To laser or not?

[Skiprr]

Israeli point shooting is the best way to train for defense. Everything else is just a range toy.

Really?

Are you serious, or just joking with us?

[Beiruty]

You ahve to ask yourself a question first:

If you plan to use the laser solely to replace your iron sights, because you think it's better, I'd advise against a laser. However, If you would like to be able to accurately aim your pistol, when it is impossible due to position, restrictions, situation, etc. to extend your arms to get a proper sight iron sight picture, then by all means get a laser and practice with it enough to be comfortable with it. When practicing with the laser, if you are distracted by the dancing dot, you're probably waiting too long to fire. Point the weapon at COM and when the dot is in that area, fire. It's not like target shooting at the range, it may mean life or death. My opinions only .

[Beiruty]

Israeli point shooting is the best way to train for defense. Everything else is just a range toy.

Really?

Are you serious, or just joking with us?

Maybe, it's technique to kill as much PAians as you can!

Do NOT try it in mall. Or, Mall's Ninja fail 101.

[57Coastie]

I find a laser to be an excellent training aid, even when dry-firing, for even an experienced handgun shooter. Time and again I have seen an experienced shooter amazed at how a laser permits him to see precisely where the point of aim was when the weapon was fired and what happens to it after firing, invariably improving his trigger control, and demonstrating to him the value of keeping his eye (or eyes) open, thus minimizing, if not eliminating, a human being's natural instinct of anticipation, instantly followed by flinching.

The latter element takes a long time, possibly as long as years, for many, if not most, shooters, and for many anticipation simply cannot be completely overcome. It can, however, become better appreciated for its impact on one's shooting.

Yours truly, for example, more than 50 years ago, was convinced that in his case this quite natural instinct could never be overcome. My AMU trainers and mentors were very much of the "old school," and went so far as to tape my dominant eye open with duct tape in order for me to experience the value of seeing my sight alignment and point of aim at the moment the weapon is fired, and that my body has nothing to fear so long as nobody is shooting back. A laser is a much less brutal training aid. I will go so far as to say that it is my experience that this skill is often the very last learned of the many required of a fine marksman. So many times I have had a shooter tell me that he just cannot keep his eye or eyes open -- that it is physically impossible. I suspect that the truth is the that he is really not prepared to try, so prepared that he will even try the old duct tape regimen. I try my best to teach him that this is not a physical problem, it is a mental problem, or one in his genes, if you will, and that it can often be overcome if one takes the time, trouble, discomfort, and, yes, expense, required to teach his body to overcome this strength which is in this case a weakness.

It is of course obvious that I am talking about shooting at paper targets, indeed with only one hand, but the skills of marksmanship are, in my opinion, directly translatable to the skills required of self-defense shooting, while at the same time not only do other skills come into play for the latter, but some of the practices required of the former must oflten be discarded. As but only one example, I believe, for instance, that point and shoot can be, under the circumstances at hand at a particular moment, the only way to go, and that worrying about sight alignment might get you killed.

Jim

PS That said, I do not have a laser on my primary carry weapon. As a matter of personal preference I normally carry an SP-101 .357 mag with a tritium Big Dot added. I do have a laser on a handgun I use primarily for training.

[doc540]

I know many guys who have been in gunfights. None of them even remember seeing their gun sights. I can't imagine trying to look for a small dot. It's one thing to point it at paper, and altogether another to point it at someone actively trying to kill you.

Dave Grossman has some interesting input on that phenomenon.

Although under high stress many warriors don't remember seeing or hearing something, that doesn't necessarily mean they didn't actually see or hear it.

And properly trained, one doesn't look for a small dot, the small dot naturally follows one's eyes to the center of the target.

And, finally, a visible laser dot can be a deterrent to all but the most out-of-control perps. (Not a primary support for laser use, but every little bit may help.)

I know personally of two, local LEO incidents where an armed and agitate perp saw Jesus in the form of a laser on his chest and became very passive.

[alvins]

i find people using lasers at the indoor gun ranges highly annoying and distracting.

[Chris]

I know many guys who have been in gunfights. None of them even remember seeing their gun sights. I can't imagine trying to look for a small dot. It's one thing to point it at paper, and altogether another to point it at someone actively trying to kill you.

Dave Grossman has some interesting input on that phenomenon.

Although under high stress many warriors don't remember seeing or hearing something, that doesn't necessarily mean they didn't actually see or hear it.

And properly trained, one doesn't look for a small dot, the small dot naturally follows one's eyes to the center of the target.

And, finally, a visible laser dot can be a deterrent to all but the most out-of-control perps. (Not a primary support for laser use, but every little bit may help.)

