Setup of the Defensive Shotgun Part 1: The Stock

This is meant to be a handy reference to answer questions about the setup of defensive shotguns since we run into them so frequently. It is by no means a comprehensive treatise on the subject, but it should serve as a good guide for those looking to set up a shotgun optimally for defensive use. 

Stock Considerations

Stock Length: 

Most shotguns ship from the manufacturer with a stock length that is entirely too long. For our purposes, the "length of pull" is simply the measurement of the distance between the face of the trigger and the rear of the stock. Most manufacturers ship guns with a 14" LOP. That LOP is designed for larger than average sized males. If you are over 6 feet tall and have typical length arms for your height, a factory stock will probably be just fine. For the 75-85% of males and 99% of females who are not 6 feet tall, your first order of business is to get a shorter stock on the gun. 

You can do this by having a competent gunsmith cut down a wooden stock, by replacing the stock on the gun with a "youth" model stock from the manufacturer, or by buying an aftermarket stock. 

Often buying an aftermarket stock is the easiest solution. There are a number of options on the market for popular shotguns. Two of the most popular are from Magpul and Hogue. The Hogue 12" LOP stock is one of the shortest options on the aftermarket. It is short enough to help out even very small shooters without being too short for larger shooters to use well. 

Comb: 

Another important dimension of the stock is the comb of the stock. The comb is the top edge of the stock that actually makes contact with your face. The comb of the stock is important because it assists in positioning the sights in the center of the focal plane of the eye.

Just as it is important for us to have a consistent cheek weld on a rifle for accuracy, it is important that we have a consistent cheek weld when we mount a shotgun if we want to use the weapon with speed and accuracy. Some aftermarket stocks have an adjustable comb by the use of cheek pieces that can be put into the stock. Other stocks can have the drop-at-comb adjusted with plates that fit between the stock and receiver.

The Magpul stock offers an adjustable length of pull and an adjustable cheek piece to allow better fitment to the user. It may not be the prettiest option on the market, but it is highly effective.

Altering these two dimensions of the stock to fit you better increases your speed and accuracy with the defensive shotgun. More crucially, it helps reduce felt recoil so that you don’t get beat up when training with the gun. Many are afraid to train with the shotgun because they have the negative experience of the gauge kicking them like a mule…but it doesn’t have to be that way. We teach a very effective technique for recoil mitigation that takes the thunder out of the user experience with the shotgun. Even so, the recoil mitigation technique is much easier to apply with a better fitting stock on the gun.

The Intermediate Range Rifle & Optics

Take a trip back in time with me to North Hollywood, CA on February 28, 1997.

It’s a pretty normal morning at the Bank of America until 9:17 AM when two heavily armed robbers bust into the bank to rob it.

The two bank robbers expected that they would have eight minutes before police would respond to the alarm tripped in the bank. They didn’t realize that before they’d even begun the robbery they had been spotted by an LAPD unit manned by officers Loren Farrell and Martin Perello. The officers called in the bank robbery and LAPD responded in force.

When the two robbers walked out of the bank they found themselves confronted by several LAPD officers who had taken up strategic positions waiting on their exit. The robbers immediately opened fire and the police responded in kind. In the almost hour long firefight that resulted, the robbers fired more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition and police fired more than 650 rounds from their issued weapons without much effect on the violent criminals.

When I saw news coverage of the North Hollywood Shootout as it was happening I remember thinking that a couple of officers (or even hunters) armed with a scoped .30-30 or .30-06 deer rifle could have completely altered the course of that fight.

Within the United States the need to defend yourself against a violent assault tends to happen at ranges we can measure in feet. Even so, there are plenty of occasions where police especially are confronted by the need to deal with a threat at extended distances. How do you arm an officer with a weapon that works at close range but will also allow them to reach out to beyond 100 yards with precision in an incident like the North Hollywood Shootout?

In Iraq, Afghanistan, and other “interesting” locations on the globe our military forces have found themselves needing to answer the same question. Combat units engaged in close range fights inside of structures and then immediately had to engage the enemy entrenched in distant buildings firing on the building they were still in the process of clearing. Unlike violent criminals or the terrorist forces our troops have fought for the last couple of decades, our police and military forces have to be concerned with positive identification of a threat and accountability for where their bullets go in the use of lethal force.

