Because I’ve heard it said that ‘Holstering’ a pistol is an ‘Administrative’ move, I would argue that there is true merit in holstering a pistol the same way we draw a pistol on two different fronts.

One is that in the tactical world, we must sometimes have to deescalate and go ‘Hands On’. We must do this without taking our eyes off of the threat.

Two, when practicing a draw stroke, the best draw stroke is nothing more than holstering in reverse. This was said to me by Rob Leatham some decades ago. So, when practicing a draw stroke, why not double the amount of meaningful repetitions by holstering the same way we drew?

…Only one is in reverse.

Patrick McNamara
SGM, US Army (Ret)

Patrick McNamara spent twenty-two years in the United States Army in a myriad of special operations units. When he worked in the premier Special Missions Unit, he became an impeccable marksman, shooting with accurate, lethal results and tactical effectiveness. McNamara has trained tactical applications of shooting to people of all levels of marksmanship, from varsity level soldiers, and police officers who work the streets to civilians with little to no time behind the trigger.

His military experience quickly taught him that there is more to tactical marksmanship than merely squeezing the trigger. Utilizing his years of experience, McNamara developed a training methodology that is safe, effective and combat relevant and encourages a continuous thought process. This methodology teaches how to maintain safety at all times and choose targets that force accountability, as well as provides courses covering several categories, including individual, collective, on line and standards.

While serving as his Unit’s Marksmanship NCO, he developed his own marksmanship club with NRA, CMP, and USPSA affiliations. Mac ran monthly IPSC matches and ran semi annual military marksmanship championships to encourage marksmanship fundamentals and competitiveness throughout the Army.He retired from the Army’s premier hostage rescue unit as a Sergeant Major and is the author of T.A.P.S. (Tactical Application of Practical Shooting). He also served as the Principle of TMACS Inc.

Gunfighter Moment is a weekly feature brought to you by Alias Training & Security Services. Each week Alias brings us a different Trainer and in turn they offer some words of wisdom.

Flat range mindset is a sticking point with me during training. Too often, when I set up drills that require kinetics, guys are hesitant to move in varying directions, with a gun in their hands. The administrative need to orient it downrange overrides the necessity to move naturally with a weapon system in hand.

I often ask those, with whom I am training, “How do we run with a pistol or a rifle?” To which I will answer, “The same way we move without a pistol or a rifle.”

If we are switched on, this can easily be accomplished while staying within the parameters of safe gun handling, while mitigating the IPSC style of nutty antics of running in one direction, while orienting our weapon system in another…..downrange.

A compressed ready, for instance, with a pistol, or a football carry with a rifle, will allow us to move naturally and provide us with the mobility necessary to get where we are going. The objective, when moving, is to get to where we are going. Mobility equals survivability. Train like you fight.

Patrick McNamara
SGM, US Army (Ret)

Patrick McNamara spent twenty-two years in the United States Army in a myriad of special operations units. When he worked in the premier Special Missions Unit, he became an impeccable marksman, shooting with accurate, lethal results and tactical effectiveness. McNamara has trained tactical applications of shooting to people of all levels of marksmanship, from varsity level soldiers, and police officers who work the streets to civilians with little to no time behind the trigger.

His military experience quickly taught him that there is more to tactical marksmanship than merely squeezing the trigger. Utilizing his years of experience, McNamara developed a training methodology that is safe, effective and combat relevant and encourages a continuous thought process. This methodology teaches how to maintain safety at all times and choose targets that force accountability, as well as provides courses covering several categories, including individual, collective, on line and standards.

While serving as his Unit’s Marksmanship NCO, he developed his own marksmanship club with NRA, CMP, and USPSA affiliations. Mac ran monthly IPSC matches and ran semi annual military marksmanship championships to encourage marksmanship fundamentals and competitiveness throughout the Army.He retired from the Army’s premier hostage rescue unit as a Sergeant Major and is the author of T.A.P.S. (Tactical Application of Practical Shooting). He also served as the Principle of TMACS Inc.

Gunfighter Moment is a weekly feature brought to you by Alias Training & Security Services. Each week Alias brings us a different Trainer and in turn they offer some words of wisdom.

