Year: 2016

My good friend Eric, who I refer to in this blog as Bluedreaux, is a kind, polite, gentle, and thoughtful man. He brought this article (click on the link at the bottom of this blog entry) to my attention.

Bluedreaux is a guy who thinks a lot. He comes up with different ways of looking at things, and I appreciate that about him. But he’s also a practical man. And he is also a violent man at times. 

You see, violence is part of Bluedreaux’s job. He is a police officer. Like all cops, he’s learned how to employ violence to bring people who choose to act in violation of Society’s laws back inside the bounds of those laws. He does so at Society’s behest, with Society’s permission; in fact, he is obligated to do so!

The idea that violence is sometimes necessary to the preservation of one’s life or the preservation of social order is ancient. NO society that has ever survived long enough to have records of its existence has ever pretended otherwise. But we have a growing sentiment in America (and to a lesser degree, western Europe as well) that pretends to believe that violence is always bad.  

This alarms me. For people to actually believe such a thing, they have to commit the most incredible contortions of logic and understanding I can possibly imagine. Yet they are doing it, in increasing numbers, and their viewpoint has become a serious factor in social discourse in our day and age. 

Now, my regular readers (all 3 of you, thanks for that!) know that I am a physician. My training and temperament, unlike Bluedreaux’s, are not geared toward rapid deployment of force or violence when a difficult situation arises. (And believe me, such situations are not uncommon in the ER!) My first instinct in such a situation is to try to de-escalate the situation as rapidly as possible so we can make sure that people who need care can get it in a timely manner. Almost all the time that works. But sometimes it doesn’t, and in those circumstances, I call the police to settle it down. 

But if the police can’t get there before some bad stuff is going down, I will not stand down nor run away. If my people are at risk, I have to act in my (and their) own defense. I once had to fetch a loaded rifle from my car and bring it into the ER–thank God I didn’t have to use it, but if the situation had devolved as I felt it was likely to, it was either send rounds downrange or die. Fortunately,  none of my staff mentioned my action to the Corporate Pukes who ran that hospital, or I’d likely have been fired and God knows what other bad things might have happened (even though at the time I was a sheriff’s deputy, you never know with Corporate Pukes!)  But my staff made it clear that they appreciated my willingness to face the wrath of the CP’s in defense of their lives, so that was nice… but truth to tell, I could not have done otherwise and continued to look at my face in the mirror every morning. 

Violence–or the threat of violence, the willingness to use violence–is not always the answer. But sometimes it is the only answer. And when it is the only answer, no other answer will serve. 

 

http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/2011/03/violence-is-golden/

Greetings from the surface of the sun! Well, maybe not exactly, but late July and most of August in west Texas feels like it could be… 

So, in my Kit-Derp blog a while back I promised to write about the whole competitive shooting vs tactical training issue. Looks like it’s still pretty much a hot topic, judging by the bullshit being spouted by internet ninjas on various websites lately! Not to mention what I hear from cops I hang out with here and there. 

Speaking of hanging out… I have to say my choice of people to hang out with lately has been gravitating toward a very different demographic… they’re not just folks who like to shoot guns, but people who like to shoot who also like to fly airplanes (they’re called pilots).  Part of the reason I think I like hangin’ with pilots is that the bullshit level is REALLLLLLLLY low. And I’ve concluded that part of the reason for that is that you can’t become a pilot by reading books and magazines and by hangin’ out on the internet. You actually have to DO stuff. Stuff that’s pretty hard to do, that requires critical thought, coordination, planning, and expenditure of your hard-earned cash. And after you do all that stuff, you actually have to PROVE IT. You have to pass a series of really difficult examinations to demonstrate that you can actually fly an airplane competently, safely, and not kill yourself or your examiner. 

Funny thing: having to do all that stuff seems to reduce the Idiot and Bullshit Factor  (which I will hereafter refer to as the IBF) by about 99% in any discussion I’ve had with pilots, not just on the internet, but also in Real Life.

Now, I’m not saying that we should have a federal regulatory body like the FAA to regulate all gun owners and firearms users… but if we did, I expect the IBF would go waaaaaaaaaaaay down on internet firearms discussion boards!

But to get serious for a moment here, there is a parallel to this pilot competency reducing IBF in the shooting world as well, but among my tactical friends it’s not recognized very well. It’s called competitive shooting. 

“Nonsense!” my tactard acquaintances bark, puffing out their kevlar-clad chests. “If you shoot competition, you’ll do that same stuff in a real fight and get yourself killed!”

