Things I Don’t Like Teaching Civilians—and Why

My career has been interesting. I served in the United States Marine Corps as an infantry rifleman through Iraq and Afghanistan. As an infantryman, your number-one job is gunfighting, but being good at that job involves a whole lot more than simply pointing a rifle and maneuvering with your team.

Over the years, I learned something interesting. Many of the skills I learned in the military translate extremely well to the civilian world. Sometimes the planning, communication, medical, problem-solving, and decision-making skills translate better than the actual shooting techniques. I've also learned the opposite lesson. Instructors teach civilians plenty of things simply because we were taught them. The information might be interesting. It might make for a cool class. It might even be an important skill in a military environment. That doesn't automatically make it valuable to the average civilian.

After years of teaching military personnel, contractors, law enforcement, federal officers, and civilians, I've developed a pretty simple filter: How likely is this person to actually need this skill? If the answer is "almost never," I'm probably not going to dedicate much valuable training time to it. Here are a few topics that always seem to perk people's ears up but generally fall pretty low on my list.

Coriolis Effect: Interesting, But Do You Actually Need It?

Let's start with precision rifles. People love talking about shooting farther and farther. But as I discussed in my previous article, distance usually isn't the biggest problem. Good processes matter far more. Want to know something I don't think most precision rifle students need to spend much time on? Coriolis effect. It seems like every precision rifle class eventually has someone bring it up. In the instructional world, there's a type of student we sometimes jokingly identify as the "sniper." This is the student who has found a subject he believes the instructor doesn't understand and wants to bring it up in front of the class. Coriolis is a favorite.

A good instructor shouldn't shut him down immediately. I'll often let the student explain it. Sometimes he's actually pretty close, and that's impressive. Other times, his understanding came from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Now we get to spend the next half hour diving into what Coriolis actually is, why the Earth's rotation can matter to a projectile, and where the student's understanding went sideways.

It's interesting. It can absolutely become relevant under certain conditions. But if we're not shooting at extremely long distances where its effect becomes meaningful, we've just burned valuable training time discussing something that won't affect anything we're doing. Meanwhile, there are dozens of processes that a shooter could actually use every time he gets behind his rifle. That's the distinction. I'm not saying Coriolis isn't real. I'm saying your training time is finite. Spend it where it matters.

CQB Doesn't Mean We Need to Discuss Every Grenade Ever Invented

Close-quarters combat creates the same problem. During the Global War on Terror, CQB was central to infantry training—marines, especially infantrymen, needed to understand room-clearing techniques. Naturally, everyone develops opinions about how it should be done. This unit did it this way. That unit entered this way. This team used this procedure. That becomes exhausting quickly. When I began working contracts after the military, I had a wonderfully simple answer: I don't care how your old team did it. This is how we're doing it on this contract. Problem solved.

Everyone needs to operate from the same procedures because CQB is essentially a very dangerous ballet. Multiple armed people move through confined spaces around one another, and small misunderstandings can have enormous consequences. That's why consistency matters more than everyone's résumé.

With civilian students, another rabbit hole inevitably appears: grenades. Mention CQB, and suddenly we're discussing flashbangs, smoke, CS gas, fragmentation grenades, and every other device someone has seen used by the military or law enforcement. Then come 15 questions. Is the information interesting? Absolutely. Is knowing the employment characteristics of an M67 fragmentation grenade important to the average civilian learning how to safely move through a structure? Probably not.

We've once again taken limited training time away from the delicate processes that actually matter to discuss something interesting that the student is extremely unlikely ever to use. Interesting and useful aren't always the same thing.

Needle Decompression: Sometimes Advanced Is Too Advanced

Tactical medicine is another area where this happens. During my first two deployments, I served in medical roles within my squad and received the combat lifesaving training required at the time. I became very interested in emergency medicine. My father was a doctor, so anatomy and physiology were subjects I already found fascinating, and that knowledge has continued to help me throughout my career.

One subject civilians inevitably want to discuss is a tension pneumothorax and needle decompression. In simplified terms, trauma to the chest can allow pressure to build where it shouldn't, interfering with the lung's ability to function and eventually creating a life-threatening emergency. Needle decompression is an invasive medical procedure intended to relieve that pressure.