The concept of a low power variable optic mounted on a rifle chambered in an intermediate cartridge is not new. If you look at pictures from the Vietnam war you will have no trouble finding evidence of the then-new M16 rifle with various optics mounted to the carry handle.

The magnification in these optics was usually 3x or 4x (although you can find some deer hunting scopes mounted to them as well) and helped make positive identification of a threat while allowing more precise engagement out to the realistically effective range of the rifle. These virtues came at the cost of speed and ease of use at closer range. Using techniques like the Bindon Aiming Concept it was possible to compensate for those drawbacks and still use the optic effectively at closer range.

In the late 1980’s Trijicon introduced the ACOG, an incredibly durable 4x scope that would see fairly wide spread adoption by segments of the Army and by the USMC. An improvement over the older Colt scopes, it was still a fixed 4x scope which made use at closer ranges more difficult.

At this point the red dot optic was becoming king of the hill for close range engagements. Some clever people thought that what really needed to exist was an optic that combined the best features of the red dot optic with the abilities of a magnified optic to help in positive identification and precision engagement.

That led to the development of the S&B Short Dot, a 1.1x-4x optic with an illuminated dot reticle. The 1.1x setting allowed a fast, nearly distortion free view through the optic similar to what you can get through a quality red dot while also allowing the magnification to be cranked up for longer range tasks. The optic was heavy and incredibly expensive, but very effective.

Over the last ten or so years the concept of an illuminated reticle, variable power optic with a 1x (essentially no magnification) setting that allows speed at close range along with identification and precision at longer ranges has found form in a wide variety of options on the market. Today practically every optics manufacturer makes at least a couple of what we call low power variable optics.

You might wonder, then, why they have not made the traditional red dot optic completely obsolete. (And, yes, I am old enough to find using the term “traditional” in concert with a red dot optic incredibly amusing!)

The LVPO optics tend to be more fragile than the rugged Aimpoint or fixed power ACOG optics. They tend to consume batteries more quickly than the Aimpoint optics, requiring keeping up with your maintenance to keep the illuminated reticle working for you. The optics themselves and the mounts necessary to use them tend to be heavier. Most importantly, a duty quality LVPO is considerably more expensive than a traditional duty grade red dot optic.

Consider the Vortex Viper PST-II optic on my personal rifle. Even factoring in street price for the optic and a decent mounting solution you are still looking at a minimum of $700-$750 on top of the cost of the rifle itself. The Vortex Viper PST-II is probably the best bang-for-your-buck LVPO currently on the market as it delivers good quality glass, a reliable adjustment mechanism, and a lot of nice features at what is pretty much the bottom end of the pricing spectrum for an optic that will likely stand up to duty use.

The optic is heavy, but the true 1x setting allows quick use at room distances while the 6x setting is incredibly useful for engaging even small targets at 300 yards or beyond. Mated to the pictured Sionics rifle, the combination allows me to hit MOA sized targets at distance with the right ammunition:

To be clear, this is not a precision setup. While the rifle is certainly very accurate with the right ammunition (contrary to what you read on the internet, a legitimately sub MOA rifle is pretty rare to stumble on) and the 6x magnification setting allows stretching out to essentially the maximum effective range of the rifle, it’s possible to get a dedicated precision 5.56 gun that will shoot .5 MOA or better. You can then mount a lot more glass on top of the rifle and make very small groups at 500 yards and beyond.

That true precision rig, however, is going to be heavy. And at least double the cost of my already somewhat expensive setup. At the end of the day even the expensive precision rig is still going to be shooting a 5.56 projectile that is profoundly impacted by wind and certainly isn’t the greatest performer in terms of terminal ballistics beyond 300 yards.

In a 5.56 rifle I am looking for a good general performer. A package that will let me use the rifle effectively at typical defensive ranges that we see inside the United States, but that I can also use to reliably put down the occasional coyote or feral hog at distances still within the performance envelope of the 5.56 cartridge. As a general purpose rifle that’s a pretty darn good specification and the pictured rifle exceeds it.

Of course, if you ask someone how much magnification they want or how much range they want, the immediate answer will be “MORE”. There are now 1x-8x and even 1x-10x scopes on the market. More is better, right?

Not necessarily. There is no free lunch when it comes to these things. The more magnification you have on your optic, generally the more restrictive the “eye box” becomes. More magnification also tends to increase the expense and weight of the optic. Although Night Force’s 1x-8X is still lighter than my Viper PST-II despite the extra magnification, it is also more than double the price.

