The Philosophy of Reactive Shooting: Gun Guys Ep. 29 with Bill Wilson and Bill Rogers

Rogers Reactive Shooting School: https://rogersshootingschool.com/
Website: https://www.wilsoncombat.com/
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Most experts agree that a handgun is the least desirable firearm to choose for defense. The advantage of firepower and inherent accuracy usually makes selection of some type of shoulder weapon the obvious choice. However, in many cases, such as driving, climbing, rappelling, fighting in very close quarters, crawling through narrow places, carrying something, or being wounded, a handgun has a definite advantage. In most of these real life cases, which are common, only one hand is used to control the weapon. We tell people that the original inventors had that intent when they designed the weapon and that is why it was called a handgun and not hand(s) gun. Over the years of training, we have had a number of past students who claim to be alive because they learned those one handed skills at our school. Unfortunately, most shooting schools, including those operated by the military and police, do very little training with one hand.

With the advent of the video recorder mounted in the police car, many shootouts have been recorded in the last few years. A review of these shows a majority of the officers using one hand techniques even when they were not trained to do so. At the Rogers Shooting School half of our instruction is dedicated toward one hand use of the weapon. This is just one of the aspects that separate us from other schools. The main difference between our school and others is that we teach the students how to successfully engage small partial targets that are only exposed for .5 to .75 of a second. From the first drill of the first day, our targets are exposed for less than a second and they never get slower. Many very experienced shooters of prestigious fighting units have found shooting at our school to be very challenging. Most if not all police and military agencies have been exclusively trained to shoot what we call "Precision" shooting with a handgun. These people find themselves in trouble when they are forced to shoot at partial targets that are moving quickly. Would they have the same problem in real life? You can count on it. Analyzing the Uniform Crime Report statistics on the number of shots fired at very close distances shows that less than 20% of the bullets fired by police hit the intended target.

All of our targets are reactive in design. They must be successfully hit in order to stop them. Peripheral hits or fragments do not stop them. This teaches the paramount skill of "following through" until the adversary is neutralized or moves to cover. Initially, students engage a close target with a shot that misses and immediately proceed to a second, farther away target. These are bad habits that have been instilled in the shooter and it sometimes takes days for us to break those bad habits. Each of our students faces an enclosure where eight concealed targets are waiting from a distance of 5 feet to 18 yards. These targets are pneumatically operated by a computer that offers the most realistic challenge in handgun instruction.

Bill Rogers is a former FBI Agent, police instructor, successful inventor with over 60 patents, and is well known in the shooting industry. Rogers has been a world ranked IPSC shooter, a state trap champion, and has over 50 years of shooting competition experience and over 45 years teaching shooting. Rogers has invented many of the holsters and equipment used by police and military worldwide. He also invented the target system and the method of instruction used at the school.