SCAR REDUCTION

If we’re going to be honest with ourselves, most defensive handgun classes are basically firearm manipulation and marksmanship classes.

This isn’t a slam, by any means. After all, knowing how to run a handgun safely, accurately, and rapidly is definitely a skill that people are not born with and needs to be learned and practiced.

However, there are a lot of built-in limitations to trying to safely teach eight to twenty students how to operate pistols on a square range.

For starters, your row of trainees are going to be squared up in a line, squarely facing two-dimensional targets in a similar row, positioned a known distance away.

The targets won’t be moving, and the students will similarly have their movement constrained to a limited number of lateral steps, or perhaps a choreographed advance or backpedal, with minders making sure nobody gets dangerously ahead of or falls behind other students on the line.

Similarly, since the instructor also has no desire to go home with any bullet holes, they will likely be giving the command to start shooting audibly from behind the row of shooters, using a whistle or the beep of a timer or perhaps a command of “UP!” or the theatrically tactical “BUST ‘EM!”. Every time this command is given, it’s a cue to start shooting; almost never do you draw and verbally challenge or draw and not shoot in a typical class.

These are all sensible constraints, but let’s examine how they relate to the real world.

It’s nighttime and you’re crossing the parking lot to your car. Perhaps it’s out in front of a big box store and you’ve been picking up Christmas gifts, or you’ve left a restaurant or theater where you’ve been spending an enjoyable evening with friends.

A couple of shadowy figures walking perpendicular to your path react to your presence by altering their path and angling your way. Because you’ve read a ton of stuff from William Aprill and Tom Givens and Craig Douglas you know a “pre-assault cue” when you see one.

At no point are they going to stop seven yards away from you, square up, produce blasters, and yell “BEEEEEEP!”

Allow me to introduce you to the concept behind the Cognitive Pistol curriculum from John Hearne of Two Pillars Training.

Hearne is a retired federal law enforcement officer and also a Rangemaster certified instructor and… I was going to say, “student of defensive pistolcraft”, but “absolute nerd for the deepest nuances of employing a pistol in the pursuit of personal protection” would be closer to the truth.

I took Cognitive Pistol when it was a one-day class, paired with another class of Hearne’s called Tactical Anatomy, in Terre Haute, Indiana, back in the summer of 2023. (If you’re reading this and you’re a reloader who shoots at the Vigo County Conservation Club…sorry about all that .45GAP brass I left on the range.)

The unique thing about the curriculum is that, after a couple of assessment strings of fire to allow Hearne to get a feel for the skill level of individual students, all drills in the class are initiated visually.

Not only has John come up with an innovative system of remote controlled multicolored lights that can be used to transmit a whole range of nuance and are positioned up by the targets (or sometimes behind you as a reminder that the whole post-shooting 360-degree scan is not just range kabuki) but he’s also one of the few traveling instructors to bring turning targets on the road.

In the Tactical Anatomy portion of the class, there was classroom anatomical discussion as well as dissection of the current state of the art in terminal ballistics, but also a live-fire segment that included movement and the effect of differing angles of fire on a human torso and how that affected ideal bullet placement on the hypothetical bad guy’s torso.

These are not basic classes, mind you. They’re structured around the assumption that the shooter has experience running their handgun from a concealed holster safely on the clock, but if you’re looking for an alternative to yet another static seven-yard square-on “BUST ‘EM!” festival, I cannot recommend Two Pillars Training highly enough.