I’m sure the Night Force is a great optic, but I’m not so sure I’d shoot twice as well at distance with it even with the extra magnification it offers.

As I said, it’s not a precision rig…but it would be perfect for dealing with the sort of problem LAPD faced in North Hollywood in 1997.

…and that’s really the point, isn’t it?

The 5.56 loaded properly is splendid as a defensive option at the ranges typically used in the United States. It is, after all, an intermediate range cartridge. It can certainly be lethal at extended ranges, but if you routinely need to kill animals at longer ranges or if you have to routinely engage lethal threats at longer ranges you are probably best served by a different cartridge altogether.

To borrow a well-established phrase, mission drives the gear train. Understand what it is you are trying to accomplish with your rifle. If you are building a rifle for a specific purpose then by all means measure each possible component of the build in terms of how it helps achieve your end goal.

If, on the other hand, you are looking for a capable general performer that can do self defense at close range but still allows positive identification and good precision at distance, don’t get lost in the staggering number of options available on the market today. It helps to remember the intended purpose of the intermediate range rifle. Try to avoid forcing it into a role it was never intended to fill.

Your Colt 6920 will never be a true precision gun at 600 yards and your true precision gun will never be great at CQB distances…and that’s fine. Every equipment choice is a compromise in some form or fashion. Just pick the compromises you can actually live with.

The Aimpoint ACRO - Battery Life & Brightness Settings

Let’s talk about the elephant in the ACRO’s room:

Battery life.

Aimpoint’s goal with the ACRO is to produce an optic that has the rugged reliability that their long gun optics have become known for. They accomplished this by using an enclosed emitter design with a significant amount of armoring surrounding it. This “tube within a tube” method protects the electronics from the shock and impacts of the slide cycling and from the inevitable abuse that the optic will receive when users rack the slide with the optic itself rather than by using the serrations on the slide of the pistol.

It is tough to get the kind of durability that Aimpoint intended with the ACRO into a footprint that will fit relatively unobtrusively on a slide. It was also clearly a priority for Aimpoint that users should not have to remove the optic to replace the battery. Swirl all the intended design requirements together and it likely became clear early on they would have to use a different size battery.

Most slide-mountable red dot optics use a CR2032 coin-style battery, but the ACRO uses a CR1225 series battery. The size difference between them is roughly similar to the size difference between a quarter and a dime. The typical CR2032 has a power capacity of roughly 200 miliamp hours. The CR1225 has a power capacity of 45-50 mAh…around one fifth of the total capacity.

The ACRO has ten brightness settings accessible through the large up and down buttons on the left side of the optic. When you turn the optic on, it defaults to brightness setting 7 at which Aimpoint claims the CR1225 battery will last for a year. I’m sure they’re right.

Aimpoint’s reputation for optics with long battery life comes from careful engineering to make their LED circuits consume as little power as is technically possible. They are so good at this that their flagship long gun products have battery lives that can extend longer than a presidential term. That kind of battery life useful primarily because it means the end user doesn’t have to pay much attention to the state of their optic. If they are proactive enough to replace the battery in their Aimpoint CompM5 once a year, the optic will simply work whenever they reach for the gun it is attached to. This is a nice feature for defensive equipment that is usually needed with little to no advanced notice. If you are heading to a fight, odds are you are part of a military unit or a specialized law enforcement team and you have some time to get your equipment ready for it.

The typical Defensive Practitioner, whether they wear a uniform or not, is responding to an ambush attack that is usually a strictly come-as-you-are event. A police officer who gets a gun pulled on him during a traffic stop doesn’t have time to check the status of his weapon and his optic before the shooting starts. Average Joe trying to use the ATM doesn’t get to make sure his weapon is in a ready state before the violent felon pulls a gun and demands money.

There are advantages to an optic attached to a piece of life-saving equipment that will work even if you neglect to conduct any preventative maintenance for a prolonged period of time.

Trouble is that LED circuits, even the ones used by Aimpoint, consume power on an exponential curve. The battery life for an Aimpoint CompM5 on a night vision setting can extend to almost a decade. On setting 7, the battery life is roughly 5 years. On setting 8, the claimed battery life is one year. Each higher brightness setting pulls exponentially more power from the battery.

