All applications of deadly force require visual awareness and decision making. Legacy firearms training and qualifications do not.
Defining the Problem
There is a substantial precedent that vocational training and testing must be relevant to the job.[1] [2] It is also well established that failure to train, especially for law enforcement, is an area of significant potential liability. [3]
There are many indicators that legacy professional firearms training and qualification methods require improvement. For one example, in 2015 a study found minimal differences between the shooting performance of trained police officers and untrained civilians.[4] For another, the International Association of Directors of Law Enforcement Standards and Training published a report [5] in 2020 analyzing law enforcement training methods. It concluded that standard training methodology is at odds with effective learning principles.
The areas demanding improvement in training, however, go far beyond skill acquisition and performance. Decision making related to use-of-force for police officers continues to be an increasingly important public issue.
Visual perception and processing are rarely a part of firearms training and almost never part of qualification. However, research shows that greater awareness produces both improved use-of-force decision-making and greater stress resilience.[6] Studies have also indicated that the training process itself is an irreplaceable component of developing performance in visual awareness and threat detection skills.[7]
Traditional training methods predominantly involve the use of static targets and pre-defined skill sequences during both training and qualification. A heavy emphasis during professional training is normally placed on preparation for qualification. However, peer-reviewed research consistently indicates that these training methods alone are inadequate to effectively prepare officers to make good decisions and exhibit acceptable performance in the field.[8] [9] [10]
All use of deadly force, whether for police, military, or civilians requires decision-making. Most tactical decisions related to using force are fundamentally rooted in situational awareness gained through visual perception and processing.[11]
Today’s most common methods of qualification and training, however, do not involve either of these factors. This severely limits the ability of any agency or instructor to adequately prepare people who carry guns for the demands of the real world. It also increases agency and security company liability. The more human performance research that is conducted in these areas, the greater this liability is likely to become.
Addressing the Problem
Every agency, instructor, and company should begin taking proactive steps to address these issues. Doing so will improve the safety of citizens and armed professionals alike. It will also reduce the liability of agencies or companies that employ armed professionals.
Performance during a critical incident is generated by a person’s existing neural circuitry at the time of the event. Memories, skills, understanding of context, even a person’s capacity for processing information, all are driven by a combination of existing brain circuitry and the chemical levels that exist in the brain and body at the time of the event.
If we want things (such as situational awareness and decision-making) to occur during critical incidents, then we need to construct the circuitry that will produce those things. It should go without saying that this needs to happen before the incident occurs.
We have written at great length about this topic between our books and the many articles available for free on our website. Here we’ll simply repeat a concept known popularly as Hebb’s Law: Neurons that fire together, wire together.[12] In other words, brain circuitry is constructed through use.
If we want something to happen during armed combat, we must construct the brain circuitry necessary to make it happen through the training process. How? In three words: By using it.
This means we need to not just develop adequate gun skills. We also need to develop awareness and decision-making skills and processes as a part of the gun skills.
Let us briefly review the key elements of what has been discussed so far.
- Real-world gunfight performance requires visual awareness and decision-making.
- All performance is produced by the existing state of a person’s neural circuitry.
- Neural circuitry must be constructed through the training process.
- Constructing neural circuitry is accomplished through use of that same circuitry.
This means that during training we need to connect the circuits involved in visual awareness and decision-making to the circuits involved in shooting skill performance—in ways that are relevant to armed combat.
The solution? Visual range control.
What is Visual Range Control?
The concept of vision-based range control is simple. What the student does is controlled, not by what they are told to do, but instead by what they see.
In today’s standard range training, a student may be told to draw and fire six rounds at a standard of accuracy (generally known as a “Bill Drill” or some variation). In a vision-based training paradigm, the student might be only told what visual stimulus means they should shoot.
When the student shoots, what they shoot at, how many rounds they shoot, and when they stop shooting, depends on when that stimulus appears, where it appears, when it goes away (or changes to something else), and how fast the student is shooting. There is no pre-defined sequence provided by an instructor. What happens in the environment around the student dictates the student’s actions.
With vision-based range control, visual awareness and (at minimum) simple decisions about what action to take based on changes in the environment are no longer idealized objectives. They become fundamental elements of successfully performing every task.
