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Gunfighter Moment – Larry Vickers

Saturday, December 8th, 2012

“How accurate should my weapon be?” is a question I get on a regular basis. Of course, the answer depends on the weapon and the application. For both pistol and a carbine it should be accurate enough to make a headshot at the furthest distance that you can realistically hope to make in the real world. In my opinion that is 25 yds for a pistol and 100 yds for a carbine .

Since my rule of thumb is shooters can only hope to be able to shoot to within 50% of the inherent accuracy of the weapon under conditions of stress then that means both the pistol and carbine need to be capable of 2.5 inch groups. This equates to the ability to hit a 5 inch circle, or the head of a small framed adult hostile at those distances.”

-Larry Vickers
Vickers Tactical Inc.
Host of TacTV

Larry Vickers of Vickers Tactical in a retired US Army 1st SFOD- Delta combat veteran with years of experience in the firearms industry as a combat marksmanship instructor and industry consultant. In recent years he has hosted tactical firearms related TV shows on the Sportsman Channel with the latest being TacTV of which Bravo Company is a presenting sponsor.Larry Vickers special operations background is one of the most unique in the industry today; he has been directly or indirectly involved in the some of the most significant special operations missions of the last quarter century. During Operation Just Cause he participated in Operation Acid Gambit – the rescue of Kurt Muse from Modelo Prison in Panama City, Panama. As a tactics and marksmanship instructor on active duty he helped train special operations personnel that later captured Saddam Hussein and eliminated his sons Uday and Qusay Hussein. In addition he was directly involved in the design and development of the HK416 for Tier One SOF use which was used by Naval Special Warfare personnel to kill Osama Bin Laden. Larry Vickers has developed various small arms accessories with the most notable being his signature sling manufactured by Blue Force Gear and Glock accessories made by Tangodown. In addition he has maintained strong relationships with premium companies within the tactical firearms industry such as BCM, Aimpoint, Black Hills Ammunition, Wilson Combat, Schmidt & Bender and Daniel Defense.

Larry Vickers travels the country conducting combat marksmanship classes for law abiding civilians, law enforcement and military and has partnered with Alias Training to coordinate classes to best meet the needs of the students attending the class.

www.VickersTactical.com

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.

Tags: Alias Training and Security Services, Larry Vickers, LAV, Vickers Tactical
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New Paul Howe DVD from Panteao

Tuesday, December 4th, 2012

Paul Howe is a Mogadishu Vet and has seen combat from a perspective shared by few. As is the case with most of the men from his Unit, when he talks, I listen. Now, Panteao Productions has released a new video with Paul that concentrates specifically on Combat Mindset, an issue that is difficult to incorporate into traditional range-based training.

Preparing yourself mentally for the fight is critical. Your success against an aggressor will depend on not just your skill-set but also your mindset. In this video Paul Howe reviews important topics like motivation to survive, fear and negative thoughts, mental programming, how to handle stress, tactical confidence, medical self-aid, and more.

www.panteaoproductions.com

Tags: Panteao Productions, Paul Howe
Posted in Training | 9 Comments »

Gunfighter Moment – Pat McNamara

Saturday, December 1st, 2012

We sometimes neglect working on the fundamentals. These are the core skills around which everything rotates. It is sometimes necessary to lie flat on your belly and work basic rifle marksmanship (BRM). Refresh on the importance of building a position to achieve a natural point of aim. Understand that without a natural point of aim, there is muscular input and where there is muscular input there will be movement in the weapon when fired. This will have an adverse effect on the desired impact of the round fired.

When you work BRM, you appreciate external ballistics and the effects that wind, temperature, humidity, and angle have on desired impact.

You develop an understanding that this differs from one round to another depending on the make, grain, caliber, and type of round.

“Single shots should be practiced one round at a time. BRM forces us to concentrate on the fundamentals. These fundamentals should be engraved into our hard drives because as tactical gun handlers we must be able to perform certain skills intuitively.

There are facets that must be felt and performed at a subconscious level. i.e., loading, pre-combat check, safety manipulation, building a position, achieving a natural point of aim, sight alignment, trigger control, feeling the metal on metal imperfections in the trigger group, calling your shot, seeing how far the sight rises, seeing where the sight settles, following through, realigning the sights, and resetting the trigger. These must be practiced in near slow motion.

You must have a firm understanding of minute of angle and the accuracy of your rifle. You must know how your sights adjust. You should have a basic understanding of external ballistics to understand the possible adverse effects caused by winds, temperature, humidity, and angle.

BRM allows the shooter to establish a tempo or demeanor.”

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).

tmacsinc.com

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.

Tags: Alias Training and Security Services, Pat McNamara, TMACS
Posted in Training | 1 Comment »

CTOMS and Kili-Climbing Collaborating to Provide Unique Training Opportunities

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

It was inevitable. Canadian companies CTOMS and Kili-Climbing are collaborating. When Chris Kopp of CTOMS started developing the TRACE Systems (micro rope systems) unveiled last year, he realized it could be used in more and more diverse applications. Then, he and his business partner used it as an ultra-light weight system climbing in Uganda for glacier travel and rappelling. This past summer they did their first lead climbs on it. Along with CTOMS’ Tactical Assault Climbers Course (TAC-C) that they’ve been running for two years now, the natural evolution was to take the CTOMS rope access and complex terrain programs to the next level. Kili-Climbing has been that enabler.

