I just finished Dave Spaulding’s Vehicle Combatives class. You can find out more about Dave here.
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| Dave Spaulding |
He claims it’s a watered-down civilian version of a course
he developed for undercover narcotic officers.
This doesn’t upset me. I don’t
have the same needs and requirements of LEOs.
What I wanted was training on a shooting solution. This course provided the information and
practice.
All car hijackings, kidnappings, assassinations and
terrorism start with violence. This
course doesn’t teach you how to recognize the developing patterns or tactical
set-ups. It’s a two-day course and
you’re on the range for most of it. But
there is an intellectual side to this.
Adults learn better when we see the reason for what we need to do. Here’s some of the ideas Dave worked with.
Dave had some interesting ideas about life at the
criminal/citizen interface. He points
out that as “good guys” we have a set of rules/behaviors not recognized by
criminals. We need to reflect these
differences in our training. The example
he gave was our concern about stray rounds from “pray and spray” shooting. The criminal doesn’t care who gets shot. He is going to dump rounds downrange and hope
to get a hit or two out of it. This
impacts, pun intended, the concept of stepping sidesways every 3-4 rounds and
moving off-line while reloading. The
criminal isn’t taking aimed shots, he’s just dumping rounds at you. So my conclusion is when faced with a single
opponent maybe it’s better to focus on hitting your target and not trying to
upset his aiming by moving around. My
other conclusion is high capacity magazines are a great invention. They are a need , not a want.
The two mostly likely scenarios civilians experience are an
attack for the vehicle (carjacking) and attack around the vehicle (robbery). Willy Sutton was once asked, “Why do you rob
banks?” His answer: “Because that’s
where the money is.” The same answer applies to “Why are both crimes
concentrated on the urban environment?
There are 256 million vehicles (cars, trucks, motorcycles, etc )
registered and most of them will be in the population centers.
We were told the first American carjacking occurred in Detroit
in the 1980’s and the problem continues to grow. As much as I hate to admit it, that makes sense. Why try to steal a car and have to hotwire
it, or defeat alarms and deterrents, when you can steal one with the engine
running.
Dave’s numbers suggest:
Half the carjacking
attempts are successful
84%
do not result in injury
Handguns
are used 79% of the time (no surprise here!)
Long
guns are used 10%
The
rest is a mixed bag of disparity of force.
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| The students practice drawing from a confined seat, like a car seat. the far left guy is doing it right. He's leaning forward to make space. The woman in front on the right is leaning to the side, where there may not be any space. |
Think about the places you find yourself with the car
stopped and motor running or keys in ignition: traffic control signs, parking
lots, attempting to make a turn, waiting for the car in front of you to do
something, gas stations. I’m sure you
can think of others. Massad Ayoob likes
to say, “Know where the attack will occur and have a proven defense in
place.”
Change your habits in these
locations. The proven defense isn’t
always a physical altercation; it could be being alert, not dawdling getting in
or out, and taking the keys out the car at gas stations. It could also be driving over someone.
Fighting starts in the mind.
We all know this. Everything else
are just tools. It starts with a
previously made decision based on rational thought about when and where to
fight back. After the decision is made
and the tripline tripped, Jeff Cooper’s Principles of Self Defense should be
your operational mode.
Just remember what John Wayne told Ron Howard in his last
movie, “The Shootist.” I’ll paraphrase,
but you can find it online.
“..I learned early on that some men will pause, or take a
breath (before shooting) and I won’t.”
Awareness and willingness are the two major factors needed
to prevail in combat. As the CIA
teaches: Avoid…Evade…Failing that, counter with great enthusiasm!
That’s quite a bit to think about and we still haven’t fired
a round.
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| It was like I was in that TV commercial with everyone fighting because someone was always blocking the view with their oversize camera. It's a good thing a armed society is a polite society, cause I was just a P.O.ed |
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