Gunfighters’ Ethos of Honor in the Old West They were called gun-men, gunmen, shootists, man-killers, and gunslingers, but the Western press eventually settled on the all-inclusive term “gunfighter.” By definition, they were “anyone in the Old West who took part in one or more notable exchanges of gunfire among civilians, not involving Native Americans…
Category: Training
Time to Get Your Ruck On
Armed Citizen Corner: Shooting at Moving Vehicles
Shooting at moving vehicles To shoot or not to shoot is the decades-old question when confronted with the decision to shoot the driver of a vehicle you perceive as intending to run you over. Some departments strictly forbid their officers from shooting at moving vehicles. As with any use of force, there are many…
The Armed Citizen Corner: Criminal Mindset – Make Yourself Harder to Kill
Criminal Mindset – Make Yourself Harder to Kill It might be cheesy to open an article up with a quote from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, but it applies so well; if you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. Today we are going to talk about…
Lessons Learned from the Battlefield: Close with the Enemy
Lessons Learned from the Battlefield: Close with the Enemy Most hand-to-hand fighting is over who controls the weapons. The Irrigation Ditch The Rangers had been on the ground for less than a minute when small-arms fire cracked from close range. After evacuating two wounded—one with a life-threatening gunshot wound—they began clearing a large grassy…
Lessons Learned from the Battlefield: “Live” Training Pays Off
Lessons Learned from the Battlefield: “Live” Training Pays Off Memorizing TTPs won’t save you; fighting under resistance will. Baghdad Checkpoint The gunner let loose a long burst of machine-gun fire through the windshield of a speeding car. Days earlier, two Rangers had been killed nearby when a “pregnant” woman detonated a suicide vest at…
Resource Library: Seven Pillars of Small War Power
Seven_Pillars_of_Small_War_Power THE WORLD SEEMED to breathe a collective sigh of relief at the end of the long Cold War. That momentous event, however, did not mark the end of global armed conflict. While the number of armed conflicts worldwide has been declining since peaking in the early 1990s, and a conventional war between two…
Shoot & Scoot
Lessons: Windows and Doors “Frame” you as a target, AVOID standing in them. If you must shoot out of a window or door, lower your profile. OODA Loop 101: Never Stay in one place too long in a gunfight; ‘Shoot and Scoot’ or ‘Get off the X’ and force your enemy to re-calibrate. Success…
Trauma Medicine: YOUR TOURNIQUET IS NOT A SYSTEM. Are You Pretending To Be Prepared?
YOUR TOURNIQUET IS NOT A SYSTEM. Are You Pretending To Be Prepared? It’s easy to feel like you’ve “checked the box” by carrying a tourniquet. I see it all the time. Someone straps one on their kit or throws it into their glove box, and suddenly the feel squared away for trauma response. Here’s…
Armed Citizen Corner: Shotguns vs. Drones – A Clay Shooter’s Guide to Defeating Enemy Swarms
Shotguns vs. Drones: A Clay Shooter’s Guide to Defeating Enemy Swarms In the escalating drone wars, where fiber optic and First-Person View (FPV) drones threaten soldiers and civilians alike, one man is turning the art of clay shooting into a battlefield advantage. Lieutenant Marco Angelelli, an Italian Air Force reserve officer and Italian Clay…