Two things not practiced enough, or at all, on the range are proprioception and kinesthetic sense. Proprioception is the sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement and kinesthetic sense helps us detect weight, body position, or the relationship between movements in our body parts such as joints, muscles and tendons. In short, it is the muscle sense.

We stand too flat footed, on a flat range range, and work with a flat range mindset.

Even incorporating small movements laterally and to the oblique front and rear, will assist us in becoming more situationally aware of our body in the space that it occupies.

My Delta 7 drill is a simple fix to an otherwise mundane flat range world. Set three cones roughly a meter apart. Target is at 10 meters.

Start at cone #1, draw and engage one time to the A zone or to the steel. Move clockwise to cone #2 and #3 taking a shot from each. Once back at cone # 1, move counter clockwise to cone #3, #2 and finish back at cone #1. One step in that direction is good enough. Because visual acuity is important here too, take a snapshot look in the direction of movement including over your shoulder as you move backwards at an oblique angle before you move in that direction.

Patrick McNamara
SGM, US Army (Ret)

Patrick McNamara spent twenty-two years in the United States Army in a myriad of special operations units. When he worked in the premier Special Missions Unit, he became an impeccable marksman, shooting with accurate, lethal results and tactical effectiveness. McNamara has trained tactical applications of shooting to people of all levels of marksmanship, from varsity level soldiers, and police officers who work the streets to civilians with little to no time behind the trigger.

His military experience quickly taught him that there is more to tactical marksmanship than merely squeezing the trigger. Utilizing his years of experience, McNamara developed a training methodology that is safe, effective and combat relevant and encourages a continuous thought process. This methodology teaches how to maintain safety at all times and choose targets that force accountability, as well as provides courses covering several categories, including individual, collective, on line and standards.

While serving as his Unit’s Marksmanship NCO, he developed his own marksmanship club with NRA, CMP, and USPSA affiliations. Mac ran monthly IPSC matches and ran semi annual military marksmanship championships to encourage marksmanship fundamentals and competitiveness throughout the Army.He retired from the Army’s premier hostage rescue unit as a Sergeant Major and is the author of T.A.P.S. (Tactical Application of Practical Shooting). He also served as the Principle of TMACS Inc.

Gunfighter Moment is a weekly feature brought to you by Alias Training & Security Services. Each week Alias brings us a different Trainer and in turn they offer some words of wisdom.

Too often we will rely on a mechanical solution for a physical flaw. Though sometimes necessary, like corrective lenses for aging eyes, often it is not. Most common, making a pistol site adjustment to bring the shots back into the center of the target. Most of the time the shots are not in the center due to bad grip, improper site alignment or a flawed trigger press.

Before making that site adjustment, have someone else fire it. Someone who can shoot! Accurately! I do this in every class, several times with several student’s pistols. Sometimes I do it because I do not believe that the shooter is influencing the poor group, and that he does indeed need to make a site adjustment. Most of the time however, I do it to show the student that it’s not the gun. “This is probably the most accurate gun I’ve ever shot in my life.”

Too many have heard me say this in my courses.

Patrick McNamara
SGM, US Army (Ret)

Patrick McNamara spent twenty-two years in the United States Army in a myriad of special operations units. When he worked in the premier Special Missions Unit, he became an impeccable marksman, shooting with accurate, lethal results and tactical effectiveness. McNamara has trained tactical applications of shooting to people of all levels of marksmanship, from varsity level soldiers, and police officers who work the streets to civilians with little to no time behind the trigger.

His military experience quickly taught him that there is more to tactical marksmanship than merely squeezing the trigger. Utilizing his years of experience, McNamara developed a training methodology that is safe, effective and combat relevant and encourages a continuous thought process. This methodology teaches how to maintain safety at all times and choose targets that force accountability, as well as provides courses covering several categories, including individual, collective, on line and standards.

