Introducing John Hearne
ma lot of the training events we cover on this column are shooting courses – whether it’s long-range rifle shots, fast strings with pistols, or the management of the usually intimidating shotgun for self-defense. This one is a bit different. Last summer we had the chance to attend two lectures led by skilled LEO and firearms trainer John Hearne. Hearne has devoted a major period of time to high-level academic research on some topics that will sound dry at first glance to the typical shooter. They were full-day lectures, with zero duration and a lot of very in-depth technical and historical discussions. We’re not saying this to dissuade you from his courses. On the contrary, we high I like to recommend attending considered one of them his lectures for those who ever get the possibility. The first was Who wins, who loses and why — an in-depth take a look at a variety of things related to how humans are biologically programmed to answer life-threatening stress, and how one can construct effective training programs around these aspects. The second was Defeating violent criminalswhich focused on historical case studies of the worst of the worst villains and what a motivated criminal can accomplish when he applies his villainous worldview and skill set.
Who wins, who loses and why
IN Who wins, who loses… Hearne starts by stripping down the highest layers of some oft-overused training tropes. For example, many self-defense courses address the concept of the “fight, flight, or freeze” response. Hardly any of those courses discuss how and why this decision matrix is rooted in essentially the most primitive a part of our brain. He goes on to clarify that in caveman times, the best threat to human life was large natural predators: lions, tigers, or woolly mammoths, for instance. Most of those creatures have motion-based vision processing patterns as they’re adapted to chasing fleeing animals resembling deer or antelopes. So in precedent days, freezing within the face of perceived threat made sense. This evolutionary understanding may explain a phenomenon resembling auditory exclusion. If you could have to fight a robust four-legged beast with a spear, do you wish a sharpened hearing aid to win this fight? NO. This deep-seated biological wiring is why even today, soldiers or LEOs report that they cannot remember anything they heard during a gunfight – because that neural processing power is redirected to things like increasing blood flow to major muscle groups for fighting or fleeing . Similarly, tunnel vision is a side effect of optimizing evolution for one-on-one duels with a big predator within the plains, versus team movement in a 360-degree urban environment. It’s layered understanding Why the human body responds the way in which it does, resulting in perhaps our biggest discovery of the course, succinctly formulated by Hearne as follows:
“Changing the opponent’s response from rational to emotional is maybe a very powerful point in human conflict. The fighter who can get his opponent to react emotionally while remaining rationally reacting has the very best probability of winning.”
This quote makes a much sharper biological point about why famous OODA the noose is so necessary to reign in interpersonal violence.
Defeating violent criminals
Defeating violent criminals is a crash course within the darkest recesses of the human psyche. Hearne uses two major historical case studies to convey these lessons: The Newhall Incident of 1970and FBI shooting in Miami in 1986. These are each high-profile events, well known in popular culture, and mountains of accessible general information, which makes them excellent teaching tools.
The remainder of the course covers each Newhall and Miami in painstaking and interesting detail, focusing deeply on the human features of the perpetrators and officers involved. At various points, Hearne includes information from their childhood, criminal or LE careers, relations’ accounts, and (un)skilled resumes throughout their lives. It points to a disturbing but documentable pattern of those personality types working in pairs or small groups to commit essentially the most heinous crimes. Newhall, Miami, North Hollywood, Toy box killers, Murder the Mac van killers, The Manson Family …a few of history’s most infamous crimes, all involving teams of like-minded killers who’ve managed to search out one another and join forces to scale up their crimes. Encountering such a team face-to-face could also be considered one of the least likely survival scenarios, but it surely carries considered one of the very best levels of threat to the intended victim – which we imagine makes this an especially necessary scenario for Do preparation.
Final thoughts
We were very impressed with each the thorough research that went into these courses and Hearne’s unobtrusive, approachable, and conversational variety of presentation. The availability of those courses is tragically limited, but we hope that the pace of his teaching will increase in the longer term, and we won’t wait to bring you more content about and about him in upcoming issues.
