Quarantined At Home? 5 Ways To Keep Your Defensive Handgun Skills Sharp
Are you staying home, quarantined during the Coronavirus pandemic? There are ways to keep your defensive handgun skills sharp, drills to practice, gear to use. Here are 5 suggestions:
1. Dry-Fire Practice For Trigger Control
This works especially well if you have a laser or red dot reflex sight on your handgun. First, close your curtains. You don’t want to alarm your neighbors. Pick a small aiming point on a wall or hang a target with a strip of masking tape. Check and double-check that your handgun is empty. Practice squeezing the trigger while keeping the sights on target. The reason a laser or reflex sight makes this drill better is that it will be very evident that you are yanking the trigger if that dot strays from your aiming point. Old timers used to put a coin on top of their handguns during dry-fire practice.
2. Draw From Concealment
Put on the clothes and holster you’d normally use if you were carrying concealed and heading out to do some errands. Again check and double-check that your handgun is empty. Using that same target or aiming point on the wall, lift or swipe aside your cover garment, draw your handgun and present it on target. Start slowly and smoothly and gradually increase speed. After several repetitions, incorporate the previous dry-firing drill into this so that you’re drawing, getting on target and pulling the trigger.
3. Move To Cover, Vary Shooting Positions
We’re at our best when we’re able to stand in our perfect, comfortable shooting stances at the range. Unfortunately, that’s probably not how it’s going to happen for real and standing out in the open isn’t the best strategy during a gunfight. Take the first two drills and add a doorway, a chair or some other element that simulates cover. With your gun empty, move to cover as you draw from concealment. Get on target and dry-fire. Practice from both the right and left sides. Vary your shooting positions from standing to crouching to kneeling. This is a good time to vary your target distances as well as adding a second or even a third target.
4. Add A Flashlight
Unless you can schedule all of your violent confrontations in broad daylight High Noon style, you’re going to need to practice in low light too. Dim the lights and add a flashlight to the equation. If you have a weapon-mounted light, practice activating the light as you present your gun on target during the above three drills. If you’re using a separate, hand-held light, practice accessing it and getting into the flashlight technique of your choice. Now is when you find out that burying your light in a support-side pocket is probably not the best choice for quick, sure-handed access. What you will find out is that when using a flashlight, your iron sights — night sights or not — will be perfectly silhouetted and will allow for an excellent sight picture.
5. Use A Training Aid
Using one of the many training aids that are available can help you to make the most of your practice time, especially if it provides some sort of feedback on how you’re doing. My favorite is the MantisX.
The MantisX is a small, rechargeable unit that clips on to the accessory rail of your handgun without tools. MantisX offers some adapters if your firearm doesn’t have a rail. The unit makes a Bluetooth connection to your smart phone or other device and links to a free app that you download.
You can enter the specific gun you’re using, so you can track your progress with different weapons. The app is continually being updated with an array of challenging shooting drills.
One great thing about the MantisX is that you can use the device for dry-fire practice and then transition to life-fire practice when you can get to the range. There’s a setting for using air guns too.
The app scores each pull of the trigger from 0 to 100 and provides feedback on such things as the motion of your muzzle, time from starting signal to trigger pull and time between shots. It provides charts on where you’re muzzle is at the time of the trigger pull in comparison to the bullseye and offers suggestions on correcting errors in your fundamentals.
You can compare your results from one practice session to the next to track your progress. In this day of “social distancing,” you can even challenge a friend anywhere in the country to a friendly, remote competition through the app.
Steven Paul Barlow is a retired sergeant/station commander and former firearms instructor with the New York State Police. He is an avid hunter, fisherman, and enthusiast with all things related to firearms, knives, and survival. He has been writing on outdoor topics for more than 35 years. His collections of outdoor humor stories are available at BriarHill Books.