I know personally of two, local LEO incidents where an armed and agitate perp saw Jesus in the form of a laser on his chest and became very passive.

Realistically, do you think it was the laser, or the loaded barrel pointed at them? Unless they were scared of losing an eye, I don't see the intimidation of a laser. Maybe in movies lasers are all well and good, but not in real life, not so much. A lot of times I had my gun aimed at someone, there were blinky lights and spotlights all over the place, and looking for a little dot amongst that would have been impossible. Also, many times when I had my weapon pointed at someone, so did others. Now you run into the issue of which dot belongs to who. Go through and look at any shooting on the web, and tell me if you honestly believe a laser would have made the outcome substantially better for the person using it. I'm not arguing against a laser if it makes someone a better shot. My argument is you shouldn't allow yourself to be consumed with a laser sight in order to fire. In a shooting, sure we'd all like to think we could hit the target, but when someone is shooting back, it's not that easy. One guy I know is a great shot. He expended 22 rounds and didn't hit the guy he was "aiming" at. He was dumbfounded by this fact in the aftermath, but he was more concerned with getting out of the way of the other guy's bullets.

I learned long ago that just because police departments do it doesn't mean it should be considered a good idea. Some of the absolute dumbest training and equipment I've been provided was courtesy of local police departments. Some of the dumbest comments involving firearms I've ever heard were made by police officers. The overwhelming majority of police officers I've known and worked with were not 'gun people'. For most of them, the only handgun they owned was department issued.

Everyone can have their opinion on what's good and what's not, but my opinion is for me personally. It's up to each person to find out what works best for them and put that into practice.

[doc540]

All I can report is what was told to me by two LEO personal friends.

In both cases, an armed perp refused to put down his handgun when multiple LEO's responded to domestic calls, one in a Waffle House at 1am, another at an apartment complex.

Multiple guns were drawn and aimed at the perp.

Only when one of the LEO's trained a laser on the chest of the perp did they see Jesus, lay down their guns, and drop to their knees.

Like I said above, those may be isolated cases, but every advantage is what I'd prefer to have.

I'm 60+ years old, wear trifocals, and after carrying and practicing with sights and lasers for many years, no one here is going to convince me they don't add value and benefits to my PD guns.

Not for you and yours? Noooo problem.

Not for me and mine? Save your breath.

re: dead batteries
Only a fool would carry without fresh batteries. That's no different than forgetting to load the gun.

[SigOperator02]

I think that it is funny that the people are telling this man that he should not listen to his buddy that has probably more experience of anyone on here. To use the excuse that his experiences are not valid because they train for “different problems and scenarios” than a person here in Texas is retarded and what color is the sky in your world? No matter if you’re a CAG, SF, SEALs, MARSOC, TXDPS or Joe Blow down the street; we all have the same goal of surviving the gunfight! I have to believe that the SEAL has a bit to say about target acquisition more than some random civilian firearms trainer that has probably never fired under pressure or even a LEO that has fired his gun a couple of times. Yeah, I want to take advice from someone whose department has them qualify ONCE a year on average. Also, I remember watching the Kehoe Brothers film where LEO’s emptied their clips and did not even hit the suspects AT POINT BLANK RANGE! Yeah, the guy has logged over 10,000 rounds a year into targets and bad guys is not the guy I should be listening to! I think that it is time for some of y’all to check the inexperience at the door and listen to professionals like his SEAL friend. These guys and their counterparts have mastered the fundamentals of marksmanship and taken it to another level. They have mastered the basics because they understand that hardware can go out regardless if you put new batteries in and that it is back to the basics. That is why the military still has them learn to use iron sights before CCO’s and ACOG’s. For the price of an aiming laser, you could buy more training ammo and work learning how to aim the old fashion way and repeat it till it becomes muscle memory. In the end, when the moment of truth has arrived in the form a bad guy coming to your house in the middle of the night with a firearm drawn and your adrenaline is coursing through your veins and you can hear your heart pounding. It is not going to matter what aid you have, it is going to come down to muscle memory and do you have fundaments of a steady position, a good sight picture, breathing control and trigger squeeze down. Experience has taught me that if you have those mastered, then you’re going to have a better chance of surviving. On a side note, we have a nickname for the guys that always have the newest gadgets for their firearms. We call them “Gear Heads” because then they think that fancy equipment is going to make them a better shooter, when actually it gives them a false sense of security and handicaps their ability. Then they don’t qualify expert with their firearms and we send down to the line units. To be completely honest in my own opinion, it is just being lazy and that is going to get you killed! I ran that comment by some cousins of mine that are LEO's in Texas and they said I hit the nail on the head.