Uh-huh. I see that happen all the time, folks.

NOT!!

Despite the fact that I hear this criticism almost every time the competition discussion comes up, I’ve never once seen a tactical shooter get into a jam because he did something stupid in a real fight that he’d learned in competition. On the other hand, I have seen (and heard of even more) cases where a tactical operator made a blunder in the Hot Zone because he had a training deficiency and/or an equipment malfunction that could have been eliminated easily by regular shooting “under pressure” (i.e., shooting in competition). 

Here’s a short list of things that competitive shooting will do for you as a shooter:

1. It will make you shoot more.  Totally true, bro. If for no other reason than to avoid looking like an idiot in front of “civilians”, everybody who shoots competitively practices more. Maybe not regularly, but 3 or 4 days before the match you’ve committed to, you’ll drive out to the range to put a couple boxes of ammo thru paper just to shake the cobwebs out. If you do that, even if it’s only 4 matches a year, you’ll likely double the round count of the average cop in America.  And guess what? Shooting more is good for your competency with your firearms!

2. It will make you shoot faster and more accurately.  Nobody who ever got into a gunfight said, “Man I wish I’d been slower and more inaccurate when I returned fire on that wannabe cop-killer.” And while folks sometimes quote Bill Jordan’s “Speed is fine, but accuracy is final,” quip. Which is true, but remember that he was the guy who could put a bullet in the bull in 0.27 seconds! Listen up: the guy who shoots fastest and most accurately wins every match. EVERY MATCH. Even if you don’t want to win the match, the atmosphere of competition rubs off on everyone, and so everyone strives for faster, more accurate shooting. You can’t help it… it just rubs off on you! And when you couple this desire to be faster and more accurate, guess what? You will actually get faster, and more accurate.  Which means that if you ever get caught up in a gunfight–God forbid, you should strive to be in an Officer Involved Shooting, not a gunfight, every time–you’ll default to your baseline level of training, which will be faster and more accurate than it was before you got into competitive shooting. 

3. It will make you “one with your gun”.  Shooting in competition trains you to deal with gun-pukes under stress. Listen, if your gun malfs when you’re out plinking with your buddy on the back 40, you can say to hell with it, throw the thing in the bed of your pickup and get out another gun to play with. In a gunfight, not so much. And ditto in competition. Example: I took my Remington 11-87 tactical shotgun to a 3-gun match one time and it “larned me a lesson”. The ammo I’d brought was the new low-recoil stuff my agency had just issued us. I loaded up and started runnin’ and gunnin’ with my pistol, then my rifle; I was smokin’ the targets and feelin’ fine. Then I picked up my shotgun, chambered a round, nailed the first target, and had a jam. Wham-bam, I cleared it, fired again, and it jammed again… the gas generated by the low-recoil shells wasn’t sufficient to cycle the action fully, and I was stuck with a single-shot shotgun, and 6 more shotgun targets remained! What did I do? I dealt with it! After each shot, I rolled the shotgun, cleared the stovepiped case, manually loaded a fresh shell, blasted the target, rolled the shotgun, cleared the stovepiped case, etc. When I was done, I had cleaned all 8 targets with 8 shots, and my time was still faster than some of the guys in that match. (Needless to say, I switched back to regular shotgun loads after that stage!) Talking with my buddies after that stage was done, we were all asking ourselves what might have happened if we took that ammo in our shotguns on a hot entry? Can you imagine the pucker factor, trying to clear that jam in a narrow hallway with bullets flying at you? My point is this: every gun is capable of puking, and they tend to do it when you really need them not to. If you learn how to deal with gun-pukes under the stress of competition, you’re far more likely to be able to deal with a gun-puke in the middle of a firefight. 

4. It’s a great way to make sure your kit works.   Most tactical guys who refuse  competition will sooner or later give me this line: “That’s game-gun gear. I use real-world gun gear.” Well, duh, Fred Flintsone! There’s nothing in the rule book that says you can’t shoot with your duty rig. One sport, IDPA by name, has a special category for cops who shoot their duty rig in matches, and I’ve seen guys in both 3-Gun and IDPA matches do it! When I shoot a 3-gun match, I usually use the same guns I carried on duty, set up the way I carried them when I wore a SWAT uniform.  I wear a chest-rig that duplicates the magazine placement of my tactical armor vest. I’ve even shot a couple matches in full SWAT gear. And by doing so, I learned in a hurry what kit and which modifications were good, which were bad, and which were going to get folks killed. A couple of these lessons I learned were passed on to the other cops on my SWAT team, and after they tried them out, they spread to the entire department. 

