[ST] Actual riding stuff

["Marc Danziger" <marc@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Aaah, synchronicity... Marc S and I admiring our gazongas (in the mirror)
at the same time ... actually Marc's post about riding in traffic was dead
on, and reflects the way I ride ... with little "paddles" out in front of
my bike and all the vehicles around me. I just try and keep the paddles
from overlapping as much as I can.

GL and I went and had dinner Tuesday with our LEO friends, Shaun and Tracy
(Shaun says "hi"), and had a long discussion about training and mindset and
similar issues because they would rather I didn't have to bring her along
in wheelchair. 

Part of what I realized is that there is an exact corollary to the issues
in m/c training, which is LEO/military style "tactical" training. I've
reviewed training materials and been a beta tester for several trainers in
this area, and I think there's an exact parallel, which points out the
deficiencies in most current motorcycle education. And what the areas are
in which I will grovel, beg, insist, and withhold sex in the hope that
Grace will try and get some further education...

If I can ask that this not turn into a "guns good/guns bad/big guns better"
argument, but a look at how people who shoot for a living (and their lives)
are trained.

In my limited historical understanding, up until the late '60s, there was
minimal tactical training, and most police/military etc. were trained in
marksmanship -- the ability to rapidly and accurately hit unrealistically
small targets at the controlled environment of a firing range. There was a
large "body of informal knowledge" about gunfights and gunfighting, but
most of it was anecdotal and romanticized. There was a little bit of
education -- kind of one-day classes -- that were run at places like
Quantico, and the military Ops types probably had some similar training,
but it was cursory at best. The emphasis was extraordinary performance --
cloverleaf groups (where the bullet holes overlap) at the firing range.

This is the equivalent of where we are now in the m/c world. We have
racetrack training -- looking for extraordinary performance in unrealistic
conditions -- and we have the MSF ERC, which is cursory at best.

What got added in the shooting world was a body of doctrine around shooting
tactics -- meaning techniques designed to deal with real solutions to real
problems. Jeff Cooper at Gunsite was the first well-known figure in that
world (first that I know of, but I'm sure there were others), and today
there are maybe five or seven first-rate "academies" that teach "tactical
firearms training". John Holschen, who taught the first-aid class, teaches
at one, Insights, in Washington. Gunsite stil exists (where I took the
rifle class in December), Clint Smith has Thunder Ranch in Texas, etc. etc.

In every one of these schools, marksmanship is important, but only one
small component in the larger body of skills necessary to solve tactical
problems -- get into the house, get the hostage away from the bad guy --
etc. The _level_ of marksmanship is deemphasized, and students who shoot
cloverleafs can often be outperformed by students (like me) who are
mediocre marksmen, but work hard at tactics and movement.

The ultimate expression of this took place a few years ago at what is
called the NTI, a national "tactical" competition. The "final exam" takes
place in a simulated neighborhood, where real people are used (using
nonlethal weapons that shoot "Simunitions", a kind paint pellets -- kind of
hyper paintball guns). The scenarios are stacked so that the competitors
face a series of more and more difficult interactions, and they are judged
on how they do -- and one year, Greg Hamilton, founder of Insights,
explained that he managed to get through the whole set of scenarios without
drawing his gun or shooting at all. As I understand it, after a flurry of
controversy, he was denied first place.

He managed to use his tactical skills so well that he never had to rely on
his marksmanship at all.

Similarly, I'd suggest that the ideal in motorcycling should be to ride so
well that you never need superior motorcycle handling to get out of bad
situations -- simply because you never get into bad situations in the first
place. It's an ideal -- not a reality.

So what's needed is a doctrine espousing superior tactics in street
motorcycling. There's this program in England that folks on the ST list
have directed me to; I ordered the textbook from Amazon UK (it so cool when
the confirmation explains that the book is being shipped via "Royal
Post"!!), and will share it around when it arrives. And perhaps the folks
on this list can start putting together notes for such a doctrine...

More later.



MarcD


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