The ACRO’s LED is no different. I’m sure that the CR1225 battery in it will last for a year at setting 7, but I find that setting 7 is not useful in a lot of circumstances. It is worth noting here that the ACRO does not have an auto-adjust feature on it, so ensuring that the optic is on the right setting for conditions is entirely up to you. If I’m in a rather tamely lit indoor environment setting 7 works fairly well. If I am in, say, a very brightly lit store with white tiles on the floor and a white ceiling (Think the aesthetic of a Target) then I’m going to need the optic on at least an 8 to reliably pick it up.

If I am outdoors on the range on a sunny day, I have to have the optic set to maximum output to be able to pick up the dot.

Everyone sees the world through a bespoke set of hardware and so what my eyes need might not be the same as what your eyes need. Maybe you need less power, maybe you need more. I have no way of knowing what the world looks like through your lenses.

It does bring up an interesting problem, though…what setting do I use for my optic? Some say that the correct approach is to use the lowest setting where you can see the dot. This has merit as it tends to make the dot appear crisp and perfectly round while avoiding the dot becoming misshapen or irregular as it can be on higher settings than necessary.

But the lowest setting for what lighting conditions?

Think about a typical trip to the store on a typical afternoon. When I pull into the parking lot with the sun near its zenith, there’s no way I’m going to pick up the dot on setting 7. If I dial up the dot to the setting 9 or 10 I need for the parking lot, once I get into the store I’m going to have more of a smear than a dot…and on the highest settings I will actually see smear-like red artifacts around the outside edge of the optic’s window. Working with the optic in lower light situations I have most certainly confused some of the “bloom” artifacts from the too-bright-for-conditions LED setting for the actual aiming point of the optic.

Well then, you might say, leave the optic on maximum and practice until you can tell the actual aiming dot from the bloom on the edges. Way ahead of you.

Trouble is that in the process I discovered that leaving the optic on its brightest setting drops the battery life to just a little over ten days.

Now you can start to see why I consider having a complete and useful set of iron sights on the gun an absolute requirement. The idea of using the tube of the ACRO itself as sort of a rear ghost ring sight with a suppressor height front sight isn’t something I’m a fan of for reasons I will discuss in a future post. Suffice it to say that because I’m not sure if the brightness setting will be right for the conditions, I most definitely want iron sights I can refer to if I draw the gun and can’t see the dot.

After living with the ACRO for a while I’ve come up with some strategies that give me decent battery life and the highest chances of having a visible dot should I need to draw the pistol.

Firstly, I bought 50 Renata CR1225 batteries. You can buy ten batteries for less than 9 dollars from reputable outlets so it’s not a major financial imposition to have a bunch on hand. I keep five in my car’s glovebox, ten in my range bag, five with whatever case of 9mm ammunition I’m working through at the moment, five in my briefcase, five in my desk at the office, and the rest at home. As a result I am rarely more than a few steps from a supply of at least 5 batteries in my daily life.

In addition, I trimmed the packaging on one of the batteries down enough so that I could keep one in the empty space behind the magazine well of my Glock, retained with a grip plug:

With a little trimming the battery package will fit in the deadspace behind the mag well of the Glock pistols.

With this I have a spare battery literally on the gun at all times should I find that the battery is dead.

Aimpoint designed the ACRO to give you a warning that the battery needs to be replaced. When the battery is low it will reduce the output of the LED until the battery runs entirely out of power. Because I rarely have the optic set to the maximum brightness level, if I find I can’t bump the brightness of the dot up while I’m indoors it means that the LED is operating in battery saver mode and it’s time to replace the battery.

Because batteries are cheap and I keep a bunch of them, the sensible thing is to simply replace the battery proactively. Rather than push the boundaries of battery life, I simply replace the battery in the optic once a month. I am typically performing some level of maintenance on the pistol around then anyway (usually just a wipe-down and lubrication) so it isn’t a hardship to take the two minutes necessary for a battery change at the same time.

I know, I know…somebody out there is going to be awfully perturbed at the idea of having to change the optic’s battery once a month, but please note what I said: I’m performing some level of maintenance and inspection on the pistol I’m carrying anyway, so it doesn’t cost me anything extra in terms of time or effort to just replace the battery.

If you aren’t at least inspecting and lubricating your carry gun once a month, consider starting that practice.

So while there has been much Sturm und Drang about the battery life of the optic, having spent time with it for a while I don’t think it’s really a big deal. I’m willing to trade the larger battery of the RMR for the benefits that Aimpoint’s enclosed emitter design brings to the table.

