Cold weather will cause certain body parts to work more slowly than usual so…I would advise that you keep this in mind when you try to go to speed as you would on a balmy sunny day when in fact, it’s really 27 degrees and overcast.

Indiana training was in December and it was cooold…at least for me. The flight attendant’s (in the old days these were stewardesses and they weren’t 80 plus years) had to pull me off the plane as I was kicking and shouting, “I’m not going…I’m not going!” Kind of like an outtake from the scene in Apocalypse Now. The interesting thing is that in order to survive in even colder weather, there is no running about on the range in shorts, a tank top and Tiva sandals. Nope. If you want to get to your gun you’ll have to work through gloves, layers of clothes and whatever else it may be that shields you from the weather. This not altogether an insignificant fact and it should never go unnoticed. Attempting to go to the same speed in cold weather that you can pull off time and again in warm weather, may not prove to be as effective as you thought it might be. Trigger presses may take longer and the simple manipulative actions one takes for granted may be fumbled when frozen fingers do not respond well to mental commands. Just be aware of this.

Many years ago I was afforded the opportunity to train with Blue team of SEAL Team 6 (Now Dev Group) in Kentucky. Now only two of us (Greg Horton and myself) went back there for three weeks in the field with these guys. It was something else, believe me. Their idea of fun – is far different than my idea of fun – so here’s one of the many ‘fun’ evolutions that we gleefully participated in.

It was in November in Kentucky mind you and since frogs do all things at night this evolution was to be no exception to this unwritten frog rule. We were to conduct an ambush deep in the woods after having been inserted by Blackhawks shortly after nightfall. We moved in and set down without a sound and of course we went to ground right in the middle of a slow running stream about two inches deep and began waiting. In about twenty minutes I couldn’t feel most of my body parts so I just concentrated on the fact that soon, this would be over. In about two hours, my lips felt like they were injected full of Novocain and my eyeballs were actually shivering. In about fours hours I had no real concentrated thoughts at all and the only relief that ever came was when you had to relieve yourself without moving and of course that particular warmth only lasts about five to ten seconds at most but at least you knew that your insides were still warm. It was somewhere around dawn that we finally launched the ambush and then had to move like hell for several miles to extraction. In the first five minutes of movement nothing on me seemed to work. Not my legs, my feet, my arms, my hands…nothing. Everything was stiff from the running water and the cold of the night and the complete absence of any physical motion. We looked like flailing apes tanked up on torpedo juice for the first few hundred meters. I learned one thing that night and that – was that these guys…are real hard core, they operate in a totally different world, and that their sense of fun is much different than mine.

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I recently was invited by the LAPD firearms training unit to participate in a focus study group with the goal of improving LAPD’s existing firearms qualification course. In addition to myself, four former SWAT officers that I worked with also participated in the meeting. The history among all of us is amazing (but that’s a story for another time). Collectively, were instrumental years ago in ushering in the modern gunfighting techniques, which proved to greatly improve LAPD’s existing firearms program. We were all thrilled and honored to be invited to take part in this effort.

The current LAPD qualification course is a 30 round course of fire with set times distances, staging of the pistol, courses of fire and standard LAPD silhouette. As far as I can tell this course of fire is the same that I conducted in 1976 and it certainly extended on well before my time. In other words, this course of fire is entirely predictable. It has been conducted multiple times and is guided by continual range commands via a loudspeaker.

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Some of you may have heard about a firearms mishap at a Riverside range a few weeks ago during a concealed carry class. Apparently the civilian instructor shot a student in the leg. This was what we consider to be a negligent incident and not an ‘accident’ as reported. Why do we characterize it as such? Because something like that should never happen and if it does, it is indeed negligence.

As many of you know, we have been training for 30 years and have never had such an occurrence. Safety is, and always should be, the number one issue. Drawing from a concealed carry position can be tricky and that’s why a student must attend Handgun I and Handgun II in order to qualify for our concealed carry class. http://internationaltactical.com/concealedcarry.html Brand new shooters should not be drawing from a concealed position and instructors have no excuse for shooting students in the leg, even if they are extremely annoying individuals.
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(Reprinted from 2018 Frontline Debriefs – SWAT Magazine)

(Note: The majority of our instructors are full time SWAT officers- most from LAPD SWAT. This past weekend, one of our students asked me what functions SWAT performs and how it differs from patrol. Here is an article I wrote last year for SWAT magazine.)
Many years ago a great friend of mine, Ray Coffman of Albuquerque New Mexico, made the prescient comment that our reliance on SWAT would be omnipresent. In other words, that past evolutions, which normal field grade officers might have addressed in the past, would automatically be placed into the purview of SWAT. Ray was an instructor for the Department of Energy and a group of us from LAPD SWAT would instruct the 10 day hostage rescue course on the Sandia Military Base grounds in Albuquerque under his direction. The program was centered around the security of special nuclear materials.

Fast forward to 2018 and his prediction has come to fruition. Having worked on shooting cases as an expert deadly force witness in both Federal and Superior Courts, the case is being made more frequently that SWAT should have been employed on, “such and such” an incident. In some situations this is a cogent argument while in others – not so much.
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