[SigOperator02]

Here is the video of Kehoe Brothers and LEO's at work. I got kind of a kick out of it, I hope you do too!!

http://www.footypd.com/view_video.php?v ... ategory=mr" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[74novaman]

Since I was that "retarded" person who said to take advice on Concealed Carry from a SEAL with a grain of salt, allow me to respond. By the way, I'd advise you to check the site rules. Calling members names is a pretty quick way to find yourself no longer welcome. We're free to disagree, but name calling is generally frowned upon (and fairly juvenile behavior to boot).

In addition, breaking a long post into paragraphs makes your posts easier to read and makes it easier on the rest of the forum, IMO.

what color is the sky in your world?

Since I'm actually pretty close to you (Bell County instead of Coryell) it's the same color your sky is on most days.

No matter if you’re a CAG, SF, SEALs, MARSOC, TXDPS or Joe Blow down the street; we all have the same goal of surviving the gunfight!

Absolutely, the goal is the same. But the options you have and the decisions you need to make to reach that goal are going to be vastly different depending on whether you're in a firefight with a fire team supporting you, a cop at a traffic stop gone wrong, or 'joe blow' who's out on the town with his wife.

I have to believe that the SEAL has a bit to say about target acquisition more than some random civilian firearms trainer that has probably never fired under pressure or even a LEO that has fired his gun a couple of times. Yeah, the guy has logged over 10,000 rounds a year into targets and bad guys is not the guy I should be listening to! I think that it is time for some of y’all to check the inexperience at the door and listen to professionals like his SEAL friend.

Reading is fundamental. In no way did I try to say that a SEAL doesn't know how to shoot.

There are a couple of distinctions that need to be made here:

Just because a guy is a great shot and has had lots of shooting experience doesn't mean that he is any good at passing that information on to others in a manner beneficial to their own development as a shooter. In sports, great players do not always become great coaches. The same is true for shooting.

Additionally, unless someone is going to TRAIN like a SEAL and "shoot 10,000 rounds a year" as you put it, he or she may never reach proficiency with something even a good SEAL teacher tries to pass on to them.

Heck, a lot of people have trouble with simple tasks like consistently hitting a stationary target at 20 feet (while also stationary), clearing stoppages, and drawing from concealment. Until they're able to get basics down, having a SEAL show them how the teams do things isn't really very helpful, and could be downright dangerous.

In summary: Everything a SEAL, a cop, a civilian firearms instructor, or you buddy Earl down the street tells you about how you should carry, shoot or train should be taken with a grain of salt and evaluated against your own knowledge base, skills and personal experiences.

Is that really such a terrible thing to say?

[Waco1959]

Well, I'm another retard that thinks lasers area good thing and SEAL training is only marginally related to my likely use of a gun.

I have lasers on both nightstand guns (mine and wife's), and both of my EDC guns. One of the main reasons is if an issue happens at night I may not have time to get my glasses in which case I wouldn't be able to SEE the front sight but I can see the laser spot. My wife is even worse but CAN see the laser spot. If we happen to go out for the evening or I'm driving I'll usually wear my distance glasses rather than progressives so once again I can't focus on the front site reliably but can see the laser spot, even on a sunny day, at any range I am going to pull the trigger. As for practice, I do practice with both iron sights and the laser but more with the laser since I EXPECT to use it. For ME, a laser makes sense and works.

As for SEALS, maybe they DO fire 10,000/yr. and are superbly trained for what they do. But I'm not going to be sneaking in to hostile territory and going toward the enemy. I'm not going to be shooting sentries at 50 meters (where they use a rifle), kicking in a door to clear a room (grenade or SMG), or taking out bodyguards at close range (maybe with a pistol). If I am involved in an incident I'm going to be going back, not forward, and using the force necessary to protect my life and those around me.

[doc540]

I'm with WACO

[SigOperator02]

Well allow me to retort. If reading is fundamental then you should have read it again because I never said you’re retarded, I said that the advice given to the man was retarded and nowhere did I call you or another member that posted by name in my post. Meaning as in you have chosen to take offense! Just because I chose random lines from advice given that I didn’t like was me being “free to disagree” with what was being said. So who is really being childish by threating to have someone booted from a forum for taking something personal that was not meant to be? If you want, I will be your Huckleberry!

