Living in Condition Yellow - Part 1

i. I just got back from four days at a firearms training institute in the vicious heat of the Nevada desert, where I learned how to shoot a Glock handgun better, faster, and with more accuracy than probably anybody you know. I learned how to clear malfunctions and fix jams. I learned how to do tactical and emergency reloads. I learned how to shoot at night, with a flashlight in my left hand and a gun in my right, each braced against the other. I did live fire action simulators where I stormed through fake houses, pretending that I was the victim of a home invasion, shooting the shit out of a lot of paper targets. I learned how to discharge my firearm while kneeling. I learned how to shoot from a concealed holster. I learned that the way to put someone down, really, is to place two shots in their thoracic cavity and then, if they are still coming, send one coup de grace to a little box on the human face that’s framed by the eyebrows and the upper lip.

But this practical stuff is only half of what I learned. It might be just a quarter of what I learned. The first thing, the most important lesson of my first day in Nevada, was that anybody who talks about dry heat being somehow more bearable than humid heat has only ever experienced one of the two kinds of heat. By noon of my first day on the range, I felt like God was patiently hammering a nail into my left sinus, then prying it out and starting again. Most of the other things I learned besides that and the gun stuff were about human nature and psychology. Oh, and how to live the rest of my life in a constant state of readiness that borders on fear.

he place where I learned how to become a human gun is called Front Sight. It sits an hour outside of Las Vegas, in Pahrump, Nevada. (To the initiated among you, the name Pahrump gets your ears cocked because it’s the home of mysterious radio host Art Bell, the epicenter of a nationwide ongoing discussion of the supernatural and unexplained. But this is a digression from guns. I’ll just say that yes, Art Bell lives in Pahrump, yes, I found his phone number, yes, I cold-called him, and no, he wasn’t happy about it. But if you don’t know about Art Bell, find out.)

Front Sight is the best private firearms training facility in the U.S. There’s nowhere else that can compete. The only other way to learn how to shoot almost this well is to join the cops or the military. Front Sight is a compound filled with outdoor firing ranges, a pro shop, a lecture hall, rappelling towers, and god knows what other hidden stores and rooms that lay in wait to be utilized once society collapses—if they don’t have some extremely destructive shit in the tunnels that run below the complex, I’ll eat this rented 9mm pistol. A four-day course at Front Sight consists of countless hours spent shooting (I easily went through over 800 rounds of ammo) broken up by a series of lectures that are equal parts motivational speaking and nuts-and-bolts here’s-how-to-be-ready-to-seriouslyfuck- up-anyone-who-fucks-with-you know-how.

The talks, administered by Front Sight teachers who are mostly ex-armed services and police, are about things like being “intentionally incompetent” (a dipshit average citizen) with regards to self-defense as opposed to “unconsciously competent” (that’s when you are programmed to do stuff like, in the middle of a gunfight, drop an empty magazine on the ground, slam a new one in, rack it, and put two rounds through someone’s chest without even knowing you did it till it’s done and you say to yourself, “Holy shit, I just shot that scumbag junkie perp in the thoracic cavity and now he’s

on the ground and it’s because I shot him without even thinking about it. I am officially unconsciously competent.”) The big lecture at Front Sight though, the one that I think tells you the most about what you’re supposed to learn there, is called The Color Code of Mental Awareness. That’s a scale that the founder of Front Sight (a former chiropractor turned gun guru named Dr. Ignatius Piazza who, with a little investigation, could probably become a book-length article unto himself) came up with to illustrate the levels of readiness one should ideally go through when the shit hits the fan.

Condition White is the state in which most people live their lives. It means you’re not watching out for threats, you’re not looking at your surroundings, and you’re not more or less ready to whip out your gun at any second. If you’re living in Condition White, the general consensus at Front Sight goes, you’re an ignorant mess who will most likely be robbed, raped, and murdered any second now.

From White, the conditions progress on through Yellow (“relaxed alertness… the condition you should be in anytime you are not asleep”), Orange (something might be just about to happen with those creepy guys across the street there), Red (something is definitely going to happen with these fucking guys in one second here), and Black (something is totally happening with these guys right now and so I am currently in the process of shooting them both in the thoracic cavity). Got that? If you aren’t in Condition Yellow every second you’re awake, you’re doing something wrong. Going from Yellow to Orange to Red shouldn’t take too long, and once you’re in Condition Black, you’d better have Combat Mind Set, which is “the state of mind that replaces your astonishment or fear of a lethal confrontation with the knowledge and confidence that you have trained for this, you expected it to happen at some time, and you’re ready, willing, and able to handle it.” In other words, you’ve got this shit wired.

In addition to practicing shooting so often that it becomes second nature, Front Sight also recommends “advance mental preparation of lethal force scenarios,” which I take to mean, “fantasizing about wasting people.” I’ve got that pretty much covered, but if they want to me to increase the amount of time that I spend gleefully daydreaming about vigilante situations—if they in fact think that doing so will benefit my Combat Mind Set, then hey, I am 100 percent onboard. Outstanding. Can do. I was already spending most of my subway and sidewalk hours lost in visions of street justice anyway, so I’ll just crank up the volume a little bit.

TO BE CONTINUED:

LIVING IN CONDITION YELLOW

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