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My course certainly covered the ins and outs of when you can use deadly force, but it was just words. It leaves me wondering whether I really have all that internalized such that I will do the right thing when it counts.

I used to teach skydiving, and we had a similar situation where there were a variety of different problems you would encounter, and you had to react quickly with the right action. We came up with a series of drills that we made the students practice, covering the majority of possible scenarios. The whole idea was to get that stuff into muscle memory, so that when the situation happened, you reacted the way you were trained. You didn't spent a lot of time thinking about it, because in a stressful situation you IQ drops dramatically. I had a total malfunction on jump 15, and I believe all the drills really helped me. I think a similar thing could be done for CHL situations.

I agree you certainly couldn't cover all the possible bad guy scenarios. However, you could cover a lot of different kinds of scenarios, and I think it would be valuable training just to get you thinking in the right mindset. My CHL class *talked* about a few scenarios, but talk is just talk. It would be interesting to do role-play with situations that are representative of things you would encounter. Just thinking of a few off the top of my head: home invasion, carjacking, mugging, mall shooting, parking garage, etc. It would be interesting to have scenarios where the best action is to shoot, and scenarios where the best action is to run away, or scenarios where the words escalate/de-escalate the situation. It has been clearly established that people learn better when doing compared to just hearing about something. *Some* CHL role-playing would have to be better than nothing.

A tactical class would probably have some benefit, but it seems like it would cover different material, and would have different attitudes - bodyguard duty, clearing a room, tactical reloading, concealment, etc.

One of the things that seems to be missing from CHL training is practice in different scenarios. I was thinking it would be cool if there was some kind of scenario training where you were presented with "real life" type role-play scenarios, some of which require deadly force and some which don't. You would use your own gun with snap-caps, and see how you handled the situation. An instructor would critique your actions in a debriefing.

It seems like something like this would really help with training situational awareness as well as making people more confident that they can handle a crisis situation. However, I have not seen anyone implementing these kinds of scenarios targeted at CHL holders. I know there are some "tactical" handgun classes, but those seem to be more targeted at personal security guys.

Has anyone seen anything like this? If it was available, would you sign up for it?