There’s more, but I won’t labor the point any further. 

Here’s the take-home message, boys and girls: people who do real stuff in real time when there’s real consequences on the line tend to learn very quickly what is IBF versus what truly works. It applies to FAA-certified pilots, and it applies to firearms professionals. The Derp-addicted wannabe’s will never get this. 

Do yourself a favor: if you haven’t tried competitive shooting, give it a shot. You won’t lose anything, and you just might gain a whole lot of knowledge, experience, and competency. It’s a win-win!

Last week I shared a post on Facebook by Massad Ayoob in which he stated that your choice of defensive handgun caliber does matter.  I strongly agree with Mas on this, and said so, which caused heads to explode all over the interweb… so as promised, here’s the full explanation.

First, this is what I have been saying in my lectures/classes/training (and in my book) for 16 years: “If you are putting your bullets into your adversary’s critical anatomy, it doesn’t matter whether you’re shooting a 9mm or a 45.”  This is NOT THE SAME THING as saying, “a 9mm is as good as a .45 any day, any way,” which some people claim I have said.

I’ll tell you how this misunderstanding came about.

In the late 90’s, most PD’s were transitioning from 9mm handguns to .40 caliber or even .45 caliber. The thought process was that bigger had to be better, because the results in officer-involved shootings with 9mm handguns were so appallingly poor. Rather than blame bad shooting–which comes from bad training–these departments blamed the 9mm cartridge, and hoped to fix the problem by changing hardware. Such thinking is sheer lunacy, and the results have been predictably poor! 

I have always maintained–and the data bear me out–that the caliber you shoot the bad guy with is far less important than what part of the bad guy you shoot. Shot placement trumps caliber, when we’re talking about service caliber handguns. Rather than investing in new guns chambered for a bigger cartridge, I have continually advised PD’s (and civilians) to invest their money in better training so that the guns and bullets you’ve already paid for will be more effective. Unfortunately, the general mentality among PD’s and most gun-carrying civilians fails to acknowledge the need for good training.

In other words: if you are highly and effectively trained, it doesn’t matter a whole lot what caliber of handgun you’re required to carry for duty or personal use. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of people have ignored the first half of that statement: “if you are highly and effectivley trained…” The corollary is this: if you are lazy and untrained, your performance in a gunfight will suck no matter what caliber you’re using.

Anyways, the upshot of all this nonsense is that now we have folks saying that the experts (which apparently includes me) say there’s no difference between a 9mm and a 45 ACP bullet/handgun. Which is a huge misrepresentation of the case!

Look:  there are very real differences between the more powerful handgun calibers and guns and their less powerful brethren, and if you ignore those differences, you may do so at your peril. It is simply nonsense to say that a 9mm is equivalent to a 45 ACP, or vice versa. The physics alone should tell you that. And there are significant differences in performance between them which are very real.

For example, I have known for years that, generally speaking, a heavier .45 caliber bullet will perform much better than a lighter caliber/bullet after passing through a hard intermediate barrier than will a lighter 9mm bullet. The greater momentum of the heavier 230 gr bullet, among other things, is the main reason for this performance difference. This is one of the reasons I hunt deer, feral hogs, coyotes, and other critters with a .45 caliber handgun: they punch through hair & hide better than lighter, smaller bullets. I’ve proven it to my satisfaction on game, and on the firing range, shooting water jugs through windshields, and paper targets through automobile doors and windows in law enforcement firearms training.  And I’ve seen it demonstrated by ballistics experts in the lab, too.

A few years ago I was at the annual SOTA (Special Operations Training Association)  conference in Minnesota. Federal/ATK had sent their ballistics testing guru, Johann Boda, to offer a class in ballistics testing, and the conference organizers asked me to sit in as adjunct instructor. We had a lot of fun busting caps into gelatin blocks, and more than a few eyebrows were raised by some of the results. (Just as an aside, I refuse to recommend any 380 ACP pistol at any time for personal defense, largely on the basis of the appalling performance of EVERY factory round I’ve ever tested, and all of those we ran in that class.)  We shot gelatin blocks under all manner of circumstances that day, including intermediate barrier tests. By the end of the day, it was readily apparent that while some smaller caliber bullets will pass through tough intermediate barriers and still do the necessary ballistic work on a gelatin block on the other side, all .45 caliber projectiles tested (200 gr and 230 gr) performed to the FBI standard every time.

