Beyond the Bullseye: Closing the Gap Between Shooter and Gunfighter
Repeat- Breakout Session
- room ATCR209
- July 23 2026 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Session Description:
Most church protectors have never been hit. They have never been shot at. They have never made a life-and-death decision in compressed timeframes while their hands shook, their vision tunneled, and their ears went silent. They have punched holes in paper from 7 yards to 25 yards and called it training. That is not training. That is a rehearsal for a play that will never be performed.
This session strips away the comfortable assumptions that get good people killed in violent events at churches. Drawing on more than 25years of Strategos International training, more than 600,000 law enforcement, military, and security personnel run through our curriculum, and a full decade of weekly force-on-force ship-protection drills built for thousands of United States Navy fleet sailors, Vaughn Baker will make the case that projectile-based, force-on-force training is the only known method to inoculate a protector against the physiological collapse that occurs in a real gunfight. The science is settled. The inclusion of force-on-force training and the proper application is what most church protectors and church security teams are missing.
Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of why credentialed people fail under stress, how to evaluate a force-on-force training partner, the five non-negotiables of an effective program, and a practical action plan they can present to their senior pastor or board on Monday morning.
Topics Covered:
-The normalcy bias phenomenon and the three-phase response pattern that gets congregations killed in the first 90 seconds of an attack
-Dr. Curt Richter's 1957 drowning rats research and what it proves about stress inoculation in human training
-Sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous system activation, what your protector loses physiologically when the shooting starts, and how force-on-force effectively conditions both systems
-The Grossman-Siddle heart rate model, including the boundary where fine motor skills collapse, and why untrained personnel hit catastrophic arousal levels in seconds
-The combat sports analogy: why fighters who only train forms and katas lose to fighters who spar, and why the same principle applies, without exception, to gunfighting
-Why the square range is the equivalent of learning the ABCs and basic grammar, and force-on-force is the sparring and ground fighting of armed defense
-The hardest truth in the room: a good or great shooter is not the same as a gunfighter, and the difference is measured in lives
-The penalty-of-pain principle, the Cherokee teaching that "only true wisdom comes from pain," and why the steep learning curve of force-on-force makes these lessons permanent
-The Strategos origin story: how our methodology was forged, training thousands of U.S. Navy fleet sailors in one week, projectile-based force-on-force courses over ten years
-Field-validated observations from more than 600,000 trainees on what holds up under stress and what does not
-The five non-negotiables of effective force-on-force training and the red flags to watch for when vetting a provider
-A Monday-morning action plan: audit, budget, vet, build cadence, debrief, document, deploy