An auto-adjust feature would certainly be nice, but I can certainly work with the optic as-is. I just dial the optic up to setting 9 in the morning and then down to about 6 when I take off the gun at home in the evening where I’m going to be reaching for a shotgun if I need a weapon anyway.

The Aimpoint ACRO - Purchase & Installation

During the SHOT show in 2019, Aimpoint released a new contender for the pistol mounted red dot sight market called the ACRO. Aimpoint has become the default option for red dot sights on long guns of all stripes due to a history of producing optics that have extraordinary battery life and a well earned reputation for nearly bomb-proof reliability.

Red dots are nothing new to handguns, of course, as competitors have been using them for years. Crucially, they have been running red dots on a static mount that is attached to the frame of the handgun. This means the optic doesn’t really experience any of the forces involved in the cycling of the pistol. Unfortunately this arrangement isn’t practical for a duty or concealed carry weapon.

It became clear fairly early on that if you want to have a red dot sight (RDS) mounted to a pistol for duty or concealed carry that it needed to be fitted to the slide of the pistol somehow. Various attempts were made at fixtures that fit into the rear sight dovetail allowing mounting an optic. Eventually it seemed that milling the slide to accept the optic directly is the best way to accomplish the task.

The forces an optic is exposed to while mounted to the slide of a semi-automatic handgun are considerable, especially when you consider how small the internal components have to be to create an optic that is compact enough to fit up there in the first place. Trijicon’s popular RMR sight was a natural fit for the purpose, but early generations of the RMR tended to get beaten to a premature death living on top of the slide of a pistol. Later generation RMR’s are much improved in durability, but their open-emitter design and the need to remove the optic to replace the battery (often requiring re-zeroing your pistol) left plenty of room for an RDS option that was more impervious to the elements and allowed a battery change without removing the optic.

Enter the ACRO: A closed emitter design that incorporates what Aimpoint has learned about making a durable, reliable optic in the last 45 years. Their long-gun oriented red dots are the gold standard for durable, combat-reliable optics with widespread adoption by police and military forces around the world. So naturally if anyone could make the killer pistol RDS it would have to be Aimpoint, right?

Aimpoint even claims that the optic was tested to 20,000 rounds through a Glock chambered in .40 S&W. That exact weapon is used by an elite counter-terrorism unit that has been experimenting with combat application for pistol-mounted red dots for years. To those in the know, this was no coincidence.

I pre-ordered my Aimpoint shortly after SHOT and in late May I received my ACRO from the big brown truck of happiness.

Decisions, decisions…

There are some decisions to be made after you have started walking the path of the pistol-mounted RDS.

The first thing you must decide is how, exactly, are you going to mount the optic? Are you going to have a company mill the slide of your pistol? Perhaps purchase a new slide that comes pre-milled for your optic of choice?

I made the decision to purchase a Gen5 Glock 17 MOS pistol. I knew that Aimpoint had done a lot of testing with Glock MOS pistols and that the 9mm MOS offerings from Glock were likely to win a number of large federal contracts in the near future. Shortly after my purchase the US Border Patrol and the United States Secret Service both announced they were adopting Gen5 9mm pistols for issue, and that MOS guns were going to be part of those contracts.

Purchasing the MOS Glock avoids the need to have a pistol permanently altered at considerable expense, and keeps my equipment in line with the way large-scale institutional users will likely end up mounting dots to their pistols. Plus it was an excuse to buy a new gun…and who doesn’t like that?

If you choose to have a slide milled to accept the optic, you have to choose the company doing the work with care: Not all milling jobs are created equal. Work from a reliable shop who knows exactly what they are doing might be a little more expensive, but given the problems I’ve seen from bad mill-jobs out there I’ll happily pay a few percentage points more to get a product that isn’t a perpetual headache.

May I take your plate, sir?

If you buy a factory MOS style gun, they are not cut for a specific optic. This means you will need some form of adapter plate for the optic. Again, because I knew how much work Aimpoint had done with Glock MOS pistols I trusted that they would have an adapter plate that wouldn’t give me heartburn.

Aimpoint has a number of different adapter plates available to fit the ACRO to various factory optics-ready options, so you aren’t necessarily stuck buying a Glock if you want to use the ACRO.

