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Ready! Hi, I'm Richard Carlton with Drypractice.com.
This video is a response to all the emails that we're getting from our users and testers
of the Front Sight Dry Practice App and what we have is a live broadcast with a number
of our testers who have been asking questions about the app and, specifically, asking about
help videos, and so we wanted to respond to those questions. Specifically, today, we have
Miles - hi Miles - we also have Jeff, right, and we also have Zach.
Now I know Jeff - you've been to Front Sight before, right, Jeff?
I have, yes. And the other two guys have not been to Front
Sight yet, so you two are testing an app that is interesting because you've not been to
Front Sight before and you actually have some questions and I know Jeff doesn't have those
questions, so we kind of have an interesting scenario here.
The first question, I guess, goes to Miles, let's dive into Miles - what's your questions,
Miles? Pretty basic, just how would I draw my weapon?
Yeah, and this is a good question. It's hard to cover in thirty seconds, because, well,
first off, Front Sight, the idea of drawing a weapon, it's, you know, people, the old
West, it's like quickdraw, right. How do you get the weapon presented? Front Sight talks
about presenting your weapon; it's in a holster, you present it out so you can use the weapon.
It's called a weapon presentation. Front Sight uses a Five Count Presentation to teach you
how to take the weapon from its storage on your hip and bring it out and point it in
at a target. The problem is, it's not something we can teach in, you know, two or three minutes
on a video. The reality is that you bring the weapon out, and I can show you the Five
Count Presentation. First, what I'm going to do is I'm going to
bring the weapon out, I'm going to check to make sure I have an empty weapon - in fact,
I have an empty magazine here. I'm going to go and put this in my pocket. I have an empty
chamber, an empty magazine, well, I'm going to release the slide forward - I have an empty
weapon. What's important to note is that what goes
into a presentation is a grip of the weapon - how you grab the weapon - it's the isometric
tension of the weapon, it's the sight alignment, it's the trigger control, it's stance. There's
a lot of things that go into the handling of a weapon system, and the actual presentation
part - the mechanics of grabbing and pushing the weapon out is a small part of it and so
asking how you present the weapon - it's a valid question, and I'm going to show that
to you right now, but understand that Front Sight spends the first day, day and a half
easy just getting to the point where you understand the basic mechanics of sight alignment, sight
picture, trigger control, stance, grip, all these basic concepts, so you're competent
with the handling of a semi-automatic pistol or revolver, if you're going to bring that
to Front Sight. Let me go ahead and show this to you, the
Five Count Presentation. Step one of the presentation is, you know,
your hands will be at your side, you'll have some sort of situation that develops, your
first step - count one of the presentation - is a firing grip. This hand right here,
and I'm going to go ahead and turn this way, is the firing grip with your finger down the
side of the weapon. The support hand is here, flat along the side of your stomach. The reason
you want it right here is that you don't want it out here floating because your weapon is
going to be out here, and pretty soon, you don't want it to be pointing through your
hand, where you might poke a hole in it with a bullet. So your support hand is here, firing
hand is here, finger down the side where it's going to stay, out of the way. Count two is
where your weapon is going to come straight up. It's going to actually come up pretty
high, and the reason is that at count 3, you're going to rotate your weapon down this way,
OK? And your finger, notice, is right here. Some people make the mistake of trying to
find the trigger right here, and that can be a very deadly mistake. They have people
all the time, industry-wide, who will fire the gun - they get excited, they'll shoot
the gun right here - boom - and they put the bullet right down the side of their leg, here,
quite by accident. So what happens is, you're at count three right here, you're going to
drive the weapon forward with your firing grip; your support side hand is going to drive
out here and find your weapon, and as you're driving, this becomes count four - count three
is here, count four is out here, and as you get from count four to count five, your trigger
finger is going to find the trigger, and then at count five, you're going to be pointed
at your target with your finger on the trigger. Now the idea is that you're not necessarily
going to shoot the target. Now, of course if it's a hostile situation it's a crisis
- you may have to make that decision. Of course, the number one rule in a gunfight is don't
get in a gunfight. Of course, if you have to, and you're gonna
break the trigger and take the shot, you take the shot. Boom boom, or boom, whatever you
need to do. The weapon comes down to the ready, then you're going to do these after-action
drills where you're looking around for other adversaries. And you're going to be moving
to make sure you're not going to get shot at by someone behind you, OK?
So, very important. OK? Now, what's important to understand here is
that Front Sight's going to spend days teaching you and explaining this information to you,
and part of the purchase of the Dry Practice App, you get this two-day certificate that
allows you to come out to Front Sight and take a two-day handgun class. You're going
to learn all these skills at that class. Front Sight also offers, of course, the four-day
handgun class and all this material is covered there at greater depth. So either way, you're
going to learn this material. So, once again, five-count presentation, there's more than
I can teach you immediately right here, but you get kind of the gist of what's going on.
