Whipped Cream Difficulties

I did some training this past weekend at the KR Training facility. (KR Training, official firearms trainer of Whipped Cream Difficulties.)

Before I talk about this, I feel like I need to address an elephant in the room. It seems like there are two schools of thought in the gun blogging community:

1. “Why aren’t you running out every weekend and traveling 500 miles, and then 500 more, to attend tactical operator fantasy camp where you learn how to operate tactically in operations using tactics? Aren’t you serious about this stuff? Don’t you have a job that lets you travel and pay thousands of dollars multiple times a month to take training courses?”
2. “Fark you, I don’t have the time or the money to travel every weekend and play pretend ninja with my gun writer buddies. I have a job that doesn’t involve shooting guns or people, a family to take care of, and I don’t get free training classes because I’m a gunwriter.”

I hate to be lukewarm, but I totally get both sides of this issue. Training is good. Training is fun. I should do more of it. But I don’t have time or money to train every weekend, so I pick my opportunities carefully.

I’m lucky in that KR Training’s facilities are just a little over an hour away from my house (an hour and a half if I stop at Buc-ee’s on the way). I’m also lucky in that KR Training concentrates almost entirely on practical training for private citizens. (I do not get free training from KR Training, even though they are the official trainer of WCD. I would not accept free training if it was offered: I insist on paying real American money for their services. They do not accept Bitcoin or Dogecoin yet, as far as I know.)

In this case, KR Training was offering two classes from John Hearne. Yes, they were a little expensive. But I decided to treat this as a personal indulgence. I’ve heard Karl talk about Mr. Hearne’s presentations at the Rangemaster conferences, and figured this was worth taking a flyer on.

(These two classes were the second and third I have taken in roughly a month, so you can throw stones at me now. However, the first class was Red Cross First Aid/CPR/AED certification: also through KR Training because that was convenient, but you can pretty much do that anywhere these days. And you should, in my ever so humble opinion.)

tl,dr: If John Hearne is teaching near you, go if you can. He’s worth it.

I’m putting in a jump here because this is going to run long. I can feel it.

Saturday’s class was “Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why: Understanding Human Performance When Death Is On the Line”. I think you could fairly summarize this as: “How To Win a Gunfight”.

I’m not going to recap everything Mr. Hearne said here, as that would be cutting into his profits, and he has a family to feed. I think I can fairly boil down the “how to win a gunfight” to two points:

• Don’t be there when the gunfight happens. This is not something Mr. Hearne actually said, this is my insertion. But it is somewhat related to the timeless wisdom of John Farnam (which Mr. Hearne did cite): “Avoid stupid people doing stupid things in stupid places.”
• The key takeaway from Mr. Hearne: the person who shoots first, and doesn’t get shot, wins the majority of the time.

(Also: never go up against a Sicilian. But we didn’t talk about that.)

I’ve oversimplified and compressed this considerably. Again, I don’t want to recap all of Mr. Hearne’s material and steal his work.

The early part of the class was a detailed discussion of human evolutionary biology, specifically with respect to the brain, how it works, and how it responds under stress. Mr. Hearne’s done a lot of reading and studying in this area. I can’t match his qualification, but I personally am an enthusiastic amateur student of this subject as well, so this was like a big rib-eye steak for me.

If we can understand the brain (and how to leverage it) then we can understand what can be done under extreme levels of stress and how to increase our personal performance.

It also stood out to me that one of his major sources cited was Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why (affiliate link), a book I read back when I was at Four Letter Computer Company, but never quite integrated the lessons of. I want to re-read that now, as I think Mr. Hearne’s talk will help me with that.

There was also a considerable amount of discussion of how to avoid “becoming a quivering mass of Jello”, or “emotional control in high stress environments”. These things are trainable and teachable: specifically, it helps a lot if you can avoid transitioning from a “rational” response to an “emotional” response, using your neocortex instead of your limbic brain.

Training helps with that.

The big goal is to allow the mind to trust the rational mind as its first choice response.

Mr. Hearne also discussed a lot of the mythology: for example, optimal heart rates, “natural” responses are better, Grossman’s “hesitation to kill”, front sight focus, and even fine versus gross motor skills.

