Source:

What You Need

First and foremost, you will not only need a gun and holster, but you will be shooting from concealment! You’ll need a concealment holster. The Air Marshals carry a Gen 5 Glock 19, and it seems like the famed P229s are still in service as well. Generally, any gun that’s in that compact realm is a good way to go.

You need 30 rounds of ammo, so it’s not absurdly demanding in the ammo department. You’ll need at least two magazines and a concealable magazine carrier to make things happen. You’ll also need all the appropriate safety gear, including ears and eyes, as well as a shot timer to keep track of par times. Finally, you’ll be using the FBI QIT target, and you’ll need three of them.

There are many versions of the FBI QIT target, but most appear to be similar to this.

Scoring

Scoring is simple. You get five points for hits inside the bottle of the Q target and two points for hits that touch the edge of the inner and out bottle and shots inside the outer bottle but on the target. The maximum possible score is 150 points, and the minimum qualifying score is 135 points.

There is also an interesting way they score the times. You’ll shoot most of the drills twice, and your times for each drill are combined, and they cannot exceed a specific time. For example, the first drill is shot twice, and your two times have to equal less than 3.3 seconds total. If you shoot one string in 1.3 seconds and the second in 2.0 seconds, you pass.

Shooting Like an Air Marshal

All right, let’s stop talking and start shooting. This is shot cold without a warm-up, with concealment being used twice. Prepare and ensure you can safely draw your firearm from concealment. I won’t make fun of you for going OWB for safety’s sake or to follow range rules. This qual is shot entirely at seven yards, which makes plenty of sense for an Air Marshal. Planes can be big, but even in a big plane, the lines of sight are fairly short.

I have not shot this qual. Looks interesting. There are eight stages and clear. Check it out at the link.

Source: The X-Drill

Range: 7yd
Targets: two targets each with a head (3×5 card) and torso (8″ plate) scoring zone
Start position: holstered or ready
Rounds fired: 32

This is another variant of the Changing Gears drill. The purpose of this drill is to build realistic multiple target shooting skills, and to further develop a shooter’s ability to regulate the balance between accuracy and speed necessary to get hits against different size and distance targets.

You’ll create two targets, A and B. Each target will have a 3×5 card as a head zone, and an 8″ plate as a body zone. It should look like this:

There is no scoring listed but you can make your own with friends. Click on the source for the drill procedure.

The X-Drill

H/T “Thomas” in comments

You’ll remember the tiff between TCJ and Ammoland about a handgun drill at that site that we linked here. Ammoland insisted that Herschel delete the post. He did delete it and made these comments here at TCJ:

I removed a post made by fellow writer PGF.  I did so after receiving this note from Ammoland editor Fredy Riehl, as follows.

Hello  captainsjournal100″ (sic)

You have content from our website that is in violation of our copyrights. (here is one example, you have multiple.)

The Captain’s Journal » Self-Defense Skills and Drills, The Casino Drill (captainsjournal.com)

 Please remove all content and images you may have scraped from our domain at once and email us notice it has all been deleted and scrubbed from your domain captainsjournal.com

This is a poorly written letter with awful editing (e.g., you don’t end the sentence with a period if there is a qualifier in parentheses, nor put a period inside the parentheses, I don’t know what the ” is about at the beginning of the letter, etc.).  But I got the gist of his offense.

You’ll note by the title of today’s post that it’s the eighth in a semi-regular series with the Tag handgun drills that we’ve been posting here at the captain’s Journal.

Well, AmmoLand has now embarked on a series of handgun drill articles. I know exactly what they’ve done because I know how lawyers think. They got Herschel to delete the link here and forbade any future links from TCJ while stealing* the idea to profit from it. I know this because AmmoLand just published another handgun drill article, and that’s how lawyers work to maximize corporate profits.

Now, I’m a Christian man, and I’m not even mad about this. In fact, I’ll do three things.

First, I’ll tell you that I can’t link the article to AmmoLand here because, as Christians, when we make a covenant, we keep it. But if you go to AmmoLand and click on recent articles, you’ll find their latest drill. It’s a pretty good practice; go read it and give it a try at the range. I recommend it.