While serving as his Unit’s Marksmanship NCO, he developed his own marksmanship club with NRA, CMP, and USPSA affiliations. Mac ran monthly IPSC matches and ran semi annual military marksmanship championships to encourage marksmanship fundamentals and competitiveness throughout the Army.He retired from the Army’s premier hostage rescue unit as a Sergeant Major and is the author of T.A.P.S. (Tactical Application of Practical Shooting). He also served as the Principle of TMACS Inc.

Gunfighter Moment is a weekly feature brought to you by Alias Training & Security Services. Each week Alias brings us a different Trainer and in turn they offer some words of wisdom.

Lots of hot topic debate issues out there in the gun world. Many revisited and many will be for years to come.

Ones of my faves is whether a rifle zeroed to me is zeroed to you. Some of the gray area in this debate lies in lack of understanding. Understanding on what zeroed is and how it’s done.

If I am shooting BRM next to a shooter who is consistently knocking out the X ring at say 100 yards – consistently doing so – it would stand to reason that not only is his rifle zeroed to that distance but he probably knows what he is doing and he is doing it consistently. His trigger control is excellent, his cheek to stock weld is true to ensure he is looking directly through the center of his aperture to mitigate any parallax. He finalizes trigger squeeze on his respiratory pause.

Now, if I am replicating what he is doing with my own rifle, the same should stand true for me. We are both zeroed, we can both shoot.

I’ve been through this dozens and dozens of times; I can switch up with him and yield the same results. There are caveats to this however. For instance, if this shooter next to me is shooting irons only, I would need to know what his hold is.

So, my answer is “Yes. A zeroed rifle is a zeroed rifle.”

I’ve got lots of empirical data to back up my finding. If you do not, don’t chime in with mindless thoughts. The rest of us however, dive in.

Patrick McNamara
SGM, US Army (Ret)

Patrick McNamara spent twenty-two years in the United States Army in a myriad of special operations units. When he worked in the premier Special Missions Unit, he became an impeccable marksman, shooting with accurate, lethal results and tactical effectiveness. McNamara has trained tactical applications of shooting to people of all levels of marksmanship, from varsity level soldiers, and police officers who work the streets to civilians with little to no time behind the trigger.

His military experience quickly taught him that there is more to tactical marksmanship than merely squeezing the trigger. Utilizing his years of experience, McNamara developed a training methodology that is safe, effective and combat relevant and encourages a continuous thought process. This methodology teaches how to maintain safety at all times and choose targets that force accountability, as well as provides courses covering several categories, including individual, collective, on line and standards.

While serving as his Unit’s Marksmanship NCO, he developed his own marksmanship club with NRA, CMP, and USPSA affiliations. Mac ran monthly IPSC matches and ran semi annual military marksmanship championships to encourage marksmanship fundamentals and competitiveness throughout the Army.He retired from the Army’s premier hostage rescue unit as a Sergeant Major and is the author of T.A.P.S. (Tactical Application of Practical Shooting). He also served as the Principle of TMACS Inc.

Gunfighter Moment is a weekly feature brought to you by Alias Training & Security Services. Each week Alias brings us a different Trainer and in turn they offer some words of wisdom.

We cannot outperform our self-image. Many of us have a predetermined notion of where our peaks and valleys lie. Every once in a while we will outperform our current belief or nose dive and completely shit the bed. Enter the world of cognitive dissonance.

Using my ‘Five Second Standard ‘drill as an example, we should perform fairly consistent with incremental improvements over time. Use IPSC targets and yard markers starting at 7 yards, 10 yards, 15, 20, etc. I call these yard lines ‘levels’.

Set a timer to a five second par time. Start at the 7 yard line (level 1), weapon at a ready position. On the timer’s ‘Beep’, engage your target twice within those five seconds. Next, draw and engage your target twice in five seconds. Next, draw and engage your target twice strong hand only. If all six shots are in the ‘A’ zone, you have graduated level one.

Next move to the 10 yard line (level two) and repeat the same. If all shots are in the ‘A’ zone, you have graduated level two. Keep moving up levels until you shoot outside of the ‘A’ zone.

Sometime, even good shooters will drop out of level one or two. Take your medicine and fail quickly.in other words, get over it. It is a biological requirement for us humans to fail. These failures however, should not be a recurring theme. Learn from the past, prepare for the future and perform in the present.

