bit about what Combat Marksmanship is to better explain how we go about training Defensive Marksmanship. First, we’ll need to differentiate between “Marksmanship” and “Combat Marksmanship.”
Marksmanship is your ability to shoot consistent shot groups. Think of when you go to the range and you’re trying to shoot the center x or 10 ring on the target and get the “high score.” If you’ve ever been to the range to zero a new scope on your hunting rifle or your sporting rifle, that’s marksmanship. You want to get your shots as close together, as close to the center of the target as possible. Most of the time there isn’t any major external stress and you have as much time as you want to take your shots and under controlled conditions. This type of shooting builds the necessary fundamentals that lay the groundwork for all other marksmanship, and it’s where I would recommend everyone starts learning about their weapons.
Then Combat Marksmanship bust through the door yelling “LEEEEROOOY Jenkins” and starts acclimating you to stress. If you’re in a situation where someone is trying to harm you or your loved ones, you’re going to be stressed. The Army explains Combat Marksmanship as your ability to place accurate and lethal shots on a threat under adverse conditions with mental and physical stress. We use all kinds of methods to create those adverse conditions, but the principles of Combat Marksmanship and Defensive Marksmanship are the same. What are the principles of Combat Marksmanship?
There are seven principles of Combat Marksmanship. The best way to look at the principles are split between cognitive and physical:
Cognitive Physical
Concentration Consistency
Desire Discipline
Offensive Attitude Aggressive
Training/Practice
Concentration is a mental focus and consistency is physically doing something. Take going to the gym, concentrating on your form while doing squats is a mental aspect of a physical act, and working on squats for three sets every Friday for leg day is consistency. Similarly, you might desire to understand quantum mechanics, but discipline is getting out the physics book, studying, and taking notes on quantum mechanics. Your offensive attitude doesn’t mean that you walk around being a jerk; we’re talking about the mental will to do what it takes to protect yourself and others. Aggressiveness, in this context, is physically applying that will in a decisive manner. A lot of people get confused on how you can have an “Offensive Attitude” in a “Defensive” situation. The best way I can think to explain this is that if someone broke into your living room to steal your TV. You might not want to shoot them over a TV, but if you have your family locked in your bedroom while you call the police, you should have the mental will to eliminate that threat if they try to break down the door to your bedroom. You need to be ready and willing to take that fight to the threat if the need arises. Training and Practice I view as both being the physical aspect of working on all of the previous principles.
If you’re in a defensive shooting situation you’ll need to learn to overcome that stress, so let’s look at how we get there. The only way to learn to overcome that stress is through practice. If you’re going to practice then you need a plan, and you should have a plan that builds on itself to progressively reinforce these skills. If you look at the drills in Defensive Rifle Basic, it may not seem like there’s a rhyme or reason, but each of those drills builds upon the one before leading up to the Dot Torture Drill*. We intentionally modified the last two dots to an immediate action drill* for Defensive Rifle Basic to help reinforce a drill we worked on earlier. The Discretionary Target drill* and Half/Half drill* come after Dot Torture intentionally. As the Defensive Marksmanship series continue we add more timers and movement to help inoculate you to stress.
Hopefully this helps clear the air about what our Defensive Marksmanship Classes are about. Decide what level of training suits you best then get out and train.
*For a better understanding of these drills check out the “Drills” page under Defensive Rifle Basic