Why Visual Range Control Works
For decades and with very few exceptions we have controlled firearms training by telling students exactly what to do before they do it. This helps us control the range and manage round counts. Unfortunately, this also bypasses any requirement for students to use the brain circuitry necessary to visually gather information and make decisions—there is no information that is necessary to gather and there are no decisions to make.
Whenever people look at tools and methods for providing visual stimulus in training environments, the most common mistake is to consider things like visual stimulus and decision making as elements that are “advanced training,” that will be added at the end of training, or as tools that will be pulled out for a single drill or a limited purpose.
Often this is done almost as if it is an afterthought. For example, in a week-long course, having a few drills on the last day that involve seeing a stimulus (such as a gun vs. hand on a turning target) and using that to make a decision before shooting.
This is well meant. However, it ignores how learning happens—through repetitive use of brain circuitry over time.
Telling someone they need to see something and make a decision just a handful of times in an afternoon has minimal long-term learning value. This is both because the brain is unlikely to create new brain circuitry as a result and because the student will be able to consciously focus on the decision process for just those few repetitions, though they completely ignore it for the majority of gun-related training.
This means that it is unlikely that the awareness and decision circuitry will ever be neurologically “wired” to the guns skills in ways that are accessible under high levels of stress or when the shooter is otherwise occupied or impaired.
At Building Shooters we frequently get asked when vision-based range control should be integrated into a training program. This is the wrong question. What should be asked is: When is it acceptable NOT to require continual visual awareness and decision-making when students have guns in their hands?
Note our use of continual in the paragraph above—specifically related to visual awareness and decision-making. This is important.
We cannot adequately address real-world needs by simply providing a visual start signal that tells the student to perform an otherwise predefined skill sequence. (For example, if the target turns and there is a gun stapled on it the student should draw and fire two to the body and one to the head).
While this type of drill does require a visual assessment and some level of decision-making, it requires no situational awareness at all once the stimulus is received. From that point forward the student is just running a preset sequence with little continued thought.
There are two problematic impacts from this that we want to discuss here.
The first is that this type of training serves to help construct or reinforce a mental framework, or schema, that establishes what we like to call a final categorization for deadly force decisions. In other words, once a “shoot” target is identified, it is game on.
Sometimes, in the real world, this works out fine. Other times (particularly for law enforcement officers wearing body cameras) it fails spectacularly.
Without going down all the potential rabbit holes in the interest of brevity, the real-world success of this binary framework in training (i.e., a target is permanently either a shoot or a don’t shoot within a training task or event) for deadly force requires two baseline assumptions.
One, the factors that led to the decision to use force must remain in place throughout the time it takes to perform the skill sequence. For example, a subject who draws a weapon and points it towards the officer or puts a car into gear with an officer in the line-of-fire, continues to point / hold the weapon or accelerate the vehicle towards the officer during the time that it takes the officer to draw and complete an engagement.
Two, the information upon which the decision to use force was made must be both correct and correctly interpreted. For example, is it a weapon or a cell phone? If it is a weapon, is it an indication of a threat? If so, does the threat require force? If the threat requires force, does it require deadly force based on the totality of contextual factors?
If there are not any visual and neurological mechanisms to keep gathering information and using it to refine or adjust the initial assessment, then the initial assessment is all that will be used. This is true regardless of whether the assessment remains valid, or whether it was even correct to begin with.
Sometimes this works out. Other times it does not.
The human visual system is a spooky place. What we consciously perceive is only partially related to what actually exists.[13] Much of what we see is self-constructed and as stress levels and cognitive load go up to critical incident levels, the level of reliability of our conscious perception starts decreasing rapidly.
Without neural mechanisms existing in a person’s gun skills that involve continued assessment of the environment, he or she is stuck with life and death decisions that were made based on rapidly gathered (usually while under great stress) information that is known to be generally unreliable even in the best of conditions.
Schema construction (building frameworks or templates for processing information and making decisions) based on experience is part of how the human mind works. We cannot avoid using fundamental brain processes. We can, however, understand and anticipate their impacts as well as their causes. We can then use this knowledge to our advantage as we design training.
Do we want to lead our students to develop a framework for killing other people that does not involve continuing to evaluate the situation as it develops? Is it appropriate in the real world to place subjects into a finalized category of “shoot this person” with no mechanism to change this category if behavior or circumstances change, or if the initial categorization is in error? If not, we should evaluate our training processes and methods and adjust them to better match the real-world performance we want to produce.