It's also something I don't want the average civilian casually attempting because he watched someone demonstrate it during a tactical medicine course. This isn't the same as applying a tourniquet. You're intentionally penetrating another human being's chest with a needle, and doing it incorrectly can cause serious harm. The laws, protocols, scope of practice, and circumstances can also vary depending on where you are and your level of medical training.

Yet you'll find decompression needles included in plenty of trauma kits. That doesn't mean everyone carrying that kit should use everything inside it. For the average civilian in America, my priorities are much more basic: recognize the emergency, control catastrophic bleeding, keep the person alive, get professional medical help moving, and get the casualty to a higher level of care as quickly as circumstances allow.

Advanced medical procedures are fascinating. That doesn't necessarily mean they belong in the hands of someone who received a few minutes of instruction during a firearms course. Sometimes knowing not to perform a procedure is part of good training.

Shooting From Vehicles: Fun Doesn't Mean High Priority

This one will probably create some controversy because shooting from vehicles is fun. I've done it. I've taught it. I've trained it extensively. I've also used those skills professionally. In military and private-military applications, vehicle-based firearms training made perfect sense.

But look at the environment. We're talking about armored vehicles, gun ports, turret systems, up-gunned vehicles, multiple armed personnel, convoy operations, and missions where abandoning the vehicle or simply driving away might not be an option. That's a very different problem from the average armed American sitting at a traffic light.

Could a civilian someday need to fire from inside a vehicle? Of course. Almost anything is possible. That's not the question I use to prioritize training. The question is: How likely is it compared with everything else we could be practicing?

If you're sitting behind the wheel and something dangerous begins developing around your vehicle, you have something incredibly useful available to you: a vehicle. In many circumstances, the better defensive option may be to drive away. Remember, in civilian defensive shooting, the objective shouldn't be to find an opportunity to use your firearm. The objective is to survive. If the accelerator gets you and your family away from the threat, that's a pretty effective defensive tool.

Again, there are exceptions. Some scenarios make escape impossible. Vehicles can become trapped. People can be attacked while seated. Reality has an annoying habit of creating circumstances instructors didn't anticipate. But we're talking about training priorities.

For the average civilian, I think it's considerably more likely that a defensive shooting will happen while standing, moving on foot, fighting from the ground, or trying to protect another person than while engaging someone from behind the steering wheel of a moving vehicle. If you have a particular road-rage problem that keeps putting you into armed confrontations, your biggest training problem probably isn't your ability to shoot through a windshield. It's your decision-making.

Cool Training Isn't Always Good Training

This is really what I've learned after spending so many years teaching. We tend to confuse advanced with important in the firearms industry. They're not the same thing. The Coriolis effect is real. Grenades are real. Needle decompression is real. Shooting from vehicles is real. I've trained or worked around all of them in environments where they made sense. That doesn't mean they deserve equal time in a civilian firearms course. If I have five days with a student, every hour I spend teaching one subject is an hour I'm not spending somewhere else. I'd rather build strong processes around skills a person has a reasonable chance of needing than make the course more exciting by filling it with techniques that make good social media clips.

This is one of the biggest lessons my military background eventually taught me about civilian training: The goal isn't to turn civilians into soldiers. It's to identify which lessons we've learned through military, law-enforcement, competitive, hunting, and defensive experience actually solve the problems civilians are likely to face. Sometimes the best instruction isn't adding another cool technique. It's knowing which ones to leave out.

About The Author

Rob Orgel enlisted in the USMC in 2004 as an Infantry Rifleman (0311), serving with 3rd Bn 1st Marines in Iraq, including roles as a point man in OIF-3 & team leader in OIF-6. Later, he joined the 1st Marine Regiment, achieved the rank of Sergeant in 2010, & continued service in Afghanistan. Upon returning, he became a Combat Instructor at the School of Infantry West. Transitioning to private military contracting with Securing Our Country (SOC), he instructed at the American Embassy in Iraq. In 2018, Rob became Chief Instructor at GPS Defense Sniper School and revamped their program. Now, as owner & lead instructor at Emergency Response Tactical, he focuses on training novice to advanced shooters on the range over 300 days a year. Rob also hosts the Silencer Analytics channel on YouTube.