This is a very real difference in performance, my friends. It’s not made-up internet mall ninja bullshit. It’s real, it’s verifiable, it’s reproducible. But the crucial question that begs for an answer is this: will it make a difference to you should you get into a real-world deadly force situation?

And that, my friends, is anybody’s guess.

Because, as a friend of mine who has been to “the dance” more than a few times, you get the gunfight you get, not the gunfight you’d like to have. You have to fight with what you’ve got, no more, and hopefully no less.  

There are obvious advantages to carrying a 9mm pistol rather than a 45 caliber pistol. A small 9mm pistol can be really, really small, and really, really concealable. My teeny-weeny 9mm “always” gun is a Kahr PM9, which is so small and light I don’t even pay attention to it, the same way I don’t pay attention to my belt or my shoes after I put them on in the morning. Also, the 9mm will hold more rounds in the same weight/size gun as a larger caliber pistol, which means you can fire more times without reloading if necessary. This won’t matter in the “average” defensive shooting, which supposedly involves one good guy, one bad buy, fewer than 5 bullets, and elapses in about 3-5 seconds. Under such circumstances,  just about any ol’ gun will do. The problem is that in this day, the age of terrorist action,  the likelihood of having to defend against multiple assailants, at variable distances, with the possibility of having to fight through intermediate barriers, is a lot higher than it used to be. So most of us are making the decision to carry something better suited to a complex tactical situation than a 5-shot pocket revolver.

Whether you choose a hi-cap 9mm, a single-stack 1911, or something else in between (or outside the box entirely!) is, in the year of our Lord 2016 in America entirely up to you. It’s up to you to know the strengths and weaknesses of any weapon system or ammunition you might choose to carry, and since it’s your life on the line should the flag go up, I strongly urge you to study hard and choose wisely. Pick a platform that works for your real or anticipated mission profile, then train to use that platform/system to the highest standard of proficiency. Whether it’s 9mm, 40 S&W, or 45 ACP, take your pick and live with it.  

So let’s recap.

The most important weapon you have is your defensive mindset. Second priority is to ensure you’re trained to a level of at least conscious competence with your chosen defensive weapon(s). Choice of weapon and caliber is your third priority.

The first and second priorities boil down to training. You need to be trained at the beginning of your defensive life, and you need periodic retraining to stay current & proficient. Know the circumstances under which you might anticipate an attack, and have a pre-planned defense in place to meet it. Know your adversary’s vital target anatomy, so you know where to place your bullets. And be proficient with your firearms, so you can reliably place your bullets where they count.

Only after these priority challenges have been met should you concern yourself with what firearm, caliber, or ammunition you will carry.  

 

 

 

 

 

Unbelievable. 

Apparently there is some mall-ninja bad-ass-wannabe out there in cyberland, tapping away at  his keyboard in his Mommy’s basement, making claims that snipers should deliberately target the kidneys of their targets. I’ve run across references to this claim here and there, but this morning I was blown away by the following email:

Dr. Williams:

I am a nursing student  and one of my assignments is to explain why a sniper would want to shoot the kidneys (keeping the focus on the short term). My research has revealed that hemorrhage and pain are the major reasons to target the kidneys directly, with cavitation of the abdominal cavity as a secondary effect. If you have any input on the matter it would be greatly appreciated.

J.A.

Yep. That’s a real email. Somebody actually sent that to me. I won’t print the writer’s name, in case he isn’t just some internet whack-job, but is actually a real nursing student who is honestly seeking knowledge. But I will print my reply to this young seeker of knowledge:

J.A.:

I have no idea who would advise making the kidneys a target for snipers. It makes no physiological or tactical sense whatsoever, and as such I suspect it’s a fiction made up by poseurs who have little or no tactical training and almost certainly no actual killing experience, either animal or human. 

Military snipers train to incapacitate their targets with a single shot. Incapacitation on the battlefield is highly congruent with rapid death of the target. Centerfire rifle bullets are designed to produce incapacitating injury as quickly as possible. Incapacitation by GSW entails putting the bullet into the primary or secondary target anatomy. The primary target is the CNS, and the secondary target is the cardiovascular system that supports the CNS. The kidneys are part of neither. The kidneys are small, deep in the body, and in anatomic locations that medically-untrained snipers would have significant difficulty visualizing in the 3D human body. As such, deliberately targeting the kidneys is so far from practicable I actually laughed out loud in disbelief when I first read your email. 