CTOMS is now partnering with Kili-Climbing, which provides logistical planning and support in Africa to their Complex-terrain & High Altitude Seminars (CHAOS, as in their slogan, “Control the Chaos”), it enables them to provide experience based training at high altitude and in foreign countries. The diversity of location options provides a broad spectrum of terrain, latitude and altitude options, beyond what is available in the continental US. The client’s specific capability requirements/desires will determine the venue. Current venues include Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Mt. Stanley and Speke in Uganda, Mt. Kenya in Kenya and Mt. Logan in Canada. While the African locations provide milder equatorial high altitude options with very diverse terrain and foreign travel experience, Mt. Logan in Canada provides a significantly lower traffic option than Mt. McKinley in Alaska, and provides a great Arctic, high latitude, high altitude, extreme cold weather training environment.

The difference between training with the CTOMS/Kili-Climbing team and hiring another African tour provider or civilian guide company is that the CTOMS/Kili-Climbing team understands and caters specifically to the military, and in particular SOF applications. They speak your language. These aren’t tourist vacations and they aren’t going to put their clients on busy, standard tourist routes, and most of all, they aren’t going to teach them civilian practices that contradict or conflict with tactical requirements. Instead, they cater the instruction, routes, objectives and activities specifically to the tactical training objectives. These are customized training programs built specifically to military SOF personnel and taught by instructors with military backgrounds and certified guides with experience instructing SOF.

For US units that require a contract with a US company, they work with The Peak out of Butte, Montana. CTOMS can also be contracted directly. For personal trips in Africa, contact Kili-Climbing directly.

www.ctoms.ca/high_altitude_operations
kili-climbing.com

Tags: Canada, CTOMS, Kili Climbing
Posted in Industry, Training | 4 Comments »

Shrek Sighting

Sunday, November 18th, 2012

Just be happy you aren’t seeing this from the opposite point of view.

‘Like’ him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TmGrom

Engage his services at aliastraining.com

Tags: Shrek
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Canipe Correspondence – Being Hard Enough to Be Lazy

Sunday, November 18th, 2012

Laziness is pretty much the scourge of America these days. People want all the benefits of hard work without, well, the hard work. There’s one circumstance I can think of that laziness pays dividends though, and in fact improves the gains of the hard work you just did. The rest day, which is often overlooked. I took a quote from the Gym Jones website a few years ago that stuck with me. I had been training with a partner for an upcoming multi-week event. I was in most likely the best shape I had ever been, knocking out a 1400+ UBRR score and a sub-2 hour 12 mile ruck time. Religious adherence to a great diet, never slacking on workouts. Unfortunately I fell into a trap of being overtraining and a week before the event I tore a tendon in the arch of my left foot on a Saturday morning, which pretty much sidelined me for nearly 6 months. That one stupid rest day I decided to cram a little extra work into caused career implications that haunt me to this day. One damned Saturday morning on Fort Bragg that I wasn’t smart enough to take a break. Like the song says, “If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.” I promise you, you’re better off being smart and tough. Afterwards I found this:

Commenting on a disappointing performance at the 2010 World Championships Mark Cavendish said, “It takes balls to rest and do nothing and I didn’t have the balls.” The hard work is easy, but it takes courage to rest. In an era when everyone thinks that more and harder is better few are brave enough to step back, to tell friends, “I’m taking it easy today.” I can hear the jibes from here. But one of my maxims is, “when in doubt, rest” and I admonish with it frequently.

The T-Shirt Gym Jones sells sums it up with “don’t do the work if you don’t have the balls to rest.” Recovery is a wonderful thing, it allows you to actually take full benefit of your hard work, mentally and physically. A lot of the high-stress activities we engage in are fatiguing. The body needs time to rest, rebuild, and prepare for another round of punishment. If not, it cannot grow to accommodate your workload. We plateau. We get complacent and lazy. We lose motivation. Exercise is a common example to relate to. You need to rest to build! Your body needs to heal to get stronger! When you break yourself off every day, you’re damaging yourself to a degree. Your body builds it’s capabilities to compensate for your workload. It needs the time to do that or not only will your results slow to stop, you’ll fall prey to injuries. Nobody wants to work that hard to flush it down the toilet on a strained muscle or torn tendon. One day of rest to save 6 months of cumulative work, or one more day of work for 6 months of rest…the choice is yours.

Plan rest into your activities. If possible, I like a 3/1 ratio of work/rest days on my training schedule. I use that for shooting, workouts, and other activities requiring a lot of physical activity or concentration. I know some animals that do 2/1 and still get by better than the rest of us. Get some sleep too. If you’re the guy that hits the bar or eats bad food “cause I worked out extra hard” today, it was all for nothing. A good night’s sleep is a rest day all its own for every day you’re on the job. Not only will a lack of rest and recovery stop muscle growth, but it will decrease your energy levels, and possibly testosterone production, and convinces your body to decrease muscle and store fat to feed itself. Don’t do the work and throw away the benefits.

