Rachel's Systema Writings >> Seminar Reviews >> Gunpoint Supremacy Seminar with Konstantin Komarov - November 11 at Fighthouse Gunpoint Supremacy Seminar with Konstantin Komarov - November 11 at Fighthouse (Part III of a three-part series) Sunday's session started off with Konstantin taking questions. Someone asked, how do you tell when someone's carrying? And also, how can you conceal the fact that you are carrying? Konstantin said that people either try to hide the fact that they are packing, or else they make it more obvious, for example, by walking with a swagger. In response to the question, he had us practice telling who was carrying. He pulled aside three people, told two of them to leave their guns, and took them outside the room, where he gave the gun to one of them. The three of them walked into the room and across the length of the floor, and then back again, while we observed. Konstantin then asked who was carrying the gun – he pointed to one, and asked everyone who that that he had the gun to raise their hand. Surprisingly, the class wasn't evenly divided among the three. Most people thought that one person had it. I chose correctly – the woman was carrying the gun. I had seen the way she walked – very upright and confident, with hips slightly thrust forward. It seemed like the walk of someone who was carrying.   Konstantin demonstrates the same principles we practiced with handguns with an AK-47.   Two-gun shooting demonstration using the crossed-arms technique.   Comrades-in-arms enjoying snacks and conversation during the lunch break. We did this with two more sets of three. I picked the wrong person for the second set but the right person for the last set. The woman had revealed herself to be carrying by her confident walk, but in the last set, the man who had the gun seemed to be hiding something. He looked almost guilty about it. It wasn't hard to spot him. But I did surprise myself by getting two out of three right. I guess all that research into body language paid off. Konstantin said he chose the people not randomly, but because of certain characteristics they had. He said that some things, like a hangover, could make people walk in such a way as to give the impression that they are concealing something. One of my classmates, who did have a hangover, fooled most of the class into thinking he had the gun, but I was familiar with the way he walks and knew that he did not have anything. Our first drill was a reprise of the readiness drills we had done previously. In pairs, one person turns around, the other positions himself, draws, points, and says "Ready," at which, the first person has to turn around and shoot his partner. The person drawing could be standing, sitting, lying down, or at any position within the room. Konstantin stopped us to review some mistakes: big flashy movement, 'pushing' the gun into the target, which he again said was a technique for the lower order of soldiers who can't be expected to become expert shooters. In groups of four, one person served as the 'director,' and one person turned his back. The director positioned the other two throughout the room and they both drew and pointed at the person with his back turned. Then the director said "Ready" and the other person had to turn around, spot the two partners, and shoot them both. It was difficult to spot your two partners in the crowded room. Often I saw them and wanted to shoot, but there were other people in the way. I didn't want to risk hitting someone else, even with plastic pellets. Also, the penalty for hitting someone who wasn't your partner was 20 pushups! We did some interesting blindfold work with eyes closed. Konstantin demonstrated on the ever-valiant Denis the Menace, who served as his target all weekend. Denis stood against the wall and Konstantin closed his eyes. Denis said, "Here," and Konstantin had to fire based only on the sound of his voice. Most of the time, he hit Denis, but of course it wasn't 100% of the time. Our own results were considerably less impressive. We practiced this in groups of four, first, just pointing the gun at three people against the wall. I asked my partners to say their names and if my pointing was completely off, to repeat their names again so I could readjust. We did the same thing, only this time we fired at our partners with eyes closed. It wasn't as dismal as I expected. Most of us managed to hit 40%-50% of the time. I was a little sleep-deprived, as it's hard to leave a Systema party early enough to be well-rested for a 9 AM seminar the following day. When we broke for lunch, I ate rather quickly, as I wasn't very hungry and had brought my light lunch to save money and calories. I thought I'd nap on the floor but it was cold in the room, people were talking, and I was concerned that someone might hit me accidentally. I made my way to the back room where the girls had slept. It was toasty warm because they had been running a space heater the previous night. In case you are wondering what it's like to bunk down at Fighthouse, it's actually quite cozy. I stretched out on the floor and using my jacket as a pillow, had a lovely refreshing 30-minute nap. I was surprised by how comfortable I was on the hard wooden