Basic Course Description:
This is the flagship course of the Lethal Force Institute. LFI-I is 40 hours and split roughly 60/40 between classroom lecture/demo/video and range training. The basic LFI-I curriculum includes: handgun safety, mechanics, care and handling; factors in weapon selection; defensive shooting skills, with intensive range exercises; wound ballistics and dynamics; principles of threat management and the judicious use of deadly force -- tactical, legal, ethical, psychological and physiological dimensions ; managing the aftermath of a defensive shooting; in short: self-defense in the home, in the street, in court -- the tactical, legal, moral and psychological survival of lethal threat.
Thus, while LFI-I very effectively covers the skills and dynamics of defensive pistolcraft, it not only teaches how to shoot but also when to shoot, when not to shoot, how to manage and survive a lethal confrontation in all its aspects. If you own or carry a firearm for professional or defensive purposes, this course is invaluable. If you contemplate ever using a firearm in self-defense, this course is a testbed for taking the measure of your skill and commitment. LFI-I is about choice and empowerment, on the premise that power and responsibility are commensurate.
The Instructor:
Massad Ayoob is the Director of the Lethal Force Institute in Concord, NH, National Chairman for Firearms Training for the American Society of Law Enforcement Trainers (ASLET), and a member of the International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors (IALEFI). An international leader in self-defense and firearms training for both law enforcement and civilians, Ayoob holds over two dozen professional special weapons and tactics certifications, a dozen professional awards, and dozens of competitive combat shooting awards. As a sworn police officer presently at the rank of Captain with the Grantham, NH, PD, he has 20 years experience as a patrol and training officer. In addition to enforcing the law, he has extensive experience on both sides of the courtroom, for the prosecution and for the defense, as a homicide investigator, as a certified police prosecutor for the State of New Hampshire, as an expert witness, and as Vice Chair of the Forensic Evidence Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), the only non-attorney ever to hold this position. Ayoob has served as an expert witness, consultant and defense architect in a multitude of court cases across the nation on the defensive use of deadly force. His course for attorneys entitled "The Management of the Lethal Force/Deadly Weapons Case" was, according to Jeffrey Weiner, past President of NACDL, "the best course for everything you need to know but are never taught in law school." Ayoob is also a prolific writer; for a list of some of his publications, click on Ayoob's name (above).
Cost:
$600 for a 40-hour (in class/on range) course. One half the tuition is due with your application. Add the cost of 500 rounds of ammunition, travel, meals, and hostelry.
Logistics:
You will want access to a car on site to transport gear and yourself. You can drive, rent, or find a buddy with a car. The range is often some distance from the hostelry (in Miami it's 20 miles from the city in the swamp, in NH it's ten to twenty minutes drive, in Pittsburgh it's the same). Some find it handy to bring a cooler in their car to store food and drink that they may require beyond lunch. Water is provided on the range. It is advisable to arrive the afternoon before to obtain provisions for the first day. Thereafter, provision may be made for ordering lunch delivered on site.
Equipment:
The following equipment is absolutely mandatory:
For any course, you need to send either a copy of your carry permit or a letter of reference from an attorney or local law enforcement chief or proof of employment as a law enforcement officer, what Mas calls certification that your are a "card carrying good guy."
Basic firearm safety and familiarity are assumed. You will not so much drill on the range, but rather will be introduced to drills/exercises/techniques with only a couple relays to practice them. It's assumed you will practice on your own, not at $100 a day for the privilege; range time is instruction, not practice. So novices had best learn to shoot half decently first if they want to pass the qualifying test (below). Also, any breach of range safety protocol gets you canned for the day; a second offense and you're outta the course (no refund), so basic handling and safety must be familiar. This is not to discourage novices, but to alert them to do some basic prep; like, don't bring or send your novice spouse or child for a cold start.
Also, while not a prerequisite, read In the Gravest Extreme (the "textbook" for LFI-I) before the course; you will have too much additional reading outside of the 10 hours to/from/in class to read the book carefully on site.
Exams:
There is an in-class exam, filed as "discoverable evidence" for future potential court use, and a qualifying shoot.
The qualifying course of fire is:
Personal Reflections on My First LFI-I Experience:
LFI-I is about 40% time on the range, 60% time in class. The class is lecture plus videotape, but very intensive on the video.
The reason for the intensive use of video is important to understand: so that every topic/aspect of instruction can be reproduced for a jury as discoverable evidence: you do not depend only on your notes to document the training you receive. Also, entering the videotapes and demonstrations into evidence allows the jury to be instructed and impressed as you were regarding the standards of care and the standards of what it is reasonable and prudent for "a reasonable and prudent person" to believe and do in various scenarios -- an invaluable opportunity to create, on the spot, a true jury of your "peers" who know better how the rubber meets the road.