Patrick McNamara
SGM, US Army (Ret)

Patrick McNamara spent twenty-two years in the United States Army in a myriad of special operations units. When he worked in the premier Special Missions Unit, he became an impeccable marksman, shooting with accurate, lethal results and tactical effectiveness. McNamara has trained tactical applications of shooting to people of all levels of marksmanship, from varsity level soldiers, and police officers who work the streets to civilians with little to no time behind the trigger.

His military experience quickly taught him that there is more to tactical marksmanship than merely squeezing the trigger. Utilizing his years of experience, McNamara developed a training methodology that is safe, effective and combat relevant and encourages a continuous thought process. This methodology teaches how to maintain safety at all times and choose targets that force accountability, as well as provides courses covering several categories, including individual, collective, on line and standards.

While serving as his Unit’s Marksmanship NCO, he developed his own marksmanship club with NRA, CMP, and USPSA affiliations. Mac ran monthly IPSC matches and ran semi annual military marksmanship championships to encourage marksmanship fundamentals and competitiveness throughout the Army.He retired from the Army’s premier hostage rescue unit as a Sergeant Major and is the author of T.A.P.S. (Tactical Application of Practical Shooting). He also served as the Principle of TMACS Inc.

Gunfighter Moment is a weekly feature brought to you by Alias Training & Security Services. Each week Alias brings us a different Trainer and in turn they offer some words of wisdom.

“It should surprise you when it goes off.”

That’s always seems like bad advice to me. I’ve been surprised when the hammer falls, and it’s usually called a ‘Miss.’

When we train, we should train to the point of knowing exactly when the hammer is going to fall. No surprises. In order to reach this point, proper repetition is paramount. To achieve proper repetition dry fire is necessary. Not the kind of dry fire where you are simply going through the motions, but deep practice and meaningful repetition.

We should work to the point of automaticity.

Automaticity is the ability to do things without occupying the mind with the low-level details required, allowing it to become an automatic response pattern or habit. It is usually the result of learning, repetition, and practice.

Of the fundamentals, one that is sometimes neglected in teaching is presentation. Especially important in pistol fundamentals, the presentation is how you present the pistol from a ready position to your firing position. As part of your draw stroke, the presentation should lie as flat as possible for as long as possible mitigating arching or scooping. In a perfect world, the hammer should fall right at the apex of your presentation.

Only through deep practice dry fire to the appropriate amount of repetition, can one achieve automaticity. When you’ve reached this point, with flat presentation and trigger preparation the dreaded ‘surprised shot’ will surprise you in that it will be an ‘A’ zone hit.

Patrick McNamara
SGM, US Army (Ret)

Patrick McNamara spent twenty-two years in the United States Army in a myriad of special operations units. When he worked in the premier Special Missions Unit, he became an impeccable marksman, shooting with accurate, lethal results and tactical effectiveness. McNamara has trained tactical applications of shooting to people of all levels of marksmanship, from varsity level soldiers, and police officers who work the streets to civilians with little to no time behind the trigger.

His military experience quickly taught him that there is more to tactical marksmanship than merely squeezing the trigger. Utilizing his years of experience, McNamara developed a training methodology that is safe, effective and combat relevant and encourages a continuous thought process. This methodology teaches how to maintain safety at all times and choose targets that force accountability, as well as provides courses covering several categories, including individual, collective, on line and standards.

While serving as his Unit’s Marksmanship NCO, he developed his own marksmanship club with NRA, CMP, and USPSA affiliations. Mac ran monthly IPSC matches and ran semi annual military marksmanship championships to encourage marksmanship fundamentals and competitiveness throughout the Army.He retired from the Army’s premier hostage rescue unit as a Sergeant Major and is the author of T.A.P.S. (Tactical Application of Practical Shooting). He also served as the Principle of TMACS Inc.

Gunfighter Moment is a weekly feature brought to you by Alias Training & Security Services. Each week Alias brings us a different Trainer and in turn they offer some words of wisdom.