You may have noticed the (relatively) new show on A&E (A&E?) called Steven Seagal Lawman, which features his real-life work with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana.
In Full-Bore Squinty Mode
Seagal is an easy person to dislike. As an actor, he’s a fine martial artist, and as a movie martial artist, he’s not 1/10th as engaging as Jackie Chan or Chuck Norris. Plus there was that scathing article in Spy magazine back in the 1990s that basically accused him of being an asshole phony who hung out with mafia figures. And don’t get me started on his music career.
So it’s easy view his job as a part-time police officer as some sort of publicity stunt. On the other hand, Seagal has evidently been doing this for 20 years, which is an absurdly long time to do something just as a publicity stunt, especially since Seagal was a big enough star in the late 80s and early 90s that he probably could have spent the time snorting blow off the backs of hookers instead. So more power to him.
Since Dwight over at Whipped Cream Difficulties has some sort of ironic attachment to Mr. Seagal (it was his fault I ended up watching Urban Justice, and lo it did stink unto the heavens), he insisted that we watch the premier episode of Steven Seagal Lawman, which is basically Cops except duller. But what made me bring it up for the purpose of this blog was the part during the show where Seagal offers some firearms training to a fellow officer, during which Seagal seemed to shoot some nice tight groups.
Dwight made me watch it. Learn from my misfortune.
Since I know noted firearms instructor Karl Rehn (who you may remember from his piece on the Ft. Hood shooter), I thought I would solicit his impressions on Mr. Seagal’s training technique.
Here are Karl’s comments:
Observations:
Seagal appears to be a good shot and does seem to understand the fundamentals.
The grip he uses is “state of the art” circa 1975 – not a bad grip but not as good as what 99% of the schools teach now.
The more upper body and grip strength you have the less technique matters when it comes to grip and stance.Grip’s not as important as trigger manipulation and that’s basically what he was telling his student, and that’s what they were working on during the session.
You can always teach an accurate shooter to go faster; it’s harder to teach a fast, sloppy shooter to shoot accurately.
Minus a few points for the student not wearing eye protection when shooting – particularly since they were shooting steel plates for some of the drills. You never know with these TV things whether the student chose to wear his sunglasses on his hat instead of on his eyes because the producer told him to, or because he was having trouble seeing the sights through the dark glasses and they didn’t have any clear glasses with them, or nobody thought about it because there are still a lot of folks out there that don’t treat eye protection as mandatory when shooting.
So, in summary: Seagal’s firearms advice may not be state-of-the-art, but you could do worse.
FWIW, here’s another view of Seagal’s pistol prowess, this one from a first-hand perspective.