The second negative impact from simply using a visual start signal followed by a pre-defined skill sequence (even when it is combined with some sort of stimulus evaluation and judgement) is that this doesn’t require the student to use visual mechanics that are necessary for effective real-world performance in dynamic environments. In fact, it actively suppresses the development of these visual skills.
The reason this suppression happens is because as our brain learns to perform tasks through the process of trial and error, it naturally seeks to optimize the skills to what is required for accomplishing the task being performed.
Trainers sometimes throw around the term “optimize” like it is a positive thing. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily true from the standpoint of tactical training impact. From a neurological standpoint, optimization is about doing the minimum necessary to accomplish the task being performed. It is not about developing robust capability that will provide general effectiveness across a broad range of unspecified problem sets.
The brain fundamentally wants to survive, so it is always looking for ways to spend less energy. In other words, it is always looking to do less while still getting the task done.
The easiest way to get high level performance on most common range (shooting) tasks from a visual performance standpoint is to ignore the environment, let the target go blurry, and to focus the dominant eye on the sighting system of the weapon. In fact, this has been taught as the primary technique by instructors for decades. Does Front Sight, Press ring any bells?
That the purest form of this technique often precludes situational awareness for significant periods of time in tactical environments does not matter at all when situational awareness is not required. Why would the brain want to use a lot of effort to gather information it does not need to accomplish the range task on which performance will be evaluated?
Adding other visual requirements demands the use of more energy. As a result, most students will not do so (or even be able to do so), even if those other visual requirements will significantly improve the real-world tactical performance for which they are preparing.
If we are not doing something (such as maintaining situational awareness while shooting) then we are not using the brain circuitry involved in doing that thing. If we are not using the brain circuitry, then we are not “wiring” that thing together as part of the shooting skill.
As we train with enough repetition, context, emotional content, etc. to develop competence, the parts of the brain and neural functions that we are actively using are both “wired” together into neural circuitry and also isolated from the rest of the brain’s processes and functions.
In other words, because of the mechanics behind how the brain learns, consistently shooting without a requirement to simultaneously process information from the surrounding environment will actively suppress a student’s ability to use the visuomotor skills necessary to see what is going on around them while they are holding a gun.
There is also more than simply visuomotor control involved in awareness. The visuomotor components (where the eyes are pointed and focused) of a visual skill are only part of what is necessary to produce tactical awareness.
Most readers have probably heard of the term inattentional blindness.[14] This is a phenomenon that results from the fact that much of the information we receive through our sensory systems is never passed through to our conscious awareness.
Processing the meaning of the signals received by our sensory systems takes a lot of effort and energy. If the brain does not need to do it, it prefers not to.
The effects of this from a training standpoint are the same as the impact of training tasks on what visuomotor skills become part of the shooting skill.
If the tasks during firearms training require that the brain process information received by the eyes and do something with it, then those brain functions will become neurologically connected to the shooting skills. If shooting tasks require nothing visually aside from seeing the sighting system (if even that—for those who prefer shooting at large target areas at close range), then those areas of the brain, over time, will become disconnected from the shooting skills.
If we want students to have situational awareness with a gun in their hand, it is not enough for their eyes to be pointed and focused in ways that allow them to see. They also need to be given something to see—and the brain must be required to do something with that information.
With visual range control, this whole collection of issues becomes straightforward to address.
If the shooter does not know what to do but instead must control his or her behavior based on what is seen, then he or she cannot learn visual skills for shooting that preclude situational awareness. Visual situational awareness and the use of information gathered through that awareness to drive decision-based shooting performance must become neurologically part of the firearms skills. There is simply no alternative for the student.
With visual range control, use of the related brain functions for awareness and decision-making become foundational requirements to accomplish all training tasks. The student cannot participate without simultaneously using the skills and functions required for shooting, situational awareness, and decision-making.
Other Benefits—Adult Learning
Controlling shooting tasks visually rather than pre-defining them also permits [15] instructors to robustly apply the principles of adult learning within live-fire range training environments.
Just a few examples include facilitation of individualized challenge levels, [16] [17] [18] mixing (interleaving)[19] skills and drills to enhance learning and retention, [20] [21] [22] integrating multi-tasking and visual processing requirements during skill performance,[23] [24] [25] and, when using tools that also allow for individualized live-fire shooting performance feedback, [26] [27] improving the availability of critical performance feedback to every student during training.[28] [29] [30]
Visual range control will not just “wire” the visual skills and mental processing necessary for situational awareness and decision-making into the students’ shooting skills. It will also provide instructors with access to a wide variety of currently unavailable training techniques that will improve not only skill performance, but also the long-term retention of those skills.
