Around 1901, a Russian physiologist by the name of Ivan Pavlov staked his claim in history through his work in the area of “classical conditioning.” Pavlov used a set of now-famous dogs in his experiments that were conditioned to link a natural response (salivation when meat powder was placed in their mouth) to a completely unassociated stimulus (the ringing of a bell).
More than a century later, we’re still using these foundational techniques to modify behavior, like training cops when to shoot.
We’ve all had our toes on the line, facing downrange, waiting for the bell so we can draw and shoot. Truthfully, there’s probably more operant conditioning happening here than classical conditioning, and it’s more accidental than intentional, but the “law dawgs” on the firing line have a lot in common with Pavlov’s pack.
Rangemaster Tech
Since the beginning of formalized police firearms training (roughly the late 1930s in America), trainers needed a way to command their students to begin firing. Most followed age-old military protocols, where the “fire” command was spoken. Bullhorns and public address systems helped to prevent going hoarse, and using that classic piece of police equipment, the whistle, made life even easier.
Eventually, folks decided that these methods weren’t very realistic and a better way was needed. Turning targets looked like a good solution to the problem (and neatly solved the issue of late shots fired past the end of allotted time), but the machinery was expensive to install and frequently broke down, so most agencies never used it. Later, electronic timers with aural signals came along and worked well, but whistles were cheaper and didn’t need batteries.
Training Scars Take Shape
The wheel turned and we found ourselves using verbal commands again to trigger the draw and shoot response. Since officers were now being trained to yell standardized threat warnings to their partners in the field, these were simply imported into the firearms training environment as well.
When a trainee heard the ubiquitous “Gun!” or “Threat!” warning on the range, then he was expected to start slaying cardboard dragons. We had linked the response to a new stimulus, and while it sounded good and felt good, hidden problems lingered.
Most significantly, under the stress of a deadly attack, the standard warnings didn’t always come out exactly standard. In real life, when the felon came out with a gun in hand, officers were much more likely to yell “Whoa!” and “Hey!” and “Stop!” and the ever-popular “Oh S**t!” instead of the proper “Gun!” command, like they were used to hearing on the sterile range.
There’s a normal cognitive lag time associated with going from condition yellow to condition red, but it was now increased by the amount of time it took to decipher and process “Whoa, look out Bob, he’s got a...” as a cue to start shooting.
To be clear, this isn’t indicative of a training or discipline problem. It’s just the imperfect way that we humans react under severe, life-threatening stress. You can’t really “train it out of them” with any measure of success — it just is.
You can see the negative effect of this conditioning process during training. I recently ran a class and used “Threat!” as the command to start firing in the first few drills. After everyone got conditioned to it, I switched without notice and issued a “Look out! He’s got a gun!” command and you could see the hesitation and delay up and down the line as the mental gears started grinding. A few of the officers didn’t even draw, but just turned around and looked at me in confusion.
A Plan Forward
So what do we do? How do we get around this problem of conditioning, so that we don’t accidentally program our folks to wait for a cue that isn’t going to be there (at least not exactly) in the real world?
We go back to Ivan’s dogs.
Look at how your K-9 units train their tail-wagging partners. When it’s time to train them to bite, they don’t put them in front of a row of cardboard arms and blow whistles at them. They set up a reality-based scenario with some unlucky guy in a bite suit, and when he starts acting like he needs to be bitten, then the dog is cleared in hot to lock jaws on him.
Your firearms training program needs to work the same way. We can’t use the “square range” as the primary — or, worse yet, only — tool for teaching our people when to shoot. They need to participate in frequent and realistic “force-on-force” (FoF) training to hone those skills.
They need exposure to living “threats” who initiate “attacks” against them in order to program their brains with the information needed to detect, assess and recognize these same patterns of behavior out on the street. Your officers need to learn how to read that “felony stretch” — that quick scan for witnesses, that target focus gaze, that shift in body weight, that drop in the off side shoulder, that lowering of the center of gravity, that knifing action of the hand as it clears a path to a hidden weapon, and all those other subtleties of body language that tell us an attack is imminent or in progress.
If they can learn to recognize these patterns in training, they will cut their reaction time to a real world threat.
“Square range” shooting is an essential part of a firearms training program — there are some skills that can only be trained on the range — but there are some skills that are better trained somewhere else. Training an officer when to begin shooting is one of those skills. When on the range, you should certainly do the best that you can--mix up your “Fire” commands and keep it fresh; Make the trainees think a little bit and don’t condition them to start drooling every time you ring the bell.