floor, but I'm blessed with this ability to fall asleep anywhere. After lunch, Konstantin talked for a little while. He's so fascinating, I'd have been happy to just listen to him talk all day. "We are not learning to shoot," he said. By that, I think he meant we're not learning to aim and hit a target, as you'd do at the shooting range. It all leads back to his definition of combative shooting as creating a set of favorable circumstances that allow you to shoot accurately without having to aim. He talked about distances and the distance recommended in a Russian soldier's handbook. I can't recall the exact number but it was a very far distance, from which a soldier is expected to shoot accurately. Konstantin said that he himself was unable to hit a target from this distance. He also talked about psychology and body language, coping with fear and stress, and how fear is stored in the body in muscular trigger points. He demonstrated with a volunteer, showing where the tension was stored in the back muscles. He said that if a person is knocked unconscious, they go soft and the muscles release the tension, but when they recover consciousness, they tighten up again. He whipped the volunteer with the Cossack whip coiled up. He hit him pretty hard and the guy took it well. The whipping is a kind of massage, though it seems bizarre and even sado-masochistic, but it isn't. Science has proven that whipping improves mental and physical health and wards off depression. I have found that it brings a lot of blood to the surface of the skin and helps to relax the muscles. But it does hurt; in fact, it's quite similar to the feeling of being struck on a vulnerable part with an Airsoft pellet; the same kind of stinging, burning sensation. In groups of three, we did another variation on the kind of drills we'd been doing all weekend. Two people walk towards one, and one of the two draws and fires, and the one has to detect the draw and fire. The rule was that you could not put your hand on your gun until you saw one of your partners drawing on you, and also you could not shoot a person once they had walked past you. In generally, this exercise led to exchanges of shots rather than one at a time. I did find that I often froze up when I saw that someone was pointing a gun at me, and this delayed my reaction time. I asked Konstantin about this at the end of the seminar and he gave me some thoughtful advice, see below, a little farther down in this review. We also did some disarm drills that I liked quite a bit, as I had missed the good ol' Systema hand-to-hand. Konstantin demonstrated the disarms and said it was quite a bit easier when the gun was actually touching your body. I quickly found that it was nearly impossible when your partner won't come close enough to touch you. My first disarm went quite well but my partner quickly discovered that staying close to me meant he'd end up underneath me, with my knee grinding into his gun hand to force him to drop it. It's not that I was being brutal, but I am much more fluent with disarms than with shooting in general. After my initial success, my partner came close only until I started to disarm him, then he quickly ran away and shot me from a safe distance. I don't know if this was wrong; it seems to me that a person with a real gun might act in such a way. But it didn't look like the drill that Konstantin had demonstrated, where the person with the gun kept close to the person who was to effect the disarm. We also did a version of this disarm drill where the gun-wielding partner threatens from a distance and says "hands up ... get down on the ground," and so forth, and the 'victim' attempts a little psy-ops to bring him closer, saying he doesn't understand, doesn't speak English, etc. In my case, I didn't have to try to be too inventive as my partner's demands were often unclear. However, as with the first disarm exercise, even when I could draw him close enough, if I tried any sort of disarm, he simply ran away and shot me from a distance. I am not saying that's wrong, just different from the exercise that Konstantin had demonstrated. I did manage to throw him off-guard a little bit just as he was going to shoot me from a distance. I grabbed a stack of loose paper on which someone had written notes and tossed it right into his face just as he was going to pull the trigger, thereby buying myself a few seconds. Though a little unorthodox, Systema is all about using what you've got, and in that case, I had nothing against a gun but a stack of papers that happened to be nearby. In case you are wondering if this ninja-style tactic works, it does. Having a bunch of papers suddenly flying right into your face is disorienting enough to make you miss your shot. Next we practiced in groups of three with two people in a line, side by side, a few feet apart. The third had to walk past them and as soon as he detected one or the other drawing, he had to shoot that person. This was very characteristic of the awareness drills we practiced all weekend, where detecting intent was the most important factor. The last 45 minutes or so were spent on crowd wor. In groups of three, you had to shoot each of your two partners twice, at a distance of no more