Everyone Thinks They’re John Wick
Let’s face it, it’s easy to imagine being capable, confident, and prepared to defend yourself if and when the time ever comes. Movies make it seem so easy to draw your firearm and accurately hit your target to put down a threat in just one shot. Reality is much different, and even though you might be range accurate, no threat is willing to wait for you to get your stance right and line up your shot. In most cases, the need to defend yourself is going to be fast, adrenaline-filled, and short distance. In a previous article, I discussed things most people don’t think about when deciding to carry and the most common response was training. While preferable training would be with an instructor on a range that you can draw from your holster and moved around, but that’s not always an option for a lot of people. Most public ranges do not allow drawing from a holster, and most will also be shooting from the line. Training with instructors or access to ranges that allow movement might also be out of the budget for a lot of people, but budget shouldn’t be a deterrent in being able to protect yourself and your loved ones.
Challenge Your Training
Training can and should be done at home with dry firing (always make sure to double or even triple-check your firearm is unloaded when performing any maintenance or dry fire practice.) Dry firing should be a consistent practice to keep you familiar with your everyday carry of choice. There are a lot of great tools out there to help facilitate your dry fire practice such as the Mantis X tools. I have personally used their products and seen large improvements in my accuracy while being consistent, as well as a drop in my accuracy when I let excuses get in my way of practice between getting to the range to live fire train. Consistency is key to being prepared and the fine folks over at ConcealedCarry.com put together their Concealed Carry 21-Day Challenge in December 2024 to really drive that focus in and an affordable for any budget price. Can you take the 10 to 15 minutes a day for 3 weeks to practice different techniques? This premise may seem simple enough, however, it’s much easier to find an excuse not to practice when life gets in the way, especially during the holidays when there is even more distraction around you.
Without Giving Away The Secret Sauce
ConcealedCarry.com really put thought into how they built their challenge, including establishing a baseline of where your current abilities are with a printable paper target to use before the challenge even begins. The training begins with the most basic of basics, they don’t even touch on pulling the trigger until the 3rd day and even then the focus is on the mechanics. The challenge evolves, building off each previous lesson to provide a consistent and well-thought-out evolution of combining movements. The challenge helps the trainee think outside the basic idea of thought and then action, providing practice of scenarios of misfire, double feeds, reloading, taking cover, and movement. No situation is ever going to be the same and rarely will it be so cut and dry. While there are hundreds of videos and articles online that discuss at home training, you will be hard-pressed to find resources that are as clear and well thought out as this challenge. The video walkthroughs are direct and simple with timelapses left over to give calls, similar to a shot timer, to help keep you on track from getting your 10 minutes of training in. Beyond the daily training they also provide daily insight from industry experts to give the challenger food for thought on defensive gun use even outside of concealed carrying. The best part is the challenge remains up for you to go back and revisit any of the training again to keep up with at home practice.
What Really Counts
Training. Simply put, that is what really matters. Fear, adrenaline, noise, people around you, lighting, etc., all will play a factor in how you will respond to a threat when leaving the situation simply isn’t an option. Just like physical activity, practice will help you develop muscle memory when all of those outside influences are coming at you all at once. Don’t allow yourself to make excuses to not practice, instead, find reasons to practice more often. There are a lot of great tools out there to help you with at home training, such as this challenge from ConcealedCarry.com, The Mantis X products, timers from Shooters Global, and dry fire magazines from DryFireMag. Whatever way you choose to go about your training, make sure you do it as much and as often as you can because it’s always better to be over-prepared than under.
