 Hey guys, Dylan Schumacher, sitting on the fence, and before we get rolling with this video I just want to real quick cover the four firearms safety rules beforehand. I just feel compelled to do that because this is an intro video, and in an intro video it's for people who are of course new to guns, and so you may or may not know the four firearms safety rules. This deserves its own video, which I will do at some point, but for right now, just so we're all on the same page, I want to give the four firearms safety rules. The first firearm safety rule is treat all guns as if they are loaded, or all guns are always loaded, which means we're never going to do anything with a unloaded gun that we wouldn't do with a loaded gun, so the word should never, never come out of your mouth. It's okay Dylan, it's not loaded, you shouldn't say that, okay? That means we're not going to point the gun at ourselves, we're not going to point at someone else, we're just going to treat that gun like it's loaded all the time. If we all just did that, no firearms accidents would ever happen. The next three rules are derivations or an explanation of, I guess, the first firearm safety rule. So the first firearm safety rule, treat all guns as if they're loaded, or all guns are always loaded. The second firearms safety rule is never point your gun at anything you're not willing to destroy, which means I'm not going to point the gun at you, I'm not going to point it at myself, I'm not going to point the gun at anything that I am not willing to destroy. I always picture that there is a laser coming out of the end of that muzzle and I don't want to laser anything that I'm not willing to destroy. So I want to be very careful where I point this muzzle. That's particularly important on hand guns because it's such a short muzzle and the slightest turn of your wrist can sweep large swaths of area with that pistol. I want to be very careful where we point that. The third rule is keep your finger straight and off the trigger. This is where your finger goes on all guns, pistol, rifle, shotgun, doesn't matter, this is where it goes. It does not go here, all right, we don't rest our finger there. We rest our finger here outside of the trigger guard. We want to keep our finger straight and off the trigger until we ready to fire. The fourth rule is be sure of your target, it's foreground and it's background. So if you pull your gun out to save your life, you want to know what's between you and the bad guy and what's beyond the bad guy. So it's important to know where else could your bullet go in the event that it doesn't go where you want it to. So those are the four final safety rules. That's very quick. Like I said, that deserves its own video, which we will do at some point. However, that is your intro. So as you watch these videos about firearms and handling firearms, I want you to keep those four rules in mind all the time and we're never going to break those. Thanks a lot. Enjoy the video. Hey guys, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense, and this is part two of You Bought a Pistol. So now what do you do? Part one was the actual pistol and how the pistol works, which is extremely simple. There's not a lot to that. Part two is how you operate the pistol. So right now, with coronavirus going on especially, you probably can't get to a range and if you just bought a pistol, you should have some semblance of an idea of what you're doing with that. So we're going to talk about that. So the first thing we're going to talk about is grip. How do you grip this weapon? Okay? Again, make sure the gun is unloaded. Make sure there's no magazine in the gun. Make sure there's no bullet in the chamber. Okay? So grip. We want to get our grip as high up on that gun as possible. There shouldn't be no daylight between the back of your hand and the top of the beaver tail there. Get a grip up as high as possible. Finger is straight and off the trigger. Second thing is you're going to see all this dead space here. So what you want to do is God gave you two hands. Let's use them. What I want you to do is I usually lock my first row of knuckles on my second row of knuckles here. That's like a hinge. Okay? I'm going to lock that here and then as I extend my arms, what you're going to feel is you're going to feel your left hand crush the daylights out of your right hand. I'm assuming you're right-handed. If not, just reverse everything I said. You can test that out if you make a fist. Again, lock those hinges and you start here and as you extend, you're going to feel your left hand naturally compress because that hinge is set. If that doesn't make sense, give it a little bit of practice or come take a class and we'll work through it. So you're going to set your hinges back here and then as you extend, you're going to feel your support hand, your non-firing weapon hand crush your weapon hand. What we want to do is we want to extend almost all that come all the way straight out and then back off just a couple inches. So I usually end up having about a 15 or 20 degree angle in my elbow. The next thing we want to talk about is sight alignment. So we want to make sure our sights are aligned, which if I can get this on camera, it should look something like that where the front sight is evenly spaced between the two rear sights and their level on top. That's called sight alignment. We want to make sure our sights are aligned and then we're going to take those aligned sights and we're going to put them on whatever it is that we're shooting. That's called sight picture, sight alignment, sight picture. So now that we understand sight alignment, we understand how to grip the gun. The last thing to cover of course is stance. We want to make sure that our stance is square to the target. So wherever your hips are naturally pointing, that's your natural point of angle. So stand square to the target and I try to leave my left foot because I'm right handed in front of my right foot by about a half a step to a step. I'll try to roll in a picture here, but in general it's pretty simple. You're just going to stand square to the target in a general athletic stance. If you've ever played a sport in your life, you have some idea of how that works. And that's it. Now I'm going to go through five different things here that you can do at home to just easily learn how to operate and move this pistol and gain yourself a little bit of confidence and a little bit of ability that will help you manage this pistol better. The first four we're going to do from an unholstered start, which means just gun in hand. When you bought your gun, you may or may not have bought a quality holster. If not, please go find a nice kydex or kydex like holster and use that to carry your pistol around. Don't use something crappy like a nylon holster or something soft sided or any of that other garbage. Get a kydex custom molded holster for your pistol. So the first four we're going to do are just from, again, the