To follow up on the last post, let’s look at some basic flashlight technique. A flashlight is not the ideal tool to hold in your hand while contemplating violence – letting your hands focus on the weapon you carry is a more comfortable, and more comforting, way to go. Unfortunately, if it is dark where you are, seeing is usually what matters first. To solve this problem, the weapon mounted light was invented.
Many instructors today warn students not to use weapon lights as their primary means of seeing the world, claiming that pointing guns at everything and everyone is a bad idea. They stress the importance of a handheld light and the training to use it correctly so that your don’t wave your gun around like, I don’t know, a flashlight. I agree with the problem but not the solution. Having used handheld lights with my pistol for the first part of my career, for the last 20 years or so I have prefered a weapon mounted light. To be clear, knowing how to use a handheld light is a useful skill and I’m glad I started with them. Good training is essential, and that is harder to get these days than it used to be.
Assuming an indoor search to begin with, the correct way to search with a weapon mounted light is to illuminate the ground or ceiling and let the light bounce to cover the area you are looking at. This is called floorboard lighting or umbrella lighting, respectively, and solves several problems at once. First, it allows you to keep both hands on your pistol or carbine. Second, it keeps your muzzle away from anyone you might encounter while searching. Third, by not having the light near eye level, it prevents our very powerful lights from blinding us when they bounce straight back off a surface and into our eyes.
With today’s powerful lights, this technique works very well indoors, and I have had success in all sorts of cluttered, multi-colored and textured environments. An empty white room certainly works incredibly well, but real rooms also work just fine. Because of the natural confines of being indoors in real people’s homes and offices, the path you can take and the angles you have available to you are usually limited. Even so, I have found that bad guys have a hard time pinpointing your location as you move through the structure. If you point your light straight at the danger area you are searching (and your gun as well, of course) bad guys have a much easier time tracking your location, and your light, held at head level or so, is much more likely to draw fire.
Keep in mind, while the light lets you see everything in its path, anyone, anywhere can see your light even easier, while you can’t see anything outside the beam. Which is why the best lighting technique for most people is to turn the lights on whenever possible and level the playing field.
When using baseboard lighting, I find it best to shine the light at or near the junction of the wall and floor. This lets the light spill well and illuminate more of the room, while also helping mask your exact location. A beam pointed horizontally only tracks back to one location, but a beam split by a 90 degree corner is less obvious in its origin.
When using umbrella lighting, especially on the typical white ceiling, the effect can be pretty awesome and the whole room lights up. That’s why those ugly tall vertical torch lights were so popular in people’s homes during the 90’s. Even so, I prefer to bias the light towards the junction of the wall and the ceiling, in the direction I am searching.
Keeping your gun in a low ready or high ready position is another issue that may be dictated by circumstances, but we will leave that discussion for another time. Suffice it to say that either position can prevent you from carelessly sweeping people where you are looking, and also gives you the much needed time to process what you are seeing and make good decisions.
Though there are no numbers to support this, I also prefer a weapon with a safety whenever possible for searching in the dark. You may be looking at the “threat area”, whatever that is, and end up grappling with the guy you didn’t see who came from the dark. For most of my career, I used an M4 to do this work and that gun is set up nicely for it. When using a pistol, I had a 1911 for many years and was very happy to have its manual safety. The rest of the time I used pistols without safeties and never had an issue, but I am a big fan of safeties on pistols and dealing with weapons retention is the big reason.
There are other, more advanced ways to use a light and gun for searching, but without extensive training and experience, I find that the above is very effective, easily taught, and easily retained. Perfect for professionals or amateurs who can’t spend a week learning to coordinate their pistol and light.
