InSights Training Center Blog

Over the next couple of weeks I will make a series of posts related to equipment. For many, this is our favorite topic and what we spend the majority of our time focused on. For those of us that are serious about training for a violent confrontation, whether military, law enforcement, or a private citizen, we must realize that WHAT we use is not nearly as important as how and when we use it.

What we find in our courses is that equipment related problems slow down the pace of training and make learning more difficult. Many students spent much of their time on the line fighting their equipment rather than learning. One of the benefits of a formal training course is that you get to work out the kinks in your equipment selection. You will learn quickly if your gear sucks. Unfortunately, you may spend the rest of your time fighting equipment rather than learning to fight bad guys. Click here to read more »

Caleb had some observations about point shooting. Since we have already done the caliber debate, I guess it is time for aimed fire vs. point shooting.

Point shooting is awesome if you can index the muzzle of the gun almost against the target, but performance with this technique tends to degrade as you increase the distance, or reduce the size of the target. Click here to read more »

After reading some of the discussion about having some kind of CCW Identifier (badge, sash, or drop down panel) I have to conclude that this an answer looking for a question.

The theory is that if there was some kind of incident, an armed citizen would display this credential and be less likely to be shot by responding police officers. The bad guys can’t get these? Who says the police are going trust people wearing them? If you are at ground zero of an incident and holding a gun you just have to hope that the police are observing your actions rather than simply seeing you as a “threat target.”

If you are standing there with a gun you are forcing the police to deal with you immediately and I would rather have the police deal with me after they have a handle on the situation. Once the police arrive on scene I want to be holstered and I want to have moved to a location where the police can deal with me on their terms (meeting the police in the parking lot would probably be best), hands up and identification out.

The eternal debate: Which cartridge is more effective? 9mm or .45. On the face of it, .45 seems like the obvious choice. However, if you take one of our classes (like General Defensive Handgun) you will realize you can’t use caliber to make up for poor shooting. The bullets just aren’t that big!

Occasionally, a student will mention some “horror story” he/she read or was told involving a bad guy who soaked up 20, 30 or more 9mm rounds and how you never hear about that happening with a .45. Or they will quote some “1 shot stop” book’s studies. By the time you’re done reading this post you should be able to figure out for yourself the usefulness of that material.

I believe there is a non-ballistic answer that can explain some (certainly not all though) of this discrepancy. So this post is going to largely ignore what we know from terminal ballistics and, instead, conduct a little thought experiment that should be illustrative of why you need to be so careful when reading about guns and self-defense.

We will use two hypothetical guns/shooters: Shooter #1 – The 1911 .45 ACP with 7 rd GI magazines. Shooter #2 – The Glock 17 9mm P with 17 rd magazines.

In our thought-experiment, we are going to shoot a bad guy (BG) who is posing a deadly threat towards us. We will assume he is reasonably motivated and doesn’t just quit upon seeing our gun. We will assume that our first shot is a mortal wound to the heart (thus subsequent shots are largely irrelevant). We will assume that there are no spinal hits or effective head shots (which, regardless of caliber, would be instantly incapacitating and so pointless to consider).

Common wisdom is that properly adrenalized and motivated individuals can continue to function for up to 15 seconds with a fatally damaged heart. We will also assume that the shooters can both shoot 3 rounds per second (0.33 splits) and their reload times are 3 seconds.

In our first case, we will assume the BG drops in just 5 seconds. In this instance Shooter #1 (1911) will shoot 7 rounds. Shooter #2 will shoot 16.

Say what?

Yes, the Glock 17 shooter shoots more than twice as many rounds! Remember, this is with the first round being a fatal though not instantly incapacitating wound. What happens if the BG drops in just 3 seconds? Shooter 1 gets off 7 rounds (still) and Shooter #2 shoots “only” 10. Still 40% more rounds! And 3 seconds is pretty quick!

Of course, I picked one of the most extreme cases, just to wake you up. As you lengthen the time to stop, the discrepancy in percentage terms drops but the round count differential still can be rather large. For example, 10 seconds to stop but with 8rd 1911 magazine instead of the 7rd. Shooter #1 shoots 16, Shooter #2 shoots 23. That’s down to +44% more, but +7 in the round count. Note that the 7rd shooter would only have shot 14 in this case!

If you assume a slower reload, say you have duty gear, the differential gets less still. Add in a 4 second instead of a 3 second reload and you have shooter #1 shooting 16 and shooter #2 shooting 20. But that’s still +4 rounds.

In all cases except extremely short times and/or very slow shooting, the larger the magazine, the more rounds you’re going to fire to stop the BG in the exact same timeframe. However, this isn’t an endorsement towards high-capacity magazines! The BG stops in the same amount of time regardless of how many rounds you fire. It’s simply that the shooter with the high-capacity gun is going to shoot more rounds in the same amount of time due to the frictional costs of having to reload more often.

The take away point is this: Round count is largely meaningless as a predictor of cartridge effectiveness without a lot more context. So take what “statistics” you read or hear about regarding self-defense and ammunition with a huge grain of salt!

I don’t think there are any meaningful statistics being gathered about shootings to date. There are far more variables than simply “1-shot stops” or even total number of shots – imagine two Glock 17 shooters against 1 BG in comparison to a lone 1911 shooter – what will the round count discrepancy be in that case?

While InSights runs training all over the US, most of our training classes for private citizens are done in the Seattle, Washington area. Getting a Concealed Pistol License in Washington is really quick and easy, but it is only valid in 19 other states (Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia.)

You can get 13 additional states by obtaining a non-resident Utah Concealed pistol license. (Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Wyoming.) However, the application process is a little more complicated – especially if you don’t live in Utah.

First you must meet the eligibility requirements:

• You do need to be at least 21 years old.
• You cannot have a felony conviction on your record.
• You can not have been convicted of any crime of violence.
• You must not have been convicted of any offense involving the use of alcohol or unlawful use of narcotics or controlled substances.
• No convictions involving any domestic violence.
• Also you can never been adjudicated in U.S. courts as mentally incompetent, unless that was reversed or withdrawn.
• You can not have been convicted of any offense that involves moral turpitude.

Then you need to provide or obtain the following:

• A copy of a valid driver’s license.
• A passport quality photograph of you for the new permit.
• A completed fingerprint card prepared by a trained fingerprint technician.
• A weapons familiarity class taught by a Utah Certified Firearms Instructor

InSights Training Center offers a 4-hour all-inclusive class that fulfills the Utah training requirement mandated by the Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification (B.C.I.) and gets your application ready to submit to Utah for your Concealed Firearm Permit. All you have to do afterwards is drop it application packet in the mail.

Update: Florida and Colorado have reciprocity with Utah at the time of this writing, but do not honor non-resident permits.