Now Jeff, you've been to Front Sight before, you've seen this material. General concept:
it's something that's hard to teach in five minutes, right?
Oh yes, definitely, it takes a little while to teach and then get these concepts down.
Now, you took the four day class, and I know that you enjoyed it a lot - in fact, you can't
wait - you couldn't wait - to go back out again, in fact, you've been talking to people
and trying to get a group of people together to go back out.
You know, five count presentation, how, by day four, you were kind of getting comfortable
with the concept of that presentation, right? Yeah. That's correct; we started off really
basic going count-by-count with the instructor and by a few days in - day three, day four
- we don't need to go count by count anymore, we're very comfortable with the technique
and we'll continue on with the rest of the teaching.
OK, so that's good. Next question, from the folks here.
I'm Zach, and my question is, how do you do the malfunction drills?
Yeah, and this follows along the same line of the issue with the five count presentation.
The malfunctions - and this gets back into the idea of, for those of you that don't have
a lot of experience with weapon systems - if your entire exposure to shooting is maybe
shooting a .22 rifle with an uncle somewhere, and maybe some experience with Modern Warfare,
in a video game somewhere, and the guns go *** ***, and they never break or malfunction,
then in real life, you know someone needs to explain to you that even great weapon systems
like the Glock, or maybe an XD or something like that - these things do break or malfunction.
It's very rare, and to me, it's a bit disconcerting when my Glock breaks, but it can happen, and
so you need to be prepared to handle the emergency procedures for clearing a malfunction on a
weapon system to make sure you're still in the fight if something happens, but it's not
something that we can teach in two or three minutes, so it's important to understand that
that's also part of the curriculum out of Front Sight.
Now, there are a couple options for learning these materials, besides going out to a full
class at Front Sight. Front Sight has what they call At Home Training, and At Home Training
is where the ambassador students, which is kind of their top-tier students out of Front
Sight. Typically, they're students that have been out to Front Sight for a number of classes,
they offer courses that are half-day dry practice courses in your local community. In areas
and cities across the United States, they offer half-day courses where they'll bring
you in and teach you the basics of weapon handling. Now they don't teach you the Five
Count Presentation, but they teach you almost everything else besides that. They teach you
the basic idea of loading the weapon, they teach you the idea of chamber checking, they
teach you the idea of emergency reloads, where if you have a magazine and a weapon and you're
firing and it locks back, they teach you the idea of checking the weapon, of ejecting the
magazine, and reloading the weapon, they teach you the idea of a type one, two, or three
malfunction - all these types of things - and that's a half-day, dry practice training class
- and, of course, Dry Practice meaning that you're doing it without any live ammunition,
so there's no real firing. Every time you pull the trigger, you're going to get a click,
not a *** or boom, which makes the shooting very inexpensive. It also makes sure that
you don't need a real live range like we have here.
So, anyway, that's Front Sight's At Home Training, a very valuable program - fairly inexpensive.
Of course, all this material is also covered at great depth in Front Sight's Dry Practice
Manuals, and we'll put a link to that here, but the Dry Practice Manuals are designed
to go with the Dry Practice App that we have, that's shipping, that you've been testing.
And the Dry Practice Manual is the reference material where you can go look up a Type 1,
Type 2, Type 3 Malfunction, what is the exact Five Count Presentation - one, two, three
four five - but what happens if you have a Five Count Presentation from concealment?
Well, count one is where you throw your garment - your jacket - out of the way and you get
a firing grip. So count one's a little more involved if you have a jacket, or if you have
a sweatshirt, it's you gotta pull the sweatshirt up out of the way and then get a firing grip,
so there's all those additional mechanics are covered in the Dry Practice reference.
That is the reference that goes with the Dry Practice software that we have. The manual
is a little bit on the dry side - I mean, you open it up it's a great reference, but
the manual itself doesn't inspire you to go out and train; the Dry Practice App, on the
phone or phone or the pad - you get it going, it inspires you to put it down and to practice
and to train, and that's what the App is good for.
The manual, the reference, is there to explain to you that if you're doing something wrong,
it's to explain to you the technical intricacies of what a perfect Five Count Presentation
should look like, right? And that's what that's for, so as you bring the weapon back, you
know, all these things that go into it, you know, and you're not drifting this support-side
hand in during the presentation, right; all these mechanics that go into it - things that
you learn during the course at Front Sight, or things that you can learn at the At Home
Training. So, important to know. So, if there's not
more questions then I think that about covers it for one of our first Google Hangouts, and
covers some of the things you need to know when you're doing your testing. If we don't
have any other questions I think we'll wrap things up here; I do appreciate everyone who's
watched. We'll put links and information - make sure you share this video with everyone, and
check the description on our YouTube page here for links to the At Home Training for
front sight, links for the Dry Practice App, and also links for the Dry Practice manual,
which is the benchmark reference for dry practice for Front Sight students. I'm Richard Carlton,
from drypractice.com, and I'll see you next time at the range.