When firearms trainer John Farnam worked with a group of state police instructors recently to strengthen their urban rifle skills, he encountered a potentially fatal bad habit that he relentlessly drilled them to break.
The instant a shooting exercise ended, the instructors all engaged the manual safety on their AR-15s — a practice Farnam disdains as “ossified orthodoxy” passed down to active law enforcement from a tradition of “sterile competition” shooting.
Back in 1975, officer survival pioneer Pierce Brooks wrote the landmark book Officer Down, Code 3, in which he listed 10 Deadly Errors that get cops killed. High on his list was “relaxing too soon.”
Nearly four decades later, Farnam says that’s still a widespread problem, exemplified by instructors and officers alike prematurely activating the manual safety on their long guns.
“In training, officers are pressured routinely to let their guard down the moment they think an exercise has ended by engaging the safety lever way too soon,” Farnam says. “That naively assumes additional shooting will not be necessary.
“The justification offered for this practice is that it’s necessary for range safety. But safety for whom?
“You will fight as you train. This dangerous habit, like other training scars, can carry over onto the street, where under the intense stress of an armed confrontation officers may robotically lock up their gun while an unforeseen threat may still exist. I don’t care if Michael the Archangel said to do this, it’s wrong!
“If I had a dime for every trainee who pointed a rifle or shotgun at a surprise target, pulled the trigger, and nothing happened because the safety had been prematurely engaged, I could retire.”
Farnam recommends that a four-part step-down procedure be faithfully incorporated in your shooting drills and applied on the street. After you discharge what you believe will be your last round and additional shots do not seem imminent:
1.) Scan: “Don’t stand and gawk at what you’ve just shot at,” he says. “Come down to a ready position, scan side to side, and look behind you. Moving your head in conscious scanning is the only way to break tunnel vision.”
2.) Reload: “In a real life-or-death encounter, you’ve probably shot three times the number of rounds that you can remember. Ideally, you want to reload during a tactical pause — when you want to, not when you have to.”
3.) Move: “Get off the X. Move away from the threat and get behind cover, if you’re not already there.”
4.) Engage the Safety: “Only after you’ve done the first three steps, in whatever order seems appropriate under the circumstances, should you consider activating the safety and slinging the gun. The safety should always be on when the gun is slung, but always off—ready to fight — whenever the gun is in your hands.”
This will seem controversial to some trainers, Farnam predicts, “but ranges are inherently dangerous places. We do what we reasonably can to make them safe, but our product must always be victory on the street.
“We’re training Operators on police ranges, not Rockettes. Any preoccupation with eliminating range risks that impedes the goal of saving officers’ lives when bad guys try to take them is counterproductive.”
John Farnam, president of Defense Training International, can be reached at (970) 482-2520 or via email at JSFarnam@aol.com.