LFI-I is not about how to shoot in self-defense or how to shoot someone and get away with it. Shooting skill is but one skill component of the judicious use of lethal force.
The course is about judgment and management skills, situational skills for surviving (1) a lethal threat, (2) the law enforcement response to a self-defense shooting, (3) legal threats and aftermath, (4) the psychological aftermath. The course places shooting skills, techniques and equipment issues in the larger contexts of the law, ethics, psychology and physiology of lethal encounters.
It is Ayoob's emphasis on the legal, ethical and psychological issues and his mastery and innovations in research on these issues and on the tactical realities, actuarials and details of the practical, legal and psychological dimensions of lethal threat management that make his course(s) unique and invaluable. His views are based on empirical research, much of it conducted or designed by himself, data from "street experience" from many sources as well as personal combat and competition experience. This is a course in theory meets reality and unforgettable lessons in the idiocies of our theories as they meet their master and get creamed.
Ayoob is a consummate performer. His live lectures are worth the price of admission. His language will melt the steel wire on a DI's chest.
There is a point to his presentational style. He vividly "acts out" in chilling scenario-fashion the answers to your questions. He may put you "on the witness stand," as he did one strapping surgeon, making him carry his desk to the front of the class like your cross to a crucifixion, and then reduce you to a dithering stammering mass as he crucifies you the way a prosecutor would crucify you. No one in class, least of all you, will forget these lessons.
But his dramatic role-play style and tough language is well tempered by a kindness, generosity of spirit and palpable genuine concern for his students that you will never doubt. His ego never undermines his humanity.
A key to his stratagems is "experiential learning," producing the analogue of "muscle memory" in the shooting drills, unforgettable lessons.
Examples:
You, and everyone else, feeling awkward and foolish but with high sweaty performance anxiety, face a TV set with an empty gun. You're going to respond appropriately, verbally and behaviorally, to a classic and tricky "Shoot/Don't Shoot" scenario on the running videotape -- in front of everyone else. Ayoob has told you about tunnel vision, auditory exclusion and many other physio-psychological phenomena that under fight-flight stress will screw up your ability to perform, your ability to perceive what's happening, your ability to recount what did happen accurately (and, hence, your ability to be both a good and truthful witness to your shooting).
You're thinking, "This is a stupid low-budget dated training tape; I'm not going to get suckered by this!" Your/the camera's eye walks you into a bar. You've been briefed on a male and female suspect, described thus and such; armed and dangerous and wanted for questioning. You see a couple sitting at the bar; do they look like the suspects? The man turns toward you and raises his hands as if in greeting, palms out; very disarming. Your eyes are glued on his hands: what's in them? Nothing? Nothing? The woman has drawn and fired a revolver from her purse. You never saw it. You had forgotten about her. You were focused on his hands. She disappeared in the periphery of your tunnel vision. You are dead.
Did you see the woman with the gun, Ayoob asks. What gun? everyone asks. no one saw it, not even your audience. Play it again, Sam, says Ayoob. Look for it, people! he commands in a bark. We look again.
Oh, someone says. Shit, someone says. It happened so fast, someone says. No shit, Sherlock! Ayoob says. You're dead, Fred. Do you like my dated low-budget video now? Even the second time, even looking for it, it's hard to get your eyes to take in the woman pulling the gun beside the man at the bar waving his hands. And his hands didn't hold a gun. When the hands hold a gun, that scenario comes later; just as you thought it was safe to shoot an empty gun at a low-budget dated video. You don't forget "tunnel vision." You do not leave this course thinking only sissies have tunnel vision, as many thought before they had to face the TV scenario that suddenly enveloped them like reality wrap.
For the extreme in "experiential learning," there's the LFI drill called "jump starting the shooters." Ever speculate about how effective 60,000 volts from a stungun would be on an opponent? Many on the net have argued the issue endlessly. In LFI you don't speculate when a demonstration can settle your mind and burn your pants. Each shooter on the line is hit with a jolt; then he has to recover, draw and fire at the target. Everyone finds out, for himself and by witness, that the experience is not so stunning that they can't quickly recover and deliver lethal intent. Without the benefit of an aggressor's adrenaline dump or drug-induced fury.
