One of the things the awful governor of Virginia tried to do is shut down tactical trainers for civilians. I don’t know how that turned out. Some media outfits are also targeting tactical trainers. Wired has a hit piece on Gunsite Academy.
We had all signed up for a two-day tactical firearms course, where we’d be learning how to shoot as if we were engaged in small-unit armed combat. Once the purview of law enforcement officers and military operators, these kinds of skills are increasingly being passed down to ordinary, armed Americans by a sprawling and diffuse industry. Gun ranges and private facilities around the country teach the art of tactical shooting, in setups that range from the fly-by-night to the elaborate: At a Texas resort, you can schedule a combat training scenario inspired by the Iraq War after your trail ride; at an invitation-only facility in Florida, you can practice taking down a mass shooter at the Liberal Tears Café; at Real World Tactical, a former Marine will teach you how to survive “urban chaos through armed tactical solutions.”
Under the aegis of his one-man company, Green Eye Tactical, Dorenbush says he trains SWAT teams and military contractors, but that about half of his students are people who don’t carry a gun professionally. In recent weeks, he’d worked with a 22-year-old mechanic who’d been robbed at work, a teenage girl, and several married couples. “Everyone has different things they’re preparing for, different threats,” he said.
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But the tactical shooting world also attracts a much wider range of people: gun bros and gamers, preppers and adrenaline junkies, LARPers who want to spend their weekends cosplaying as commandos, and crime victims seeking a particular flavor of empowerment. Women make up a growing proportion of students, and the industry is increasingly catering to preachers and teachers who want to know how to face a mass shooter. “We’re getting a lot of nontraditional gun owners, and some people who don’t want people to know they’re learning to shoot guns,” says Ken Campbell, the CEO of Gunsite, which claims to be the country’s oldest tactical training facility.
As we head into an era that seems destined to be marked by escalating vigilantism and political violence—or, if we’re very lucky, just the fear of them—it’s time to reckon with the whole of American tactical culture. For all its power to shape this moment, that culture has roots that long precede it. The tactical world is a byproduct of years of rampant mass shootings and of our nation’s longest wars, the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s a space where paramilitary ideas thrive and where ordinary gun owners learn to see themselves as potential heroes; but it’s also where many Americans have simply gone looking for a way to negotiate living in a country where there are more firearms than people. To try to understand it better, I spent this fall absorbing its mix of skills training, political indoctrination, and camaraderie. Sometimes it felt like CrossFit with bullets; sometimes it was more alarming than that.
The gun world we live in today, in which millions of Americans don’t blink an eye at the idea of eating lunch with a loaded pistol on their hip, is a relatively recent invention, and part of the credit goes to Gunsite’s founder, Jeff Cooper. Cooper, who died in 2006, is revered at Gunsite, where his photo hangs on the classroom wall and his house is preserved as a museum. An upright, broad-chested man with a stern, scholarly manner, Cooper was a veteran of World War II and the Korean War with a degree from Stanford and a library full of history books.
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It was over fast—we’d secured the hostage, Dorenbush declared. During the debrief, I cried. Dorenbush stood next to one of the targets, a visibly pregnant woman gripping a pistol. “You just shot a pregnant female—how does that make you feel?” he asked Jody. Realistic training was important because it helped acclimate the body to stressful situations, he explained. “You’re taking steps to help yourself so it’s not such a drastic departure from your reality. You inoculate yourself to trauma. It takes time to build that up to where it’s not bothering you that much anymore.”
She would cry more if she ever had to suffer the indignity and assault of rape.
As for the alleged societal change of people eating lunch with a weapon on their side, she isn’t educated enough in history to understand that not so long ago, gentlemen and churchgoers carried firearms to worship.
I think I related an experience I had several years ago when my mother-in-law had to be removed from her home and placed in assisted living. Her home was a wreck, and had to be repaired, worked and cleaned for days.
The duty fell to me. I used the weekends for the job, while my wife had to stay and tend home. The home where she lived had become known to the locals as having had break-ins and strange visitors due to the absence of my mother-in-law.
Every weekend evening for several months – because after work, the evening was as soon as I could get there – I arrived and knew I had to engage in some tactical work. I would engage in “room clearing” as taught to me by my son.
I never found anyone, usually only found the results of critters who had wandered in despite the locked down house (I never did figure out how they were getting in). I also noticed that windows were unlocked, when I know that I had ensured all windows locked before having left the home the last time. If someone was getting in, I never could figure out how, but this did add to my discomfort.
It was difficult to hold the weapon steady and upright for ten or fifteen minutes to check every room and every closet, to turn lights on as I entered or left rooms, to maintain awareness of rooms behind me (because light bulbs had burned out and I had very little light), and nerve racking to continue that until finished.
It helped when I had my Heidi-girl, a 90 pound Doberman, who would usually go ahead of me, but I didn’t always have her. I was alone at times.
If you think you don’t need that skill (and I’m not here claiming that I have a skill set beyond the very basic), you’re mistaken.
Here is a prediction. In the near future, it will be illegal to give this training to civilians.
