Starvin Larry

It’s become something of a cliché, in the training world, to point out that “Life isn’t a square range!” The implication—and sometimes it’s not even implied, but violently explicit—being that if you’re doing fundamentals work with your weapons, you’re going to die, because your training isn’t “real” enough. I’ve always found this ironic, since in my experience, the ability to actually hit what the fuck I was shooting at, on demand, as many times as I needed to shoot it, was THE defining factor in success in a gunfight. Where did I learn to do that? On the fucking “square range!” Admittedly, they were actually, usually rectangular, but…

I don’t know who first coined the phrase, “Life isn’t a square range,” but I suspect they’ve been taking horribly out of context. I’ve always understood the phrase to mean “ there’s more to combat shooting than standing still, waiting for the…