I recently read The Low Light Fight - Shooting, Tactics, Combatives written by Michael Seeklander. Michael Seeklander was in the U.S. Marine Corps 5 years active duty, and 4 years in the Reserves as an intelligence specialist and primary marksmanship instructor and combat engineer. He also served on the Knoxville Police Department. Afterwards, he became Branch Chief and Lead Instructor for the firearms division with the Federal Air Marshal Service. Seeklander is an USPSA and IDPA competitor. He is ranked as Grandmaster in USPSA.
This book was published in 2016 and can be purchased from his training website, shooting-performance.com. It was a pretty quick read at only 90 pages in length but was still very in-depth and had lots of detail on why he likes certain low-light techniques and also covers the pros and cons of these techniques. He begins the book by explaining that most civilian self-defense encounters do not occur in low-light. I had always believed the opposite. Seeklander explains that even when civilians are attacked at night, it is generally in a well lit area such as gas station parking lots or areas that have some sort of low lighting at the minimum because the attacker needs to be able to see as well. At this point he quotes another well respected firearms trainer, Tom Givens. Tom Givens reports that 64 students that have attended Tom Givens courses have been involved in life threatening self-defense situations. Of the 64 students, none of them used a flashlight or felt the need to use a flashlight during their attack. Due to these statistics, Givens recommends spending more of your efforts in honing your shooting skills and the fundamentals because it is unlikely for a civilian to use low-light skills in an attack.
In this book, Seeklander also lists Givens Training Priorities, even in order of most important to least important. The biggest take away from choosing which low-light techniques to use is to make sure that you can block strikes and deliver strikes with your support hand if needed while still operating a handheld flashlight. He talks about what situations he might use a two-handed flashlight technique and which situations in which he would use a single-handed flashlight technique. At the end of the book he provides the reader with dry-fire and live-fire drills to become proficient with using a handheld light and a weapon mounted light.
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