PERSONAL DEFENSE
Cleaning House
A course in Dynamic Structure Clearing will significantly up your chances of successfully defending your home and hearth from intruders.
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A shrill scream wakes you and your wife in the dark of night, and you sit up with a start. "Shut up!" An unfamiliar man's voice reaches your ears. It sounds like it came from your 12-year-old daughter's room down the hall. Your wife grabs your arm, sinking her fingernails into your bare skin, and half whispers, half shouts into your ear, "Someone's in Christy's room!"
"Christy, are you okay?" you shout.
You hear a muffled cry for help and the man's voice again.
"Shut up!"
This is not a dream. This is not a drill. Your daughter is now a hostage in your own house. Sure, you can call the cops, but a lot of bad things can happen to your little girl before help can arrive, even if it gets there in three minutes. What now?
Oh, you have a gun, huh? That's good. You know how to shoot it, and you even practice on the range a couple of times a month. That's good, too. You're also a fan of cop shows and have watched how they clear a house of bad guys, so you reason, I know how to save my daughter. I'll just go get her while my wife calls 911.
The reality is, you don't know how ill-prepared you are to save your daughter or protect yourself and your wife. Go ahead and try that Hollywood nonsense and you and your family could end up in the hospital or morgue. To increase the probability of success, you need to know the right techniques for moving through and clearing a house with one or more hostiles in it.
Law-abiding citizens can get that training at the Scottsdale Gun Club from instructors who have real-world experience doing just that. The club is a new facility located in an upscale area of Scottsdale, Arizona. With 36 air-conditioned, 25-yard shooting lanes; state-of-the-art Mancom target systems; classrooms; a two-story shoot house with moveable walls that can quickly duplicate any floor plan; and a large retail gun and accessory shop, it is well equipped for teaching everything from fundamentals to advanced tactical team techniques.
There is no substitute for real training in the shoot house. Reading about how to enter a room or being told how to "pie" a corner is good, but until a person has done it and had his mistakes corrected by a knowledgeable instructor, he or she just won't get it.
I attended the three-part Dynamic Structure Clearing class that consists of classroom instruction and realistic force-on-force shoot-house training using Man Marker cartridges against other students and the instructors.
These cartridges, manufactured by Ultimate Training Munitions fire a small aluminum-jacketed and plastic 7 1/2-grain projectile from a real gun. Modifying a gun to fire Man Marker projectiles requires replacing a few parts. It's not hard to do, but the gun won't fire regular ammo until you restore it to its normal condition, which is also simple.
The Man Marker projectiles are very light, travel fast enough to deliver about two ft-lbs of energy and get your attention, but they don't cause injury. Nevertheless, shooters wear protective headgear with full face and eye protection, long-sleeved shirts and long pants for safety. I also wore a pair of gloves to protect my hands and found they worked well without compromising my gun-handling ability.
My class drew Paul Smith as the lead instructor for the first two segments. With service in a Marine unit specializing in the recovery of nuclear weapons, SWAT experience and a job in the private sector providing personal protection for globetrotting VIPs, he knows his business.
At the outset, he made it clear that moving inside a structure containing hostiles is not recommended, but at the same time, a person may have to do so to protect a family member or to safely escape. The skills taught in the course will improve the student's chance of doing so successfully, but it is still a dangerous undertaking.