Yes, Joint Special Operations Command units such as CAG, Green Berets, SEALs and MARSOC train for different situations and scenarios that are heavily combat-related in nature but that does not mean that those skills these Operators have learned are not useful in civilian settings. You assume that he is going to show him offensive tactics that could get him into trouble with law but I was referring to the defensive tactics that are learned to survive an armed confrontation with one or multiple assailants. They still have to follow the ROE (Rules of Engagement) as CHL carries must follow the law when deciding to draw or walk away but sometimes it is out of your hands and you forced to react with sometimes deadly force and that is where those lessons learned from the combat hardened friend or trainers come in handy.

You never know the situations or scenarios that you are going to find yourself in Afghanistan to even Texas, which is why seeking advice from someone who has would be beneficial for any CHL carrier. Assuming that you’re never going to find yourself in a very dangerous situation is begging for Mr. Murphy to come in and kick your door in. What is the first thing people say when describing a traumatic event that happen to them, “I never thought it would happen to me!” That is why civilians pay former Special Operations Operators big money to attend their classes and get some insight on how to survive a firefight, when every intervention was used to prevent unnecessary bloodshed beforehand, not to initiate the fight. Obviously these Operators know how to teach their craft because no one is going to pay for horrible instructors and these men take their craft seriously because they’re professionals. These men have spent time teaching other units in our armed forces, other countries forces and indigenous people, who have never even touched a firearm before then in their marksmanship style which has been proven. The reason why these schools are so successful is because they know how to package the lesson for civilian shooters to benefit them. As for training like a SEAL is concerned, it is not going to make you a high speed operator but get you to work on the fundamentals that most civilians neglect once they adapt to using lasers and actually make you a better shot. All these guys do is train to make sure their rounds hit where they want to every time, wither its double tap to center mass or triple tap to the center mass and head. As for sneaking around, you must not know a lot about them because they can be very overt and there is nothing that is going to stop them. So tell me again, how is taking some advice from someone with actual experience versus opinion and no experience is going to lead them down the wrong path?

On A Side Note: I think it is quite humorous that these schools require civilian students to take a marksmanship class before they are allowed to access any of the advanced firearms classes. I asked the lead instructor why that was and he said and I quote “Because for civilian students they lack the basic marksmanship skills need to complete the courses and are heavily dependent on aiming lasers which can go out and then their sorry out luck and can’t aim with irons. They lack knowledge of how to properly and safely deal with weapons malfunctions on a range, in the field or while dealing with an incident. They have learned bad habits from shooting with inexperienced shooters or trainers and they just don’t practice the correct way enough. They got money to buy a Corvette but no money to spend on training ammo and range time with the exception of coming here. So you can see where their priorities are at.”

Waco1959: So what you are telling me is that you or your wife are going make blind shots in the night because get to your glasses quick enough but you can see the red dot laser and that is the only information you need to make a decision to fire? Okay, so you can barely see what looks like to be an intruder and you point and you see the red dot and fire but what about what is behind the intruder? What if it is your wife who is coming to bed and you mistake her for an intruder? To me that’s the path the 74novaman was talking about that will lead you to no good.

On A Side Note: I wonder how many irritated husbands wish they could make that last one happen and not go to jail lol!

I will give you an example: When I was about eight years old, someone broke into our house in the middle of the night. They had gotten to the upstairs hallway before the intruder knocked over a little table in the hallway that mother kept fresh flowers on. I got up thinking it was my mother, who was seven months pregnant with my sister at the time, had tripped over in the night to get some water because her night vision sucks. I walked into the hallway as I saw the moonlight silhouette of two men, one being the intruder and the other being my father, who was rising up his 1911 to fire but quickly decided not to and then tossed the gun on the bed and preceded take the man down to the ground. My Father was able to subdue the intruder till the police came. I remember incident pretty well. I told that event from my life to tell this, when I asked my father years later why did he not shot the man, he said because he could make out a smaller silhouette behind him and he knew it was me and could not bear the thought of accidently hitting me. He could also make out that the man had no weapon or he would have already had it out after knocking over the table with the vase of flowers. He said “You don’t shoot an unarmed man, you beat the daylights out of him!” Later on, when he began to train me on how to use a handgun, he told me to never to take a shot if you can tell what’s behind the target. I was told the same thing by my Green Beret 1Sgt and Ranger tabbed and Scrolled Sniper Drill Sgt at Infantry School. You might not have anyone living with you at your house besides you and your wife but I would highly recommend not take blind shot in the middle of the night because you can make out a red dot. I would look into seeing if your optometrist can get you into some contacts that you can wear when you sleep in or you can look into eye surgery.

I’m trying to get the shooters that use aiming laser to supplement their nonexistent aiming skills before their reliance on hardware fails on them and they accidently hurt someone because they made poor aiming choices.

[carlson1]