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TACTICAL TIPS

Looking for more combat tips? For related topics, download S.W.A.T. Magazine's past issues.

In S.W.A.T.’s February 2007 issue, learn how gun mavens train, get instinctive shooting tips, and find out how T&Es (test and evaluations) of EOTech’s weapon sight model 553 and Benelli’s M4 shotgun fared.

S.W.A.T.’s December 2003 issue is chock-full—tactical waterborne operations, a how-to on building a fighting shotgun on a budget, tactical weapons painted camouflage style, managing Glock’s .357 SIG pistols and much more!

Looking Cool

By Louis Awerbuck (September 2009)

Apparently rule number one is to look cool. To quote Willard Motley’s character Nick Romano in Knock On Any Door, you’re supposed to “Live fast, die young and have a good looking corpse.” The operative word here, obviously, is corpse—looking good, but dead.

Heaven forbid you should look like one of the little gray people and actually win the gunfight, rather than be festooned with black, camouflaged, Velcroed pimped-out equipment and die. Which, of course, leads us into the realm of the tactical world: tactical guns, tactical knives, tactical firearms accoutrements, and inevitably, the tactical pistol reload.

Since virtually nobody who's been man alone in a pistol gunfight since Moses was a corporal has performed a tactical reload in a gunfight—it’s inevitably a speed load, which has been executed when all hell broke loose. So why are we religiously performing tac loads on the training range in lieu of concentrating on speed loads or transitions to a secondary weapon?

Three reasons:

The most important—it looks cool.

We don't want to damage magazines dropping them on the ground. After all, magazines cost plus/minus twenty-five dollars apiece, and we all know our lives are apparently worth less than twenty-five bucks to us in the street.

And our backs hurt at the end of a long day of continuously bending down to retrieve jettisoned speed-loaded pistol magazines.

And yes, to reiterate, we’re talking one good guy with a handgun—no support personnel, no eleventy-seven round carbine. Both of the latter circumstances are an entirely different ballgame. And since we're talking about what people actually do in battle, and not discussing an expedition to find the Loch Ness monster or the mythical Lull, in reality, people speed load a pistol or transition to a secondary weapon.

The mythical Lull—for the uninformed—is a bluebird with red spots on its breast that magically descends in mid-fight to provide cover and time for you to execute the look cool tactical reload. Hence, the common term heard on every training range, “When there’s a lull in the fight...”

So if you’re fortunate to find cover or time to perform a tac load between firing strings or see the Pturquoise Pterodactyl swooping down in the middle of a ballistic trade-off with the enemy, go ahead and calmly rotate magazines with your ice-vein, rock-steady fingers. After all, why ditch ammunition on the ground unnecessarily?

On the other hand, don’t hold your breath that you’re actually going to have the opportunity to do this in a down-and-dirty close encounter of the worst kind. And if you’re lucky enough to have the availability to perform this operation, don’t forget the swivel-my-head-like-Exorcist rotation trick, which is too fast for the brain to comprehend what the eyes are seeing, let alone the fact that nobody has done this with stationary feat—day or night—in a for-real fight anyway.

After all, rule number one is to look cool above all else—even if it can be the cause of your death.

[Louis Awerbuck is Director of the internationally acclaimed Yavapai Firearms Academy. Course information and schedules are available at www.yfainc.com.]

Competence and Technology

By Patrick A. Rogers (August 2009)

We’ve been conditioned into believing certain “truths” as espoused by the print and electronic media, advertising agencies and other drama-net sources.

We know that we can grow hair, attract the opposite sex, and make millions from home, if we only buy a how-to DVD. We can lengthen our organ, and our prospective significant others can lift and separate their firm yet tender bosoms to enhance their charms while hiding that brassiere strap from view.

We’re taught that if someone kicks your door in with intent to commit burglary, assault, rape or something else, an articulate, neatly dressed telephone operator from an award-winning alarm company will immediately call you as the miscreant flees the scene. Amazing.

This untruth in advertising carries over to the firearms industry, in spades. Many companies compete for relatively few dollars, and many have pushed forth advertising attesting that they have the one true widget. It doesn’t quite work that way.

In order to master any given skill, certain facts of life exist. You must have a need; believe that you can master the skill; must have equipment sufficient to the task; and you must have training and mentoring to acquire the skill sets.

You have options when purchasing guns, sights, magazines, slings and ammunition. You can buy cheap—but often wind up buying twice. To this end, many spend exorbitant amounts of currency on equipment that may be superfluous to the perceived real needs.

A good example of this may be the so-called “match trigger.” There’s no doubt that a smooth trigger can be easier to manage and can aid in precision shooting, if combined with the basic principles of marksmanship. However, when one doesn’t understand trigger control, sight picture, weapon manipulation or mindset, and fails to understand the implications of reduced service life, that potential enhancer is worse than useless. Conversely, we see a trend where people will go out of their way to purchase “cheap” (in every sense of the word) optics that are poor counterfeits. They may have a service life measured in hours; then people complain when the cheap optics predictably die on day one of a class.

So, what is one to do? The answer is simple, though not as uncomplicated as one might wish.

First, define your needs. Understand that needs and wants are two different animals. The mission drives the gear train—not the other way around.

Second, seek advice of qualified people to help in your search for gear that is sufficient to the task.

Third, buy the equipment that offers the best quality that you can afford. Buying cheap usually means buying twice if you actually use the equipment. If you don’t use it, anything will suffice.

Fourth, seek quality training so that you may actually understand how to use that equipment. The mere purchasing of a piece of equipment does not equal competence.

I’ll end this with a quote from Lloyd Gully, who hosted a training course I ran at Brady, Texas: “Pat has educated me that you cannot replace practice with gear, but you can practice enough to make second-rate gear function. Better to have both if you can get it!”

[Pat Rogers is a retired Chief Warrant Officer of Marines and a retired NYPD Sergeant, as well as the owner of E.A.G.Tactical, which provides services to various governmental organizations. He can be reached at info@eagtactical.com.]