I used the factory mounting screws included with the Glock MOS pistol (the Glock MOS guns come with a couple of plates) to mount the Aimpoint plate to the slide of the pistol. The ACRO mounting plate comes with a small vial of Vibra-Tite. Our friends at Aridus Industries have found that the Vibra-Tite product works a bit better to prevent the loosening of screws than the typical LocTite products, so I was happy to see I didn’t need to break out the tube of Vibra-Tite I keep around. Following the instructions for mounting the plate and using the Vibra-Tite very carefully is important if you want to avoid having the plate come loose on you down the road.

Iron Sights

Yes, even though I purchased an optic whose raison d'être is to be the un-killable pistol-mounted RDS, I was going to make absolutely certain that I had good iron sights on the gun. I was specifically looking for sights that would give me a lower 1/3 co-witness, meaning the sights are visible through the lowest third of the optic’s window.

Wayne Dobbs (who does some work for Aimpoint) mentioned that they had mounted Ameriglo suppressor-height sights on their test Glock MOS guns and that they provided a good lower 1/3 co-witness. I ordered the Ameriglo GL-511 sights (tritium front sight with an orange outline, plain black rear sight) to function as the backup iron sights on the pistol.

The sights do indeed co-witness in the lower 1/3 for a sight picture that isn’t what I’m used to, but is still more than usable, even at speed. Spoiler alert: This would come in handy later.

Installation

Installing everything was fairly easy. I would urge you to follow the instructions for installation carefully. Take the time to degrease the screws and the holes they will screw into. Follow the Vibra-Tite instructions for use to the letter. Don’t go nuts over-torquing the screws. Etc.

I would recommend installing your iron sights and getting them set up more or less for mechanical zero before you start mounting the optic. It’s simply easier to work with the slide to mount the sights properly without the optic in the way.

The entire process took roughly half an hour, but primarily because I took the time to thoroughly degrease the parts and I allowed for the manufacturer recommended setup time for the Vibra-Tite. While the process is not difficult it is detailed, so take your time and get the details right. Ideally you expect the resulting setup to survive thousands of rounds of live fire and manipulations…so it’s worth your time and effort to try and get it right.

All that was left was to head to the range to zero the irons and the ACRO…and we’ll discuss that next time!

Critical Considerations for the Defensive Practitioner

Human perception is a fascinating topic, and certainly one that you could spend the time it takes to earn a Doctorate’s Degree or more studying. When it comes to self-defense and related disciplines, it is important to factor it in to your training as well as your pre-gaming of what to do “in case something happens.”

The current trend amongst many shooters is to try to perform all tasks as rapidly as possible. Some of this trend is admirable and useful, some of it is possibly unproductive, and potentially harmful for real world encounters.

Most criminal acts do not start with a buzzer or the turn of a target. In reviewing numerous accounts from victims and law enforcement officials, as well as hours of video, it is apparent that many conflicts have warning cues, or pre-fight indicators. Upon the recognition of those indicators, individuals must successfully position themselves and use verbal interaction to clarify the nature of the conflict. This positioning and interaction with their assailant takes time, space, and mental processing power to achieve.

In order to solve the other problems, a self-defense practitioner should have a solid command of the fundamentals of combat marksmanship. That means things like the draw, aiming, and trigger control should be accomplished subconsciously. The more mental processing an individual must commit to the fundamentals of marksmanship, the less mental processing power one has available for things like problem solving and movement to cover and communication, all these tasks are critical in terms of survivability in a real fight.

Once that expertise is achieved, the practice of movement, communication, and problem solving is required. Real fights often require you to think as well as react. A true fight is often a split attention situation, especially as it initially unfolds. An unknown contact may be somebody out shopping, a panhandler, or a violent criminal, and work is required on your part to figure out exactly what you are dealing with.

Successful criminals often play on the average human’s ability to only focus on one thing at a time. A standard ruse to get close to a victim often involves things like asking for the time, directions, or a cigarette. Once a victim’s attention is drawn to whatever the criminal asked for, the criminal’s true intent manifests. This is often revealed through movement that establishes positional dominance, and often backed up with the introduction of a weapon. This violence of action and surprise allows the criminal to demand what it is that they want, be it money, cell phone, or the victim’s person, possibly all the above.

