Imagine it pouring down torrential volumes of rain for days, and you are in the forest, sleeping in sleeping bags, with no option to go indoors whatsoever. You’re standing around with a group of your friends, embracing the misery, when some sort of leader walks over to your despicable band of brothers and says “Good training Gents!”. Such is the attitude of many a senior ranking person in a certain branch of the Armed Forces. In that case, I would almost always disagree with such people, but in this case, tell us your opinion in the comments section.

Atlantic Firearms recently posted a video of a training course done by a group called the AK Operators Union, a Kalashnikov platform based civilian training group that is successful in their own right, they hold classes across the country, and have the military experience to back it up. In this case their lead instructor, Rob Ski is former Polish military and now works in the States. Anyways, it looks like the group held a training class for the employees of Atlantic Firearms (or at least I think) and they posted this video on Monday. The training is legitimate except for certain instances where the instructor discharges live rounds feet away from the shooters in order to induce the stress of an enemy force firing back at them.

Now, from my perspective as an NRA instructor and from all my Marine training, this is an extremely unsafe act and does not add to the training environment. However, that is just my perspective and please let TFB know what you think in the comments section.

I completely get their point, gunfights are not a joke, it’s not like training for the Olympics, there are no second place winners in a firefight. My own section leader was killed while on patrol in Helmand while engaged with the Taliban. But there are an enormous number of ways to induce this kind of stress while not putting students in a legitimate amount of danger. Physical fitness performed beforehand to get heart rates up, shooting fireworks at the shooter with eye protection on, working with whistles, buddy dragging your friend to simulate your own death or wounding because of your errors. But I don’t think blasting off rounds at your feet is a valid training tool. From a tactical perspective, if rounds are impacting within feet of you, the proper response should be to get your head down and find some cover, not continuing to reload or manipulate your firearm. This the difference between sporadic and suppressing fire. A unit can maneuver, fire back, manipulate their weapon systems while under sporadic fire, which is rounds making a whistling sound or impacting at least 20 to 30 meters away. However with suppressive fire, which means those “cracks” in the air or impacts extremely close to you, priorities should be shifting to taking cover, and then returning fire because essentially the enemy is right on target, and he is bracketing you with his fire.

On another note, this directly from the Facebook post, from the instructor-

@Safety Nazis – just STFU. This was 100% controlled environment and at no time students were at any risk.

Safety Nazis? Just Shut the F*** Up? being smoked on the streets of Paris? Really? In addition to their response when called out on the safety aspects of the training when I personally commented on the lack of safety-

I’m at 45 degrees angle, shooting way away from the students, using heavy 7.62×39, which is landing in the sand, in direction away from the students…You have higher probability being smoked on streets of Paris today than get hurt from my hand. Making judgement based on 60 sec video clip and running your mouth on it isn’t something what i would expect from fellow infantryman

Unsafe or good training? What are your thoughts?