Rest is important, arguably as important as the work you do to need it. Be man (or woman) enough to take that rest day when you need it. Plan on it! Don’t worry about your friends calling you a pussy. You’ll get to mock their “weak genes” when they’re on crutches or at the gym twice a day every day and can’t get any stronger.

Take it easy folks.

Tags: Canipe
Posted in Training | 5 Comments »

Gunfighter Moment – Mike Pannone

Saturday, November 17th, 2012

I have met a number of instructors in the, for lack of a better term, “tactical” world. I have the benefits of being a constant shooter and several years’ experience teaching in classroom settings to form opinions of instruction and training for real-world firearms use. And I have had the opportunity to discuss the effectiveness of various instructional techniques with professional military and law enforcement individuals who were willing to speak frankly and did not hold anything back in their assessments.

All of this has led me to the conclusion that Mike Pannone is one of the most effective and well-rounded firearm instructors in the world. Why?

– He has an extremely impressive military background, one which has given him a level of experience found in only a few modern instructors;

– He has studied kinesiology (the scientific study of human movement) at the collegiate level;

– He has experience as an instructor for federal law enforcement, namely being the head range instructor at the Federal Air Marshals Service school;

– He is very low key – mostly because he does not feel the need to impress anyone;

– He is not a “stick-in-the-mud” – he is always looking to develop new and more effective shooting techniques.

So he knows what is and is not relevant to real-world applications, he can explain in a scientific manner why a certain technique is effective or ineffective, he has the ability to impart this experience and knowledge to students, he does not showboat during classes, and he keeps an open mind about how he does all of this.

Mike Pannone with a fancy handgun

When I have occasion to discuss the merits of Mike’s instruction with individuals who shoot guns for a living, they express universal praise and admiration. They have no time for BS and while they often receive training from Mike as well as other instructors through work, they also pay for Mike’s classes out of their own pockets.

His training is in constant demand from actual military and law enforcement units. We hear this so often from various instructors that it becomes background noise – Mike actually tries to make this part of his life background noise. He teaches high-speed military and law enforcement units but never, ever talks about it publicly.

It’s almost weird – it would be easy for him to cultivate a following based on personality, but he doesn’t bother with such things. He’s so self-effacing that I feel a constant need to write about him. Part of it is that I consider him to be a friend, sure. The other part is that he is an intellectual and a true badass. That is a rare combination indeed.

This article was first published at Vuurwapen Blog. Reposted at the request of Mike Pannone and with the permission of Vuurwapen Blog.

Mike Pannone retired from the Army’s premier assault force (1st SFOD-D) after an explosive breaching injury. A year after his retirement America was attacked on 9/11 and he returned to help serve his country as the head marksmanship instructor at the Federal Air Marshals training course and then moved to help stand up the FAMS Seattle field office. In 2003 he left the FAMS to serve as a PSD detail member and then a detail leader for the State Department during 2003 and 2004 in Baghdad and Tikrit.

In 2005 he served as a ground combat advisor of the Joint Counter IED Task Force and participated on combat operations with various units in Al Anbar province. Upon returning he gave IED awareness briefings to departing units and helped stand up a pre-Iraq surge rifle course with the Asymmetric Warfare Group as a lead instructor. With that experience as well as a career of special operations service in Marine Reconnaissance, Army Special Forces and JSOC to draw from he moved to the private sector teaching planning, leadership, marksmanship and tactics as well as authoring and co-authoring several books such as The M4 Handbook, AK Handbook and Tactical Pistol shooting. Mike also consults for several major rifle and accessory manufacturers to help them field the best possible equipment to the warfighter, law enforcement officer and upstanding civilian end user. He is considered a subject matter expert on the AR based Stoner platform in all its derivatives.

www.ctt-solutions.com

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.

Tags: Alias Training and Security Services, CTT Solutions, Mike Pannone, Vuurwapen Blog
Posted in Training | 1 Comment »

Is He Doing it “Right” or Not?

Saturday, November 17th, 2012

Some readers may look at this photo and say that he is doing it wrong. Sure, he’s got a grip on the magwell and his buttstock is off of his shoulder, but he may just be adapting to the cover.

Weapon handling skills are very much up to the individual and should be looked at more from a TTP standpoint than dogmatic adherence to one school of thought over another. Sure, there are definitely ways not to do it, but there are also multiple ways to get rounds on target. Over time, you’ll find something’s work better than others for you.

Gain a wide variety of skills from multiple instructors and then learn how to adapt them to your situation. When I say instructor, I mean that in a rather broad sense. Many if you serve in the military or LE and gain instruction associated with your duty. However, I recommend everyone seek training from a professional instructor whether uniformed or not.

So what do you think? Is the guy in the photo doing it “right?”

Posted in Training | 56 Comments »