Then there's the vividly vicarious "experiential learning" delivered by video reconstructions and analyses of shoot-outs -- the FBI Miami Massacre and other scenarios where officers lost their lives or nearly so in nightmare situations. Followed by lives saved or lost by ballistic vests or underestimated edged weapons, respectively. Or the lecture on the myths of the "one-shot stop" sung to the tune of countless autopsy slides that etch into your mind forever, analyzed with technical eloquence and virtuosity by Ayoob. For every conviction he has a grisly counter example. Double-ought buck, two shots at point blank? A good bet to stop your assailant? Probably. But take the case of this perp, whose heart was shredded and blown out his hyper-extravacated back, never to be found in sufficient pieces for recognition. He lived to shoot and kill the officer who delivered the buckshot. Lesson: the heart can be destroyed beyond recognition, the trauma can be devastating, but the brain can remain oxygenated for up to seventeen seconds, enough time for a dead man to shoot back. Or, how about a point-blank shot from a 44 mag to the face? Take the case of the perp who lost a third of his head thereby, but then walked down two flights of stairs to his car to get his gun, to expire only after reaching for the car door. If he'd had his weapon in hand, the officer would be dead too. Lesson: never underestimate the resilience of the psycho-physiology of the human organism, especially one hyped up on adrenaline and drugs.
These are tactical lessons. The autopsy tour also serves to remind you of the key questions, in paradoxical tension: What are you capable of doing to prevent an aggressor from doing this to someone you love? OR: Are you sure you are capable of doing this to another human being?
These are just highlights. The total cumulative impact of this course usually produces a version of "Post Shooting Trauma," the subject of yet another of the myriad lectures and videotapes. It's called "Post LFI Trauma." If you are a cowboy, a Rambo, a Dirty Harry going in to LFI and those personae come out alive in the end, you have good prima facie evidence of psychopathic tendencies. It is the rare person who is so on top of these issues and the awesome realities that lie behind lethal threat and lethal force, that he is not profoundly moved and changed in ways hard to articulate. It's the "you gotta have been there" kind of experience. It's the rare individual who, if he or she stays the course, will not find it amongst the most invaluable and educational experiences of his life.
It's a rare individual who does not feel at once humbled but edified by the Ayoob experience. It is not about shooting, shooting well, or getting away with shooting bad guys. It's about who you are. As I'd put it, as a professor of ethics: it's the best ethics course I've ever had, from how you negotiate judgments of right/wrong to the meaning of life, questions that raise in vivid relief against the ultimate exigencies of life/death. And, like good military training, it's the next best/worst thing to going to war.
So go the testimonials. Any class will include hard-headed, hard-nosed macho types highly experienced in competition shooting and/or highly trained professionally (cops, mercenaries, Special Forces folk, PI's, and the like). One tall strapping SOF-type stood up and asked quietly, after the final exam, to say something. "I want to tell you what this meant to me, he said. I've been to Cooper, to Chapman, to Farnam. They're good. I learned a lot about practical shooting. And I just spent $6,000 to go to Israel to an anti-terrorist school. I shot every f--ing auto and semi-auto and exotic weapon you've ever dreamed about. We blew things up. We did the works. If you're into rock 'n roll, well, this can be fun. It was a good experience. But all those courses put together aren't worth a fraction of LFI. They're all about shooting. But this course gives you what you need. I kind of knew what LFI was about. But I didn't really know how much I needed it, until now, when it's over. Because this course asks the questions you need to ask. Like why you're messing with this s__t, what you're going through all this for. I know I never got close enough to the real questions before. This course makes you think. And feel. This course is the best, because of how it makes you think and feel."
There wasn't a sound when he finished quietly. Then applause. Everyone knew what he was talking about. Everyone agreed.
It's just one of those things where "you've got be there." If you're serious about the RKBA and all that that entails (power and responsibility are commensurate); if you're serious, or want to test whether you are, about surviving both lethal and legal threats; if you just want to have a great life-affirming, value-clearing adventure in self-knowledge, you can't go wrong in going there.
As the range owner in Miami put it to me when I called the night before my first LFI plunge to say that I was sick as a dog with the flu and could I withdraw: "Yes," he said, "you can withdraw. But let me tell you something. I don't know how sick you are, but do yourself a favor, my friend; don't miss this." I got on the plane. Head aching; nose running; popping antihistamines; thinking: I can't think straight, let alone shoot straight in this condition! Two hours into the first day's class, my adrenaline dump fried the flu right out of my system. I was there.
My last wild claim for the Ayoob experience, and I can claim this on the basis of personal experience, is that it will cure both vicious flu and the common cold. My flu was no match for Mas.