Another thing that I particularly appreciated was that he spent a considerable amount of time talking about two things that are of urgent interest to me, and that I need to work on: vision and balance. “Everyone can improve their vision.” Eye training is a thing. And I had not considered this, but balance is also a thing: you can get knocked off balance by muzzle blast and recoil and miss your shot. Guess what? Balance is a trainable thing too.

I thought this was a good list of training priorities:

1. “Remove novelty.” In other words, do as much as you can so you can say, when stuff happens, “I’ve seen this before.”
2. “Build valid mental maps and schemas.” Not just “I’ve seen this before” but “I know how this goes.”
3. “Develop robust motor programs”. Train so things like the drawstroke and clearing malfs are automatic, and don’t require conscious thought.
4. “Keep skills and maps refreshed.”

It struck me that there’s a lot of this that applies to my business as well. If you’re training techs for enterprise IT, what do you want to do? Remove novelty: make sure, as much as you can, that when they get that customer phone call, they’ve seen this (stuff) before. Or at least maybe the ten most common call drivers. “Build valid mental maps and schemas.” Isn’t that what we’re trying to do: give techs mental maps so they know where to look when something goes wrong?

Mr. Hearne is very clear that “a lot can be accomplished with minimal cost”, and he’s excellent at giving specific, actionable, recommendations that don’t cost a lot. He was also generous in providing sources, recommended books, recommended instructors (and “recommended” in this case means people he’s actually taken classes from), and even a “to-do” list.

Repeating myself when under stress: if you have a chance to take “Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why”, do it. We spent close to nine hours in class (plus a group dinner afterwards). The man is thorough.

The class on day two was listed as “Newhall and Miami Shootouts“. Mr. Hearne has given multi-hour presentations on both the Newhall and Miami incidents at the Rangemaster conferences. He’s done a lot of research on both incidents, including going to the crime scenes and digging through the agency records. (At least as much as he can: a lot of material in the FBI file on Miami is still redacted.) If you want to get a sense of what his presentations are like, the page at KR Training I linked above contains links to Mr. Hearne’s episodes of the “Ballistic Radio” podcast where he discusses each incident.

There were fewer people in this class than there were on Saturday’s class. Seven hours of Newhall and Miami is probably a hard sell to people who aren’t interested in handgun history. But that is kind of unfortunate, because Newhall and Miami were only the second and third parts of the class.

The first part of the class was what I would call “Inside the Criminal Mind”: an overview of criminals, how they think, their victim selection process, and the FBI studies mentioned on KR Training’s page. Mr. Hearne referred to us as “guinea pigs”, as this is the first time he’s given this presentation in this format. (For that reason, I don’t have the detailed notes for it, like I have for “Who Wins…” He did offer to email us the PDF of his presentation, and I will be taking him up on that. I’ll also be sending him a link to this post so he can comment if he wishes.)

Interesting facts from one of Mr. Hearne’s slides:

Weapon Acquisition

• 97% of the handguns used were obtained illegally.
• None of the weapons used were purchased at gun shows.
• Trade or illegal sales was the most common source of criminal guns.
• Once used in a crime, the guns were sold to other criminals.

Remember, this is based on FBI studies, specifically of violent offenders who kill (or try to kill) police officers. (Also noted: the hot gun among criminals these days is apparently…a Glock with an extended magazine.)

(Noted.)

One of the key takeaways from the “criminal mind” part of the class was: avoid looking like a victim, and you probably won’t be targeted. Walk with confidence, maintain situational awareness, and “avoid stupid people doing stupid things in stupid places”, and your odds improve considerably.

Was it worth it? To me, it was, for the insights into criminal mindset and his mentions of recommended books. But I’m also the kind of person who would sit still for seven hours of Newhall and Miami. For the average person, I feel like a four hour version of this class, just covering the criminal mind stuff, at half the price, would be a great investment, and the additional historical stuff would just make their eyes glaze over.

(Noted: according to sources, Mike Wood, who wrote the definitive book on Newhall, is working on a book about Miami.)

My take: if you have the chance to hear Mr. Hearne talk about Newhall, Miami, and the criminal mindset, I recommend it. For the average gun owner, I recommend it slightly less enthusiastically than “Who Wins…” If, on the other hand, four hours of Newhall and Miami sounds like your jam, I enthusiastically recommend this: and then you should contact me if you’re ever in Austin so we can go out for rib-eye steaks, bourbon, and gun geeking.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 11th, 2022 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Books, Endorsements, Geek, Guns, Leadership. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.