What can you learn from a playhouse? Life-saving tips, actually.
Step 1 of the house clearing exercise – opening the door. The Glock is equipped with a Simunitions conversion and the new LaserMax Native Green laser.
I just returned from a few days at Gunsite Academy – one of the nations premier shooting academies located just outside of Prescott, Arizona. That’s pronounced more like “biscuit” by the way, not “Scott.” You may also know of Prescott as Sturm, Ruger and Company builds most of their pistols there. It’s a gun friendly place to say the least.
I ended up at Gunsite thanks to the good folks at LaserMax. They’ve got some big news that will ripple through the laser sighting industry over the next couple of years – Native Green technology. We’ll talk more about that next week when I write a separate article on Native Green laser technology. For now, just be aware that green laser light is currently generated by shooting an infrared laser through some ‘magic’ crystals to “create” green light. Native Green lasers generate bright green light right off the bat with no conversion required.
Chris is not telling me how awesomely tactical I am. He’s telling me to stop “water skiing” and that I just shot the bad guy in the hand.
The LaserMax team enlisted the Gunsite staff to help us test out the new LaserMax Native Green lasers in a variety of scenarios, one of which was clearing the famous Gunsite Playhouse. The Playhouse is a specially constructed building designed to simulate a home or business with multiple rooms, hallways and hidden corners and nooks. In other words, it has lots of places for innocent bystander and bad guy targets to hide. The Playhouse is set up to handle either live fire from real guns or Simunitions marking projectile rounds. We used Glocks configured with Simunitions conversions so we could easily see hits. Using Simunitions in the Playhouse also allowed us to take pictures from a catwalk above during the exercises without risk of losing photographers to friendly fire.
I’m an experienced shooter and have taken a number of self-defense shooting classes. One predictable outcome from every training experience is that there are always leaning epiphanies. This time was no different.
First, I must stress how much our Gunsite Rangemasters, Mike Moore and Chris Weare, emphasized that you never, ever, ever, ever want to clear a house on your own. It’s a bad tactic and you’re at a major disadvantage from the start. The purpose of this drill was to learn some basic clearing techniques in the event you had to “clear” a building in order to get out of it, or perhaps reach a loved one in trouble. If you ever arrive at your home or business and see signs that there’s been a break in, back up and call 911. Don’t go in on your own.
We were given minimum instructions: open the front door and “deal” with things. That’s it. At the end of my three or four minute house clearing, I thought about what went right and what went wrong.
Read the rest at OutdoorHub.com!
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