Saturday, July 17, 2010

Meditations on Platform

When it comes to your defensive shooting platforms, I'm a big fan of getting out there and shooting a bunch and picking what feels right for you. I do not think that any single platform dominates, performs better, or is perfect. When you decide on a platform, my suggest is to use it, train with it, and if you get bored with it, switch to something else. That's right, change your platform, and you SHOULD change your platform. Why? A couple of reasons:

1) You may discover that another platform works better for you in the end. Your instincts and work are not necessarily intuitive to the system you have initially chosen. You have two options, try something else or train hard with your platform and hope the issue never comes up. In my opinion, you are better served using your training hours not to correct non-intuitive movements, but to practice shooting the gun.

2) When we get bored with a platform or vehicle of shooting, we don't practice enough, we don't shoot, train, or work as hard. Why would we? It's boring. Then it's time to change your platform and shake things up a bit. Does it mean you've mastered that gun? Maybe, maybe not, probably not, but you aren't going to master it if you don't care about shooting it.

Keep in mind the platform that works for one does not always work for another. For instance, I do not rely on an AR platform as a primary defensive weapon. Why not? Well a variety of reasons, I never can seem to get the gun to feel right, even with 50 bajillion adjustable accessories. I don't like the AR platform bolt release, in fact, I HATE the bolt release, my instinct is to run a charging handle by hand to release a bolt. I don't like malfunction clearing drills on the AR platform, they feel awkward and completely counter-intuitive to me. Finally, I don't have preference in the 5.56/.223 chambering the guns normally come it. That's a lot of reasons and yes, I could train nearly all of them away, if I spent hundreds or thousands of hours clearing malfunctions, releasing bolts, and adjusting the gun to fit. OR I could just pick up a gun that feels right, works the way I expect and fires a round I prefer, like a plain old standby M1 Carbine.

Some may argue that one platform is better than another, I'll just continue to point out that not everyone is made equal. A person who feels well armed with 15 rounds of .30 Carbine and can run the gun is just as deadly as a person with 30 rounds of .223 and who can run the guns. The point here is not that one platform works better or worse, it's that shooting skills apply across all weapons platforms and we should simply choose the guns of our preference.

-Rob

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