Professionalism & Dry Fire

2014 Training Schedule

Feb 3-5, Team Leader, Thurston County, WA
March 24-26, Hostage Rescue, Spokane WA
April 14-16, Tactical Carbine, Kent WA
April 21-22, Tactical Pistol, Kent WA
May 19-21, High Risk Warrant Service, Kent WA
June – TBA, Likely Team Leader
August 25-26, Ballistic Shield User, Kent WA
Sept. 22-26, Basic SWAT School, Spokane WA
Oct. 20-21, Ballistic Shield User, Spokane WA
Nov 3-5, Tactical Carbine/SubGun, Union Gap, WA
Nov 6 & 7, Tactical Pistol, Union Gap, WA

If you’re interested in attending any of the courses above, shoot me an email for registration info.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is now retired from LE. He still has frequent contact with coppers and the topic moved to my training. He made mention that “A guy he knows” had attended one of my courses and liked what I was throwing down. However, due to my use of profanity he did not think he could attend future classes or host training at his agency. The language was deemed “unprofessional”. I have often heard about “professionalism” and what amounts to “unprofessional” behavior. In my case it usually has some connection to the adjectives I select in training courses. I guess sometimes they are nouns, verbs, and adverbs depending on where they fall in the sentence. Regardless of all that, I decided to look up the definition of professionalism. “The competence or skill expected of a professional”. Weird, nothing about profanity. Lets check “Professional – 1. Of, relating to or connected with a profession. 2. engaged in a specified activity as one’s paid occupation rather than as a pasttime”. Interesting. I think context, time, place and audience have more to do with whether profanity is acceptable or not.

Patton once said “When I want my men to remember something important, to really make it stick, I give it to them double dirty. It may not sound nice to some bunch of little old ladies at an afternoon tea party, but it helps my soldiers to remember. You can’t run an army without profanity; and it has to be eloquent profanity. An army without profanity couldn’t fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag. … As for the types of comments I make, sometimes I just, By God, get carried away with my own eloquence”.

So please, pardon my eloquence and hear the message. I tell every class that if profanity offends you, tell me, and I’ll try to tone it down. No one has ever said anything to my face, twice I have heard after the fact. Don’t be an old lady at a tea party, for the love of Pete your job is too engage in conflict as a cop. Tell me and I’ll try to tone it down. Or not. Either way your critique can include that you asked and I still didn’t stop. Or just dont come to my training, we’ll both be happier. 

People think I’m bullshitting when I say I dry fire every Sunday. I do, usually 30 minutes on each gun. Some have asked so here are a few examples of the things I do. Remember 4 universal rules and read up on dry fire procedure. Proceed at your own risk, Tap-Rack does not recommend this to the untrained and you should always use a back stop that will stop a round. With handgun:
Shot timer on random start and a second beep at 1.25 seconds. Target is a sheet of paper at 7 yards. Hands in interview position or resting at sides. On beep, draw and “fire” before second beep. You gotta call your shots and you should be able to say whether or not you would have hit the target.  Do this ten times under the mark with hits. (set your own par)
Slide locked open, empty mag in gun, spare mag with dummies. On beep, speed reload and “fire” before second beep. Same par time of 1.25, you still have to make the hit. Ten times under YOUR par time.
Ten “eyes closed” Tac reloads. No time, just smooth and perfect with everything stored where I want it before I start again. Drill starts aimed in and ends aimed in.

Same thing with rifle. Not that hard, doesn’t take very long, and it pays HUGE dividends on the range. As always, pardon the typos.