than 6 feet, and shooting from the hip. We then mixed it up so that you shoot one and the other one shoots you, so we had to shoot and avoid at the same time, which puts a totally different spin on the exercise. And then we reversed the targets so the person who had been shooting at you was now your target. I found one of my partners quite easily; her long black coat was distinctive. The other was much harder to spot and he seemed to hide out in the corners a lot. Also, his windbreaker looked so much like everyone else's jacket. It was hard to recognize people who were wearing face guards, unless their clothing was unique. For our final exercise, everyone shot everyone else, up to three shots each, and whoever used up their three shots had to go stand against the wall. I fired only one shot. Konstantin asked us, what's the hurry to shoot? He said this is how gunfire happens in crowds; it only takes one shot for the other shooters to panic and fire, too. I wasn't quite sure what he was getting at. He told us to fire three shots and it seemed the people who did that the quickest were told to stand up against the wall and those who took longer to fire their three shots were the 'survivors.' We tried this exercise again and Konstantin said not to rush to shoot, and anyone who got hit had to go stand against the wall. It was hard for me to tell if I got hit as the pellets just slid right off my jacket, so if someone hit me at the zero point, I would not even feel it. But I don't think anyone hit me, nor did I fire a single shot. I noticed that the people who were against the wall were more spontaneous and impulsive. The people who were left milling around, who had not fired, tended to be more cautious and thoughtful. I'm not saying spontaneity is necessarily a bad thing, just that those of us who were left were waiting for any one of us to draw before shooting, so we had this kind of stalemate, as none of us drew, therefore, we didn't fire. Konstantin said that the training applies to all different kinds of guns, and someone had an Airsoft AK-47, which he used to demonstrate. As I mentioned previously, he said that each bullet costs money, life, and health, and suggested we practice with just three rounds in the magazine, to make us stop and think between shots. In conclusion, he took questions, of which there were many. I asked him how to stop myself from freezing up when I knew that my partner and I would be shooting each other simultaneously. He commended me for noticing that tendency in myself, which kind of surprised me as I saw it as a kind of failure, but I guess as long as you are conscious of it, it's not a big a failure as if you pretend it's not happening. Konstantin said I should remember to breathe, and to use the short panting breath if necessary. He said to practice re-creating the situation, the exact moment where I froze, and work through it from that point. He said don't stop and start again, but keep going even if I freeze up. One of my classmates asked how to quell the panic and fear of the blowback from a real gun, but I don't recall the particulars of Konstantin's answer. Denis said that Airsoft was similar in feel and blowback to a real .22. Konstantin had encouraged us to pick a gun that feels right for us, and not one that is big or shoots fast. He said all that was irrelevant in the long run, if the gun wasn't comfortable in our hands. Someone else asked why aim for the zero point, the midsection, when the American shooting schools teach you to aim for the chest. Konstantin replied that it's not necessary to aim, the stomach happens to be in line when you shoot from the hip or from the navel level, so that eliminates the need to aim. He also said the stomach is less mobile than the head or chest and therefore can't get out of the way of incoming fire as easily. Previously, he had also mentioned that shooting to the stomach is psychologically easier than shooting to the head. There was an inquiry about shooting with two guns and Konstantin did a brief demonstration. He said there were two methods: shooting with a gun in each hand in direct line, and crossing the guns and shooting the to the left with the gun in the right hand and vice versa. He demonstrated both ways, again with the intrepid Denis as the target. There were a whole bunch of other questions, but I didn't write them all down. Many were just re-iterating what Konstantin had already told us earlier in the seminars. We spent a good half-hour in the Q&A and finally Konstantin concluded by saying that we could not expect to retain this knowledge that we'd gained in two weeks' time unless we practiced. He also once again told us not to trust him, but to trust only ourselves. We all applauded him for sharing his wonderfully astute wisdom with us during the three days. I also publicly thanked Val Hainley for providing such tireless translation of Konstantin's words. I wish to also thank Peggy and Edgar for hosting the seminar – it was not easy, as we had to work in a segregated, padded room with all the mirrors covered and the windows blocked out. Many thanks also to the people who travelled great distances to participate in the seminar and make it a truly successful event. Spasibo!