It has become far more popular for a lot of instructors to teach shooting at contact or entangled distances. I am seeing it crop up again and again with new courses popping up all the time.

I am all for this, with the caveat that the instructor has actually put the work in. Rather than just show something that they have given little thought or effort to in order to appear that they are “cutting edge”, or that they have spent zero time exploring in force-on-force scenarios against role players that have the freedom to act as bad guys truly act, as long as the instructor has done the work, I will support them 100%.

Unfortunately, that effort into doing the work is generally overlooked, and replaced with the “well, I have been teaching shooting for 40 years” or “I have been LE for 40 years” or “I was a SOF face shooter in Dirkadirkastan” and they teach incredibly sub-optimal techniques. This area demands as much thought and effort and study as trying to get a sub second draw, or shooting B8s at 25 yards, and anything less is doing the students a complete disservice, and arguably is unethical.

And just having certain components at a high level – i.e. the instructor is an excellent shooter, or is a BJJ black belt – does not meant they will get it. Shooting in an entanglement is its own thing, and requires that the instructor has put time into it, nit just the individual pieces. A couple of years ago, there was a video from two top black belts, both with direct ties to the founders of the art, showing how to shoot at contact. It was atrocious, mostly because while they both are undoubtedly better at BJJ than I am, they have never been shooters. They live in an area where they cannot carry as a private citizen, and have never been in LE or the military, so they have no clue about shooting, which means they have no clue about shooing in an entanglement.

Here is a video showing some explanation of a couple of crucial things to deal with in retention shooting. If an instructor ignores these, than I submit he has not done the work.