Let me be perfectly clear: shooting an enemy combatant anywhere other than the CNS/CV bundle target zones would be, first, a failure to fulfill the tactical mission (incapacitate your target asap), and second, wanton cruelty. This is at best comic-book mall-ninja material, and should be rejected out of hand. 

I strongly urge you to tell whoever gave you this “assignment” that it is nonsense and should be rejected as complete and utter bovine excrement.

Sincerely, etc. 

Now, I do not believe that J.A. is actually a nursing student, nor that s/he was given this assignment by an instructor. I expect that in most non-violent gun-free-zone universities in the USA today, giving such an assignment would get an instructor shit-canned by the Dean of Faculty in record time.

But since there are untrained wannabes running around the internet advocating “the kidney shot” as a legitimate tool for the tactical toolbox, let me underscore my letter, above, once again:  THIS IS UTTER BULLSHIT.

J.A., tell your pals to buy a copy of my book and read it. If you have any questions when you’ve done that, I strongly urge you to go down to your nearest U.S.M.C. recruiting office and enlist. Complete a 4-year tour of duty, and when you get back home if you have any further questions feel free to come to one of my classes and ask me face to face. Until then, stop propagating bullshit.   

Over the past 17-18 years or so I have been a member of more than a few internet gun forums. As an active recreational shooter, hunter, and part-time police officer, I quickly learned that the majority of the people who post on these forums have little or no practical experience in shooting, hunting, or police work. Apparently I was not alone. Within a few years better internet sites popped up that either had a highly critical membership that verbally beat the shit out of the stupid folks, or restricted membership to folks with some real-world credibility that could be verified by other real-world folks. 

But a lot of these high-end end-user sites didn’t last. I was really, really disappointed when Hilton Yam’s 10-8forums.com closed up shop, as the most prominent example. It was obvious why these closures occurred: the high-quality end users are mostly too busy doing real life shooting, hunting, and policing to be online several hours every day.

The reason some gun boards–like AR15.com, AccurateReloading.com, and 24Hourccampfire.com–thriving is equally obvious: a lot of people are using them. Not just to exchange information. No, no: contrary to the intent of the people who invented it, the internet is not about exchanging information. It’s about posting pictures of guns and cats, and getting into pissing matches over things that may or may not be important in the Real World. 

You see, what keeps internet gun forums going is “hits”… users open pages, write posts in response to other posts, piss on other posters’ posts, and so on. Every hit is recorded, and this translates into what, in ancient times when information was printed on paper and sold on the streets in newspapers, used to be called “circulation”. Circulation drives advertising revenue, and advertising revenue is what keeps websites up and thriving.

Capitalism at work, my friends. 

Which brings me to the point of this blog entry. 

In the past year or so I joined what was supposed to be a fairly stout forum for people who do real-world tactical stuff. I have to admit that I stopped going there after a few weeks, because it was getting little use. But I “liked” their Facebook page, and I get several updates from this site every day. And most of these updates aren’t worth the pixels used to post them, I’m sad to say. 

I don’t think the main Forum would have survived, except that the Facebook side of it generates lots and lots of pissing matches. They’re polite pissing matches, which is refreshing, but they’re still pissing matches. 

Case in point: I got sucked into replying to a thread on the Facebook side started by a guy who’s having problems with his red dot sight because he’s developed astigmatism, a problem many of us deal with. He was asking if there were other sights out there that had “better” red dots than his Aimpoint T1. I saw a lot of posts supporting the Aimpoint T2, but also a couple other RD sights like Vortex, and so on. In other words, the focus was on kit, not training/experience.

Now, I’ve wrestled with astigmatism my whole life, so I get this guy’s problem, big time. And I decided out of the goodness of my heart I would share my experience of late. I said he might want to look at a RD sight that could be switched off to allow use of a non-illuminated reticle at the touch of a finger. I used the example that had worked for me, a Burris Fullfield 1-4X scope with an easy on/off RD feature. I shared my experience in using this sight in 3-Gun competition, using it on my daily-driver M4 (the same gun I carried on SWAT ops for several years, with an Aimpoint Comp3 + LaRue magnifier). 

The reply I received was: “Not a game gun.”

Well, slap my ass and call me Sally. I done got told, didn’t I? 