Justified Defensive Concepts recognizes the need to be technically proficient, and we’ll train you to do that in our classes. Once we’ve achieved the first goal, we’ll introduce you to performing technically while dealing with other tasks, be it communicating, moving, or problem solving, or all three. It is our opinion that as a well-rounded defensive practitioner, you need to be able to do more than react to the sound of a beep. You need to be carefully prepared for the threat’s reality.

The Price of Not Practicing

It is often said that defensive skills are perishable. If you don't continue to maintain or improve those skills they diminish. Practice is the "rent" that is due to keep the skill at a high level of on demand proficiency. This mantra can certainly apply to more than defensive skills but if you're reading this you are probably more concerned with your defensive skill set than your observance of the niceties of society.

I recently worked with a shooter that I had trained three years ago. When I last saw them on the range, they were doing pretty well. I found out that they changed jobs a year later and hadn't done any firearms skill maintenance in the interim.

While working with them, I noticed that their ability to hit had held up reasonably well. What hadn't stayed with them was speed, manipulations, and malfunction clearance. I suspect that it is going to take them several weeks of dedicated practice to get anywhere close to what they had before. And when I say "dedicated practice" I mean daily dry fire, 4-6 times a week, on top of 1-2 range sessions a week. In other words, 40-60 hours of work, and I don't know that will get them 100%, but it might get them to 80% or that neighborhood.

There are several things that can get you firearms proficiency. Going to a class and learning is certainly one of those things, but it doesn't end there. If you take a class and then do no dry fire or any other shooting afterwards, you won't get the opportunity to really put those lessons into practice. While the class itself may have been fun and solid learning, the real rewards you get from a good class don't happen during the class, they happen later. Only when you put in the WORK!

I am advocating that you continue your training and put in the work to develop and maintain your skill. Justified Defensive Concepts would be honored if you came to train and work with us. We will respectfully challenge you, give you significant personal coaching during class and we'll give you a plan to maintain and/or improve your skills after the class. Like seeing a personal trainer, we'll give you a path toward improvement!

If you're serious about your firearms skills be sure to put in regular practice. Do the work! It has been asked before, "if you knew somebody was going to try to harm you tomorrow, how would you train today?"

What is JDC about?

The core motivation behind the formation of Justified Defensive Concepts is to address a void that we see in the training market. There is a great deal of emphasis on technical proficiency in the industry and that is a good thing. The ability to shoot well is absolutely critical in the lawful and effective use of a firearm for defense. We believe in holding ourselves and our clients to a very high standard of shooting. All but the most elite performers will find the time and accuracy standards we present to be a challenge to meet or exceed.

Our focus at JDC goes beyond technical proficiency. We want to develop the critical decision making skills necessary to lawfully use force. The ability to shoot with speed and precision is a force multiplier…but defending yourself requires more than just being able to shoot with speed and precision. In the real world, you will have to accurately read a situation and respond to it appropriately while your life and future hang in the balance.

Developing technical proficiency to the point where you can deliver on an almost subconscious level allows the limited processing bandwidth in your brain to process more than just running the gun.

In a JDC class we will push you to achieve a higher level of technical shooting performance. We will also put you through drills designed to familiarize you with making use of force decisions at speed. You will learn just how much of your active focus is necessary to deliver on target when your focus is divided with performing other tasks.

The first time you experience the need to assess a possible threat and react to a rapidly changing situation shouldn’t be when you are faced with a real life use of force.

The folks at Civilian Carry Radio were kind enough to have us on their Community podcast to discuss the philosophy behind JDC. You can catch a replay of the livestream below:

https://youtu.be/4mJPC5VV2iY

What can you expect from a JDC class?

• A 1:4 instructor to student ratio - This allows us to provide a safe training environment and to offer individual attention to each client.

• Coaching - Specific to your performance based on what experienced instructors are seeing from you

• Challenging technical shooting - All but the most skilled shooters will find our time and accuracy standards to be tough…but it is tough love. The accountability for using lethal force is unforgiving. We hold you to a high standard on the range because we know you will be held to a high standard in the real world.

• Decision making - We will expose you to drills that force you to focus on something besides controlling the gun to help build your ability to think behind the gun and to show you just how much active attention you need to perform.

• A path to improvement - Our instructors will give you a path to improving your skillsets and abilities…including suggestions for seeking out other training opportunities from other qualified instructors.

We aren’t just looking to fill seats in classes. Our hope is that we can build a solid relationship with our clients that helps them achieve their goals as Defensive Practitioners.