If you’ve followed Modern Combat & Survival at all, you know how we feel about traditional gun ranges.
There are some things this type of traditional shooting training does well, and some things it doesn’t do well.
And, honestly, some people bash on gun ranges and how they’re semi-useless for practical firearms training.
According to my friend Ox, even experienced shooters are making some critical mistakes when it comes to their gun training if that training takes place on the good ol’ “square range.”
Here is a run-down of what he had to tell me.
As A Shooter, Are YOU Making These Killer “Square Range” Mistakes?
We live in interesting times for firearms owners.
There’s more realistic tactical training out there than here has ever been before.
That doesn’t mean training has gotten less expensive, though.
In some cases, it’s even more expensive.
And a lot of people are still using the same old traditional practice routine of going down to the local gun range and shooting at paper targets.
That’s a mistake for a number of reasons.
I’ll go into just a few of them here.
#1: Safety Issues
The biggest negative that I run into when I go to indoor ranges is actually safety.
I absolutely cringe almost every time I go to an indoor range during public shooting hours, and the reason is fairly obvious.
There’s lot of people out there who don’t understand muzzle disciplines.
They think that because they’ve checked to make sure it’s unloaded, they can point it anywhere they want.
I just don’t agree with that.
I don’t like having guns pointed at me, and most people don’t.
#2: Monkey See, Monkey Do
Another big problem that happens at ranges, especially with newer shooters, is “monkey see, monkey do.”
They’ll see someone with a bunch of cool gear.
They’re doing something in their lane.
The new shooter doesn’t know what they’re supposed to do at the range, so they just copy what the guy next to them is doing.
The guy next to them may not know what he’s doing, and he may not be shooting to a standard that the new shooter should really try to imitate.
You’ll get these wannabe shooters who look like an operator and smell like an operator, but they‘re spraying rounds all over the place.
The new shooter sees that and thinks that that’s the standard they need to live up to, and they don’t need to be any more accurate than that because the cool guy’s putting rounds all over.
#3: A Lack Of Dynamic Shooting
Another big problem with traditional shooting training is you can’t do dynamic shooting at most ranges.
You can’t move around.
The targets don’t move while you shoot them.
You can’t shoot at the speeds that you would shoot at in a self-defense situation.
You can’t yell.
Hell, in many indoor ranges you can’t even draw from concealment and then shoot.
That’s a big training issue when you’re training for self-defense shooting, because yelling and drawing from concealment are components of realistic self-defense shooting.
You want to verbally confront your attacker, if possible.
You want to train as realistically as you can to simulate the real thing.
And even if you’re behind the curve and have to draw your gun, and that’s the first thing that you do in a conflict, you still want to be yelling and making it very obvious to everyone around who the intended victim is and who the attacker is.
Those are all things that you can’t do at most ranges during open range time, but they all have a place in realistic shooting training.
When you look at all these factors together, it tells you one thing:
You need to get OFF the square range and start doing some realistic shooting and force-on-force training if your gun training is going to save your life in a real-life encounter.
I plan my visits to the range well in advance and try to incorporate tactics into my drills. I have a mental check-list of what it is I want to acccomplish and what I need to do to ‘get there.’ For example; put a ball cap on an IDPA target and then try a head shot. The first thing you will notice is that the ‘box’ is gone! Or put an old dark t-shirt over the target so you can’t see your hits until after the drill, or even stage targets at eneven spacing and uneaven heights. Turn some of them a bit sidways. People rarely wear red coats and march in straight lines anymore. I try to do what I can to best duplicate ‘the street’ on the range.