I guess there’s no way to politelly tell the guy that my M4, with one or the other of these 2 sighting systems, has been through roughly 15,000 rounds of practice, range training, and actual tactical shooting, and that these astigmatic eyes of mine have overcome the problems of astigmatism for more decades than he’s been alive. I guess it’s more important to chew the fat over what latest piece of kit is the best “new” option for the switched-on tactical gunner. And there’s no way I am ever going to convince 95% of the “tactical” guys out there that competition is essential training. (I’ll address this concept in a later blog entry.)

So I decided to delete my hastily-written retort and moved on.

But there’s a lesson here that may be of some use to the folks who follow my Tactical Anatomy blog. And I’m not talking about the lesson that it’s pointless trying to talk about real-world tactical shooting with Equipment Junkies on the internet, as it’s equivalent to trying to teach a pig to sing.

No, the lesson is simply this: you need to shoot your Real Life guns. You need to shoot them a lot. You need to shoot them with all the sights, accessories, and other kit you think will be cool to have on your guns. And you need to shoot them under high-stress non-optimal training conditions to find out if they will work when you’re in a non-optimal shooting environment.  

My primary “tactical” M4 isn’t a sexy uber-cool rifle. It’s an out-of-the-box Smith & Wesson M&P M4 that I acquired 7 or 8 years ago, which has had some minor gunsmith tuning done to its action, but is otherwise box-stock. I actually have a new, sexy, uber-cool carbine in my safe, but it hasn’t been through the grinder that my primary rifle has been through, so I don’t reach for it when I want my most reliable fighting rifle.

I reach for my M&P because it’s got something like 15,000 rounds through it under conditions ranging from great to goatfuck ugly, and it always works. ALWAYS. It’s gone through a half-dozen HRC (high round count) carbine classes of 2-4 days duration without puking on me once. The sight systems on it (AimPoint Comp3 in LaRue QD mount, LaRue magnifier in LaRue tip-off QD mount, and Burris Fullfield in LaRue QD mount, plus the Troy Industries BUIS) have survived those same classes without puking even  once. In the past 4 years, I’ve used the Burris scope for 3-gun training and shooting when I’m shooting matches that require more shots out past 50 yards,  and on the shorter courses I switch back to the Aimpoint. Sometimes. The non-illuminated black reticle on the Burris is much easier on my astigmatic eyes for nailing steel plates at 300+ yards, and for precision head shots on deer at 100-150 yards, but the point  is, I’ve shot my primary rifle with both systems THOUSANDS OF TIMES under stressful training and competition conditions,  and I know that they will absolutely always work.

Real-life trigger time counts, kids. One of the deadliest tactical riflemen I’ve ever shot with was an old fart from Indiana who brought an iron-sighted Marlin .30-30 lever rifle to a tactical carbine class. Yes, he was a cop. Yes, he carried that levergun in his squad on duty. Yes, he had shot real people with it. And yes, he not only kept up with the rest of us in that tactical rifle class, he waxed most of our tails. 

It ain’t what rifle you pick, kids. It’s how good you are with it that counts. 

 

And the only way you’ll get that good is by shooting it. With real ammo, in real conditions. In the rain. In the mud. In the wind and the dust. Thousands and thousand of rounds.

 Yet I am constantly confronted by people who have kindergarten-level shooting experience, on the internet and at matches, too, who will pooh-pooh my experience, or that of other men who’ve BTDT so much that we’ve forgotten most of it. These derps are infinitely more obsessed with having the latest kit than they are on practical experience. And I sincerely hope that these guys’ derpitude doesn’t get themselves or some other good guy killed when that latest bit of untested tacticool kit pukes on them in a really-o and truly-o SHTF gunfight. 

The best way to get that kind of experience with your primary rifle and handgun is to take some tough carbine classes. I strongly recommend Pat Rodgers’ Carbine Operator class, and there are great classes taught by Paul Howe, Henk Iversen, Hilton Yam, Tim Lau, Tom Givens, and many others; there are many other good ones out there. If you take your primary weapons to one of these 3-day classes, you’ll put 2000+ rounds of ammo through them, and by the end of TD-3 you’ll know if your kit is GTG, or if it’s derp. Then take your fighting weapons to competitive matches to keep up the skills you’ve learned in your carbine class. Take a carbine fighting class at least once every 2-3 years. Instead of spending money on new guns and useless shit, spend it on ammo/reloading compenents and on good training courses. 

So, I’m done spitting nails.  My point is simple: test your kit under tough conditions. Shoot a LOT of rounds with your kit. If you’ve got less than 1000 rounds through your primary rifle as it is currently set up, in my opinion your rifle is not proven. And “not proven” means it may well puke on you when your life is on the line.