Several recent peer-reviewed studies have in fact indicated that incorporating visual awareness tasks and decision-making into firearms training (including the use of simple projected stimulus as components of the training process) will improve decision-making and performance.[31] [32]
Precedent
Visual stimulus as a primary method of range control is a relatively new approach (at least at scale). However, it is worth noting that New York State has adopted this method as the basis for its new state-wide police recruit curriculum.[33] This is currently in the process of being implemented with over 5,000 recruits annually.
The Syracuse, New York Police Department has been using vision-based range control for both its police academy recruit firearms training and for its in-service training [34] for almost two years. The agency reports observable and consistent improvements in decision-making as a result.
The Collin College Criminal Justice Training Center in McKinney Texas has also adopted visual range control as a primary method of police recruit training [35] and reports similar results with respect to skill improvement and better decision making. Agencies from several other States, including Minnesota, Tennessee, Indiana, and Illinois are also already in the process of shifting to visual range control as a primary training method.
As more human performance research related to use-of-force and armed combat is conducted, we predict that using legacy training methods and pre-defined skill sequencing will become nothing short of an unacceptable liability, especially for law enforcement agencies. There is no scientifically valid argument that pre-defined sequence tasks with no awareness and decision-making components are job-related. How could they be?
Adopting visual range control as the primary method of training will improve the quality and value of firearms training. It will increase learning, better prepare students for the realities of armed combat, and reduce liability, especially for companies and agencies that employ armed professionals.
References
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[11] Olma, J., Sutter, C., & Sülzenbrück, S. (2024). When failure is not an option: a police firearms training concept for improving decision-making in shoot/don’t shoot scenarios. Frontiers in Psychology, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1335892
[12] Jensen, E. (2008). Brain-Based Learning: The New Paradigm of Teaching. Corwin Press.
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[17] Wadden, K., Hodges, N., Asis, K., Neva, J., & Boyd, L. (2018). Individualized Challenge Point Practice as a Method to Aid Motor Sequence Learning. Journal of Motor Behavior, 51, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/00222895.2018.1518310
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[27] Wright, T. (2025, January 2025). Training with the NURO from Building Shooters In Defenders and Disciples. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wcPYINY9aQ
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[29] Ali, A., Fawver, B., Kim, J., Fairbrother, J., & Janelle, C. (2012). Too Much of a Good Thing: Random Practice Scheduling and Self-Control of Feedback Lead to Unique but Not Additive Learning Benefits. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 503. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00503
[30] Wu, W., Young, D., Schandler, S., Meir, G., Judy, R., Perez, J., & Cohen, M. (2011). Contextual interference and augmented feedback: Is there an additive effect for motor learning? Human Movement Science, 30, 1092-1101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.humov.2011.02.004
[31] Heusler-Krug, B., & Sutter, C. (2022). Shoot or Don’t Shoot? Tactical Gaze Control and Visual Attention Training Improves Police Cadets’ Decision-Making Performance in Live-Fire Scenarios. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.798766
[32] Olma, J., Sutter, C., & Sülzenbrück, S. (2024). When failure is not an option: a police firearms training concept for improving decision-making in shoot/don’t shoot scenarios. Frontiers in Psychology, 15. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1335892
[33] Smith, J., & Salomon, D. (2023). Visual processing is the Key to De-escalation: The Neuroscience Behind the new DCJS Recruit Firearms Curriculum. 2023 Public Safety Symposium, Albany, New York. https://apps.cio.ny.gov/apps/mediacontact/public/download.cfm?attachment_uuid=31390092-08C8-4A78-5BF28A80E324DE80
[34] Ristic, B. (2023, November 29, 2023). Police Firearms Training: How Visual Stimuli Are Transforming Officer Decision-Making. Media Coverage. https://mediacoverage.com/police-firearms-training-visual-stimuli-in-decision-making/
[35] LLC, B. S. T. (2023). Collin College first to adopt de-escalation-based firearms training. Retrieved June 8, 2025, from https://www.police1.com/police-products/firearms/training/press-releases/collin-college-first-to-adopt-de-escalation-based-firearms-training-YE05oXnZgVtBtJR4/