Second, I’m telling you this out of Christian love, only because I want your family to be safe from tyrants of all stripes, be they lone assailants or the government. I never intended to profit from this series.

Third, I’m giving AmmoLand the cloak off my back (Matthew 5:40) by encouraging you to go read their article, which I won’t even name but look for the bull with red eyes. I pray AmmoLand profits handsomely from their handgun training drills series of articles.

I would have loved to have helped by sending them traffic. We could have worked together to make America a safer place. Lawyers are ruining America, but Christians have a duty to make it better.

*It’s not precisely a novel idea, and I surely was not the first to consider it, and neither were they, which makes AmmoLand all the more reprehensible for their corporate lawyer measures against TCJ.

Here’s another helpful handgun drill as provided by handgun law us.

Three Target Test,  Ken Hackathorn

I have a simple test I run when checking new trainees or operators. I place three NRA five-yard bullseye centers up at 10 yards. I ask the student to fire six rounds at the first target slow fire, about 2.5 minutes normally). Next I ask them to fire six rounds at the second bullseye in 10 seconds, and finally six rounds at the third in five seconds.

Each string starts with the handgun in hand, at the ready. This is done with both hands on the gun in whatever grip or stance the student prefers. If the student cannot shoot a good slow fire group on the first target, with plenty of time for using good sight alignment and precise trigger control– guess what? The second and third targets are pretty sad.

My key point is that if you cannot fire an accurate group at 10 yards taking your time, you will be in big trouble if you ever expect to do anything well using marksmanship as a goal. Simply put, you had better learn the basics before you plan on being anything serious with a handgun.

This is excellent. I always point out that starting slow and attaining the objective is the first goal. Once rounds are on target to a satisfactory degree, then, and only then, do we increase the rapidity of the training. Don’t drill faster than you can productively hit the target because it’s a waste of time and ammo, teaching inadequate skills. This is especially important in practicing smoothly drawing your weapon to put rounds on target.

In light of AmmoLand’s lawyers pitching a fit over linked articles here at TCJ, we’ve been working on getting permissions from quality sources that don’t mind sharing praxis while driving traffic back to them. Quality training, ideas, and techniques you may not have considered, and specific instruction to get better with our tools is the goal. We’ve already posted several Handgun Training exercises. We’ll tag those and all upcoming training posts with ‘Tactical Drills and Training,’ so we’ll have one tag to use as a reference resource.

Many of the readers here will find some of these to be entry-level. However, there are some with less experience who don’t comment much. The idea is that we all teach and share, encouraging one another. We’ll have higher experience/skill level posts soon.

The first article we’ll link is handgun training from Shooty McBeardface. If you’ve never heard of him, he’s at the usual online places.

From a defensive standpoint, habitually shooting with both eyes open is vastly superior to just using the one. Here I’ll explain a simple method that works; one you can use starting today.

When any of us first starts shooting we make a point to close our off eye so that we can have a clear sight picture. That clear, unambiguous sight picture is vital at this stage because we typically have no trained mechanics or muscle memory to assist with our effort to shoot accurately. What’s more, most of us are unaccustomed to directing our focus into one eye while the other eye remains open.

All of this is to say, there’s a bit of a learning curve to proper defensive firearm technique (of which the eyes are just one component).

I say defensive firearm technique because there is little benefit in target shooting with both eyes open. This doesn’t mean one shouldn’t target shoot with both eyes open, but the point of having both open is so that your field of vision remains as wide as possible so that you don’t miss something important or deadly in a fight for life; yours or someone else’s. However, since humans are creatures of habit, it is best to make a habit of shooting with both eyes open.

Picture: Shooty McBeardface

He continues with some basics and explanatory photos, including finding your dominant eye, aiming, and encouraging you to get out there and practice your new shooting technique to build lifelong skills. Please give him a click.

How I teach folks to check for their dominant eye is to extend both hands out straight in front of the face with the back of the hands facing you, forming a triangle (pictured below). Then focus on an object 20 feet away—close first one eye, then the other. You should be able to see the object with your dominant eye and not the other. I happen to be opposite-eye dominant, which means my dominant eye is not on the side of my dominant hand.