by Rich Grassi If you want to learn to do something well, you go to the best practitioner you can find and hope he or she can teach. Being able to perform well in terms of physical skills is one thing; being able to transmit your knowledge and abilities to others is quite something else. The idea behind finding the best practitioner is the assumption that he had to learn to do what he does so well. He's run across the pitfalls and obstructions to great performance and found ways over, through or around. No sense in reinventing the wheel. When we apply this scenario to shooting in defensive combat why are we so averse to learning from champions in the action shooting disciplines? There are good reasons. One is the tendency for the game players, in effort to get short times on a stage, to reload on the move from cover to cover. If someone is shooting at you, you'd never leave cover without a loaded gun. Neither would they. It's a different game, but a competition nevertheless. You need to be able to pick the wheat from the chaff. Back to our original premise, why wouldn't you go with a champion? Jerry Miculek is clearly a champion. He's one of the top three (or top five, depending on who you ask) in action shooting disciplines. He's so good, he's an exhibition shooter. And you don't hear me challenging Bob Munden to a shooting contest! Jerry's skills are not just with revolver and shotgun - two of the formats he's best known for. Try him with a Modern Sporting Rifle (AR) or a semiauto pistol. He'll whip you soundly. He has such a great personality though, it doesn't matter. And that's where we get to the second stage of judgment: is he an effective teacher? Having examined his three-DVD set Jerry Miculek Practical Rifle, I have to conclude his methods of instruction - lecture and demonstration - are champion quality. This 28-time winner of multi-gun championships and holder of five world records takes you through the competition rifle, the basics of stance, grip and trigger control, and demonstrates basic and advanced drills designed to get your times down and scores up. Jerry shows his methods of shooting at moving targets and how he quickly transitions among multiple targets. Rapid reloads, cover drills and position shooting are all covered as is clearing stoppages. In shooting over the peak of the "roof," Jerry demonstrates different magazines and how some conflict with the ability to shoot just over the cover. While it's unlikely we'll be shooting over a roof peak defensively, the lesson about a magazine's length and how it can obstruct or help one's shooting ability is demonstrated. The camera angles aren't placed for a Hollywood production. They're used to best illustrate the teaching point being discussed. You get 137 minutes of top-flight AR instruction from a master at the craft. Yes, he's not wearing multicam and using .mil lingo to illustrate his "operator-ness." He's out to reach the largest number of shooters of the modern sporting rifle - from 3-Gun competition, USPSA, National Match, hunters who use the AR-platform as well as people interested in defensive riflecraft. That task he accomplishes admirably. To order, go to brownells.com and search their books and videos department. Buy the DVD set. Practice with that rifle. Who knows? Maybe someday you'll get to compete with Jerry Miculek.