ON TRAINING

A guide offers a radical reconsideration of arms training coupled with a discussion of bias in law enforcement.

Salomon makes the provocative argument that a thoughtless fidelity to training standards has become a liability in the cosmos of armed professions, including law enforcement and the military: “We should get rid of the notion that standards, in and of themselves, either comprise training or should be the objective of training.” Instead of preparing for “real-world performance,” shooters practice for an examination that is as arbitrary as it is inefficient. At the heart of the problem is limited resources—firing ranges are scarce and ammunition is expensive—and the fact that fears of liability result in a dearth of qualified instructors. Trainers are “deathly afraid” of potentially lethal accidents. The author recommends an approach, articulated at length in Salomon’s previous work, Building Shooters (2016), based on the “architecture and function of the human brain.” According to the author, there are three basic memory systems for human beings: short-term memory, long-term declarative memory, and long-term procedural memory. Only the last of these is accessed during times of intense stress, Salomon asserts, and so any training method must focus on this particular storehouse of information. In this series opener, the author’s expertise in arms training is beyond reproach, and his knowledge of the relevant literature on neuroscience is impressive, especially for a layperson. In addition, he draws intriguing—and timely—implications from the same neuroscience regarding debates about police bias that are both sober and thoughtful. And his prose is lucidly blunt and snappy: “Real-world events vary in innumerable ways, and the only consistent performance metric is who is still vertical after the fact.” This is a well-researched introduction to a complex set of issues, and given the contemporary debates regarding policing, the work may even interest general readers.

A concise and expert primer on arms training.