Tactical Pistol Shooting by Erik Lawrence

Tactical Pistol Shooting is comprehensive look at the fundamentals of pistol shooting for self-defense or tactical situations. It is a 216-page soft cover book published in 2005. The book covers everything from mindset, grip and stance to drills, movement and one-handed malfunction drills.

The author, Erik Lawrence, served over 10 years in the U. S. Army Special Forces, and is the founder training director for Blackheart International, LLC (this is according to the book, but I have found nothing that would cast doubt on his credentials). The book is presented as a distillation of that operational experience and training into a manual relevant for the layman or the professional. The text certainly has the feel and flavor of other military-influenced instructional material.

Overall the book is a solid resource. It covers a lot of ground and covers it with clear photos and good descriptions. The material covers a lot of subjects that other instruction skirts around, like performing reloads or malfunction drills one-handed with the weak-side (non-firing/reaction) hand. The only weak point is in the drill listing. The descriptions are a little too lean for the novice shooter.

The mindset section is provided by Col. Jeff Cooper of Gunsight Inc. The material covers familiar subjects of self-defense shooting, including the color codes of awareness. This is not a chapter to be overlooked. It also details common responses to stress and fear and methods to cope with that response – high quality material.

The early chapters deal with the basics, starting with a glossary of terms and nomenclature. The book then moves into safety, range procedures and range commands.

Shooting fundamentals begin with determining eye dominance before moving to stance, grip, breath control, sight alignment, sight picture, trigger control and follow-through. Each fundamental is presented in good detail, often with illustrations or pictures. Trigger control even details the differences in single action, double action and Glock safe action triggers.

The next chapter goes through a full deck of draws, shooting positions and basic movements. It includes everything from the standard draw, to concealed carry draws and seated draws to shooting in standing, kneeling, sitting, supine and prone positions. It also covers turning and movement. It’s thorough.

For anyone interested, Lawrence demonstrates a modified isosceles stance, a 4 position draw and drawing to the high compressed ready position. He doesn’t use these terms, but those are the labels the internet forums would put on his technique.
The next chapters deal with reloading and malfunction drills. Most of this is standard fare; the only complaint that the chapter details the slingshot technique of release the slide from slidelock. It’s not a major issue, but I consider the power stroke to be a superior method. Lawrence uses what I call the “problem solving” school of malfunction drill. That is, he advises the shooter to diagnose the problem and take the appropriate corrective action. This stands in contrast to the other major school, which advocates using the “Tap, Rack, Bang” drill for every malfunction.

It’s probably important to note here that Lawrence gives a very thorough and detailed account of HIS method. He does not detail other ideas, techniques or methodology. You can consider this a strength or a weakness in the text. It doesn’t give the reader a broad picture or a way to experiment with variations. It does give the text unity, direction and focus.

The next chapter is combat marksmanship; some of the best and worst parts of the book can be found in this section. The chapter covers topics like flash sight picture, movement, cover and transitioning to the pistol from a long weapon. One of my favorite pieces is a chart for diagnosing shooting errors by  showing miss locations and the common shooting mistakes that would cause them. For example, shooting low and left can be commonly caused by jerking or snatching the trigger, while shooting low left may be cause by a tightening the whole weapon hand during trigger squeeze. It certainly won’t replace a qualified instructor, but it’s still a great resource for regular practice.

The only real weakness of the chapter is the drills section. The book lists 26 useful drills. It’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s good enough for a start. The only thing I don’t like is that the descriptions are very brief. The text is enough to get the gist of the drills, but I’d like a little more detail about the objective of each drill and some benchmarks defining a good drill.  It’s always nice to know how the drill you’re running fits into the larger picture and if you are doing it right.

The next chapter covers shooting wounded, including, shooting with one-handed, one-handed reloads and one-handed malfunction drills (all with both the firing and non-firing hands). This is the really high-level stuff that everybody should practice, but few people do, because it’s hard. The book wraps up with short chapters for low-light shooting, left-hand dominant shooting, a list of shooting schools, progress worksheets and the 10-rules of a gunfighter.

As an added touch, each chapter has an opening pistol profile of some tactical or concealed carry pistols. The profiles don’t provide a ton of information, but they should give the novices a few names to ask their instructor or firearms dealer about. The feature pistols are, in order of appearance: the Beretta PX4 Storm, Browning Pro-9, Tarus PT99, Springfield XD, Sig Sauer P226R, Walther P99, Smith & Wesson SW99, Ruger P95DAO, Kimber Tactical Pro II, Glock 35 and HK USP Tactical.

Overall it’s a really good book, and has something of value for every shooter.