weapon is already out because this way you can practice this whether or not you have a holster. So the first one we're going to do is from Sul. Sul is just Portuguese for south, and that means right here. This is Sul. Basically one of your support hand, in this case my left hand, against my chest, gun hand right over the top, and I'm pointing the gun straight down. That's Sul. I'm going to start in Sul, and we're just going to come up to on target. Like we talked about earlier, both hands are on the gun. My elbows are slightly bent, and I'm just extending the gun straight out, bringing it up level with my head, and I am concentrating on that front sight. What you want is you want the front sight to be clear, the rear sight should be blurry, and the target on the wall, like your light switch or whatever, should be blurry. That's what we're looking to do. So just start here and take five times and just come out to on target. So to start here, start in Sul, come out to on target, and after you've seen the target, deactivate the safety. If you have that, put your finger on the trigger and pull the trigger. Reset the weapon, finger off the trigger, come back to Sul. You're going to do that five times. Again, make sure your gun's unloaded. I suggest doing this in a basement so that if you're stupid and you don't unload your gun, at least you can mitigate your accident. Five times from Sul. When you pull on that trigger, when you pull the trigger, I want you to make sure that you're not disturbing the sight picture. We just need to concentrate on pulling that trigger straight into the rear without the sights moving. If as you pull the trigger you do this, or you see the gun dip, or you see it move, that's wherever your front sight was when you pulled the trigger, that's where that bullet went. So we want to be very careful to hold the gun as steady as possible while pulling the trigger to the rear. That's really the art of pistol shooting, is holding the gun steady while you pull the trigger. That's what we practice thousands and thousands and thousands of times for, is to be able to hold the gun steady while pulling the trigger. It sounds simple, however, it is one of the more difficult things in pistol shooting. So the next thing we're going to do is we are going to shoot this pistol from low ready. So low ready is, if you extend the gun out to on target, and you just drop the gun so that it is out of your view, and you can see what you need to see. In general I try to drop the gun, I pointed at someone's feet or below their belt buckle so that I could still see their hands. That's what I'm picturing here when I picture low ready. So I have the gun down and out of your field of vision so that you can see, you can turn your head, you can look, and just come from low ready, on target, go ahead and align that sight, disengage the safety, pull the trigger, reset, come back down to low ready, and again do that five times. Now we're going to go from high ready. The gun is right here. I'm looking just over the front sight, and what I'm going to do is I'm going to ride that front sight all the way onto, on target. So as I extend the gun, I'm still concentrating my front sight. When I get the front sight picked up in my visual profile, and the gun is on target, I'm going to depress the trigger, reset, come back to high ready. So again, what you're doing is you're riding that front sight. I can see the front sight right here. I'm looking over the gun to see where you need to see. And as I extend, I'm picking up that front sight, pulling the trigger, reset. That's high ready. Do that five times. And the last of the four unholstered starting positions is high ready or high carry or temple index. There's a bunch of different names for it. Up is another name. Basically what we're going to do is we're going to marry that gun right here to the side of our head. I put my thumb on my ear, kind of the back of my ear lobe or on my neck. That way I kind of have it as an index point of that, that's where the gun goes. This is very useful for if you're in a crowded situation or if you need to move around your kids who are usually below you. This way you can of course not point a gun at anything that a gun doesn't need to be pointed at. Side note, if you're doing this in a basement, make sure no one's above you. So we're going to start at temple index here. We're going to come through, we're going to marry our hands right to high ready. We're going to flow through high ready to untarget, depress the trigger. We're going to do that five times. Those are the four unholstered starting positions that we're going to do for the Stryfire sequence. The last one we're going to do, if you have a quality kydex holster that's custom molded for your pistol, this is the last one you should do. You're just going to do it from the draw. As a concealed carrier or a person who wants to carry a pistol to save their life, you need to have a very, very smooth draw stroke. That is one of the most important things for any concealed carrier to have is to have a smooth draw stroke. A draw stroke is just drawing the gun. For me, I carry my, for me, I carry my pistol appendix, which means I carry it right in front of myself. So I'm just going to clear my cover garment with my support hand. I'm going to draw a pistol with my left hand. I'm going to marry our hands like we talked about, extend to untarget and then pull the trigger. It's going to look something like this. You can notice I'm not rushing through this. I'm not trying to hit a certain time. Although I do use a timer in my personal dry fire time. This is just a dry fire session for you to get used to the motion. Don't put too much pressure on yourself too soon. We're just trying to get the basics down so you have a smooth draw stroke. Then once you have a smooth draw stroke, you can start to put yourself under a buzzer and under a timer in order to get faster and better. Okay? So just do your draw stroke five times. And that's it. That is just an introductory dry fire session in your pistol. Again, this is for people who just purchased a pistol, aren't really sure what to do with it or how to handle it. This is where you can start. If you're interested in learning more about dry fire and more things you can do such as reloads and malfunction clearing, I do have a full pistol dry fire sequence on my channel. I'll put it in the description below. And you're welcome to do that as much as you like. Your heart's content. I will tell you right now, the better you want to be at pistol shooting, the more dry fire you need to do. Professionals who get paid to shoot guns dry fire all the time. That is the primary way to get better at shooting is dry fire. If you'd like to know more about how to use your pistol to save your life, please come take a class with me. And I would love to spend the day shooting your gun with you so that we can get you better prepared to save your life. Until then, do brave deeds and endure.