Let’s paint the picture. It is the middle of the night and you’re in bed. You wake up to the sound of someone rummaging through your kitchen downstairs. Your kids are at a sleepover, so you know it’s not them, and your wife is sleeping soundly next to you. You keep a gun next to your bed, so you grab it. You creep down the stairs and peer into the kitchen to see a man in a mask, filling a bag with your stuff. He sees you and raises his gun. You point yours at him, pull the trigger and… no bang. You’ve got a dead trigger. Your gun just malfunctioned. Wait… guns can malfunction? Do you know what to do?
The first time my gun malfunctioned I didn’t know what just happened. Luckily, I was in my first day of my gun training course at Dr. Ignatius Piazza’s gun training school, called Front Sight Firearms Training Institute. We were just learning how to aim at a stationary target and put two bullets through the thoracic cavity of the paper man. There was no timed pressure, and I wasn’t worried about my paper man shooting back. My gun training partner, who had previously attended Front Sight, looked quickly at my gun and said, “Oh, you have a type three malfunction. Don’t worry. You are going to learn all about that and how to fix it.”
How did he KNOW that?
My Front Sight gun training instructor came over and helped me clear the malfunction and told me the same thing. Ignatius Piazza planned for this sort of thing when designing his gun training program at Front Sight.
There is NO WAY I’m going to remember all of this.
The next morning, at the Front Sight gun training range, the instructors announced that we were going to learn about the different malfunctions. They gave a quick lecture and a demonstration that made me think, “Huh? How did he do that so fast?” Step by step, we went through each gun malfunction, how to diagnose them and how to clear them.
This gun training stuff is beginning to get pretty intense. I’m starting to learn how to clear these things when the steps are being called out for us, but I don’t know if I’d be able to handle this under timed pressure in a gun fight with no one telling me what type of malfunction my gun has.
The Front Sight gun training instructors stuck with us. They didn’t give up or get frustrated when it took some of us longer to learn these difficult gun training and gun handling techniques. Ignatius Piazza really did a great job picking these guys to be Front Sight instructors. That fact was brought to life on my third day of gun training: the night gun training section.
I had my gun and my flashlight pointed in on my target. I pressed the trigger. Dead trigger. I can’t give my position away so I do what the Front Sight instructors teach: kill the light and move. Would I have been able to do what I did on day one? Heck no. But by day three, I was able to do it. I cleared that malfunction in just a few seconds… in the dark, not being able to see my gun. I stayed “alive” in that gun fight because of what Ignatius Piazza’s gun training instructors taught me.
Will you stay alive in your gunfight?
